New Books on Japan: "Japan Reborn: Race and Eugenics from Empire to Cold War"

Monday, April 6, 2026 | 5:30-7:00 PM ET

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Japan Reborn: Race and Eugenics from Empire to Cold War (Columbia Press, 2025)

Presenter: Kristin Roebuck, Assistant Professor, Cornell University

Discussant: Takashi Fujitani, Dr. David Chu Professor in Asia-Pacific Studies, University of Toronto

Moderator: Seiji Shirane, Associate Professor of Japanese History, City College of New York

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Kristin Roebuck, who will be speaking about her new book Japan Reborn: Race and Eugenics from Empire to Cold War (Columbia University Press, 2025). Tracing changing views of the “mixed blood” child, Japan Reborn reveals how notions of racial mixture and purity reshaped Japanese identity. Roebuck unravels the politics of sex and reproduction in Japan from the invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s to the dawn of US-Japan alliance in the 1950s, uncovering eugenic ideas and policies that policed the boundaries of kinship and country. She shows how the trauma of defeat sparked an abhorrence of interracial sex and caused a profound devolution in the social status of “mixed” children and their Japanese mothers. She also unpacks how Japan’s postwar identity crisis put pressure on the United States to bring Japanese brides and “mixed blood” children into the Cold War American family. Shedding light on the sexual and racial tensions of empire, occupation, and the Cold War, this book offers new ways to understand the shifting terrain of Japanese nationalism and international relations. Takashi Fujitani (Toronto) will serve as interlocutor.