 Hello and welcome. My name is Fabio Gigi. I'm the chair of the Japan Research Center here at SOAS and I'm very happy to welcome you all in the middle of the flu season that is now replacing COVID season. So I thought it would be very apt to sort of concentrate in these last three lectures before Christmas on questions on the history of science and technology. And it's a great honour for me to introduce the speaker of today, Dr Aya Home. Aya is a lecturer in Japanese studies at the University of Manchester and she specialised in the history of healthcare and medicine in modern Japan. She has written about issues of reproduction, population and sovereignty. She's the author of the forthcoming book, Science for Governing Japan's Population, which will appear from Cambridge University Press and she has co-edited several special issues on population control in Cold War Asia, for example, for the East Asian Science, Technology and Society Journal and critical approaches to reproduction and population in post-war Japan for the Japan Forum, which appeared this year. Her talk today is entitled Family Planning in Post-World War II Japan Through a Transnational Lens. Thank you very much for being here and I hand over to you. Thank you so much Fabio for such a nice introduction and it's really nice to see many names if I don't see faces of people I know. Well, so thanks for coming to you too. So let me first share screen. I hope it's going to work. We try and test it. Please let me know if it doesn't. Okay, so is that okay? Yeah, great. Okay, so without much further ado, I'm going to start. So yeah, so thanks again to Fabio for inviting me to speak with this exciting series and then also Charles for advertising this event who is behind the screen at the moment. So as you see on the screen, my talk today is about family planning in post-second world war Japan, which I examine using a transnational lens. And this is the fourth coming book from Cambridge University Press, which Fabio kindly introduced at the beginning. The title of the book is Science for governing Japan's population. Hopefully it's going to come out next year at the moment going through the index indexes, which is quite a laborious but exciting task. Exciting because it's going to, I have a feeling it's going towards the end. Now, just briefly introduce the book. It's a work of social history, which examines various scientific fields that was established around the notion of Japan's population. Now, and I looked at also the fears that were also scientific practices that were mobilized for the governing of the population in modern Japan. Now, population, as many of you know, was a neologism as so many other new words created in the modern period, in the Meiji period. And my book is going to look at the roles of the science for the governing of Japan's Japanese people, this neologism, this new idea as population. Now, for the book, I'm going to introduce, I'm now going through this book because today's talk is actually part of this book. I'm going to the part of this book. So that's why please, please allow me to introduce a book for the book for a little while. So now in the book, I present two arguments. Now, the first is that the the creation of the human and social science population and the state sovereignty, which is based on population management, had a symbiotic relationship. And each was driven by surrounding ideologies, institutional agendas, socio-political and material conditions, and also personal motivations. And the second argument is that transnational elements, forces, were important in shaping science making and nation building, although the interplay on the surface asserts the nation-centered discourse. So, so to elaborate on these arguments in the book, I present a total of six case studies. And one of them is about post-war family planning, the topic of today's presentation. Now, just to talk about the semantics because I'm I'm pretty sure many of you are students or scholars of Japanese studies. So the term family planning or Kazuki in Japanese, spread around the Second World War, and it kind of direct, so it's spread after after the Second World War, and it directly corresponded with the post-war drive to social reform that was aimed to generate the moral, efficient, and disciplined modern families. It's the kind of the kind of thing that Andrew Gordon talked about. But the term family planning was also used synonymously with another one called birth control, or in Japanese, jitai jōsutsu, or sanji segen. Now, they existed, these terms existed already before the pre-war period. So now, getting back to the subject to follow the book's argument, today I'll focus on the transnational elements that importantly shaped family planning in Japan after the Second World War, particularly the birth control pilot programs and research initiatives in the 50s that were seen as vital for the post-war reconstruction. Okay, so and by transnational elements, I mean primarily the flow of flow in exchange of money, goods, personnel, and knowledge across national borders, and also involving individuals and organizations whose actions were not necessarily always confined by a modern state as a political unit, but the state as a background acted as an important pivot. So and in the specific context of family planning in post-Second World War and in Japan, these transnational elements primarily meant the elements within the transnational population control movement, or the transnational efforts that were instigated by demographers, public health specialists, philanthropists, and government technocrats in the middle of the 20th century to curb the growth of world population by popularizing the birth control practice with contraceptives in the so-called underdeveloped countries. Now, with this understanding, today I'll specifically tell the story of the birth control pilot programs and research that were organized and run in the 1950s and 1960s by the teams at the Department of Public Health Demography at the Institute of Public Health, which used to be right in the middle of Tokyo. Now it's in Saitama, relocated to Saitama. Now these birth control initiatives were headed by Koya Yoshio, who you can see the kind of image that the pixel is not really great, so the resolution is not that great, so you can only see a kind of blurry image of him, but that's Koya. Now Koya was the director of the Institute and one of the most prominent racial scientists and eugenicists in Japan at the time. I'm going to come back to him later. Okay, and I chose this story because the birth control initiatives of the Institute of Public Health on the one hand really influenced and were influenced by domestic birth control policies, but on the other hand it was also entangled in this transnational efforts to curb the world population growth. But what do I want to achieve with this story? So what is the objective of today's talk? Now in Japanese history, post-war family planning for a long time has been pulled with the nation-focused kind of perspective. Now this is inevitable precisely because the nation-state plays an overwhelmingly important role in constructing population discourses that drive reproductive policies. Like for instance the discourse of population crisis today, which you know drives policy to boost fertility or and promote child care, you know is informed by a demographic graph such as the one you see on the screen. Now and that is predicated on the notion of Japan as a campaign nation-state. So kind of to almost like challenge this nation-focused narrative I want to today I want to what I want to do is with the with the story is to really de-center this narrative right of the post-war to Japanese reproductive policies and politics by showing how family planning in post-war Japan which was first and foremost associated with the national project of post-war reconstruction was in fact buttressed by this transnational, these transnational elements. And at the same time I also want to kind of complicate the role of the Japanese government and the US-dominated Allied occupation in post-war Japan's reproductive control and population management which ended up producing the image such as the demographic chart again you see on the screen. So in this sense this work is built on the recent works by scholars such as at the Aikotake Ojidemejji or Christine Roebuck who explained the history of reproduction in post-war Japan as part and parcel of the global exchange on race, modernity and sovereignty in the post-war post-colonial world. Now on that note let me first talk about the nation-centered narrative of reproduction and population problems that emerged in Japan after the Second World War to give you some overview. So official and public intellectuals immediately after Japan's surrender in 1945 now began to argue Japan was confronted with two kinds of population problems like Jinpo Monbeke. The first being the crisis in the quality of the Japanese race and the second one was overpopulation which was brought by the so-called baby boom, post-war baby boom and the sudden influx of repatriated soldiers and civilians from the war front and Japan's colonies that it lost after the surrender. Now to solve these population problems the government first revised the wartime national eugenic law and implemented the eugenic protection law in 1948. Now eugenic protection law as many of you know aim to protect the quality of the Japanese population or race by controlling the reproductive bodies of the people allegedly with inferior biological traits through abortion, contraception and sterilization. But the law especially the amendment in the 1949 de facto legalized abortions in Japan led to the search in the number of abortion cases. So to counter this trend the government advisory council on population problems proposed to popularize birth control across the country. Now in 1951 the cabinet approved the proposal from the council and decided to make it a national policy to popularize kind of spread birth control across the nation. Now based on this in 1952 the government then amended the eugenic protection law and built a public health infrastructure to facilitate the teaching of contraceptive methods among the mass among the people across the country. Now behind this government's move was Koya Yoshio, the man the figure I in today's talk I introduced earlier. So Koya is a must individual for scholars who study the history of race science in modern Japan. Koya's name already appears in Oguma ages you know classical works on the Japanese race and identity from the late 1980s. So Koya was one of the most influential medical researchers in race science and he was also a promoter of eugenics in the prime of his career which kind of spanned what Miriam Kingsborough called a transport period so kind of roughly between 1930s and 1960s. Now he was the vice president of the Japan Association for Racial Hygiene also sorry 30s and 60s so vice president of Japan Association for Racial Hygiene when he was established in 1930 and and he was so he was a really kind of from the kind of pre-war period of powerful within the kind of powerful circle of intellectuals aimed to promote eugenics. Now then after and Koya also originally had career in the academia so as professor of medicine at Kanazawa University but from 1939 became a technocrat so Gikam was hired as a technocrat when the Ministry of Health and Welfare was established in 1938. So Koya as being a race you know a racial scientist was at the heart of the Ministry of Health and Welfare's race studies and at the same time involved in drafting important policy documents that led to the general plan for the establishment of population policies which was established in 1940. So for the remainder of the war Koya was it was really kind of led the racial and race studies within the Ministry of Health and Welfare Research Institute. And after the war Koya you know continued to be kind of continued to excel in the government's health administration and in fact Koya became appointed by the general headquarters GHQ to head the Institute of Public Health and actually reign in the position until he moved to Nihon University in the 1960s. And from the late 1940s he used his this influential status and worked very hard to persuade the government to implement eugenic birth control programs as population policies to solve the population problems. Now at the same time after the war Koya established himself as a really central figure in the popular birth control movement so he became an activist himself. So while being an activist Koya was also at the heart of the policy making process. So as the head of the Institute of Public Health Koya had connections with the health officials both in the Japanese government and the in the SCAP GHQ and especially had a connection with Crawford F. Sands on the screen on the left from from the on the image next to Koya who was the who was heading the public health and welfare section at the time. And also Koya was a member of the advisory council on population problems which advice like I said earlier which advice the government on the population matters. Now evidence shows that it was Koya who swayed the opinion of Hashimoto Ryogo who was health minister at the time in the in the early 1950s in favor of birth control. Now but as you can imagine so I don't have that much time to talk about the pre-war kind of politics of birth control but birth control was actually a really sensitive topic in Japan or elsewhere since the pre-war period and within the government officials and among the experts. In the specific context after the war it was a controversial subject because of its association with the Nazi genocide of the Jews in the Nuremberg trial and also because there was this there was a voice that birth control was popular only among the educated urban middle class and because of that it would promote the so-called reverse selection which he used as well quite on and on Koya which referred to the shrinking of the biologically so for biologically stereo urban middle class and the parallel expansion of the people in other classes with so-called biologically inferior trade so the so eventually those biologically inferior groups would take over the kind of biologically superior group within this within the group within the race and then the racial quality kind of goes down is the idea of reverse was the idea of reverse selection now because of that birth control was not kind of popular topic in policies for a long time so to counter these voices of concern Koya proposed a what he called guided birth control program now in the guided birth control program government officials and population experts and health practitioners would work hand in hand to promote contraception through what Koya called guidance or sometimes enlightenment activity he called so the biggest feature of the guided program was that they aim narrowly at target groups the groups with growing populations and of course for this Koya identified rural so those who are supposed to have kind of in their supposedly inferior trade such as rural populations or workers and benefit recipients in cities as a target he for his guided birth control program he he kind of narrowly targeted the that at those groups now Koya suggested through this guided birth control program the government could have basically could have the cake and eat it so in other words they could prevent sorry prevent the population growth and shield the racial quality of the Japanese at the same time so in the late 1940s using his power within the institution institute of public health Koya then managed to establish the department of public health demography as a research institute conducting policy relevant research on birth control eugenics and population phenomena now what you see on the screen is the stated areas of expertise of the department at the time of the foundation now you can see clearly that you know public health demography was built around Koya's political and research interest and and was intended to generate data that will be directly useful for the government to evaluate the efficacy of the government's birth control policies so based on that in the 1950s and until the kind of early 1960s Koya organized many kind of studies like these are application driven kind of projects so you would set the pilot kind of experimental kind of pilot studies sets within within a village recruited villagers and kind of you know had the kind of spread taught birth control and then you know let them use contraceptives and kind of measured how how they use it and that kind of thing so yeah so Koya did that in all sorts of different villages and villages or cities in different locations and many of them are called you know what we call now longitudinal studies so they you know they would chase you know they would follow the contraceptive use for a number of years and then collate data so that's what they did now the goals of the projects in Koya's mind were twofold so he had two main goals the first was to show the growing number of induced abortion rates and also the guided birth program as an effective countermeasure for the growing population of popularity of abortion and also the population growth itself and also racial prices so as you can see again you know these are you know directly relevant for policy birth control policy that you know would you know that was made as a countermeasure for abortion a growing number of abortion so specifically these studies were intended to show the effectiveness of the program in reducing both birth rates and abortion rates among the target groups okay so I'm going to briefly explain kind of show you what it was like just by introducing this the three village study so now the three village study was oh oh oh hello hello I don't know what happened here um so okay so sometimes they're called it was the three model village study like I said it was a longitudinal study so it lasts for seven years between 1950 and 57 and I don't know what what what is why it's it's like this but in any case maybe that maybe uh that technology is telling me to skip that part so perhaps I'm going to skip that part if you're interested I'm going to talk about it later but in any case with this study Koya argued that so the number of pregnancies dropped and also number of abortion cases dropped you know so he in in the end concluded that this pilot birth control program was successful you know they would they would they would you know in the village they would teach local midwives or local doctors who would have lectures and also one-on-one consultation or home visits to teach the methods of birth control and also why birth control is good so lecture on birth control and then use kind of distributed different kinds of contraceptive methods including condom diaphragm you know jelly or all sorts of things and let let couples decide what to take obviously this is at the time this was targeted towards married people it wasn't you know unmarried people clearly they were not supposed to have sex right have children so it was you know categorically kind of you know aimed at married people but anyway so so it was it was success he declared success Koya and after that for each of these studies Koya promoted their success stories really globally by publishing in English as you see also in the three village case studies case it was the case as well now the question is why was that obviously you know you could say well you know English was becoming lingua franca in science so you know obviously if you want to you know as an academic if you want to get yourself known you publish in English you know similar kind of um rationale but you know fine you know that um that's you know that has a currency today must have also had the you know it was the case at the time but I argue that it was more than that and to respond to this question that the English publication in fact illuminates I argue how embedded Koya's applied studies was in the the transnational population control movement that I just explained earlier now I use this expression this transnational population control movement as a shorthand to refer to this really amorphous efforts occurred transnationally in the middle of the 20th century to curb the growth of world population via family planning with contraceptives in the so-called underdeveloped countries so this movement was really buttressed by the by the modernization theory which insisted that overpopulation was terminus to poverty and outmoded traditional cultures so highlighted the role of family planning as a technique of population global population control but also by extension a technique of socio-economic development now initially international oriented charitable organization especially Rockefeller Foundation played a leading role in part because of John D Rockefeller's third initiative he was really at the forefront he was a forerunner of the movement but also from the mid 1960s especially after the US government under the Lyndon B. Johnson's administration integrated family planning in its development aids program family planning became established as part of international health and overseas development aids and assistance now an overwhelming feature of the movement was that the scientific experts on birth control for instance demographers or and especially the researchers based in the US let the movement in partnership with the technocrats of the so-called recipient countries or nations because the knowledge about how best birth control could be deployed to combat the population growth and poverty needed to needed yet to be established now specifically they would conduct fieldwork and also study you know in which they studied sexual and reproductive behaviors of the local population and also acceptance rate in family planning pilot studies and exactly the kind of research Koya was conducting within Japan that they did it in the so-called recipient countries now of course then those scientific experts would meet at international conferences and share the knowledge from the fieldwork and promote the family planning you know and you know in front of other attendants and who were technocrats from the recipient countries so it and also other kind of non-governmental and international organizations for instance the International Planned Parenthood Federation and so to a great extent because of these activities the field of demography especially in the United States really thrived in the mid 20th century now looking at Japan in the late 40s and 50s you see some individuals who participated in the international movement significantly influenced the Japanese government's birth control policy and Koya's activities too so within again this happened I don't know why so within the government I'm really sorry I don't know why this is happening so if this happens again I'm just going to summarize again so within the staff GHQ these are the kind these are the kinds of people so Edward Ackerman past okay well well done and warreness symptoms but they were you know they were there serving the staff GHQ as consultants or advisors scientific advisors now they were all academics and served for the GHQ as consultants and stayed in Japan for only a few months at a time however the network they forged with the Japanese colleagues and knowledge about Japanese situations they gained during their stay became an important factor when the Japanese technocrats such as Koya took part in the international movement now in addition to the academic consultants serving the GHQ I don't know why this is happening what I wanted to say is in addition to that okay no I don't know what to do okay what I wanted to say is I have no idea why this is happening but I'm probably going to summarize then is that so in so in addition to GHQ you had also Rockefeller foundation so the person now that came from well that were dispatched by the by the Rockefeller foundation who were stationed in Japan at the time they played a really pivotal role as well one of them called Oliver McCoy I wanted to show you the slides but somehow it just doesn't work no it was also was really important for Koya because Oliver McCoy was based in the Institute of Public Health where Koya directed and he kind of liaised between Koya and the GHQ but also Rockefeller foundation on kind of reproductive policies and and and also yeah okay so Yona is saying maybe you close and reopen the PowerPoint yeah sorry I'm going to try that because this is significantly I had to skip the um skip the presentation the ghost in the machine I have no idea it did happen it happens occasionally it's very strong yeah somehow it doesn't want me to talk about Rockefeller foundation now that there's a thought okay so let me just um okay so that game right okay I'm do the presenter view no it's still the case oh well I'll just I'll just summarize it then so yeah so there's Rockefeller and Rockefeller connection was good also really important for Koya because uh well at least some of the personnel called Marshall Balfour who was stationed in Hong Kong at the time and later India now this is going to be quite important in the story I want to tell later um kind of liaised between Koya and the people in in his colleagues in India and so kind of created the kind of inter-agent network by these these um Rockefeller foundation um sort of delegates but really what I would say is more than more than Rockefeller more than these GHQ consultants the the figure who was really important for Koya's research was the guy called Clarence J Gamble um okay so I'm I'm really hoping because I want to know so Clarence J Gamble was a he was a the guy on the screen you can see was um was an American researcher he was an American birth control um kind of researcher but also he was as you can see um if if you know P&G the company that produces you know like everyday essentials like soap and and you know shampoo and these kind of things it's called Proctor and it used to be called Proctor and Gamble so he was an heir of this Gamble who created this soap fortune soap empire and so he had a lot of money with them and with that money um he basically he um through um he became very interested in developing uh contraceptives uh from the 1930s um and kind of using his his his wealth have helped birth control research so research that you know develops contraceptives since 1930s now um so initial so so Gamble became interested in Japan through uh the contacts uh he had um it's also through for instance uh Frank W. Notchstein or Warren Thompson who served either uh who who were in Japan uh serving either for uh the GHQ as academic consultants or you know kind of completing uh Rockefeller missions so during the 1940s in the late 1940s Gamble then got in touch with um uh these guys um became very very interested because um he heard uh the rumor that um the Japanese government was considering um implementing some birth control as a national policy and so through these connections right through this American American connections um you know Americans who you know were in Japan at the time you know once or twice so um he got to know Koya and then really quickly they became really close friends and um so and then started to you know fund Koya's research now from Koya's perspective this is a really welcome um you know move you know the because although um the government set um you know birth control uh as a as a national policy um the government was underfunded so you know in Koya was always in need of getting external funding and so really welcome Koya Gamble's support so from the um from the 1950s kind of early 1950s um supported um Koya's um Koya's birth control research uh at the department of public health demography and um okay and particularly you know and so what he did was not only just funding but also really he had heavy hand handed uh approach to uh certain uh research so he would for instance uh not only uh give give money but also he would suggest the design of the design of the research at the pilot project and um and also helped um Koya in writing English so you know in in the archives I visited I could see a lot of um a lot of papers where they they exchanged the um you know the proof so he was not only proof but or even like earlier draft um kind of stage um and so he would correct English but he would also suggest which data should should go in for which publication so really heavy handed approach to Koya's research now the question then which is to do with this um what you've been seeing on the screen in front of you why was Gamble interested in helping Koya what motivated him to support Koya's Japanese birth control pilot project now one big factor behind Gamble's support in Japan was his ongoing quest for uh a what he called simple contraceptive methods now Gamble believes that population control realized through the fertility regulation among the people of the underdeveloped countries should adopt a simple contraceptive method because he assumed that the target population in such a family planning program was uneducated so the existing contraceptives such as pessories were too complicated for them now based on this understanding since the 1930s like I said Gamble was carrying out research right that developed simple contraceptive methods now in the 1940s when Asia's overpopulation became an agenda in the transnational population control movement Gamble financially supported the distribution of the so-called form tablet in India so the form tablet was a spheromysidal tablet which a woman inserted into her vagina ahead of the intercourse and the tablet containing spheromysidal chemicals then formed up and built a barrier that prevented you know sperms from entering into entering the uterus now in the in the early 1950s Gamble became particularly interested in Koya's research when he heard that the Japanese pharmaceutical company ASI in Japanese it's called ASI developed the form tablet called Sampoon now so at the time Gamble then urged as soon as he learned about about about Sampoon Gamble then urged Koya to set up a pilot project and test the efficacy of Sampoon so Gamble wanted to compare the samples efficacy with the efficacy of the existing form tablets which were currently in the market especially in India and hopefully replace them with Sampoon if Sampoon turned out to be more effective now so for this reason Gamble's fight financially supported and also had a heavy hunted approach to one of Koya's first control pilot project that Gamble called the form tablet or Kajiya village study so which started in October so the experiment or the pilot study started in October 1953 in Kajiya village they called it 40 miles south of Tokyo just in kind of our prefecture so in a way so Gamble's further for simple contraceptive methods was combined with Koya's interest in promoting guided birth control program in Japan and eventually the knowledge about the Japanese family planning initiative not only had lasting impact on the domestic reproductive and population policy and lives of the people taking part in the pilot projects in Japan but also traveled across national borders and became part of the narrative in the transnational population movement so then what came out of the transnational connections enabled by the you know GHQ Rockefeller Foundation and Gamble what were the results so to start with in a fairly simple term these transnational connections really enhance the transnational exchanges of personnel goods and knowledge and so in terms of personnel the department of public health demography researchers studied abroad and then they presented at the international conferences or met government officials in underdeveloped countries in all funded by for instance Rockefeller Foundation or Gamble and also so in turn these Koya and his team at DPHD invited non-Japanese colleagues to Japan what you see on the on the image here is a snippet from from the visit of Rama Rao who is who was the the founder of the international parent parent food in as well as the India family planning association in India okay so and in terms of goods money contraceptives papers photos telegrams all sorts of things were exchanged and the knowledge wise like I said just now in knowledge about birth mental practices in Japan and the image Japan was at the forefront of population control in Asia kind of became consolidated through these transnational exchanges but really more broadly the transnational connections really consolidated Koya's and his team's position within Japan and Japanese birth mental policy and in the transnational movement at the same time and also through these international connections the department of public health demographies researchers and their research became integral part of the transnational network which buttressed the efforts to discipline reproductive bodies in underdeveloped countries and also to connect the transnational nations kind of enhanced Japan's ties not only with the US but also India with India and other kind of free world allies and of course the Cold War here that plays a pivotal role as a background here so finally so with the story today that kind of clearly pointed out these transnational exchanges buttressed Koya's policy relevant birth control activities I wanted to illustrate how chorus the Japanese and the Japanese government and the allied occupation were as governing bodies overseeing reproductive and population matters even as they have been presented as self-contained political units in the history of family planning in post-war Japan right okay with this I finished my presentation and sorry about the technical glitch I don't know what happened there thank you very much somebody clearly didn't want you to share these images well maybe we can come back to them but thank you very much for a really fascinating talk I learned a great deal and I was particularly struck by the difference between this sort of immediate post-war discourse and the later discourses that form around the use of the pill the contraceptive pill which seemed to be almost belonged to a completely different sort of discourse and I was wondering I was wanting to start you off with that question what because when Koya developed or designed the village study I mean what was the language that I mean it seemed from the pictures that you showed it seemed that there will be sort of a medical professional and there will be an assistant and they will talk to married couples and I wonder what kind of language was used in these exchanges would you try to keep it very technical medical or would it be what did you think about because he spent a lot of time developing these research methodologies did you think about you know what language would be appropriate because obviously the elephant in the room is sex right you have to somehow to mention when this happens or how this happened yeah so yeah I think thank you for this question it's it's an interesting it is a very important question actually so the question you know what language was was being used so I think yes Koya was quite Koya knew his his social standing and of course the you know this elite public health you know researchers right so and that they were quite you know their social standing is very different from their target you know population so what they did was like you said so you saw in one of the slides which was skipped actually is the is the image of kind of a female figure teaching about you know about sex and so what what they did in these in these test villages was was to really employ female public health practitioners or midwives so I wrote a paper about about that in the past because I managed to in fact interview a midwife turned into public health specialist you know in this little village one of the village test villages and yeah she was she was very very important my my argument is that she was not only important for the success of the the project the project you know because she she in a way kind of translated a scientific language into the everyday everyday language of course you know being a midwife she had some trust among you know local women um and so um so she could you know who you know confided in all sorts of sometimes very controversial you know subjects right um and so um so there was a you know so of course the then the you know the doctors the the the research team took well I'm saying to cut advantage of you know certainly maximize the role of the midwife um and and the local help you know female health practitioners um for the success but my my my argument is that that was you know certainly important for the success of the project itself but also for scientific research because she then was collecting all the data right and then you know passing it on to the researchers or without this data you know it wouldn't it wouldn't have worked the scientific research um yeah Mike thank you very much so there's a question early on in the chat that asked from Hermione that asked to what extent were parallel epi studies in India such as the USA funded Hanna study and Rockefeller work in East Africa as well as research in Nigeria influenced uh or how did the influence design of the japan research work in the 50s and 60s seems there is considerable similarity so thank you so much um this is fantastic question so in uh another so this is in the book I do talk about how Koya um then um interacted with researchers who was doing uh who were doing Hanna study so um how you know Gamble's money in a way enabled um the kind of interagent relationship you know so yeah there was a parallel you know um projects right so so I would say in terms of um Kajiya village studies and Hanna were absolute parallel so I don't know about the other one in Nigeria but certainly in Gamble's mind so Gamble was um actually um behind the back so he didn't want to be named named in you know so but but financially supporting the Hanna study as well as Kajiya study at the same time and you know it was also Gamble who um then uh let Koya travel to Hanna itself and kind of had them you know had him interacted with not only the American um you know research team that was leading the study but also local um you know health officials and Ramara as well um so certainly uh you know the connection is there and at the same time in fact when he went to India he actually had gone to Egypt before that so I don't know about Nigeria Nigeria didn't really feature in at least when I read you know his correspondence Koya's correspondence with Gamble but but certainly yeah Hanna definitely there so so as you can see like these were really amorphous but also connected stories right and the Japanese case was um I think started a little bit earlier I think I would say compared to other projects um part because you know the Japanese government was quite interested in in doing the research and also the Japanese one was also um unique in that in the abortion because they were really interested in abortion right so so to try to kind of mitigate you know mitigate or the lower the number of abortion cases um so Hanna study also studied um sorry for others who who don't know this study it also studied from tablets you know the efficacy of from tablets in a very small village called Hanna in India yeah thank you very much sorry I I always get carried away with my own questions so I forgot to say please you can either raise your hand put your questions into the Q&A um but I can also see that in the chat there's a few questions coming up so we're open on all channels and there was a raised hand at the very beginning by David Walter um if you want to ask your question please hello can you hear me yes uh kind of a twin one was Kyo Yoshio ever suspected of being part of any atrocities during the Second World War and how did these policies affect the feminist movement in Japan in later years thank you very much and thank you very much for the for an interesting lecture Aya thank you very much David for this wonderful question um so so as as many technocrats um who are kind of mid-career uh mid to kind of advanced career technocrats um he was let off um he himself didn't I mean he was um you know certainly involved in um you know drafting the national eugenic law which promoted sterilization um but in fact you know the the actual sterilization cases in the in the wartime was was not that was not the great it wasn't you know it had to it had to go through all sorts of bureaucratic hoops so the number was not that great so it wasn't as um I'm not I'm not saying of course the the number you know doesn't matter but it wasn't as prominent as you know the Nazis um kind of atrocity you know atrocity in of Jews and in the in the Japanese case the atrocity through um kind of reproductive means um wasn't as highlighted um so yeah he was let off like I said you know he he straight away was appointed to direct um this institute which was you know which was a quite a you know a prestigious institute right within the Ministry of Health and Welfare now he's uh linked with the feminism talking about I think David you're talking about the 1970s so kind of second wave of feminism now he died so in 1974 and he he basically retired from you know from the kind of you know the forefront you know the forefront um in the in the late 1960s so you know clearly um but actually uh having said that quite interesting kind of combination so so feminism and birth control have kind of awkward relationship from the beginning anyway and um so in the end so this is the story I want to also tell in the in the next project is um how Koya was involved in as a kind of like a figurehead um in the international kind of cooperation in family planning in the in the 1960s when the government but the Japanese government you know started to you know support um overseas development days and family planning programs within it there was a NGO called Joicef and he became the council he became the kind of head of advisory board now he then he had to kind of work with Kato Shizue who was also you know who called himself a feminist and also a birth control activist since the 1920s so really interesting kind of dynamic dynamics going on between Koya and and um and Kato but as a as a kind of group feminist feminist no I think he didn't you know he wasn't attacked or anything he was hated by birth control activists though in the 1950s because you know before the war Koya was saying birth control is bad because he promotes you know reverse selection and then suddenly after the war he then became the you know this government spokesperson you know promoting birth control so birth control activists who were you know locked up and um and really kind of you know harassed by the government in the post war period uh pre-war period they really didn't like Koya thank you amazing I mean that's exactly the kind of question that I was thinking about yes how do you square these different attitudes right so Janet Hunter asks in the chat your pictures show women being provided with contraceptive advice could you say something about how Koya and his international colleagues thought about the relative responsibilities of wives and husbands in relation to means of contraception was the science largely oriented towards female contraception yeah this is a this is really interesting questions of course um so you know as as some of you know um you know the Japanese um kind of contraceptive practices or family planning practices for a long time was considered uh you know but basically was regarded as women's duty right so um so you know the case of abortion um as Tiana Norgren you know has mentioned and you know contraceptive pills you know they were kind of women's matters so you know even though you know and sterilization as well even though technically it was you know it'd be easier to sterilize you know the um the vasectomy was you know male vasectomy was technically easier than you know female sterilization uh many women uh were you know mobilized for that um so yeah so most of them um so even international um you know Koya's international colleagues um one of the big things of course apart from pill contraceptive pills um one of the big things that the this movement as as a movement um you know those taking part in the movement was were really kind of putting forward was the intra uterine device it's iud um again you know Chikako Takeshita uh actually um uh writes a book about wrote a book about this uh is how you know even though technically I mean you know women really complained about um about the you know the uncomfortable you know feelings it had in but but the population council for instance um spent lots and lots of money for the development of iud's um iud's and then in the end managed to you know um produce it you know mass produce it and and distributed it to you know so so yeah this this was targeted right for for women um in India though I think the the story so sometimes you know um the um move you know sometimes the programs um uh use incentives as a monetary incentive to promote um you know contraceptives and in the case of India the second me male among best males was was taken up because you know they could get money um you know if and of course it was reversible um and so you know but not not in Japan uh and in South Korea and in Taiwan really aggressive campaign to promote uh iud so you know you can actually see um the kind of contraceptive practices even today uh we were really rooted around that time you know in Asia certainly um yeah thank you we can now go to the q and a there's several questions here and if we start with the top one uh why were the growing rates of abortion seen as a problem as it still would have curbed the increase in population sorry what was the where where where is it um if you click at the bottom under the q and a q and a it should oh I see I see yeah yeah I understand okay um yeah so so okay so abortion was seen as a problem um firstly because it also you know the technically um you know at the time they um it wasn't you know that it was quite harmful for for women for at least koya used that argument right it's really harmful for for women to you know to get abortion so you know for health reasons um you know it's it's not a good idea contraceptives is much health you know in a way can you know let's harmful for for women's health but also it's interesting interesting there was an interesting study conducted by koya and he's again his his colleagues about the interval of um so um kind of pregnancy so uh experience among women so he compared they compared the team compared women who have had abortion and when they get uh pregnant next uh and compared those to those compared that to the group to the group that didn't have abortion and it turned out that um well they found out that the interval between you know abortion and the next pregnancy is much shorter among those you know those who have had abortion than those who didn't have abortion so um koya then concluded that abortion is not a good family planning or kind of fertility regulation methods right so so that those are the those are the two reasons um uh yeah and also uh there was another study that said abortion was also practiced among educated people so there's that eugenic argument as well yeah right um there's another question uh uh asked by Rebecca who writes hello dr. Hallme you said that family planning is one of the case studies you are using in your book i was wondering if you could tell us what the others will be oh right um so i looked at vital statistics um medical midwifery i looked at um kind of social scientists or economists um who were involved in the kind of policy policy debate on population problems in the 1920s and also during wartime i looked at um those uh uh various kind of policy scientists who were kind of mobilized for national land planning so these are the yeah and also i looked at census kind of census and population statistics so these are the cases um yeah dogmatics you know i think i'm pleased with how many pages i mean that's amazing because you there's there's so many as you've shown us uh in this talk you know there's a really enormous amount of information um and a lot quite a lot well the machine wouldn't let you there was something no straight down but how many pages does the manuscript amount to well i know i still need to get the the proof but um it is it's 120 you know i i i did squeeze it into 120 so yeah excellent okay there's there's another question in the q&a by lineman gamberton um thank you so much for your very fascinating talk i was curious about the sterilization study you mentioned and was wondering if you could elaborate on it do we know whether the participants in that study were voluntary or coerced i asked because state-sponsored sterilization programs in the usa were mostly uh were almost universally coercive yeah um so um there was not a uh so there was not a project that really specifically kind of um you know specialized in you know promoting sterilization acoya did um kind of in passing mentioned sterilization um as a as a choice um so um that women could take and and apparently yeah some some women did take it you know um uh the the midwife i interviewed said yeah they they took it um because you know they had so many children they didn't want to have you know anymore and you know they got they got subsidies so why not but it wasn't yeah sorry i think i might have kind of misrepresented the case but yeah there was nothing that you know really kind of promoted sterilization itself always kind of contraception contraception you know by means of modern contraceptives they call okay there's there's another question by christian rook um who writes is koya still highly regarded or has he fallen into disrepute racism racism still exists in most societies and i do appreciate the high homogeneity but i'm also thinking about the comments of a japanese minister who claimed the japanese were less susceptible to covid 19 because of their rates and implied superiority oh dear yes um so koya is uh is a is a known figure you know among specialists you know among uh among historians who you know study reproduction race science and and such i don't know whether he's you know known so much i mean you know of course he was the director of you know public you know institute of public health but again this is a specialized institution so there is not a a kind of like a public wide wide public recognition of you know koya um as an individual you know not so much as cotton here so um no um but yeah what he said um you know in in the 40s and 50s it's it's quite hard to be sometimes um yeah and then following up from that alejandra adamanderis hernandez asks uh were there also educational scientific films produced by koya or other public institutions regarding sexual health and birth control yeah thank you um so this is a really good question as well because um so so-called propaganda or or around kind of promotion uh through a visual image was one of the one of the things that um um that they you know deployed in the in the transnational population control movement um i would say though that this came slightly later so the so koya's uh was you know from the 50s 50s and by the 60s you know um the japanese birth rate actually had fallen quite significantly so you know there was there was a one or two you know continued studies from from you know uh in the in the 60s but really birth control became a non-issue you know uh in in the policy you know in policy and along with that koya's you know team's research interest kind of moved as well and um in the promotion through visual and films and you know that came slightly later certainly in the promotion of birth you know contraceptives um so yeah there were lots of like um i think um some pictures including the one i couldn't see i couldn't show uh used you know kamishibai this paper um how do you call it yeah like paper theater or yeah yeah street performance that's right that's right there so that was used but um yeah but not not necessarily yeah films thank you and there's another comparative question um what about backlash to the family planning movement in Japan in other countries such as dimba where it came to be seen as racial oppression and took very many years of focus of contraception used for birth spacing and for after family completion as well as increasing girls education so many women saw it as a freedom they wanted so in the case of within within japan itself um so there was not a a huge backlash um you know of course you know at the time um the the the discourse the racial discourse that was forming at the time was that you know and certainly uh the um you know the research team was you know um you know using the discourse that you know japan was a homo you know like this racial homogeneity so um so it wasn't you know seen as a racial oppression um and you know so so it wasn't no there was not a huge backlash um in that in that regard um in fact um you know in the japanese case um family planning was you know um massively promoted and and on the whole uh was kind of positively welcomed um it wasn't kind of uh kind of tied to oppression or anything like that even if the discourse you know kind of underneath and and also background has some oppressive components um uh I think it is it is partly because um it was also um you know tied to you know like Andrew Gordon described this life improvement um movement in the the post world like which which the company you know private and public corporation really aggressively um kind of promoted right so family planning was kind of integrated into that um so yeah it was it was kind of like a uh uh seen as kind of something modern um and something kind of new family new new family would um you know would take up thank you and there's there's there's another question in the chat by Yona Sidder who asks who were the children in the photo with Gamble? Koya? Uh I I think um it's I took this one out of a secondary source so it was Gamble's biography but he says uh in the in the in the book he says it was you know taken in one of the test villages I don't know which one but um yeah um sorry and uh and the last question in the Q&A uh so in the Japanese context um it was a moral class thing and the and the issue of social elevation especially among Japanese women then race asks David Walter yeah I would I would I would certainly say so um you know uh and um Koya also um characterized so for instance one of the um birth control pilot projects was in Katsushika Ward and um his his idea is uh you know they and and you know targeting specifically at um recipient you know benefit receivers right recipients of um social benefits and um and the the the idea is well the idea is um that you know you know they came in with the idea that you know the idea of reverse selection and da da da da da but they quickly found out um that those recipients um more many of them were you know kind of in the um you know kind of lower social um economic socioeconomic classes but some of them were kind of kind of fallen through you know after the you know through the kind of uh term or you know term all of the war and so you know um they uh argue that you know family planning you know birth control would at least help them to kind of come back you know in a way kind of go back to where they belonged um so yeah so certainly and I yeah that disciplining of bodies certainly was a class thing um in the post war context Japanese context right I wanted I wanted to ask a last question uh about the transnational aspect of things so you talked about the sort of the transfer of knowledge and expertise but also of people and of goods themselves and I was wondering about because so many of the contraceptive methods were based on on the rubber based on on on latex uh you know the pesteries but also the the condoms of course whether there is a colonial history too because the rubber trees obviously go only grow in sort of dense rainforests where there is a colonial aspect to that as well yeah yeah well that that is a really good question which is you know which itself is a is a research question isn't it so maybe we have to be asking Mitch uh asshole who's looked at the history of rubber in in Vietnam and maybe he can give us some good idea yeah that'd be really interesting um something yes it's kind of like a material culture is something I'm interested especially um the um yeah the the raw product of course certainly would have some colonial connection but even idea you know even iud you know the finished product itself um if you look at how they troubled uh you can you can see a history of uh in in the case of iud certainly postcolonial um and you know postcolonial that was you know kind of we certainly kind of um you know uh kind of founded on the history of Japanese colonialism uh and so yeah that'll be really interesting but yeah I can't I can't tell but yeah that's another if somebody could do the research that'd be great I think I think that would be an excellent project yeah I think that's a good medicine and materiality yeah excellent so um join me please in thanking Dr Ayahome for a really fascinating talk uh thank you all for coming uh I just wanted to remind you that in two weeks time on the very first of December we'll have our next session and we'll move from the beginning of life and how to stop it uh to the end of life and how to well probably uh prolong life itself um it will be a talk and a film screening called can robotics aided here be person centred uh and uh both a professor now Noriko Date and the professor David Prendergast will be here to present present the film and then I will be hosting a Q&A afterwards so please join us again but for now thank you very much it was a really very fascinating talk have a nice evening and take care thank you