Wombs of empire: Population discourses and biopolitics in modern Japan By SujinLee. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023. 258 pp.

Population policies operate at the macrolevel of the nation-state and its colonies, but they also impinge on the bodies of individuals at the microlevel. Sujin Lee surveys the development of discourses of population in the expansionist Japanese state and its empire from the 1880s to the 1950s. The title, Wombs of Empire, deftly indicates the mutual imbrication of population discourses and policies at these micro- and macrolevels. Much of this discussion of Japan's population policies and discourses will be familiar to scholars of modern Japanese history, but Lee provides a fresh view of this topic in her thoroughgoing deployment of Foucauldian discourse analysis, along with the concepts of biopolitics and governmentality, which “have been influential among scholars who study legislative and administrative management, scientific knowledge, and technological interventions that center on sexuality, reproduction, health, and welfare, and so forth” (p. 9). Readers from outside Japanese studies will benefit from Lee's meticulous analysis of Japanese-language primary sources: government policy documents, media and press sources, and discussions in intellectual journals. Twentieth-century Japanese feminist debates on marriage, sexuality, reproduction, and population are also given full weight. The case of the modern Japanese state and discourses of population can thus be placed in a comparative and transnational context. Lee facilitates such comparative perspectives with references to research by international scholars (Bashford, 2014). Lee argues that population discourses focus on quantity (population statistics) and quality (the population's reproductive health). This is inseparable from discourses of racial purity. The fertility of some bodies was seen as desirable, while the fertility of others was seen as undesirable. Married Japanese women in the heteronormative family were valorized for their fertility due to their provision of (literally) reproductive labor through their wombs. By contrast, so-called comfort women (victims of institutionalized military sexual violence) were subjected to the enforced provision of sexual labor through their vaginas. The impact of government policies on embodied individuals appears most vividly in the discussion of the valorization of women who bore large numbers of healthy children in wartime (kodakara butai, which Lee translates as “the fertile womb battalion”) and the parallel discussion of women who provided sexual labor for the Japanese military. Men are less apparent in these discussions, but we can posit that it was largely male bureaucrats, politicians, and medical professionals who were implicated in the patriarchal implementation of these policies. Men were positioned as citizens, workers, and soldiers, while women were positioned as mothers and others. In the discourses of eugenics, both men and women were enjoined to undertake eugenic counseling before marriage. The state also managed men's sexuality by promoting heteronormative marriage, managing the licensed prostitution system in Japan proper (naichi) and its colonies, and managing or facilitating the provision of military brothels in militarized zones wherever the Japanese forces advanced in Asia and the Pacific. This book could be read in conjunction with the work of Ogino Miho, one of the leading scholars of population policies in modern Japan. Ogino (2014) points out that, although modern Japanese government policies have swung between the two poles of promoting pronatalism and population growth and promoting family planning (through some forms of birth control) and population limitation, there is continuity in the modern Japanese state's concern with population policies. Lee's book reinforces this view. Wombs of Empire could also be usefully complemented with reference to Homei's (2022) Science for Governing Japan's Population, which looks specifically at the role of science and scientists in the development of population policies in modern Japan, which Homei (2022, p. 262) calls the “science-policy nexus.” Lee's book opens and closes with comments on Japan's current biopolitical crisis, characterized by a plummeting birth rate, a superaging society, a declining population, and a labor shortage. Lee briefly discusses some of the policies that recent governments have implemented to address the declining birth rate, such as providing health insurance for fertility treatments like artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, and micro-insemination. Notwithstanding these policies, it could be argued that in recent decades, much of the Japanese population has been engaged in a “birth strike.” They are marrying later (if at all), having fewer children, and having them later (if at all). Since the 1990s, the Japanese economy has been marked by long decades of recession, and waged labor has become increasingly precarious. In this environment, people have been reluctant to procreate. For me, this raises questions about citizens’ agency and the efficacy (or otherwise) of state policies. I would welcome an examination of these issues from the 1990s to the present in a follow-up volume.