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Differing Conceptions of "Voluntary Motherhood": Yamakawa

Kikue's Birth Strike and Ishimoto Shizue's Eugenic Feminism

Sujin Lee

U.S.-Japan Women's Journal, Number 52, 2017, pp. 3-22 (Article)

Published by University of Hawai'i Press


DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jwj.2017.0009

For additional information about this article


https://muse.jhu.edu/article/686352

Access provided by UFC-Universidade Federal do Ceará (19 Sep 2018 19:21 GMT)
Differing Conceptions of “Voluntary Motherhood”:
Yamakawa Kikue’s Birth Strike and Ishimoto Shizue’s
Eugenic Feminism
Sujin Lee

The Multiple Definitions of “Voluntary Motherhood” in Interwar Japan


In March and April 1922, American birth control activist Margaret Sanger (1879-1966)
visited Japan to promote the concept and techniques of birth control. In her first lecture, held
at the Tokyo Y.M.C.A. on March 14, Sanger addressed an audience of over five hundred
people on the subject of “War and Population” (Japan Times 1922). Sanger attributed
colonization and militarism to an overflowing population, as typified in Germany before
the outbreak of World War I, and urged Japanese audiences to address similar issues facing
Japan. Sanger’s accounts of overpopulation were anchored in Neo-Malthusianism—the
advocacy of birth control to ensure the balance between population size and resource supply;
she believed that Japan’s rising population would lead to domestic problems as well as
international conflicts.1 Thus the debate on birth control heralded by Sanger’s visit to Japan
went far beyond medical debates over the use of contraceptives: the introduction of birth
control into interwar discussions about population growth provided a chance for Japanese
intellectuals, activists, and bureaucrats to tackle a variety of pressing social issues, including
poverty, employment, migration, and maternal and child health. As I will argue, despite their
differing views on the primary purpose of birth control, Japanese birth control advocates
reconfigured sexual reproduction and motherhood as central politico-economic problems.

Sujin Lee received her Ph.D. in history from Cornell University in 2017 and is postdoctoral fellow
at the UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies. Her dissertation, Problematizing Population:
Politics of Birth Control and Eugenics in Interwar Japan, explores the impact of various population
discourses among Japanese intellectuals, activists, and bureaucrats on the reconfiguration of
population control, sexual reproduction, and motherhood during the interwar years.
© 2017 by Jōsai International Center for the Promotion of Art and Science, Jōsai University

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Yamakawa Kikue (1890-1980) and Ishimoto Shizue (1897-2001, later Katō Shizue
after marrying labor activist Katō Kanju in 1944) were feminist pioneers of the birth
control movement and established the first birth control organization in Japan, the Japan
Birth Control Research Group (Nihon Sanji Chōsetsu Kenkyūkai), in May 1922, led by
Ishimoto. Ishimoto observed Sanger’s birth control movement firsthand during her stay in
New York between 1919 and 1920. After returning to Japan in September 1920, Ishimoto
worked to introduce birth control to Japanese society (Ishimoto 1935 and 1984; Hopper
2004). Organization members included physician Kaji Tokijirō (1858-1930), socialist and
baron Ishimoto Keikichi (1887-1951), socialist and Waseda University professor Abe
Isoo (1865-1949), and labor activist Suzuki Bunji (1885-1946). The group published the
magazine Shōkazoku (Small Family) along with a series of pamphlets promoting birth
control. Although the organization disbanded less than a year later, the birth control
movement continued throughout the interwar period as different actors—social reformists,
proletarian activists, and feminists—agreed on the need to control population size and
improve the “quality” of the Japanese population on eugenic grounds.
I add to the growing body of scholarship in English, Japanese, and other world
languages that has delved into the political dimensions of birth control to address questions
of sexuality and reproduction within broader contexts of modern Japanese society. This
article sheds new light on the history of birth control by arguing that the transnational
discourse of problematizing populations was an integral part of Japanese feminists’
advocacy for birth control. For example, Fujime Yuki (1997), in her comprehensive
analysis of sex and gender systems in modern Japan, locates the prewar history of the
birth control movement within long-term conflicts between state power and individual
sexual freedom. Sabine Frühstück (2003), by focusing on social discourses and knowledge
production about sexuality, broadens the notion of power to include the social control of
sex and emphasizes intellectuals’ roles in normalizing and regulating sexual behaviors such
as artificial birth control. As opposed to these two researchers who address the question
of control in the politics of birth control, Ogino Miho (2008) sheds light on Japanese
citizens’ responses to the political and social control of individuals’ reproductive bodies.
Ogino considers birth control as both a biopolitical technology and the sexual practice of
individuals; she examines the often-overlooked fissures between discourse and practice
in the politics of reproduction. Despite different understandings of power and agency
in the politics of birth control, these scholars all agree with the underlying premise that
social and scientific discourses on birth control exemplify the politics of women’s bodies
in modern Japan. While previous literature confines the history of birth control within
national borders and the politics of female sexuality, my article analyzes the intersection
of population discourses, feminist movements, and transnational birth control campaigns.2

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I argue that Yamakawa and Ishimoto, as leaders of the Japanese birth control
movement, played important roles in redirecting transnational birth control debates toward
the feminist critique of domestic socioeconomic structures. Although numerous studies
have examined prewar feminist movements and perspectives on motherhood and have
accounted for the complex relationships between women and the state, production and
reproduction, and gender equality and bodily differences, there has been little attention
to the interplay between population discourses and Japanese feminists’ advocacy for
reproductive autonomy (e.g. Miyake 1991; Molony 1993 and 2000; Mackie 2003; Uno
2005; Otsubo 2005). This article considers the birth control movement, contraceptives, and
eugenics as “population discourses,” namely, languages, movements, and technologies
that problematize, regulate, and govern the population. Through the lens of population
discourses in the interwar period, this article reveals how Japanese feminists actively
embraced birth control and “eugenics” as a scientific means to empower women and
reorder gender relations. As Diane Paul (1998, 19) keenly observes, eugenics has been
“a protean concept” throughout modern history, which has been easily bonded with
humanitarian politics, its goal for biological progress. This article defines eugenics as a
scientific discourse encouraging people with desirable traits to have many children while
regulating the reproduction of racial inferiors.
Sanger’s concept of “voluntary motherhood” epitomizes the interplay between
population discourses and feminism in the United States and Japan during the interwar
years. Voluntary motherhood—a term used by Margaret Sanger in the late 1910s,
borrowed from late-nineteenth-century American women’s suffrage groups and Free
Love groups (Gordon 1973)—was reinterpreted by Yamakawa and Ishimoto in the
Japanese social context of the 1920s. Originally, Sanger used voluntary motherhood
to emphasize women’s self-determination of motherhood and to integrate her feminist
pursuit of reproductive autonomy with Neo-Malthusianism and eugenics. The crux of
Sanger’s birth control movement was to promote women’s reproductive autonomy to
transform the womb from the birthplace of poverty into the birthplace of a healthy race.
In their cross-border circulation of voluntary motherhood, Yamakawa and Ishimoto did
more than simply translate the concept as “bosei” (voluntary motherhood) or “jishuteki
bosei” (autonomous motherhood) or repeat Sanger’s discourse; instead, they reconfigured
the concept in service of the quantity and quality of the Japanese population, an agenda
that was further diversified by Yamakawa and Ishimoto’s opposing political goals.
Accordingly, I will examine the collaborations and conflicts within the Japanese feminist
birth control movement that led to the politicization of women’s reproductive roles, and
conversely to the sexualization of the politico-economic system.

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In other words, their different conceptualizations of voluntary motherhood


can be summed up as “birth strike” (Yamakawa) and “eugenic feminism” (Ishimoto).
Yamakawa, a prominent socialist feminist critic, was a keen observer of the worldwide
rise of contemporary social movements (Mackie 1997, 81-84). Between 1920 and 1921,
she reframed Sanger’s “voluntary motherhood” through her own critique of the inhumane
exploitation and oppression of working-class women under capitalism. The term “birth
strike” (shussan sutoraiki) encapsulates Yamakawa’s protest against this double burden
and her attempt to reorient the goal of birth control toward the critique of gender and
class (Yamakawa 1921a, 283). Although Sanger’s “voluntary motherhood” triggered
Ishimoto’s sympathy for birth control and eugenics, Ishimoto redefined the slogan based
on her sense of family-oriented values and nationalism. I apply Asha Nadkarni’s (2014)
concept of “eugenic feminism,” used to illuminate the historical link between feminism,
eugenics, and nationalism in twentieth century India and the United States, to Ishimoto’s
argument for birth control.

Birth Strike: Yamakawa Kikue’s Socialist Critique of Gender and Class


Yamakawa Kikue was a theorist rather than an activist in the public debate on birth control;
a series of her public writings attests that her goal was promoting “self-awareness” among
women rather than explaining the specific birth-control techniques (Yamakawa 2011,
285-286). Yamakawa’s writings since the 1910s linked the liberation of women with that
of the working class. To Yamakawa, birth control was a practical and scientific means
for both realizing women’s freedom from the shackles of a patriarchal family system and
alleviating the reproductive burdens of the proletariat. Thus her pursuit of the emancipation
of women, especially working-class women, was consistent with her promotion of birth
control. What was inconsistent was that Yamakawa came to embrace the new vocabulary
and technology of contraception to tackle the problems of gender and class.
Yamakawa introduced Japanese audiences to Sanger’s concept of voluntary
motherhood in her 1920 article “The Curse of Pronatalism” (Tasan shugi no noroi) in the
magazine Taikan (General Views). Quoting Sanger’s Women and the New Race (1920),
Yamakawa advocated “bosei,” her translation of voluntary motherhood, to highlight an
individual mother’s self-conscious choice to give birth: “Millions of women are asserting
their right to voluntary motherhood. They are determined to decide for themselves whether
they shall become mothers, under what conditions and when. This is the fundamental revolt
referred to. It is for woman the key to the temple of liberty” (Sanger 1920, 5).3 This quote
shows that the concept of voluntary motherhood attempted a feminist reconfiguration of
motherhood by advocating women’s autonomy over their own bodies and reproduction.
Agreeing with Sanger’s perspective on women’s reproductive agency as a way of revolt,

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Yamakawa embraced the concept of voluntary motherhood in order to assert women’s


freedom of reproductive choice.
However, there were gaps in both Sanger’s and Yamakawa’s understandings of
the sociohistorical conditions that justified the need for voluntary motherhood. On one
hand, Sanger embraced eugenics to justify the biological benefits of women’s autonomous
choice over their bodies. To Sanger, whose ideological basis on Neo-Malthusianism and
eugenics became conspicuous by the beginning of 1920s (Jensen 1981; Coates 2008),
voluntary motherhood was the “new morality” that would “set its face against the
conversion of women into mechanical maternity and toward the creation of a new race”
(Sanger 1920, 226). The concept of voluntary motherhood implied a causal link between
a mother’s freedom and her potential to improve racial quality. It was therefore gendered
and racialized freedom that Sanger pursued through the birth control movement.
On the other hand, Yamakawa (1921a, 284) used voluntary motherhood as a
means to revolt against enforced sexual morality, inhumane exploitation, and oppression
under capitalism. Her defiance against feudal patriarchy and capitalism was a reaction
to existing social structures “which had treated women merely as breeding machines,
that is, the machines for supplying workers for capitalists and soldiers for the state.”
In the fight for women’s liberation from the dual shackles of patriarchy and capitalism,
Yamakawa (1921a, 286) championed “women’s freedom to love and their rights to
choose motherhood”; from her viewpoint, birth control was a means to rise against
“involuntary motherhood,” which she considered to be “slave morality,” and an essential
condition for achieving voluntary motherhood. In this sense, birth control was related
to the project of transforming women’s bodies into a political subjectivity. Therefore,
it was crucial for her to resist the reduction of women’s sexuality and reproduction into
an expression of womanhood or to an instrument for race betterment. With the notion of
voluntary motherhood, Yamakawa conceptualized reproductive autonomy as women’s
political subjectivity.
Yamakawa’s theorization of birth control as the means of revolt was associated with
her sharp criticism of two major responses to the “population problem” (jinkō mondai):
Neo-Malthusianism and socialism. The term “population problem” was ambiguous: it
mainly, but not exclusively, referred to overpopulation (kajō jinkō), which was based on
eighteenth-century Malthusian assumptions about future population growth forecasted to
exceed limited food resources. For example, Japanese Neo-Malthusianist Abe Isoo (1922
and 1931) attributed the fundamental cause of social ills—unemployment and poverty,
along with physical, mental, and moral deterioration—to overpopulation and justified birth
control as a panacea for the “population problem.” Japanese socialists, in the meantime,
dismissed the idea of overpopulation as catering to the interests of the bourgeois class

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and condemned the capitalist system as being the root cause of socioeconomic inequality;
for example, leading socialist Kawakami Hajime (1879-1946) advocated for the
abolition of the capitalist mode of production as the fundamental solution for population
problem (Kawakami 1927). It should be noted, however, that both Neo-Malthusianism
and socialism shared an economic determinism concerning the relationship between
population and resources. Whereas Neo-Malthusianists believed that the balance between
population and resources could be acquired by reducing population growth, socialists
advocated an equal distribution of wealth or an increase in wealth (Abe 1931; Kawakami
1927). Discussion of reproduction as the bodily experience of women and as an object of
patriarchal exploitation was absent in both kinds of purely economic reasoning. Yamakawa
positioned herself as a critic of Neo-Malthusianism and socialism to remind both groups
of the fact that birth control had to be a permanent goal even after overpopulation or
poverty was resolved by the proletarian revolution (Yamakawa 1921a, 284-286). In her
view, voluntary motherhood could not be reduced to economic determinism but instead
retained its own merit as an expression of individual free will.
Yamakawa basically agreed with the Marxist denunciation of the Malthusian
theory that poverty was caused by rapid population growth and the resultant depletion
of resources as a mechanistic presumption. Yamakawa (1920, 201) pointed out that “[n]
owadays, it is the unfair distribution of products rather than low productivity relative to
population growth that prevents the reduction of poverty encountered in some societies.”
Yamakawa (1920, 201) concluded that the fundamental solution to social problems
should be focused on “the change in the system of production and distribution instead of
that in overpopulation.”
Yamakawa (1921a, 271-282) gave two general reasons for her critique of Neo-
Malthusianism’s causal link between overpopulation and social problems: 1) the socialist
optimism of technology and human progress, and 2) the Marxist understanding of
overpopulation as the necessary condition for exploitation. Yamakawa drew upon
critiques of the population problem by Karl Marx, Peter Kropotkin, and August Bebel
who offered bright pictures of human progress based on technological development and
growing food resources. Drawing on German socialist Bebel’s accounts of production and
reproduction under capitalism in Women Under Socialism, originally published in 1879,
Yamakawa (1921a, 281-282) argued that the idea that a surplus population could outstrip
food resources was mistaken because of a superabundance of yet untapped resources:

Humanity must still multiply considerably to do justice to all the tasks that are awaiting
it. The soil is far from being cultivated as it might be, and almost three-quarters of
the surface of the earth are still uncultivated, because there are not enough people to

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undertake its cultivation. The relative excess of population that today is continually
produced by the capitalistic system to the detriment of the working class and of society
will prove a blessing on a higher level of civilization (Bebel 1971, 494; quoted in
Yamakawa 1921a, 281-282).

According to Bebel’s logic, relative surplus population—population growth outstripping


food resource supply—was inevitable in the higher level of human progress regardless of
its detrimental effect on the proletariat. However, Yamakawa (1921a, 282) stressed the
point that a “relative excess of population” was being “produced by the capitalist system.”
The relative excess of population here refers to the excess of the laboring population in
relation to capitalist production, in contrast with the Malthus’ principle of absolute surplus
population outstripping resource supply. Yamakawa (1921a, 282) pointed out that “the
relative surplus population is the nature of a capitalist society and, therefore, is generated
and increased by capitalism and at the same time becomes a necessary condition for the
existence of capitalism.” Her critique of the surplus laboring population, both as the product
and the condition for capitalist accumulation, was closely linked to what Marx (1976,
793) in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy called “the despotism of capitals” in his
analysis of the capitalist mode of production and its creation of the industrial reserve army.
Insofar as the capitalist mode of production necessitated the surplus laboring population
for the expansion of capital, the exploitation of laborers would continue independently of
the size of population.
The notion of the relative surplus population refuted both the Malthusian theory of
overpopulation and the Neo-Malthusian solution for social ills. In Yamakawa’s view, the
overpopulation problem posed by the Neo-Malthusian groups was merely a displacement
of the nature of capitalist exploitation into the so-called “natural law” of absolute
overpopulation. Yamakawa’s understanding of capitalism was inevitably opposed to
Sanger’s underlying logic behind women’s reproductive autonomy. Sanger (1920, 9)
asserted that the misery of the proletariat originated in their sexuality and, furthermore,
that their sexuality served capitalism as its accomplice. Whereas Sanger problematized
overpopulation as an immediate reality that working-class mothers themselves created,
Yamakawa grasped the ideological tactics of the population problem, which inverted the
causation of poverty. Yamakawa reframed birth control as a means of protest against the
capitalist system. She advocated birth control as a weapon specifically for the proletariat
against exploitation and oppression and as a way of fighting the instrumentalization of
women as breeding machines.
Yamakawa’s idea of using birth control as a “birth strike” was controversial
among many Japanese socialists of the time, including Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876-1956), a

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Christian socialist turned anarchist. Her conflict with her fellow Japanese socialists was
fundamentally due to her recognition of women as both individual subjects and members
of the proletariat.4 To Yamakawa, women’s bodies and reproduction lay simultaneously
inside and outside the domain of the class struggle because women were not only workers
who pursued social equality and liberty but also individuals with freedom of choice.
Reproduction could not be an exception and thus had to be respected as the realm of
individual rights (Yamakawa 1921a, 285). While most socialists incorporated women’s
reproductive rights into the political goals of the proletariat, they not only denied
women’s individual subjectivity but also regarded the feminist advocacy for birth control
as a marginal issue in the proletarian movement.5 Yamakawa (1920, 202) must have been
aware of this disavowal of women’s individual freedom for the ultimate goal of socialism
given her sharp question: “what will happen if society provides welfare for people in
the future so that birth control is no longer needed for economic reasons?” Defining
women’s place at the intersection between individual rights and class interests was deeply
problematic in the socialist debate of birth control.
Evidence of the conflicting definitions of women and reproduction is found in the
debate between Yamakawa and Ishikawa in 1921. This debate on the rights and wrongs
of contraception revealed their opposing views on two issues: first, whether birth control
served the interests of bourgeois ideology or women, particularly proletarian women;
and second, whether birth control would be needed once poverty was solved by the
proletarian revolution.
In regard to the first question, Ishikawa (1921, 34) saw contraception as merely “the
pleasure (dōraku) of bourgeois intellectuals” and a “tricky philosophy born out of modern
decadence.” This objection resonated with his antipathy toward all social and relief works
whose humanitarianism invariably buttressed capitalist and commercialist interests. In
response, Yamakawa (1921b, 244) criticized Ishikawa’s bourgeois mentality in equating
contraception merely with “pleasure” while overlooking women’s burden. In her view,
“women, particularly proletarian women who are working mothers” bore the burdens of
childbirth, parenting, and education which ought not to be ridiculed by an androcentric
indifference to women’s labor (Yamakawa 1921b, 244).
Yamakawa’s critique of women’s domestic labor suggests that women’s
exploitation was mainly defined by their natural motherhood—that is, the gendered
representation of motherhood as biologically predetermined—and class could only
intensify or mitigate women’s sexualized labor. It can be said that Yamakawa was keenly
aware of how the gendered categories of sex and class determined women’s experiences
and thus how particularly difficult proletarian women’s experiences were due to the
dual shackles of feudal patriarchy and capitalism. Her understanding of the intersection

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of sex and class contrasts with Ishikawa who overlooked the question of motherhood
altogether. From Yamakawa’s view, Ishikawa was ultimately complicit in the subjection
of women because of the androcentrism common to both bourgeois intellectuals and
socialist activists who excluded sex from socioeconomic domains. In other words, the
bourgeois and socialist circles were ultimately complicit in sexualizing domestic work
and thereby domesticizing women.
The second question further reflects Yamakawa’s and Ishikawa’s opposing views
on the place of women between nature and society, that is, between biological motherhood
and the social relations of capitalism. While Ishikawa envisioned a socialist state in
which the economic burden of childbirth and child rearing would just simply disappear,
Yamakawa asserted that women’s rights to reproductive choice had to be protected even
in a socialist state. Yamakawa (1921b, 247) asserts:

In short, [in an ideal society], people should be able to choose whether to give birth or
not at their free will, just like they do when deciding marriage… I have no doubt that
the difficulties in getting married for economic reasons would be solved in the future.
However, that cannot be directly linked to the conclusion that women will no longer
need reproductive choice. In the same manner, the uselessness of contraception for
economic reasons should be distinguished from the issue of birth control as women’s
rights to decide on motherhood.

Thus Yamakawa emphasized voluntary motherhood by representing women’s reproduction


within the domain of individual rights. Her insistence on reproduction as an individual
right suggests that Yamakawa’s understanding of motherhood was already politicized
in the language of individual will. On the contrary, Ishikawa and many contemporary
socialists left reproduction in the realm of nature, that is to say, the depoliticized sexuality
of women. From their economic-centered view, motherhood, which was assumed to be in
the realm of nature, would improve in a socialist state founded on economic equality and
technological advancement. The question of the proper place of women’s bodies either
in nature or culture—in the realm of depoliticized sexuality or the domain of politics—
was crucial in the socialist debates on contraception. While anti-birth control socialists
depoliticized reproduction by naturalizing it as women’s sexual function, Yamakawa
strove to politicize reproduction by placing it into the language of modern political rights.
It was this new political terrain of reproduction upon which Yamakawa agreed
with Sanger’s birth control movement. For Sanger, it was overpopulation that had to
be addressed while women’s reproductive choice was a solution to the problematized
population, and, more significantly, a new political niche for women. Yamakawa tackled

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intersectionality between gender and class. To Yamakawa, women’s reproductive choice


was the means of protest against the depoliticized realm of reproduction in the socialist
movement. Ironically, the different definitions of voluntary motherhood were analogous
to each other in terms of the politicization of motherhood. For both, reproduction had
been in the politics of gender where motherhood had been represented as the terrain of
nature by androcentrism. By the same reasoning, reproduction had to be in a different
politics of gender where women could exercise their individual rights instead of simply
succumbing to the dictates of a depoliticized nature.

Birth Control for Japanese Mothers: Ishimoto Shizue’s Eugenic Feminism


Like Yamakawa, Ishimoto justified the socioeconomic necessity and morality of birth
control practice. Her involvement with the birth control movement shifted from being
an ideologue to a pragmatist when she operated a birth-control clinic (sanji seigen
sōdansho) in the Shinagawa district of Tokyo in the 1930s (Hopper 2004, 52). While the
form of her work changed over time, her support of birth control remained consistently
rooted in Neo-Malthusianism, eugenics, and feminism. Birth control and eugenics were
the new tactics and discursive instruments of feminism by which the improvement of
women’s political status joined forces with the cause of race betterment. This refashioned
feminism, or “eugenic feminism,” was the crux of Ishimoto’s argument for birth control.
Ishimoto also found new political potential for women’s reproductive roles by imaging
birth control as a scientific solution for overpopulation and racial degeneration. For these
reasons, historians Elise Tipton (1997a and 1997b) and Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci (2010)
have deemed Ishimoto “the Margaret Sanger of Japan.” Ishimoto stressed the urgent need
for the practice of birth control in light of the population problem on one hand, and the
liberation of women on the other.
In August 1921, Ishimoto published the pamphlet Neo-Malthusianism (Shin-
marusasu shugi), which can be read as her initial effort to justify birth control in relation
to specific social problems; the concept of Neo-Malthusianism and its argument for
contraception were already being discussed among Japanese intellectuals at that time.
Debates over the pros and cons of controlling fertility revealed a vague and confusing
distinction between Neo-Malthusianism and birth control (sanji seigen or basu kontororu).
The ambiguity of terminology itself was a symptom of the numerous issues surrounding
birth control. Ishimoto stated in 1921 ([1921] 2000, 265):

“Sanji seigen” or “birth control” in English, translates literally to “voluntarily having


a child.” In other words, it means giving birth to a child when one wants to. Recently,
people in America are using a term “voluntary parenthood” [sic], or “jishuteki bosei,”

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to refer to giving birth to a child when one wants to become a parent. However, insofar
as we live in the era of capitalism under which parents’ duty of childrearing is a social
convention, “voluntarily having a child” necessarily pursues the goal of “sanji seigen.”
Therefore, it is inevitably appropriate to translate birth control as “sanji.”6

Thus Ishimoto was careful in defining the terms of the birth-control debate. She translated
voluntary motherhood as “jishuteki bosei,” which in a literal sense means “autonomous
motherhood,” referring to a women’s free choice to have a child. She used the term “sanji
seigen” for birth control when emphasizing socioeconomic reasons for contraception. In
other words, while the term voluntary motherhood was employed to empower mothers
to reproduce at their will; the term “birth control” was often used when addressing the
malaise of capitalism by controlling reproduction. To Ishimoto, the terms “voluntary
motherhood” and “birth control” were not necessarily mutually exclusive but rather
exemplified the multilayered advantages of contraception. The fluidity of terminology
promoted public debate.
Ishimoto ([1921] 2000) writes that the potential for “bunka seikatsu”—or “modern
life,” namely physical health, a high standard of civilized living, and levels of income and
consumption—among European populations decreased as the rates of human reproduction
increased, and she equated Japan’s population crisis to this situation. She reasoned that the
imbalance between population growth and food resources in Japan was worse than that in
European countries due to Japan’s mountainous territory making agriculture difficult and
leading to a high population density. Ishimoto presented Japan’s population problem as a
fait accompli; hence, a solution was required to stem or reverse the increasing size of the
population. Because she saw the uncontrolled fertility of Japanese people as the root cause
of socioeconomic problems, Ishimoto believed birth control to be the preordained solution.
Women’s liberation was another crucial factor in Ishimoto’s advocacy for birth
control. Ishimoto ([1921] 2000, 267) claimed that Japanese women’s social status was
relatively low because they lacked time and money to develop and liberate themselves.
Ishimoto ([1921] 2000, 267-268) believed that this dearth of time and money was a result
of women’s frequent pregnancies and the physical and economic burdens of childrearing
and domestic labor. Ishimoto argued that uncontrolled fertility also had a detrimental effect
on the health of Japanese children, which was one reason that she embraced eugenics.
In her use of eugenics as the expected effect of birth control, the question of whether
genetic or environmental factors was more determinantal to human reproduction was less
important than the goal of eugenics itself: the reproduction of mentally and physically
healthy offspring. She believed that healthy, enlightened mothers who practiced birth
control advanced this goal. Ishimoto ([1921] 2000, 268) concluded that “the only solution

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for the population problem in Japan is birth control… It is primarily a women’s issue. It
is not strange at all that the population problem that has troubled great male politicians
so far can be resolved by women.” The goal of women’s liberation was not synonymous
with women’s civil freedom but rather with the rearrangement of gender norms through
an altered meaning of reproduction. To Ishimoto, reproducing healthy children was the
new prescribed norm for women.
The paradox in linking feminism and eugenics lies in the assumption that all
women are mothers. In other words, liberation from “involuntary” motherhood still
depended on women’s reproductive role. Mothers were political subjects only to the
extent that their reproductive role influenced the national population. Initially, Ishimoto
championed women’s liberation as one of the chief principles of birth control while, at the
same time, arguing that voluntary motherhood would strengthen motherhood. In an essay
titled “Women’s Liberation and Birth Control” (Fujin kaihō to sanji chōsetsu), published
in the inaugural issue of Small Family, Ishimoto ([1922] 1993a, 578) summarized this
ambivalence:

The birth control movement is a prerequisite for the issue of women’s liberation.
We women have been ruled by a slave morality and have resigned ourselves to the
forced duty of motherhood. However, times have changed. Motherhood in the true
sense becomes possible only when a married woman who is physically, mentally, and
financially qualified to be a mother gives birth to a beloved baby at her own will. In
light of this, birth control can be interpreted as voluntary motherhood.

Thus, to Ishimoto, voluntary motherhood was an ideal form of motherhood as well as a


condition for the liberation of women. In other words, women’s freedom was mediated
by their motherhood, particularly eugenic-minded mothers. According to this logic,
women were not only reduced to mothers—or at least potential mothers with reproductive
functions—they were also granted a new morality, that is, the science of birth control and
eugenics in place of conventional sexual morality. The significance of motherhood in
terms of eugenics was highlighted in the concept of voluntary motherhood.
Ishimoto used voluntary motherhood in a different way from Sanger and Yamakawa.
To Ishimoto, motherhood conditioned women’s reproductive choice, whereas Sanger
argued that women’s autonomy outweighed motherhood. Sanger’s (1920, 226) claim that
“[v]oluntary motherhood…, [that] morality will, first of all, prevent the submergence of
womanhood into motherhood” clearly shows Sanger’s privileging of the self-awareness
of women. While Ishimoto attempted to endow women with political agency through their
reproductive roles, Yamakawa considered women’s reproductive choices an expression

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of their innate political subjectivity. The differences between the multiple definitions of
“motherhood” depended upon the vision for political subjectivity that each individual
birth control advocate pursued.
The different visions for voluntary motherhood held by Yamakawa and Ishimoto
added a new condition of controllable reproduction to the existing feminist discussions
about whether motherhood was an essential component of womanhood; this fact was
exemplified by the motherhood protection debate (bosei hogo ronsō) in 1918 and 1919.
Sparked by Yosano Akiko’s (1878-1942) critique of women’s dependency on men and
the government in the magazine Fujin kōron (Women’s Review), four female critics—
Yamakawa, Yosano, Hiratsuka Raichō (1886-1971), and Yamada Waka (1879-1957)—had
a heated discussion on the issue of motherhood protection, each representing a different
viewpoint. The motherhood protection debate generally divided Japanese feminists into
two camps: 1) those who argued for the rights of the mother, as represented by Hiratsuka,
and 2) those who advocated women’s rights in general, led in part by Yosano. Endorsing
the Swedish feminist Ellen Key’s (1849-1926) maternalist feminism, Hiratsuka supported
the rights of mothers, whereas Yosano, based on her reading of Olive Schreiner (1855-
1920), advocated women’s economic independence by means of providing more chances
for employment to help them achieve rights in other areas. To Yosano (1918, 85-86),
domestic labor, including reproduction, nurturing, and various household chores, was
nothing more than “parasitism” (iraishugi), and, by the same reasoning, governmental
protection of domestic work would result in an intensification of women’s economic
dependency and servitude. In contrast, Hiratsuka ([1918] 1984, 86-91) argued that the
state should provide social assistance for the protection of motherhood. Influenced by
Key’s view that motherhood is the natural vocation of women, Hiratsuka believed that
the rights of mothers were central to women’s rights. The conflict between the rights of
women and the rights of mothers reveals a fundamental discrepancy in acknowledging
gender equality and difference. To Yosano, gender equality was the ultimate goal,
whereas Hiratsuka believed that gender difference had to be protected to ensure equality.
A few years later, Yamakawa and Ishimoto reframed the question of which should
be prioritized—gender difference or gender equality—by adding the issue of controlling
reproduction. Yamakawa adhered to her socialist feminist perspective on gender and
class. Acknowledging socioeconomic dimensions of women’s distinctive experiences
under capitalism, Yamakawa resisted the idea of reducing women to idealized mothers
or to an abstract, homogenized class. To her, birth control was essentially a revolt against
the capitalist and patriarchal representation of gender difference. However, Ishimoto
advanced notions of gender difference by strengthening women’s distinctive reproductive
roles. It should be noted that Ishimoto did not simply repeat previous feminist arguments

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Sujin Lee

for mother’s rights but instead redefined reproduction as an important component in


the political economy, namely Neo-Malthusianism and eugenics. By coupling women’s
bodies and population control, Ishimoto replaced the protection of motherhood with a new
motherhood. To her, motherhood was not an end in itself but rather a means of population
control and race betterment.
As her involvement in the birth control movement deepened, Ishimoto’s insistence
upon the link between women’s reproductive role and population control became
increasingly clear. In a pamphlet published by the Japan Birth Control Research Group
in 1922, she advances the aim to breed better humans based on individuals’ “self-
consciousness” and defines birth control as “a conscious control of population, far from
race suicide or advocacy for sinful abortions” ([1922] 2000, 80). This statement reiterates
the fact that Ishimoto’s eugenic feminism called for women’s self-conscious responsibility
for the future of the human population and notions of race—and ultimately humankind—
instead of women’s liberation.
It can be said that Neo-Malthusianism and eugenics transform individuals into
biological subjects; in particular, both theories advance hierarchies of living beings, such
as superior and inferior, fit and unfit, and “us” and “others.” How Ishimoto (1922b, 2-8)
problematized overpopulation, namely the “sharp increase in the size of the unhealthy
population” who would “burden the superior and healthy humankind and diminish
national strength” illustrates what Michel Foucault (2003, 255) terms “a biological-
type relationship.” According to Foucault, a biological-type relationship refers to the
fundamental mechanism of biopower, namely a modern form of power ceaselessly
addressing the biological continuum of life while creating the caesuras within it. Simply
put, Ishimoto and other adherents of Neo-Malthusianism rationalized that the decrease in
the population of the unfit ensures the proliferation of the fit. Individual bodies were never
equal in terms of their qualities; bodies were differentiated between superior and inferior
ones. Therefore, women were subjected not only to the autonomous choice of giving birth
or not giving birth but also to the ethical categories of being entitled to give birth and
being banned from giving birth.
In 1931, Ishimoto resumed her movement for birth control after a brief hiatus
during the mid to late 1920s. During her hiatus from birth control advocacy, Ishimoto
was involved in different social movements, including the League for the Attainment of
Women’s Political Rights (Fujin Sanseiken Kakutoku Kisei Dōmeikai), an organization for
women’s suffrage movement founded in 1924. In the late 1920s, however, she limited her
social activities in large part due to her own marital discord (Hopper 2004, 37-39). In May
1932, she organized the Women’s Birth Control League of Japan (Nihon Sanji Chōsetsu
Fujin), the first women’s birth control advocacy group in Japan that included Kawasaki

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Natsu and Niizuma Itoko, liberal feminists involved in the women’s suffrage movement;
the labor activist Akamatsu Tsuneko; Yamamuro Tamiko, daughter of Yamamuro Gunpei
and a Christian who worked for the salvation army; and medical doctor Yamamoto
Sugiko. The chief aims of the group were to educate women in the specific methods
of contraception, provide medical guidance regarding birth control, and to manufacture
and sell contraceptive devices such as pessaries and jellies. This group operated birth
control clinics in Tokyo’s Shinagawa district starting in 1934. These efforts epitomized
the pragmatic ways in which Ishimoto attempted to transform individual women into self-
conscious subjects of population control.
This shift in the strategies of Ishimoto’s birth control movement, however, did not
necessarily mean the absence of ideological justifications. Motherhood and biological
relationships that had been emphasized in Ishimoto’s eugenic feminism were more
specifically targeted at Japanese mothers. For example, one of the pamphlets published
by the Women’s Birth Control League of Japan, In a World Full of Difficulties (Sechigarai
yononaka ni), illustrates how motherhood and organic bodies were made the basis of
the family and the nation-state (Nihon Sanji Chōsetsu Fujin Dōmei 1934, 130). The
family and the nation-state constituted the two poles of birth control practice in the sense
that the former was the principal unit of reproduction whereas the latter demarcated the
line within which a biological relationship could be considered effective. The slogan of
women’s liberation was replaced with a family-oriented emphasis on the protection of
mothers, particularly the bodies of mothers (botai). What determined the importance of
a mother’s physicality was her reproductive role, that is, giving birth only to the number
of children one can afford and raising healthy children. Moreover, the bodies of mothers
were represented as a basic biological unit on which the health of the nation-state
depended. The above-mentioned pamphlet reiterates the convergence of nationalism and
eugenic feminism, which paradoxically reduced women to breeding machines: “A child
is a family treasure as well as a social treasure. Giving birth to a child is the vocation of a
woman (josei). We, Japanese women, should give birth to strong children for the society,
and to good children for the family” (Nihon Sanji Chōsetsu Fujin Dōmei 1934, 130).
This declaration reveals the complex structure of women’s gender identity premised
both on biological sex and discursive construction of the national subject. The centrality of
reproduction in female sexuality itself was the political-cum-scientific product for creating
the eugenic chain of life which moved from healthy mothers to healthy offspring and
further on to the healthy nation. While Ishimoto previously maintained the ambiguity of
universal bodily categories in her eugenic feminism, the representation of organic bodies
became enclosed within national borders. In place of the ambiguous terrain between
womanhood and motherhood, Ishimoto reconfigured women as mothers—or at least

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Sujin Lee

potential mothers—whose vocation and moral obligation were to have healthy children.
Thus Ishimoto’s eugenic feminism remained consistent in the birth control movements as
she continued to draw both national borders and a biological chain around mother’s bodies.

Conclusion: Politics of Motherhood in the Feminist Birth Control Movement


This article has delved into the multiple meanings and objectives of Japanese feminists’
advocacy for birth control and the questions they raised about motherhood during the
interwar period in order to show how population discourses not only served as a feminist
critique of the existing gender structures but also led to the reconfiguration of political
subjects. Feminists Yamakawa Kikue and Ishimoto Shizue adopted Sanger’s voluntary
motherhood to link the empowerment of women with women’s free choice in reproduction
and to link motherhood with politics, but their reasons for doing so differed due to their
ideological stances and views of the Japanese social context.
A socialist, Yamakawa promoted birth control to unsettle the relationship between
production and reproduction under capitalism and to emphasize the intersection of
biological sex and social class. Yamakawa’s advocacy for birth control was not only
a magnifying lens that reflected the double shackles of women under the patriarchal
capitalist system but also a “birth strike” to protest this oppressive system. Ishimoto’s
argument illustrates the discursive relationship of feminism, eugenics, and nationalism.
Ishimoto regarded birth control as a new political niche for the empowerment of women.
Her argument was based on eugenic concerns about the quality of the Japanese population
and the nationalist reconfiguration of birth control. Through this process, women were
reduced to their reproductive roles and motherhood was redefined according to national
identity and placed in a biological hierarchy.
I began with a question about the intersection of population discourses, prewar
feminism, and the birth control movement. I have shown that the contradictions in the
different ways in which the issue of Japan’s growing population was subsumed in the
birth control debates. However, in both Yamakawa and Ishimoto’s feminist arguments,
reproduction plays a central political and economic role. In particular, in their own ways,
both emphasized concerns about the reproduction of the labor force under a capitalist system,
the population of the nation-state, and the desire for a better life. These different goals
of reproduction were not separate from each other but instead were intrinsically related.
Therefore, these feminists’ concerns about reproduction were simultaneously the symptoms
of the politico-economic representation of reproduction and the respective critiques of it,
that is, the formation of women’s political subjectivity by means of reproductive autonomy.
Regardless of their different ideological visions, both Yamakawa and Ishimoto emphasized
the link between the voluntary control of reproduction and women’s autonomy.

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Notes
1. One of the pioneering advocates of Neo-Malthusianism was the Malthusian League, a British
organization established in 1877. While these Neo-Malthusian advocates basically agreed with

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Malthus’ principle of population, which presumed increasing imbalance between population


growth and food supplies, Neo-Malthusianism differed from Malthusianism in supporting
contraception as a solution to overpopulation. In Japan, Malthusian theory and Neo-Malthusianism
were introduced through the translation of An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1877,
and later through Oguri Sadao’s book The Practical Theory of Social Reforms (Shakai kairyō
jitsuron) in 1903. Neo-Malthusianism, however, was reconceptualized in interwar Japan due
to growing concern about Japan’s overpopulation and its resultant effects on domestic and
international security, as well as racial degeneration on eugenic grounds. For example, Japanese
Fabianists and social reformists such as Ishimoto Shizue (1897-2001), her husband Baron
Ishimoto Keikichi, and Abe Isoo, advocated Neo-Malthusianism and linked surplus population
with widespread poverty and race regression as a causal relationship.
2. Similarly, Aya Homei (2016: 227-243) looks at the birth control campaign led by the Japanese
government during the postwar period as a product of both transnational population discourses
and the state’s effort to govern its population.
3. I quote directly from Sanger’s Women and the New Race because Yamakawa translated the quote
into Japanese. In “The Curse of Pronatalism,” Yamakawa translated most parts of the Sanger’s
first chapter “Woman’s Error and Her Debt.”
4. An exception was Sakai Toshihiko (1871-1933), a socialist who advocated the reproductive self-
determination of women while criticizing both Neo-Malthusianism and pronatalism as serving
the bourgeoisie (Sakai 1916).
5. For example, at the Fourth General Meeting of the Japan Famers Union (Nihon Nōmin Kumiai)
in February 1925, the proposal for the “promotion of birth control” (sanji seigen shōrei-an)
was not adopted. One month later, the National Meeting of the Japan General Federation of
Labor also rejected the proposal for birth control submitted by Inoue Suejirō from the Kobe
Association. These two cases exemplify the widespread disavowal of feminism in the proletarian
movement in Japan.
6. Voluntary parenthood is possibly a misprint for “voluntary motherhood.” While Sanger advocated
voluntary motherhood, feminist activist Mary Ware Dennett (1872-1947) led the “Voluntary
Parenthood League.” In the early 1920s, Sanger and Dennett were rivals advocating different
strategies for the birth control movement (Coates 2008, 188-189). Considering Ishimoto’s
affinity for Sanger, “voluntary motherhood” appears to be correct in this paragraph.

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