Recent literature exploring postwar human diversity studies has renewed race mixture studies as well as the common account. Reacting to this nationalistic response to konketsuji, Suda and other Japanese intellectuals turned their attention to the study of children’s race mixing (Sakano 2009 Roebuck 2015). In this context, the mixed-blood ( konketsu) of the “Negro hybrid children” was considered to pose a threat to postwar nation-building due to its potential to disintegrate the pure bloodline of Japan ( junketsu) (Roebuck 2016). Indeed, with the end of Allied occupation in 1952, the Japanese government tried to build a new nation-state based on the mythical idea of the Japanese nation bound by a unified bloodline (Oguma 2002). Along this line, previous scholars have overlooked the effect that internationally shared scientific inquiry might have had on Suda’s interest in konketsuji studies domestic, ideological concerns with pure-blood nationalism in Japan. 3 This story fits well in the common account of a postwar transition from scientific racism to population genetic research on human difference, which coincided with the fall of Nazi Germany (Stephan 1982 Barkan 1992). In examining the prewar history of race mixing studies in Hawaii, historian Warwick Anderson points out that, in the United States, already in the 1930s race mixing was no longer considered a “compelling biological problem” (Anderson 2012, p. 2 For example, historians Sakano ( 2009) and Roebuck ( 2015) have speculated that Suda’s remarks were based on the “disharmony” theory devised by American eugenicist Charles Davenport (1866–1944) and refuted by American anthropologist Harry L. Previous literature has considered Suda’s konketsuji anthropology as a belated, isolated eugenic enterprise occurring in a non-Western country.
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