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Jennifer Robertson
Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Abstract

During the heady, nationalist decades (1880-1945) of empire-building, "blood" was invoked by Japanese ideologues not only as a metaphor for "shared heredity" or "shared ancestry," but also as the essential material of "race." As a symbol of and euphemism for racial and cultural essence, blood remains a symbolic code or organizing metaphor for profoundly significant, fundamental, and perduring assumptions about Japaneseness and otherness, both within and outside of Japan.

It was during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries that "blood" (chi, ketsu), equated in earlier periods with death and ritual pollution, gradually acquired a positive metaphorical meaning of "life force" and lineage. The specific field of science that took up this "positive" meaning of blood as its subject was eugenics and race science, and it fueled a discourse that permeated all aspects of everyday life in Japan by 1900. The public sphere shaped by the discourse of eugenics (selective breeding) and race science was premised on a future-oriented vision of a racially-improved nation-state, one peopled by taller, heavier, healthier, and fertile men and women whose anthropometrically ideal bodies would serve as the caryatids of the Japanese nation and empire alike. Through networks of modern institutions and industries, such as the army, schools, hygiene exhibitions, immigration training programs, the press, fashion, advertising, popular genealogies, and so forth, the Japanese people were encouraged to think very differently about their bodies; that is, to think of their bodies as plastic, in the sense of capable of being molded, and as adaptable, pliable, and transformable through new scientific regimens of nutrition and calisthenics. These regimens would, it was argued along implicit (and sometimes explicit) Lamarckian lines, would amplify and augment the beneficial results of eugenics.

This paper contextualizes and discusses the debates about "blood" (pure or mixed) at the crux of the multifocal eugenics movement in early twentieth century Japan. Shifting interpretations of endogamy and exogamy are explored as are the gendered operations of blood in the context of nation- and empire-building. Attention is also drawn to the importance and relevance of historically-grounded research on ideologies of blood. Only by attending to continuously present historical patterns of social control and national identity formation can we begin to frame a critical discourse of bioethics relevant to Japan with comparative potential; a critical discourse that will make visible the euphemisms for, and the interventions of, "second-wave" eugenics today.