The Japanese Program That Destroyed Generations

Video Description

By the 1920s and indeed, by the early 30s, eugenic ideas had become popular among the ruling class of Japan, if not mainstream, and a series of "public education" campaigns were launched with the idea that they would encourage the "right" people to reproduce and the "wrong" people to avoid pregnancy. Marriage and child-rearing were encouraged – for the military class and the growing wealthy middle class, but contraception was encouraged among workers, the uneducated – and one particular group of "foreigners" who had been living in Japan for centuries – Koreans. The people at the top were regarded by eugenicists and a growing number of people as "members of a pure race" - children of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu whose isolation had allowed them to avoid polluting and dangerous ideas from outside until a unique (and "superior") Japanese society emerged. To a large degree, Japanese ideas about human culture and their place in it were remarkably similar to that of Nazi Germany. Japanese were at the top, and everyone else was beneath them. WWII in Asia began when Japan invaded China in the late 1930s. By that time, Japanese society was a highly regimented fascist state, and this is when eugenics in Japan became public policy. Sterilization and segregation of people who were deemed "unfit" became policy. In 1940, the military pushed through the National Eugenic Law. The law allowed the government to forcibly sterilize both the severely physically challenged (those with epilepsy, muscular dystrophy, etc) and the mentally challenged as well. The person in question had no legal recourse, nor did their parents or family. At the same time, the government offered cash and tax incentives for "healthy couples" to have more and more children. Condoms and reproductive education programs were given to the poor and uneducated – and the Koreans who lived in some of the more squalid parts of Japan's cities. By WWII, "eugenics" had become synonymous with racism, not only in Japan and Germany but in places like the United States, where eugenics laws spread throughout the 20s and 30s and where approximately 60,000 people – primarily uneducated Southern blacks were forcibly and "legally" sterilized, to Australia, where aboriginal people were subjected to the same thing, and Canada, which had a program to sterilized members of the "First Peoples" there. In Germany, in the late 30s, the infamous "T-4" euthanasia and sterilization program took place under the guise of hospital care. Things never went that far in Japan, but the principles of eugenics were undoubtedly part of occupation policy in the Japanese Empire, especially in China. Japanese eugenicists their believers, and quite honestly, a huge segment of the Japanese population viewed the Chinese as a "once-great" people who had allowed themselves to degenerate into the over-crowded, desperately poor, and dirty cities that Japanese troops and visitors saw in much of China. #japan #eugenics #wwii Copyright © 2025 A Day In History. All rights reserved. DISCLAIMER: All materials in these videos are used for entertainment purposes and fall within the guidelines of fair use. No copyright infringement intended. If you are, or represent, the copyright owner of materials used in this video, and have an issue with the use of said material, please send an email to [email protected]