Japanese and American leaders alike advocated healthy and hetero-normative marriages in postwar Japan through laws, public health services, and the media. But they often had different—even contradictory—goals and purposes. Americans preached that democratization would liberate Japanese women from the feudalistic family system. They promoted public health measures such as venereal-disease control and contraception as a modernization process for Japanese families. They promulgated these policies to sell the value of the individual and the nuclear family—the principle of democracy. Ultimately, their intention was to contain the quantity of Japanese population for economic and political stability as a defense against communism. On the other hand, the defeat in war and occupation by a foreign army had heightened the sense of national crisis among many Japanese. They feared that the individualistic lifestyles introduced by the Occupation would break up the traditional Japanese family and corrupt sexual morals. Japanese leaders thus emphasized the importance of “eugenic marriages” to defend the racial and sexual purity of the nation. In short, they sought to preserve the quality of their population against the corruptive influences of Western culture.
The paper thus explores how marriage in postwar Japan became a foundation of national identity against foreign forces and a contested site for international power dynamics.