The Intersection between Bio-politics and emigration policies: Historical Sociology of Overpopulation Discourse in 1920s Japan

Foucault's concept of biopolitics is useful for analyzing how power operates in modern states. This paper analyzes the discourses on overpopulation in 1920s Japan, based on historical sociology, exploring how biopolitics intersected with emigration policies.
“Overpopulation'' was a crucial problem in Asia during the Cold War. The same issue was actively debated in the West and Japan at the beginning of the 20th century. At that time, population studies defined overpopulation as a decline in living standards and regarded it as the fundamental cause of unemployment. Today, the idea that overpopulation is the cause of unemployment isn’t accepted. Experts on population studies were aware that unemployment was a structural problem of capitalist society. Nevertheless, they tried to maintain the idea that overpopulation was the cause of unemployment by redefining Malthus’s definition of overpopulation.
This concept was shared within the Social Affairs Bureau of the Ministry of Home Affairs, which was responsible for a wide range of social administration in Japan back then. To compensate for the deficiencies in unemployment measures, they promoted a policy fully subsidizing travel expenses for the unemployed to migrate to South America. As such, the overpopulation discourse became the excuse for inadequacies in unemployment policies and forced the unemployed themselves to find solutions: migrants were later called “The Abandoned”.
Overpopulation discourse was maintained after then, and was used to justify the migration to Manchuria in the 1930s and emigration policies in the post-war period. In this way, biopolitics developed through the overpopulation problems and emigration policies.