Family planning in post-WWII Japan through a transnational lens
Key information
- Date
- Time
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5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
- Venue
- Virtual Event
About this event
Dr Aya Homei (University of Manchester)
Abstract
“Family planning” ( kazoku keikaku ), or various efforts made by the government and people to regulate the number of babies born in Japan after the World War II (WWII), has been accounted primarily with a domestic perspective. This talk revisits this nation-centred narrative of family planning by locating the Japanese history in the global population control movement that emerged in the middle of the twentieth century. Specifically, the talk focuses on the birth control pilot projects organized by the Institute of Public Health, which directly influenced the project participants’ reproductive practices as well as the government’s birth control policies in the 1950s. By identifying transnational elements that shaped the flow of money, goods, personnel, and information across Japan, US, India, and other places that shaped the Japanese birth control pilot projects, this talk shows the link between the global population control movement and Japan’s local and national family planning endeavour, thereby adds to the recent historiographical trend that calls for a need to view modern and contemporary Japan through the lens of transnational history.
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Speaker Biography
Aya is a Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Manchester and is specialized in the historian of healthcare and medicine in modern Japan with a specific focus on the issues of reproduction, population, and sovereignty. Aya has guest-edited special issues, ‘Population Control in Cold War Asia’, for East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (with Yu-ling Huang, 2016) and ‘Critical Approaches to Reproduction and Population in Post-War Japan’ for Japan Forum (with Yoko Matsubara, 2021). Aya is also the author of Science for Governing Japan’s Population , forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
Organiser: SOAS Japan Research Centre
Contact email: centres@soas.ac.uk
