Creating Racial Subjects: Eugenics, Psychiatry, and the Ainu

ABSTRACT

This article explores the development of psychiatric interest in the Ainu people of Hokkaidō Island within the socio-political context of Japan’s colonial expansion and the eugenics movement from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War. Japanese researchers reinterpreted data on the Ainu – particularly as this related to racial categorization and blood-mixing – in reaction to the passing of the 1940 National Eugenics Law and the Japanese Empire’s geographic expansion. Their studies negated colonial reality and attributed psychiatric degeneracy to a racialized Ainu constitution, building off and reinforcing preexisting anticipated futures for Ainu people. The article ends by raising questions about the impact of eugenics ideology, its practices, and related laws on minoritized groups in the post-war period.

KEYWORDS:

• eugenics
• psychiatry
• Indigenous people
• colonialism
• Ainu

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr. Yumi Kim, Dr. Sujin Lee, and Dr. Jaymelee Kim for their invaluable comments on early drafts of this essay and encouragement to pursue publication.

Notes

1 Suzuki 2012.

2 Takasugi 1971; Ueki 2017; Siddle 1996.

3 Clarke 2021.

4 Engstrom and Crozier 2018.

5 Hovhannisyan 2020; Mitsubashi and Yamada 2023.

6 Suzuki 2012; Ōtsuki 2011

7 Adams, Murphy, and Clarke 2009, 247.

8 Adams, Murphy, and Clarke 2009, 255.

9 Suzuki 2022.

10 The film was censored due to the government’s concern about its portrayal of the massacre of Koreans during the Great Hanshin Earthquake, hate speech lyrics incorporated into the film, and because it presents Koreans as being oppressed in Japan. See Fukushima (2022) for further details.

11 Engstrom and Crozier 2018; Ueda 2021.

12 See Nakamura 2019; lewallen 2007; Ueki 2017.

13 It is important to note that not all psychiatrists were complicit in these practices, as implementing a eugenics law was highly contested in both the pre- and post-war period of Japan. See Matsumura (2010) and Hovhannisyan (2021).

14 Many of these studies were concerned with the origins of the Japanese as an ethnic group, and the Ainu were seen as useful material to make historical analyses or racialized comparisons. See Low 2012 and Katō 2010.

15 American Psychological Association 2015; Yap 1952.

16 Tsuboi 1889, 457-458.

17 See Roellinghoff 2020.

18 Koganei 1912, 534.

19 An example provided for this is when asked not to throw an object, a tokkoni-bakko would throw it. Or when told not to hit another person, they would immediately hit them. See Tsuboi 1889, 458.

20 Sekiba 1896, 211-215.

21 Sekiba 1896, 214.

22 Munro 1963, 101.

23 Piłsudski 1912, 178.

24 Piłsudski 1912, 188-189. A few points can be made from this story. First, Piłsudski noted that Jaśinoske reported hearing many similar stories during his stay in Hokkaidō, further complicating the definitions of imu given by non-Ainu scholars and commentators in Hokkaidō until this time. Second, although Piłsudski translated imu as “imitative insanity,” (1912, 193) this translation does not fit the narrative of the story. A more appropriate translation is in Chiri Mashiho’s explanation of the etymology of imu. Chiri, an Ainu linguist, offered three definitions: day-to-day exclamations of surprise; a form of hysteria; and a shaman’s reflexive movements to the beat of a drum (Mashiho 1952, 55-58). Piłsudski’s account reflects the third definition, yet he pathologized it as “insanity.” Lastly, as Wada Kan has noted, the stumps placed at the front and back of the woman’s house were talismans through the “voice of imu,” again pointing to Chiri’s alternative description of imu (Wada 1964).

25 Sakaki 1901, 249. Again, this differs from other definitions of imu that emerged around this time. For example, John Batchelor, an English missionary who published a dictionary for the Ainu language, defined imu as a “kind of hysteria” and mentioned a term called “imu-imu,” which he defined as “an intensified form of imu” (Batchelor 1905, 174).

26 Defined by the APA Dictionary of Psychology as “mechanical repetition of words and phrases uttered by another individual.”

27 Like echolalia, but the repetition of another person’s movements or gestures.

28 Sakaki 1901, 256-257.

29 Sakaki 1901, 253.

30 These would later be reconceptualized by Pow Meng Yap (1952) as culture-bound syndromes, which continues to be the dominant framing for such behavior.

31 Sakaki 1901, 254.

32 Sakaki 1901, 255.

33 A similar conceptualization of heredity was shared by German psychiatrists, who had the most impact on Japanese psychiatry during this time. See Ritter and Roelcke (2005) for a useful overview of this development.

34 See Kretschmer, 1960. Comparative transcultural psychiatry emerged as a field during colonialism, when the colonized were assumed to be biologically and intellectually less developed, and thus not able to manifest complex forms of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia or depression. See Kirmayer and Minas 2000; Bhugra and Littlewood 2001, 5.

35 Weckowicz and Liebel-Weckowicz 1990.

36 Weckowicz and Liebel-Weckowicz 1990, 218.

37 Uchimura Yūshi’s father, Uchimura Kanzō, was a graduate of Sapporo Agriculture College, which later become Hokkaidō Imperial University.

38 Uchimura 1967c.

39 Otsubo and Bartholomew 1998; Uchimura 1967a. This research was among ten national projects on medical and hygienic research, highlighting the national and academic attention given to studying the Ainu. See Ueki 2017, 88.

40 See Uchimura et al. 1941, 89; Inoue and Endo 1936. It is curious that despite their publication of statistical analyses on rates of morbidity, the research team provided no specific number for the total Ainu population at the time in their publications. This is perhaps because some of these numbers came from information relayed to them by local residents and not direct encounters. See Uchimura, Akimoto, and Ishibashi 1938.

41 Matsubara 1998; Otsubo and Bartholomew 1998.

42 Uchimura 1967b.

43 Siddle 2003.

44 Though the studies liberally mixed the language of jinshu, minzoku, and shuzoku, it is clear from these that these refer to the idea of race (biological and hereditary race).

45 Siddle 1996.

46 Uchimura 1967c; Uchimura et al. 1934.

47 The Wasserman test was the first blood antibody test for syphilis and was widely used in the early twentieth century.

48 Uchimura et al. 1934, 50.

49 Uchimura et al. 1934, 53-54.

50 Uchimura et al. 1938, 846.

51 Fujino 1998, 230-231.

52 Uchimura et al. 1940; 1942.

53 Uchimura 1967a.

54 Suzuki 2012.

55 Uchimura, Akimoto, and Ishibashi 1938, 9.

56 Uchimura, Akimoto, and Ishibashi 1938, 20.

57 Uchimura, Akimoto, and Ishibashi 1938, 49.

58 Uchimura, Akimoto, and Ishibashi 1938, 30.

59 Uchimura, Akimoto, and Ishibashi 1938, 54.

60 Uchimura, Akimoto, and Ishibashi 1938, 40 and 57.

61 Uchimura, Akimoto, and Ishibashi 1938, 46.

62 Uchimura, Akimoto, and Ishibashi 1938, 33.

63 Uchimura et al. 1938, 817. It is important to note that this was not the case for all medical research on the Ainu during this time. For example, a group of dermatologists mention in a published paper that treating skin conditions among the Ainu was a high priority for the team (Takahashi, Kohara, and Mori 1935).

64 Uchimura, Akimoto, and Ishibashi 1938, 35. Such attitudes of medical researchers were not exclusive to Ainu scholars at the time; most psychiatrists in Japan considered themselves to be scientists, not medical caregivers (see Kitanaka 2012). This general apathy towards providing medical care was also reflected in a group discussion on Uchimura Yūshi’s career that was held in 1997. This focus group was composed of six prominent psychiatrists in Japan, including Kazamatsuri Hajime and Harada Ken’ichi, who expressed that Uchimura was the psychiatrist they admired the most. Although the participants exempted Uchimura from ethical scrutiny of his study on the Ainu because of the “limits of the time” (jidaino seigen), Utena Hiroshi stated that Uchimura had “little social interest” (shakaitekina kanshinga usui) in his research. Utena pointed to the lack of any written or verbal discussion by Uchimura regarding the oppression the Japanese brought to the Ainu, or the circumstances in which his studies of mental disabilities had occurred. See Kazamatsuri et.al. 1997.

65 Uchimura, Akimoto, and Ishibashi 1938, 2.

66 Kauanui 2008; lewallen 2016; Winchester 2019.

67 Robertson 2002, 195.

68 Roellinghoff 2020.

69 Uchimura et al. 1934, 55.

70 Uchimura, Akimoto, and Ishibashi 1938, 46.

71 For Mongolia, see Tamura 1939; for Southeast Asia see Kato and Uchimura 1947; Suzuki 2012.

72 Kim 2018.

73 Uchimura 1967b.

74 See Articles 1, 3, 4, and 6 of the law. See also Norgren, 2001, Appendix 1.

75 Otsubo and Bartholomew 1998; Matsubara 1998.

76 Uchimura 1967b, 55.

77 Adams, Murphy, and Clarke 2009, 247-255.

78 Uchimura 1967b, 56.

79 Suzuki 2012, 245.

80 The most evident of this influence comes from the specific methodology and underlying assumption of degeneracy in which the Japanese government gathered statistics on mental illness (seishin shikkan), mental hygiene (seishin eisei), and disability (shōgai), largely between 1954 and 1984. Although a number of scholars have commented on the unethical, intrusive, and sometimes lethal consequences of these national surveys (Cf. Hirota and Teruoka 1987; Omata 2018; Hamada 2009), none have yet connected Uchimura Yūshi’s studies of the Ainu in the 1930s with his involvement with these later national epidemiological projects.

81 Uchimura et al. 1941, 74-75.

82 Uchimura et al. 1941, 96.

83 Ishibashi et al. 1942, 237.

84 Morris-Suzuki 1998. It is telling that they did not revisit their past studies on syphilis – one of the core concerns of the eugenics movement – as the incorporation of mixed-blooded people may have significantly shifted their conclusions about the Ainu composition.

85 Ishibashi et al. 1942, 290.

86 Ishibashi et al., 1942, 291.

87 Uchimura et al. 1940; 1942.

88 Ishibashi et al. 1942, 294.

89 Ishibashi et al. 1942, 294.

90 Ishibashi et al. 1944, 349.

91 Ishibashi et al. 1944, 345-349.

92 Ishibashi et al. 1944, 340.

93 Murphy 2017, 23.

94 Yap 1952.

95 Chiri 1952.

96 Takahata and Shichida 1988; Wada 1964.

97 Ōtsuki 2000.

98 American Psychological Association 2015.

99 See Chiri 1952; Aoki and Nagai 1983.

100 Ohnuki-Tierney 1980.

101 Nakamura 2007.

102 Otsuki 2000, 2011.

103 Tsagelnik 2021.

104 Fujime 1997, 327; Matsubara 2021.

105 Funatsu 2018; Hovhannisyan 2021.

106 Funatsu 2018; Yoshida 2018.

107 Hovhannisyan, 2021.

108 Funatsu 2018, 72.

109 Hokkaidō Eiseibu and Hokkaidō Yūseihogō Shinsakai 1956, 16.

110 Hokkaidō Eiseibu and Hokkaidō Yūseihogō Shinsakai 1956, 9.

111 Hokkaidō Hygiene Group 1951, 8.

112 Hokkaidō Hygiene Group 1951, 25.

113 Hokkaidō Eiseibu and Hokkaidō Yūseihogō Shinsakai 1956.

114 Uchimura et al. 1941, 7.

115 Hovhannisyan 2020; Yokoyama 2015.

116 The journal editor noted that the paper was initially submitted and scheduled to be published in July 1946, but was delayed due to the aftermath of Japan’s surrender.

117 Ishibashi 1947.

118 Ishibashi 1947, 16.

119 Ishibashi 1947, 16.

120 Uchimura, Akimoto, and Ishibashi 1938.

121 Suwa et al. 1963, 401.

122 Suwa et al. 1963, 402-403.

123 Sorano et al. 2022.

124 Aoki and Nagai 1983.

125 Arai 1984; Chapman 2014.

126 Tahara 2018.

127 Fanon 1988.

128 Akimoto 1987.

Additional information

Funding

Part of this research was made possible through support from the D. Kim Foundation for the History of Science and Technology in East Asia.

Notes on contributors

Hosanna Fukuzawa

Hosanna Fukuzawa is a doctoral student at the School of Social Work and Department of Anthropology at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. His research focuses on the entanglement of colonialism, disease, and experiences of suffering in Japan and its former empire.