- 1 This ironic expression was coined in 1951 by Leo Strauss, in an article written for Measure: A Cri (...)
- 2 Mayr, 1989, p. 623.
- 3 Alain Drouard, for example, declared there had been a “rewriting of history” with regards Alexis C (...)
1Eugenics is not an obvious choice for academic study, and for good reason. It was considered a pseudo-science, an ideology frequently associated with Nazi thought and therefore to be banished according to what Leo Strauss called “reductio ad Hitlerum” logic.1 To quote Ernst Mayr, “it has become almost impossible, since 1933, to discuss eugenics objectively”.2 Whether then or now, labelling a historical figure a eugenicist evoked a “dark” or “negative” chapter in their lives. In retrospect, every eugenicist became a precursor to the Nazi tragedy.3
- 4 Berlivet, 2018, p. 459–460. Berlivet’s article adopts a transnational perspective to present a gen (...)
2It was only in the early 2000s that research on human heredity was revitalised by a new field of enquiry: “the social and cultural history of heredity”. This new theme dismantled traditional disciplinary boundaries by bridging together “the history of biology, of medicine, of the human sciences, of sociohistorical studies of race, and of rural history”, with the law being a relatively minor concern.4
3Yet it would be impossible to understand Japanese eugenics without examining its legal foundations, since two successive laws were promulgated: the National Eugenics Law of 1940 (Kokumin yūsei hō 国民優生法) and the Eugenic Protection Law of 1948 (Yūsei hogo hō 優生保護法). The term “eugenics” (yūsei) subsequently disappeared from the legal landscape in 1996 when the Eugenic Protection Law was reformed and renamed the Maternal Body Protection Law (Botai hogo hō 母体保護法).
- 5 Yonemoto, Matsubara, Nudeshima & Ichinokawa (eds.), 2000. This book updated the pioneering work of (...)
4Thanks to the work of historians and sociologists (for example Matsubara Yōko and Ichinokawa Yasutaka), it is clear today that the 1940 law failed to achieve its eugenicist ambitions.5 Forced sterilisation, for example, was suspended under pressure from pro-family and pro-natalist quarters, in line with the wartime imperial regime. Voluntary sterilisation was strictly limited to “genetic” cases and heavily resisted by psychologists, who argued that the genetic transmission of mental illness remained unproven. In this context, despite the systematically proclaimed influence of the 1933 Nazi law, the National Eugenics Law of 1940 was limited in both scope and application (166 sterilisations between 1941 and 1947 according to official statistics). The replacement law of 1948 was more ambitious, conditioned as it was by Japan’s determination to “ethnically” rebuild the nation after defeat and reduce the birth rate in a context of overpopulation. Some 845,000 people are thought to have been sterilised between 1949 and 1996 – 16,500 of them involuntarily –, but the real figures are likely much higher. The Eugenic Protection Law of 1948 further broke with its predecessor by legalising abortion for socioeconomic reasons, thereby abandoning the rationale of eradicating bad genes and instead becoming a means of family planning. This was, after all, the era of neo-Malthusianism, “social development” (shakai kaihatsu 社会開発) and the “cultural state” (bunka kokka 文化国家).
5Whereas the National Eugenics Law of 1940 mainly focused on stamping out bad genes, the Eugenic Protection Law of 1948 had a much wider scope and more complex aims: sterilisation was officially legalised for certain non-genetic conditions like leprosy and for large families. As for abortion, an “ethical” clause (for rape) was introduced, followed by an economic hardship clause in 1949, which de facto decriminalised abortion since no checks were carried out by either the state or doctors. The Eugenic Protection Law thus partially decriminalised abortion and sterilisation, first and foremost for eugenic purposes but also to protect women’s bodies in a context of overpopulation. Eugenics and feminism thus found themselves heavily co-dependent, particularly under the 1948 law: the partial legalisation of contraception and abortion was both an assertive eugenic policy to improve the quality of the population after defeat and a neo-Malthusian response to overpopulation which borrowed, among others, the feminist cause.
- 6 For a more detailed treatment of eugenics as the modernist drive for human improvement and nationa (...)
6The 1948 Eugenic Protection Law is often analysed in the light of Japan’s post-war constitution of 1946, seen as having transformed the country’s democratic landscape, including human rights. How could such a law have emerged under this political and legal framework, people wonder, as if the two were mutually incompatible. The present issue of Cipango – entitled Eugenics in Modern and Contemporary Japan – is part of a wider re-evaluation of the role of eugenics in liberal democracies.6 This trend invites us to see Japan’s eugenic laws not as a contradiction inherent in the post-war democratic regime but as a mutual reinforcing of eugenics and human rights. Such a re-evaluation is vital if we are to understand the nature of contemporary societies, far from being a Japanese specificity.
7The 1990s saw a growing awareness of the adverse – if not catastrophic – effects of Japan’s post-war eugenic regime. Unusually for Cipango, this issue opens with two informal essays that give a powerful account of events while conveying the insights of specialists on the rapid opinion shift underway today. One example is the Kumamoto District Court ruling (May 2001), which ushered in an era of legal challenges to Japan’s eugenic policies. The account provided by Ishizaki Manabu, a constitutionalist who closely followed the case and supported victims of the government’s leprosy segregation policy, eloquently illustrates the benefit and limitations of such legal action. In this turbulent context, the Sagamihara stabbings at a care home for people with disabilities (July 2016) reignited debate in the academic and public spheres. What causes contemporary society and mankind to be deeply eugenicist? Saishū Satoru offers some potential answers in his essay. Despite some reservations among our editorial board about the stance adopted in this essay, we decided to publish it for its detailed account and the author’s unusual background as one of the main protagonists in the Zenkyōtō university protests of 1968. These experiences inform his stance and his essay should be read within this precise historical and academic context.
8The present issue of Cipango also includes four academic papers that aim to provide the necessary historical context to understand Japan’s eugenic policies. Arnaud Nanta looks at colonial scholarship at Keijō Imperial University, analysing the emergence of the “annexationist” school of physical anthropology, which sought to demonstrate a “racial” proximity between Japan and its colonies. He compares support for this discourse with that of the eugenicist or “nativist” school back in the metropole, which opposed intermixing and became the dominant discourse in the 1940s. Homei Aya looks at the post-war period, when influence shifted from the emblematic eugenicists of the 1940s to eugenicists advocating social development (euthenicists), a branch that first grew in the 1920s and still held a certain amount of sway in the 1930s. However, while Japan’s eugenic policies developed a strong social and environmental dimension under the 1948 Eugenic Protection Law, the practice of segregating certain populations in the name of “racial purification” – for example people with leprosy or disabilities–, continued unabated. This triggered opposition from disability rights groups, represented by the association Aoi Shiba no Kai. Anne‑Lise Mithout analyses this movement to emancipate people with disabilities and oppose Japan’s eugenic policies by examining texts written by Aoi Shiba no Kai’s main leader, Yokozuka Kōichi. These developments have impacted the way eugenics, in Japan, is almost systematically associated with disability, as illustrated by the Sagamihara massacre. Yet, as Christian Galan illustrates, this influence extended to education, which both underpinned the 1948 regime (social eugenics, eradication of bad genes) and was shaped by it. The result was educational practices designed exclusively for “normal” children and a focus on “ability-ism” (nōryokushugi), the prerequisite for which was educational equality, itself made possible by eugenics.
9Finally, this editorial would not be complete without thanking Simon Ebersolt, Guillaume Muller and Jérémy Corral, our French proofreaders, as well as graduate students Nicolas Chazan and Chloé Stolar for their editing work. We are also deeply grateful to our editorial assistants Noémi Godefroy and Anne‑Lise Mithout, without whose dedication and efficiency Cipango would simply cease to exist. Last but not least, our thanks go to Michael Lucken and Estelle Bauer for their kindness, patience and continued support of Cipango as directors of the French Research Institute on East Asia (IFRAE).
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