Post-War Birth Control Policy and Aging Population in Japan

Aya Homei’s Science for Governing Japan’s Population (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines the science and policy of population in Japan, 1860s-1960s. As in other modern nation-states and empires, population has been an index of national strength and a preoccupation of specialists and policymakers alike. Homei tackles the origins and changes of this interest in Japan, and the mutual dependence of the development of population as an object of knowledge and management for both the state and scientific community. Science for Governing shows that population science was shaped by the shifting imperatives and ideologies of the state and the sociopolitical and economic conditions in which knowledge was produced.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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