生命というリスク―二〇世紀社会の再生産戦略

生命というリスク―二〇世紀社会の再生産戦略 Osamu Kawagoe and Ken’ichi Tomobe, eds., Seimei to iu risuku: nijisseiki shakai no saiseisan senryaku [A Risk Called Life: Reproductive Strategies of Twentieth-Century Society] Tokyo: Hosei daigaku shuppankyoku, 2008. 318 pp. ¥3,570. Aya Homei Received: 8 October 2008 /Accepted: 8 October 2008 /Published online: 3 October 2009 # National Science Council, Taiwan 2009 Toward the end of the twentieth century, reproduction surfaced on the public agenda in Japan—yet again. As it had half a century earlier, the reasoning of policy makers followed utilitarian lines: reproduction at replacement rates was essential to the thriving state. This time, however, the aim was not military victory or imperialist expansion but overcoming the dwindling birthrate and the so-called super-aging society. The framework, too, was different. Osamu Kawagoe, one of the editors of the book under review, Seimei to iu risuku: nijisseiki shakai no saiseisan senryaku, claims that Japan’s quandaries about reproduction “derive from attempts to solve problems . . . in a ‘risk society’ using systems and methods now conventional to ‘industrial society’” (12). Drawing on concepts proposed by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck in his seminal monograph, Risikogesellschaft (Risk Society), the editors define their project as a “historical analysis of the politics of reproduction” (12) which they approach by “clarifying the historical starting point of problems surrounding life today” (12) and “illuminating the historical processes responsible for the emergence and development of twentieth-century society” (1). Essays in the collection focus on moments when Japan or Germany was grappling with decisions about reproduction and child care, dilemmas born of the tension between traditional mores and modern medicine. The editors propose a new term, “life risk” (seimei risuku 生命リスク), which they set at the center of their analytical framework. Life risk is, according to the book, “a working and hypothetical notion . . . that seizes East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (2009) 3:389–392 DOI 10.1007/s12280-009-9094-5 A. Homei (*) Needham Research Institute and Department of East Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail: ah567@cam.ac.uk those groups of issues around the body that surface over the course of life, moments such as infancy, toddlerhood, pregnancy and childbirth, illness and aging, all of which destabilize one’s life” (1). In Chapter 1, Ken’ichi Tomobe discusses “Life Risk from the Perspective of Population.” Through a reading of discourses around the death of children from the Tokugawa (1603–1868) to the Meiji (1868–1912) period, Tomobe rejects conventional interpretations by suggesting that the Tokugawa was haunted by images of dead children. He then describes how venereal diseases became associated with prostitution in the Meiji period (as the term karyūbyō potently illustrates). His analysis of the rate of infection in the Taisho (1912–1926) period, which he explains as a “negative effect . . . of urbanization and the move to a market economy” (28), correlates with data about children’s health extracted from a census conducted in Gunma Prefecture, some 100 km northwest of Tokyo. The latter half of the chapter uses statistics to identify risks—demographic data are presented as an indicator of life risk and as a point from which discourses of reproductive politics and policies can be analyzed. A similar theme unites Chapters 4, 6, and 7. In “A Reexamination of Wartime ‘Population Policy,’” Hiroyuki Takaoka refuses to consider demographic figures as self-evident, choosing instead to subject them to critical scrutiny. From 1938 a wide range of ideas about population stretched from a policy that placed the industrial population at the center to a policy that focused on agrarian population (146–54). Takaoka also reveals how the speculation over future birth rates by demographer Tomonaga Nakayama became a foundation for the new policy of the 1940s. Similarly, in “Life Risk and the Modern Family,” Osamu Kawagoe introduces demographic data and other figures to define changing family structures in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. Unable to reconcile these numbers with the state’s childcare policies, he dives into official reports as well as surveys in a popular women’s magazine, Brigitte. He concludes that men (including politicians) came during that period to embrace the idea of sansai shinwa, the superiority of...