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Reviewed by:
  • Political Economy of Reproduction in Japan
  • Patricia Boling (bio)
Political Economy of Reproduction in Japan. By Takeda Hiroko. Routledge-Curzon, London, 2005. x, 278 pages. £65.00.

Takeda Hiroko's Political Economy of Reproduction in Japan is a big book in terms of its historical sweep, erudition, and theoretical ambitions. Her aim is to "elucidate and analyze the historical trajectory" of the political economy of reproduction in Japan since 1868 (p. 4). She is interested not just in "reproduction" as procreation but also in economic and social notions of reproduction, and all of these senses are connected in her analysis of reproductive and population policies.

Takeda uses "political economy" to refer to a web of political, economic, and social interactions that traverse public and private space and connect the nation-state with the everyday lives and bodies of citizens (p. 5). She does not see this interaction as a one-way street, with a powerful state shaping and manipulating the lives and reproductive behaviors of its subjects; she also traces the resistance and protest of subjects and the ways women are empowered as well as subjugated by different policies and practices.

Political economy understood in this encompassing sense connects to Takeda's core theoretical approach, which is based on "governmentality," studies of which "provide us with perspectives through which we may analyze the power dynamics between the organization of everyday life at the level of the individual and the institutional arrangements of states" (p. 5). Drawing on Michel Foucault and Jacques Donzelot, Takeda examines how intermediate institutions such as schools, clinics, and social welfare offices operate as agents for managing the population through a kind of power that "does not physically oppress people, but by being dispersed into everyday life, comes to be like a compass which directs people's everyday actions" (p. 12). "By resorting to this form of power," she writes, "the government no longer needs to wield its power either crudely or violently. Instead of [End Page 431] physical oppression, [it] seeks a rational and economical means of governing, realized through a secured society and achieved by internalization of disciplines and surveillance on human bodies" (p. 13).

Takeda demonstrates the aptness of governmentalitity for understanding Japanese approaches to shaping an adequate and healthy population in her discussions of population and reproductive policies before, during, and after World War II. Her empirical chapters provide rich descriptions of how national researchers and policymakers collaborate with administrative agencies from other levels of government, corporations, social movements, currents of popular culture, and the intended targets of reproductive policies (who are almost always women) to pursue evolving notions of national economic productivity, healthy procreation, and sound childrearing. She focuses not on a single political institution or policy, but on the broad interplay of institutions, practices, expectations, and policies that work both at the level of formal governmental policy and also at social, familiar, personal, and even intimate levels.

The five substantive chapters of this book display unusually detailed knowledge about a wide range of historical periods. Chapter two discusses the Meiji and Taisho periods and the project of modernization as it applied to the household and to nation building. Meiji intellectuals encouraged mothers to be better educated so they could do a better job educating their children and introduced notions of cleanliness, good hygiene, and the home as a private sphere. Turning out educated, disciplined children who could be good workers and soldiers fit with the often-articulated aspiration to "enrich the country, strengthen the military" (fukoku kyōhei). This chapter discusses the debates among early feminists about sexuality, motherhood, and abortion, and shows how their concern with maternalism provided an early bridge between women and the public world. It also focuses on the beginnings of a birth-control movement with links to eugenic thinking and the Everyday Life Improvement Movement, initiated by the government in 1919 to foster more rational techniques for cooking, washing clothes, cleaning the house, and increasing home savings.

Chapter three deals with the total war regime, addressing the activities of women's groups, eugenicist and pro-natalist policies undertaken by the government, and the development of new governing and bureaucratic capacities which provided the...

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