The crisis of reproduction in Japan: the state and the operation of biopolitics/necropolitics

The crisis of reproduction in Japan: the state and the operation of biopolitics/necropolitics

The statistical fact of the 2022 number of newborn babies recording less than 800,000 yet again stirred a sense of crisis in Japan, prompting the Kishida government to announce a series of policy ideas ‘in another dimension’ to tackle fertility decline. Such current developments urge us to review the trajectory of political developments in the last three decades in which fertility decline has continuously been placed as the high-priority political agenda and successive governments designed and implemented numerous measures to tackle the issue. Despite its proactive posture, why has the Japanese government been so ineffective in reversing the reproductive trend?   

The purpose of this seminar is to highlight problems existing in the logic of governing ‘reproduction’ in advanced capitalist societies in the Japanese context. To do so, the seminar will re-assess the discussion of biopolitics vis-à-vis the notion of ‘necropolitics’ to understand how ‘life and death’ have been handled and managed through the state governing system in Japan. The talk will particularly pay attention to ‘gender’, which constitutes a condition on which individuals’ lives and deaths are reified and then, made subject to the demarcation of ‘a life worth living’. By taking these steps, the seminar attempts to elucidate the governing logic of reproduction in contemporary Japan, with which women living in the family are driven to face higher risks of being subject to necropolitics.

Speaker

TAKEDA, Hiroko is Professor of Political Analysis at the Graduate School of Law, Nagoya University. She completed her PhD at the University of Sheffield, and taught at Cardiff University, the University of Sheffield and the University of Tokyo prior to taking up the current post. She specializes in political sociology and her research interests include gender and politics/political economy in Japan and East Asia, biopolitics/governmentality and governance, and political discourse analysis.