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Podcast: New Books in East Asian Studies
Episode: Sujin Lee, "Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Description: In 2007, Japanâs health minister referred to women ages 15-50 as âbirthing machines.â The context was a speech about Japanâs declining birthrate and projected population shrinkage. As Sujin Lee shows in Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan (Stanford UP, 2023), neither population anxieties nor the idea of women as childbearing devices whose wombs were the property of the state are new. However, when the âpopulation problemâ became a public preoccupation for politicians, scientists, and activists in the 1910s, it was an expression of worries about overpopulation and carrying capacity in a âresource-poorâ nation and empire. Wombs of Empire tra...