Orphans by Design: ‘Mixed-blood’ Children, Child Welfare, and Racial Nationalism in Postwar Japan

Abstract

ABSTRACTAt the end of the Allied occupation in 1952, the Japanese press reported that two hundred thousand ‘mixed-blood’ children had been fathered and abandoned by foreign (mostly American) soldiers in Japan. Japanese commentators often converged on a single solution: the expulsion of all foreign troops and all ‘mixed’ children from Japan. Although most scholars treat the 1950s sense of ‘crisis’ surrounding ‘mixed’ children as a product of concern for their welfare, the ‘crisis’ is better understood as a complexly co-authored moral panic. Opposition politicians deployed wrath and fear over ‘blood mixing’ to discredit the dominant Liberal Party and its alliance with the United States. Meanwhile, ideological activists and mass media circulated false facts to present ‘mixed’ families as doomed and dangerous. Moral panic over ‘mixed-blood children’ fostered a ‘pure-blood’ identity in Japan after World War II and helped reconstruct Japanese nationalism on a new basis: that of the ‘pure’ race rather than the failed state.