Aya Homei – författare

Twenty-first-century Japan is known for the world's most aged population. Faced with this challenge, Japan has been a pioneer in using science to find ways of managing a declining birth rate. Science for Governing Japan's Population considers the question of why these population phenomena have been seen as problematic. What roles have population experts played in turning this demographic trend into a government concern? Aya Homei examines the medico-scientific fields around the notion of population that developed in Japan from the 1860s to the 1960s, analyzing the role of the population experts in the government's effort to manage its population. She argues that the formation of population sciences in modern Japan had a symbiotic relationship with the development of the neologism, 'population' (jinkō), and with the transformation of Japan into a modern sovereign power. Through this history, Homei unpacks assumptions about links between population, sovereignty, and science. This title is also available as Open Access.

Twenty-first-century Japan is known for the world's most aged population. Faced with this challenge, Japan has been a pioneer in using science to find ways of managing a declining birth rate. Science for Governing Japan's Population considers the question of why these population phenomena have been seen as problematic. What roles have population experts played in turning this demographic trend into a government concern? Aya Homei examines the medico-scientific fields around the notion of population that developed in Japan from the 1860s to the 1960s, analyzing the role of the population experts in the government's effort to manage its population. She argues that the formation of population sciences in modern Japan had a symbiotic relationship with the development of the neologism, 'population' (jinkō), and with the transformation of Japan into a modern sovereign power. Through this history, Homei unpacks assumptions about links between population, sovereignty, and science. This title is also available as Open Access.

Fujimoto, Homei, and Nakamura bring together the perspectives of women engaging in professional medical work across the expanse of the modern Japanese Empire (1868–1945). Through translations of primary source documents in three East Asian languages, this collection provides a window into the experiences of women working in a variety of medical professions, including doctors, nurses, midwives, and nutritionists. The voices of these women, collected from books, magazines, diaries, roundtable discussions, and oral histories, speak of the challenges, hopes, triumphs, and at times despair that women faced in their medical studies and workplaces.While the women represent a kaleidoscope of political views both critical and supportive of the Japanese empire, this book demonstrates the significance of the Japanese nation and empire for many of these women. Their stories show how they pushed boundaries, traversed national or regional borders in search of medical opportunities, or attempted to carve out new spaces for women through their service as medical professionals.This work, which includes little studied sources never before accessible in English, will appeal to scholars and students of history, Asian studies, gender history/studies, and the history of science, technology, and medicine.

The 1980s was a critical decade in world history. With the Cold War global order at its height, the decade witnessed new modes of population governance across the political spectrum, from China’s One Child Policy to Reagan’s Global Gag Rule, alongside fast-evolving reproductive technologies. Populating the 1980s delves into this transformative decade to offer fresh insights into the late-twentieth century world through the lens of population, and explores the economic, legal, political and religious implications for the relationship between individuals, kinship and the state.In revisiting this remarkable decade, not only does this book identify what the reproductive politics were at that time, but highlights this period as a defining moment for reproductive freedom around the world. As the global political order was undergoing fundamental transformation, how did bio-politics and geo-politics become entangled? What does a history of the global population of the 1980s reveal about late modernity, individual freedom, family, sovereignty, gender, secularization and changing moral economies? This book addresses these themes and more to better understand the evolution of rights and justice for reproductive bodies across six continents during the 1980s, and explores how this decade laid the foundation for the myriad ethical, legal and social questions around reproductive politics today.