Abstract
Japan is renowned for its “selective adaptation of ideas and institutions.”1 This chapter deals with one example, the transplantation and domestication of “eugenics.”2 “Eugenics” is a term coined in 1883 by British scientist Francis Galton to describe the notion that human genetic stock could be improved by controlling heredity. The boundary between the “fit” who were encouraged to reproduce, and the “unfit” often coincided with boundaries of “race,” gender, and class. It is thus intriguing to ask why some Japanese chose to adopt and adhere to the Western science of eugenics, even though it seemed to prescribe inferior status to the Japanese in a white-dominated international “racial” hierarchy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Japanese leaders, aspiring to make Japan capable of competing with industrial and “civilized” Western nations, launched comprehensive modernization programs. Scientists were among those who eagerly participated in this process of “building a new era.”3 In this context, eugenics can be seen as a “biological” approach to this far-reaching modernization plan.
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Notes
I would like to thank James Bartholomew, Kevin Doak, Margaret Lock, Morris Low, Matsubara Yōko, Lawrence Sitcawich, Sharon Traweek, Yuki Terazawa, and Rumi Yasutake for generously assisting me during the course of this research. The quote is from Mark B. Adams, “Toward a Comparative History of Eugenics,” in The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia, ed. Mark B. Adams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 225–226.
For the hierarchy of center and periphery of scientific knowledge production, see Nancy Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 3;
Hiroshige Tetsu, Kagaku to rekishi (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 1965), pp. 103–105;
Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988);
and Morris Fraser Low, “The Butterfly and the Frigate: Social Studies of Science in Japan,” Social Studies of Science 1989, 19: 313–342.
For the concepts of transplantation, domestication, and translation, see Joseph J. Tobin, “Introduction: Domesticating the West,” in Re-Made in Japan: Everyday Life and Consumer Taste in a Changing Society, ed. Joseph J. Tobin (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 1–41, on p. 4;
and Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “The Great Translation: Traditional and Modern Science in Japan’s Industrialization,” Historia Scientiarum 1995, 5 (2): 103–116.
This was the assessment of the Japanese historian of science Yoshida Mitsukuni, quoted in James R. Bartholomew, The Formation of Science in Japan: Building a Research Tradition (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 4.
For existing work that touches on Ōsawa’s eugenic ideas, see Suzuki Zenji, Nihon no yūseigaku: Sono shisō to undō no kiseki (Tokyo: Sankyō Shuppan, 1983), p. 92;
and Saitoh Hikaru, “Chiiku taiiku iden kyōikuron o kangaeru: Nihon yūseigakushi no hitokoma,” Kyōto Seika Daigaku kiyō 1993, 5: 168–178, on pp. 171–173. Neither Saitoh nor Suzuki suggest that Ōsawa paid a special attention to the female body. Though she analyzes him more as a sexologist than eugenicist, Sabine Frühstück, however, notes that Ōzawa (Ōsawa) Kenji identified “chastity, women’s participation in the workforce outside the home, and birth control” as the most important “sexual problems” in 1920. See her Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 104.
“Medicalization of life” refers to medical professionals’ attempt to bring various events, behaviors, and problems into their sphere by diagnosing them as pathological. This means the creation of a new market because previously nonmedical matters are transformed into something that required health scientific treatment and care. See Margaret Lock, “Ambiguities of Aging: Japanese Experience and Perceptions of Menopause,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 1986, 10: 23–46.
About Ōsawa’s life, see his memoir, Ōsawa Kenji, Tōei chūgo, ed. Nagai Hisomu (Tokyo: Kyōrinsha, 1928).
See also K.R. Iseki, ed., Who’s Who Hakushi in Great Japan 1888–1922 (alternative title: Iseki Kurō, ed., Dai Nihon hakushiroku), Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Hattensha, 1925), pp. 4–5, 27–28 (in English) and 4–5, 26–27 (in Japanese);
Koichi Uchiyama and Chandler McC. Brooks, “Kenji Osawa, a Pioneer Physiologist of Japan,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 1965, 20: 277–279;
Sakagami Katsuya, ed., Gekidō no Nihon seijishi, Vol. 1, Meiji Taishō Shōwa rekidai kokkai giin shiroku (Tokyo: Asaka Shobō, 1979), p. 958;
and Nihon Seirigaku Kyōshitsushi Henshū Iinkai, ed., Nihon seirigaku kyōshitsushi, Vol. 1 (Tokyo: Nihon Seirigakkai, 1983), pp. 272–277.
Masao Watanabe, The Japanese and Western Science, trans. Otto Theodor Benfey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), p. 79.
Fukuzawa Yukichi, “Jiji shōgen,” in Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshū, ed. Keiō Gijuku, Vol. 5 (1881; reprint, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1959), pp. 225–231. Galton published Hereditary Genius in 1869.
For “whitening” and “whiteness” discussion in China, Brazil, and Japan, see Sakamoto Hiroko, “Ren’ai shinsei to minzoku kairyō no ‘kagaku’: Goshi shinbunka disukōsu to shite no yūsei shisō,” Shisō 1998, 894:4–34, on p. 7; Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics,” pp. 154–156;
and Morris Low, “The Japanese Nation in Evolution: W.E. Griffis, Hybridity and Whiteness of the Japanese Race,” History and Anthropology 1999, 11 (2–3): 203–234.
See Takahashi Yoshio, “Nihon jinshu kairyō ron,” in Meiji bunka shiryō sōsho, Vol. 6, Shakai mondai hen, ed. Kaji Ryūichi (1884; reprint, Tokyo: Kazama Shobō, 1961), pp. 15–55. For studies on this subject, see Suzuki, Nihon no yūseigaku, pp. 32–44;
and Fujino Yutaka, “Kindai Nihon to yūsei shisō no juyō,” in Nihon fashizumu to yūsei shisō (Kyoto: Kamogawa Shoten, 1998), pp. 371–394.
In English, see Hiroshi Unoura, “Samurai Darwinism: Hiroyuki Katō and the Reception of Darwin’s Theory in Modern Japan from the 1880s to the 1900s,” History and Anthropology 1999, 11 (2–3): 235–255.
See Fukuzawa Yukichi, “Nihon fujinron,” in Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshū, Vol. 5, ed. Keiō Gijuku (1886; reprint, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1959), pp. 447–474;
Sugihara Naoko, “Fukuzawa Yukichi no joseiron ni okeru paradaimu tenkan,” Ningen bunka kenkyū nenpō 1991, 15: 219–229; and Fujino, “Kindai Nihon to yūsei shisō no juyō,” pp. 386–392.
Later Ōsawa wrote an article analyzing the lefthandedness of Katō Hiroyuki in 1899. Ōsawa also noted that Katō was involved in the mixed marriage debate a decade and some years earlier, see Ōsawa Kenji, Tsūzoku kekkon shinsetsu, (Tokyo: Ōkura Shoten, 1909), p. 245.
Sumiko Otsubo and James R. Bartholomew, “Eugenics in Japan: Some Ironies of Modernity, 1883–1945,” Science in Context 1998, 11 (3–4): 545–565, on pp. 549–552.
Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 96–101.
Weindling, Healthy Race, and German Politics, p. 9. The German notion of “social hygiene” and the French notion of “social medicine” were often used interchangeably. For social hygiene in Japan, see Nihon Kagakushi Gakkai, ed., Nihon kagaku gijutsushi taikei, Vol. 25, Igaku Part 2 (Tokyo: Dai-ichi Hōki Shuppan, 1967), pp. 73–104.
For instance, Ōsawa published a couple of articles regarding the impact of civilization on the physical and mental quality of humans in 1905. See Nihon Seirigaku Kyōshitsushi Henshū Iinkai, Nihon seirigaku kyōshitsushi, Vol. 1, p. 276. For degeneration, see Ian Dowbiggen, “Degeneration and Hereditarianism in French Mental Medicine, 1840–1890: Psychiatric Theory as Ideological Adaptation,” in The Anatomy of Madness, Essays in the History of Psychiatry, Vol. 1, People and Ideas, ed. W.F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd (London: Tavistock, 1985), pp. 188–232;
Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
and Matsubara Yōko, “Meiji-matsu kara Taishō-ki ni okeru shakai mondai to ‘iden,’” Nihon bunka kenkyūjo kiyō 1996, 3: 155–169.
Ōsawa Kenji, Shaiteki eisei taishitsu kairyōron (Tokyo: Kaiseikan, 1904), pp. 26–27.
Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 92 and note 29 on p. 325; Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics, pp. 293–294;
and Atina Grossman, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Control, 1920–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 16.
See Kathryn Ragsdale, “Marriage, the Newspaper Business, and the Nation-State: Ideology, in the Late Meiji Serialized Katei Shōsetsu,” Journal of Japanese Studies 1998, 24 (2): 229–255. As for the Hōchi marriage detective service (Hōchisha Anshinjo), see its advertisement in the back of Ōsawa, Tsūzoku kekkon shinsetsu. For agencies investigating lineage, see Fujino, Nihon fashizumu to yūsei shisō, pp. 107, 392–393.
For the process of redefining middle class in the Meiji period and the significance of education for the new middle class people, see David R. Ambaras, “Social Knowledge, Cultural Capital, and the New Middle Class in Japan, 1895–1912,” Journal of Japanese Studies 1998, 24 (1): 1–33.
Ōtsuka Miyao, Shinpan Meiji ishin to Doitsu shisō, ed. Yamashita Takeshi (Tokyo: Nagasaki Shuppan, 1977), pp. 322–335;
and Hashikawa Bunzō, Kōka monogatari (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1976).
See Sumiko Otsubo, “Women Scientists and Gender Ideology in Japan,” in A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan, ed. Jennifer Robertson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
Suzuki Yūko, Joseishi o hiraku, Vol. 1, Haha to onna: Hiratsuka Raichō to Ichikawa Fusae o jiku ni (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1989), pp. 50–51;
and Miyake Yoshiko, “Kindai Nihon joseishi no saisōzō no tame ni: Tekisuto no yomikae,” Kanagawa Daigaku Hyōron Henshū Senmon Iinkai, ed., Kanagaka Daigaku hyōron, Vol. 4, Shakai no hakken (Tokyo: Ochanomizu Shobō, 1994), p. 65.
Ōsawa Kenji, “Shugai to kinshu hōhō,” Kuni no hikari 1907, 167: 20–22.
Katō Junji, Nemoto Shō-den: Miseinensha inshu kinshu-hō o tsukutta hito (Nagano: Ginga Shobō, 1995), pp. 167–171.
See, e.g., Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982).
See also the assessment of this influential view in Morris-Suzuki, The Technological Transformation of Japan: From the Seventeenth to the Twenty-first Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 72–77;
and Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. xii.
See Fujime Yuki, Sei no rekishigaku: Kōshō seido, dataizai taisei kara Baishun Bōshi-hō, Yūsei Hogo-hō taisei e (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1997), pp. 320–321;
Kondō Kazuko, “Onna to sensō” in Onna to otoko no jikū: Nihon joseishi saikō, Vol. 6, ed., Okuda Akiko, Semegiau onna to otoko: Kindai (Tokyo: Fujiwara Shoten, 1995), p. 481.
See Suzuki Zenji, “Yūzenikkusu ni taisuru Nihon no han’nō,” Kagakushi kenkyū 1968, 87: 129–136, on p. 135.
Andrew Gordon states that “a profound anxiety that something was being lost in the headlong rush to a Western-focused modernity surfaced with increasing intensity in the 1880s and 1890s. This worry pushed intellectuals to improvise new concepts of Japanese ‘traditions.’ It also linked up with the fear of social disorder and political challenge among state officials. They responded by putting in place oppressive limits on individual thought and behavior.” See his A Modern History of Japan, p. 94. For invented traditions in Japan, see Stephen Vlastos, ed., Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
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Otsubo, S. (2005). The Female Body and Eugenic Thought in Meiji Japan. In: Low, M. (eds) Building a Modern Japan. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981110_4
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