Ajia no shussan to kazoku keikaku—“umu, umanai, umenai” shintai wo meguru seiji アジアの出産と家族計画—「産む・産まない ・産めな い」身体をめぐる政治 [Childbirth and Family Planning in Asia: The Politics of Women’s Reproductive Bodies] ed. by Kohama Masako and Etsuko Matsuoka (review)

Sociopolitical implications of women’s reproductive bodies have been subject to historical scrutiny over the decades since the second wave of feminism and since Foucault provided the notion of biopower. Yet over the last decade, additional— and exciting—scholarship has emerged that encourages historians to reappraise the significance of reproductive bodies in terms of political economy and international diplomacy. These works have aptly characterized how cultural and political elites, including population scientists and medics specializing in human reproduction, understood reproduction as consisting of the problematics of its aggregate form, namely, population. They also have pointed out the transnational aspect within the politics of reproduction, precisely because the problem of population dovetails with issues that straddle national borders, such as food, land, resources, security, and migration. These works have also identified how Asia’s “overpopulation” has surfaced as a contested theme in international politics during the mid-twentieth century, when demographic transition theory, implying the intricate link between high fertility and socioeconomic “underdevelopment,” was being established at the dawn of the Cold War.

This is the historiographical background to the collection under review, but it can also be read as a response to the above-mentioned scholarship. With the objective that it “traces the changing state of reproduction in various countries and areas in Asia from the middle of the twentieth-century to present and examines its meanings pluralistically with the comparative perspective” (7), the collection, based on the notion of reproductive health and sensitivity to gender dynamics, introduces eight case studies on the politics of reproduction in Japan, Okinawa, the People’s Republic of China, Nepal, Laos, and the Republic of Korea.

The chapters are organized both thematically and in chronological order. The first two chapters fall under the first theme: “Women and the State in Reproduction in Post-WWII ‘Japan.’” In chapter 1, Yasuko Tama studies the notion of women’s desire for abortion and fertility control, which allegedly contributed to the rapid decline in birth rates in the early postwar period in Japan. Tama first argues that women’s desire was informed by their experience during the Second World War, thereby invalidating the notion of discontinuity between the pre- and postwar periods. Tama further maintains that the politics of choice was influenced by the prewar pronatal eugenic policy and ideology; thus, she claims, women’s “choice” of fertility control was a privilege granted to a chosen few healthy middle-class housewives in a marital relationship.

In chapter 2, Kayo Sawada studies the politics of reproduction in Okinawa prior to its “return” to Japan in 1972, thus the reason for Japan in scare quotes in the theme title. Making a full use of archival sources and oral history interviews, Sawada aptly reconstructs how the dialogue between the Ryukyu government and the occupying US Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands ended up preserving Japan’s pronatal policy of the wartime and how women negotiated their reproduction confronted by the policy and additionally by Okinawa’s patriarchic ideology.

The second theme is “Medicalization of Reproduction under State Direction in Rural China,” to which Masako Kohama and Yi Yao each contribute one chapter, which together could be read as a set. Both use quantitative data and materials from oral history interviews conducted in the anonymous Q Village in Liaoning Province. However, each has a different focus: while Kohama in chapter 3 focuses on birth control, Yao directs our attention to aspects of birthing in the village. The approaches are distinctive, as well. Kohama primarily elaborates on the multilayered politics in the process of state-led birth planning and, in particular, stresses women’s everyday negotiations with their reproductive bodies confronted by the microlevel economy, patriarchy, and career options. In contrast, Yao contextualizes...