Sujin Lee’s academic research has been devoted to the conundrum of modern Japanese fertility rates. An Assistant Professor of Modern Japanese History at the University of Victoria, Lee’s scholarship has established an incontrovertible connection between population management and cultural conceptions of womanhood. Her research has been most ambitiously reified in her new book Wombs of Empire, a spell-binding exploration of the historical precedents leading to contemporary Japan’s low birth rates. Despite each chapter’s extensive research basis, Lee’s crisp portrait of population discourse in Japan’s early twentieth century dissipates abruptly at the eve of the country’s post-war period. While Wombs of Empire convincingly argues for the normative character of Japan’s current population crisis, its omission of recent Japanese history struggles to ultimately articulate its roots.  

In sharp contrast to Japan’s contemporary fertility crisis, during its interwar period Japan pinpointed overpopulation as a principal concern. In the fallout of the first World War, different theories emerged about how best to instrumentalize population control to best serve the needs of the Japanese people. Neo-Malthusians sought to deal with food and housing shortages through the use of contraceptives and birth control. By contrast, leftists urged working-class families to moderate procreation in order to create less “wage-slaves” to be assimilated into the capitalist  system. Eugenics undergirded both of these views: intellectuals argued that by controlling the quantity of the Japanese population, they could also determine its quality. Although the definition of which types of people were valued in Japanese societies has changed throughout history, population control has remained a consistently problematized issue. 

Population control was adopted by Japanese feminists, many of whom argued for “voluntary motherhood”: a term of Western import that promoted women’s control over their fertility. While some leftists mobilized their term to serve classist critique, others elevated the issue of reproduction outside of the country’s current overpopulation issue and argued that motherhood exploited women on both the physical, mental, and financial level, regardless of whether Japan was facing an overpopulation or underpopulation crisis. Still others who fell under the feminist umbrella drew from eugenic theory. “Producing children itself was no longer a desirable expression of womanhood,” Sujin Lee stated. “Producing healthy children on eugenic grounds was the new norm.” As Shidzue Katō, a leading Japanese feminist in the 20th century, argued: “What birth control aims is to awaken people to the goal of breeding better humans on this earth.” Feminist views on reproduction during this period drowned each other out, just as much as they were influenced by each other.

During the Sino-Japanese War and World War I, population discourse pivoted abruptly to promote fertility rates rather than stifle them. While Lee successfully documents the enduring influence of eugenics theory in deciding the nation’s population discourse, Lee does not adequately address what led to a drop in fertility rates in the first place: did the Neo-Malthusianist and leftist arguments of the earlier decades succeed? Or did emigration become an overwhelmingly popular option for Japanese families? In any case, Lee argued that the main actors of population discourse in Japan shifted from intellectuals and activists to the Japanese government itself. In a remarkable chapter titled “Building a Biopolitical State,” Lee demonstrates how the government exacted increasing levels of biopower over the Japanese people: by expanding welfare, surveilling expecting mothers to ensure the mental and physical health of their babies, and ensuring that “undesirable” women (mainly women with hereditary mental disorders and comfort women) did not reproduce, the government inserted itself into monitoring the health of its people in order to promote the health of its nation. As Lee elucidates at length, the population of Japanese colonies such as in Manchuria and Taiwan were frequently excluded from the national health coverage that Japanese women received. Governments awarded commendations to families with ten children or more. The nation stipulated women’s wartime duty as resting in their reproductive capacities demonstrating that “women were recognized as rightful citizens only through reproductive bodies and responsibilities.” Lee succeeds at demonstrating that whether or not women were deemed normative, they were still relentlessly surveilled by the government and mobilized for nationalist ends. 

Wombs of Empire is a thoroughly enjoyable read with a rich examination of Japanese population discourse in the first half of the twentieth century. However, its research necessitates a second volume. In the post-war period, Japan’s economy fell from its once lofty position, never to be restored to its former glory. The nation’s asset price collapse of the 1990s also took a tremendous toll on the economy, from which they are only now beginning to recover. Exacerbating these nation-wide issues is the grueling conditions endured by Japanese workers. Despite Japan’s focus on raising physically and mentally healthy children, as evidenced by their diverse club options at school, adult life under capitalism still retains its perennial bleakness. Considering these societal malfunctions, how can the Japanese government hope to successfully encourage reproduction? Considering that fertility rates are declining worldwide, this is not just a question for Japan to contend with, but for each country to examine in the context of its own society.