“Japan Reborn: Race, Sex, and Eugenics from Empire to Cold War" w/ Roebuck

In the late-imperial era circa World War II, Japanese touted themselves as a “mixed blood” people with a world-historical gift for assimilating diverse races. The konketusji or “mixed blood child” was widely celebrated as the eugenic fruit of imperial expansion. Eugenic “blood mixing” ceased with defeat and loss of empire in 1945, when foreign armies and “races” of men marched into Japan – and into the beds of Japanese women. Allied occupation, followed swiftly by postwar alliance with the erstwhile enemy, the United States, sparked in Japan a broad, negative reaction against “blood mixing” and a profound devolution in the social status of the “mixed blood” child. In the late 1940s and 1950s, Japanese eugenicists, policymakers, protestors, and presses railed against women “mixing blood” with Americans soldiers. Partisans on Japan’s left and right aimed to delegitimize the nascent US-Japan alliance by tarring it with the black brush of miscegenation and tarring “mixed” children themselves as innately foreign and threatening. Amid widespread calls for the mass removal of konketsuji from Japan, anti-mixing activists such Sawada Miki helped pioneer the practice of international adoption. The United States was on the defensive, and sought to salvage its reputation and Cold War alliance by reforming its laws and culture to welcome “mixed” families and adoptees from Japan.

Speaker's Bio:

Kristin Roebuck is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Cornell University. She earned her PhD in East Asian History from Columbia University. She and her work have appeared in such venues as Japanese Studies, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, NBC News, The Hill, and National Public Radio. Her first book, Japan Reborn: Race and Eugenics from Empire to Cold War, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

Host or Publisher Center for East Asian Studies