Eugenics in Japan: Sanguinous Repair

Abstract The article aims to discuss the relationships between eugenics, nationalism, and colonialism in Japan, and to highlight the ways in which eugenics was popularized and incorporated into everyday practices and official policies at home and in the colonies. It deals with eugenics-related activities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and addresses some of their postwar guises. It discusses some of these guises as posthuman eugenics, or the biotechnological enhancement of human life and reproduction. It concludes with the argument that Japan was only one of many nation-states to employ eugenics as social policy nearly a century ago, but it may be one of the first to implement posthuman eugenics to address looming demographic concerns.