wikipedia | Eugenics in Japan has influenced political, public health and social movements in Japan since the late 19th and early 20th century.
Originally brought to Japan through the United States (like Charles Davenport and John Coulter), through Mendelian inheritance by way of German influences, and French Lamarkian eugenic written studies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[1] Eugenics as a science was hotly debated at the beginning of the 20th, in Jinsei-Der Mensch,
the first eugenics journal in the Empire. As the Japanese sought to
close ranks with the West, this practice was adopted wholesale, along
with colonialism and its justifications.[2]
The concept of pureblood as a criterion for the uniqueness of the Yamato people
began circulating around 1880 in Japan, while eugenics in the sense of
instrumental and selective procreation, clustered around two positions concerning blood, the pure blood (純血 junketsu) and the mixed blood (混血 konketsu).[2]
Popularity of the pure-blood eugenics theory came from a homegrown racial purity or monoculture national belief that has been part of Japanese society since ancient times[citation needed]. The local movement was however less focused on modern scientific ideals and more on the "outside person" vs the "native or inside person" and blood purity.[2]
Later legal measures were supported by certain politicians and movements that sought to increase the number of healthy pure Japanese, while simultaneously decreasing the number of people suffering mental retardation, disability, genetic disease and other conditions that led to them being viewed as "inferior" contributions to the Japanese gene pool.[3][4]
Opposition to the eugenics movement persisted amongst several right-wing factions, including members of the Diet of Japan
and obstetricians, who perceived eugenics as suggesting that the
Japanese people were only animals, not inhabitants of the "country of
the kami" (神国 shinkoku) as believed by the Japanese national Shinto tradition.[5] Yoshiichi Sōwa (曽和義弌), author of "Japan's Shinto Revolution",[6] wrote in 1940, "When we look up into the past, the people of our country are descended from the kami. Are they claiming we must sterilize these people?"[7] Similar resistance to these theories occurred within conservative and traditional Christian communities in the United States.
wikipedia | Racial discrimination against other Asians was habitual in Imperial Japan, having begun with the start of Japanese colonialism.[62] The Meiji era Japanese showed a contempt for other Asians. This was exemplified in an editorial titled Datsu-A Ron, which advocated that Japan treat other Asians as other western empires treat them. The Shōwa regime preached racial superiority and racialist theories, based on nature of Yamato-damashii. According to historian Kurakichi Shiratori, one of Emperor Hirohito's teachers: "Therefore nothing in the world compares to the divine nature (shinsei) of the imperial house and likewise the majesty of our national polity (kokutai). Here is one great reason for Japan's superiority."[63]
According to the An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus, a classified report in 1943 of the Ministry of Health and Welfare completed on July 1, 1943, just as a family has harmony and reciprocity, but with a clear-cut hierarchy, the Japanese, as a racially superior people, were destined to rule Asia "eternally" as the head of the family of Asian nations.[64] The most horrific xenophobia of the pre-Shōwa period was displayed after the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, where in the confusion after a massive earthquake, Koreans were wrongly maligned as poisoning the water supply. A vicious pogrom resulted in the deaths of at least 3,000 Koreans, and the imprisonment of 26,000.
Attacks against Western foreigners and their Japanese friends by nationalist citizens, rose in the 1930s under the influence of Japanese military-political doctrines in the Showa period, after a long build-up starting in the Meiji period when only a few samurai die-hards did not accept foreigners in Japan.[65] For an exception, see Jewish settlement in the Japanese Empire.
Racism was omnipresent in the press during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Greater East Asia War and the media's descriptions of the superiority of the Yamato people was unwaveringly consistent.[66] The first major anti-foreigner publicity campaign, called Bōchō (Guard Against Espionage), was launched in 1940 alongside the proclamation of the Tōa shin Shitsujō (New Order in East Asia) and its first step, the Hakkō ichiu.[67]
Mostly after the launching of the Pacific War,
Westerners were detained by official authorities, and on occasion were
objects of violent assaults, sent to police jails or military detention
centers or suffered bad treatment in the street. This applied
particularly to Americans and British; in Manchukuo at the same period xenophobic attacks were carried out against Chinese and other non-Japanese.
0 comments:
Post a Comment