War, for all its violence and destruction, is not just about death; sex and birth are also realities of war, historian Kristin Roebuck points out.
“When people meet in battlefields and occupied lands, quick and often coercive intimacy follows,” said Roebuck, assistant professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences. “It’s not just that children are born in contested territory; the children themselves are contested territory. It must be decided what nation or ‘race’ these children belong to and what rights they should enjoy – or be denied.”
In her new book “Japan Reborn: Race and Eugenics from Empire to Cold War,” Roebuck explores what happened to “mixed blood” children born to Japanese women and foreign soldiers from the peak of Japan’s imperial expansion in the 1930s through the empire’s collapse in 1945 and beyond, a period that included Japan’s occupation by the Allies and the formation of a fraught Cold War alliance with the United States in the 1950s.
After World War Two, the Japanese, who had recently ruled a proudly “mixed blood” empire, rejected “mixed blood” children sired by Americans during the occupation and early Cold War, Roebuck said. Ironically, as Japanese became increasingly intolerant of “mixed” family formation, the U.S., where interracial family formation had long been illegal or taboo, swung in the opposite direction. In particular, U.S. legislators and mass media mobilized to support veterans who wanted to marry Japanese brides or adopt children from Japan.
“Adopting ‘mixed blood’ children, who were rejected in their home countries into the American national family was a means of promoting American moral leadership on the international stage while ameliorating the sexual and racial tensions plaguing early Cold War alliances with both Japan and South Korea,” Roebuck said.
The College of Arts and Sciences spoke with Roebuck about the book.
Question: In the period of imperial expansion Japan undertook from 1895-1944, why was race-mixing supposed to build the Japanese empire?
Answer: At a time of rapid imperial expansion, Japanese constructed themselves as a “mixed blood” people with a world-historical gift for assimilating diverse others. Citing deep evolutionary histories of blood ties between Japanese, Asians and the wider world allowed wartime Japanese to transcend the narrow and artificial borders erected by states and naturalize Japanese expansion.
Far from alien invaders, Japanese in this blood-based imaginary were “coming home” to reunite with diverse kin in countless lands. Better even than relying on ancient blood bonds, Japanese could forge stronger blood ties in the present through intermarriage and “blood mixing.” Imperial Japanese government agents, eugenicists and mass media promoted intermarriage, adoption and “blood mixing” to fuse colonized and conquered populations into one harmonious family-state. In the minds of proponents, breeding “mixed blood” children enabled Japanese to reproduce their eugenically superior “mixed blood” selves overseas while building kinship and community with diverse people in conquered lands.
At the time, “mixed blood” children were often imagined as the offspring of Japanese soldiers advancing into foreign lands and impregnating foreign women. Such reproductive expansion was often celebrated, but there was a clear double-standard, with social taboos (albeit no laws) against Japanese women similarly taking up with foreign men.
Q: How did that double standard come into play after 1945?
A: When occupying soldiers and Japanese women started having sex and babies, the response in Japan included campaigns to abort those children and expel any who were born from the country. They were born in Japan to Japanese mothers, but these children were widely defined as non-Japanese. Thousands wound up in orphanages and many were adopted and emigrated to the United States. A smaller number emigrated to Brazil.
From the imperial era into the postwar era, there was a clear patrilineal bias determining who counts as Japanese and why. Culturally and legally, children of Japanese men were readily granted Japanese identity and rights, regardless of who their mother might be. Legally, unmarried Japanese mothers could also pass on citizenship to their children. But culturally, babies of unmarried mothers and foreign men were often denied membership in the Japanese community. That cultural bias reflected the law governing marital units, where the citizenship of the husband overrode that of the wife. Japan adopted that legal principle in the 19th century from the U.S. and Europe, where wives also lost their separate legal identity upon marriage. A woman who married a foreigner was expected to become a foreigner, and their children would inherit his citizenship while she lost hers.
Japanese nationality law was revised in the 1980s to grant citizenship on equal terms to children of Japanese mothers and those of Japanese fathers. But even today there is a lingering cultural bias towards defining the nation in patrilineal terms.
Q: How do ideas associated with “konketsu” (“mixed blood”) come up in Japanese culture or politics today?
The outrage and alarm in Japan isn’t nearly as severe as it was in the late 1940s and 1950s, when “blood mixing” was linked to the catastrophe of defeat and occupation by foreign armies. But the idea that took hold in that era – that Japanese are bound together by “pure blood,” that the nation is a race, a reproductive unit threatened by sexually insurgent countrywomen and genetically foreign Others – still resonates.
However, Japan is a cosmopolitan place. International marriage is not uncommon. Universities, tourism and popular culture foster international intimacy. And there are a lot of activists and everyday people in Japan working toward building a more just, equal, and inclusive society.
