Latest / New Books in Japanese Studies
Sujin Lee, "Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan" (Stanford UP, 2023)
In 2007, Japan’s health minister referred to women ages 15-50 as “birthing machines.” The context was a speech about Japan’s declining birthrate and projected population shrinkage. As Sujin Lee shows in Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan (Stanford UP, 2023), neither population anxieties nor the idea of women as childbearing devices whose wombs were the property of the state are new. However, when the “population problem” became a public preoccupation for politicians, scientists, and activists in the 1910s, it was an expression of worries about…
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