Professor Susan L. Burns, The University of Chicago

In 1936, Mitsuda Kensuke, the Director of Nagashima Aiseien, Japan’s first national sanitarium, published an article in the sanitarium’s house journal, Aisei. Entitled “Twenty Years of Vasectomy,” it offered an assessment of the use of vasectomy on leprosy patients, a procedure Mitsuda had pioneered two decades before when he was the medical director of Zensei Hospital, one of five public sanitaria created by Japan’s first leprosy law of 1907. The tone of the piece is celebratory: the first patients to receive the procedure were, in Mitsuda’s words, “now men of 40 or 50, in middle-age, and the fact that they are even now healthy and active shows that [vasectomy] is the secret key to allowing the world’s leprosy patients of both sexes to live together and flourish together.”

The rosy picture of the use of sterilization in the sanitarium offered by Mitsuda stands in sharp contrast to the assessment offered in recent scholarly work and public discourse on Japan’s leprosy policy, in which no issue looms larger than the claim that male patients were routinely, coercively, and unnecessarily sterilized, while women who became pregnant were forced to undergo abortions, sometimes in the final months of their pregnancies.  The Japanese historian Fujino Yutaka, whose work has played an important role in making Japan’s leprosy prevention policy a political issue, likened the use of vasectomy in the sanitaria to the Nazi policy of sterilization.  In this presentation, I want to reconsider the sexual and reproductive policies deployed within the sanitaria. My argument is that the policy of sterilization cannot be understood either as completely voluntary (the claim of sanitarium doctors at the time) or overtly coerced (the view that has come to prevail).  My attempt to make sense of it in this work reflects recent work by Adrianna Petryna, Nikolas Rose and Carlos Nova, and others who have complicated the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics by what they term “biological citizenship.”

It has long been argued that long rule of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party was a major roadblock to historical reconciliation in East Asia. The pro-contrite police of the Japanese Socialist Party (JSP) of late 1980s and early 1990s are then interpreted as evidence that had the Japanese Left assumed power earlier, it would have closed the history gaps quicker. The purpose of my talk is to test this assumption.  

I do so by analyzing a critical problem of Japan's early post-war foreign policy: the settlement of war reparations with its East Asian neighbors. According to Article 14 of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, Japan had the obligation to pay reparations for the damages it caused to Asians during WWII. Eventually it reached four reparation agreements:  with Burma, the Philippines, Indonesia and South Vietnam under this framework. Subsequently it also concluded a normalization agreement with South Korea in 1965. The Socialists were not involved in the reparation negotiations. But the party was a key public critic and a powerful parliamentary force during the ratification process. In this paper I analyze the JSP's approach towards these agreements and by extension towards the general issue of Japanese war responsibility.    

<Internment of the Japanese Prisoners of War (POWs) in the USSR and its Implications>

The history of Japanese prisoners of war of the Second World War in the USSR was one of the dramatic pages of Russian-Japanese relations. Over time, its severity decreased, however, historical memory is preserved. Archival historical sources on this topic were discovered in the USSR only with the beginning of the “perestroika”of  M. S. Gorbachev. Large number of monographs, collections of documents and hundreds of articles have been published on a wide range of issues of the history of POWs. On the other hand, more than 2,000 memoirs of former POWs were published in Japan, but historical studies on this topic began relatively recently. Among the controversial issues that caused the active debate of historians was the mechanism by which the Soviet authorities decided to transfer POWs to the territory of the USSR. The number of Japanese interned in the USSR in various sources varies from 490 to 610 thousand people. The number of dead and buried on the territory of the USSR is from 45 to 60 thousand people. The geographic distribution of internees on the territory of the USSR was associated with the needs of industry, construction and agriculture in a large amount of labor. The real, concrete contribution of the Japanese internees to the development of the Soviet economy is difficult to count, since these data were not highlighted in separate reports and other documents. The program of the indoctrination of Japanese internees, conducted by the Soviet authorities in POW camps, is causing serious discussions. The facts show that its effectiveness was minimal. Of particular interest is the story of the repatriation of the Japanese to their homeland and the many circumstances that accompanied it.