Please join us for a book talk by Kristin Roebuck, organized by the Modern Asias and the Middle East Working Group and the Global Asias Collective.
Japan Reborn: Race and Eugenics from Empire to Cold War
Sponsored by: Modern Asias and the Middle East Working Group and the Global Asias Collective
Contact event organizers Eleanor Lenoe (
In this talk, Dr. Kristin Roebuck will introduce her new book, Japan Reborn: Race and Eugenics from Empire to Cold War. In the late-imperial and World War II, Japanese touted themselves as a "mixed blood" people with a world-historical gift for assimilating diverse races. The konketsuji or "mixed blood child" was widely celebrated as the eugenic fruit of imperial expansion. However, with defeat and loss of empire in 1945, foreign armies and "races" of men marched into Japan - and into the beds of Japanese women. Occupation by the United States and a profound devolution in the social status of the "mixed blood" child and his mother. As the United States and Japan forged a Cold War alliance in the 1950s, Japanese eugenicists, policymakers, protestors, and presses railed against "blood mixing" with US soldiers. Partisans on Japan's left and right aimed to delegitimize the nascent US-Japan alliance by tarring it with black brush of miscegenation. Amid widespread calls for the mass removal of US soldiers and their "mixed blood" children from Japan, anti-mixing activists, such as Sawada Miki, helped pioneer the practice of international adoption. The United States sought to salvage its reputation and Cold War alliance in Japan by reforming its laws and culture to welcome "mixed blood" adoptees and interracial families.