Origins of Japanese Domestic Scientific Eugenics
Yamanouchi Shige (1876–1973), a plant cytologist, was one of the early and important members of the Japanese eugenics movement, who was trained under John Merle Coulter (1851–1928) an American eugenicist and botanist. He was a major promoter and academic of early Lamarckian theory, but later blended his ideas with Mendelian evolutionary theory.
His career is a direct link between United States and Japanese eugenics. His approach has been credited with searching for a way for the Japanese race to genetically "catch up" with the "dominant Western race" of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
According to Jennifer Robertson of the University of Michigan, eugenism, as part of the new scientific order, was introduced in Japan "under the aegis of nationalism and empire building." She identifies "positive eugenism" and "negative eugenism." Positive eugenism, promoted by Ikeda Shigenori, refers to "the improvement of circumstances of sexual reproduction and thus incorporates advances in sanitation, nutrition and physical education into strategies to shape the reproductive choices and decisions of individual and families" Negative Eugenism, promoted by Hisomu Nagai, "involves the prevention of sexual reproduction, through induced abortion or sterilization among people deemed unfit". "Unfit" included people such as alcoholics, lepers, the mentally ill, the physically disabled, and criminals.
Social Darwinism was at that time gaining credit with scientists around the world and thus was introduced to Japan as well.
Read more about this topic: Eugenics In Japan
Famous quotes containing the words origins of, origins, japanese, domestic and/or scientific:
“The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: “Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?””
—Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“No human being can tell what the Russians are going to do next, and I think the Japanese actions will depend much on what Russia decides to do both in Europe and the Far East—especially in Europe.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“The domestic career is no more natural to all women than the military career is natural to all men.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecution of science as imagination. Find me a people whose early medicine is not mixed up with magic and incantations, and I will find you a people devoid of all scientific ability.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)