The history of eugenics has long served in bioethics as a cautionary point of reference in debates over reproductive medicine and genetic technologies. Yet bioethical discussion has largely relied on a narrow set of Western cases—most notably the UK, the USA and Germany—even though eugenics developed as a global movement with diverse social and political consequences. This selective focus has encouraged an oversimplified understanding of eugenics and obscured the ways in which eugenic ideas were received, adapted and transformed outside the West. This paper highlights the relevance of non-Western histories of eugenics for contemporary bioethical governance, using Japan as an illustrative case. In Japan, eugenics emerged within projects of Westernisation and national consolidation and was shaped by ideas of racial superiority and by anxieties about geopolitical vulnerability. Eugenic policies were framed as collective strategies of national improvement in response to external pressures—a dynamic we describe as collective autoeugenics. The Japanese case also shows that eugenic reasoning extended beyond heredity, targeting environmental and social conditions and incorporating non-hereditary traits into coercive reproductive policies. These features complicate familiar distinctions between genetic and non-genetic interventions and demonstrate how eugenic logics can persist even in the absence of explicit genetic determinism. Greater attention to regional variation can therefore strengthen the historical foundations of bioethics and support more careful evaluation of contemporary eugenic-adjacent practices, including those often described as ‘liberal eugenics’.
Nakao et al. (Wed,) studied this question.