Mixed Race Studies

The Japanese public echoed the state’s abhorrence for this population of biracial babies. Whereas Japanese enthusiastically embraced cultural mixing with the U.S., they rejected biological mixing outright, seeing mixed-race babies as a threat to their racial purity and tantamount to an assault on the Japanese race itself. Black-Japanese babies were especially despised, but all biracial mixtures encountered greater prejudice in Japan than did biracial “GI babies” in Germany and Britain.⁵ Even Sawada Miki (沢田美喜, 1901-80), who in 1948 founded an orphanage for occupation babies, defended the policy of separating Japanese and biracial orphans. Mixed-race children, she felt, possessed “mental and physical handicaps” and in any case would never be accepted into Japanese society due to “the people’s traditional dislike for Eurasian children.”⁶ By 1955, Sawada’s orphanage had accepted 468 babies and negotiated 262 adoptions in the U.S. No Japanese adoption service accepted Sawada’s children, however, and a Japanese couple who had adopted one “returned it when the neighborhood prejudice they encountered proved too strong.”⁷

W. Puck Brecher, “Eurasians and Racial Capital in a “Race War”,” Asia Pacific Perspectives: A Publication of the Center for Asia Pacific Studies, Volume 14, Number 2 (Spring 2017). 4. https://jayna.usfca.edu/asia-pacific-perspectives/center-asia-pacific/perspectives/v14n2/brecher.html.

Eurasians and Racial Capital in a “Race War”

Asia Pacific Perspectives: A Publication of the Center for Asia Pacific Studies
Volume 14, Number 2 (Spring 2017)
pages 4-19

W. Puck Brecher, Ph.D., Professor of History
Washington State University

The ubiquity of racist propaganda in Japan and the U.S. during the Pacific War and the extraordinary cruelty of the fighting have fostered the perception that Japanese and Americans harbored a deep racial hatred for each other. Indeed, historical research convincingly interprets the Pacific War as a “race war” within the contexts of military engagement and state rhetoric. We know little, however, about how resident Westerners lived and interacted with Japanese during the war and whether they became victims of racial hatred. This article explores the impacts of state ideology on Japanese citizens’ racial attitudes by examining the treatment and experiences of mixed-race individuals, and Eurasians particularly, stranded in Japan during the war. In doing so, it contextualizes and corrects harmful allegations of racism among civilian Japanese.

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