「なぜ生物は死ぬのか」という問いには、二つの局面がある。一つは老化や死の原因を問うもので、二つめは、生物が死ぬべく運命づけられている理由を問うものである。本論のねらいは、これらの疑問に生物学がどう答えてきたかを歴史的に明らかにしようとするものである。第一点については、自然死と事故死を区別してかからねばならない。古代ギリシャ時代から、自然哲学者にしろ生物学者にしろ、基本的には自然死すなわち老化過程を扱ってきており、一般に、老化過程は何ものかが失われていく過程として捉えられてきた。第二点については、ドイツのヴァイスマンが19世紀後半の進化論的考察の中から初めて明らかにしたものである。それによって、死は不可避な、忌むべきことがらではなく、外界によりよく適応するために生物が獲得した進化論的戦術と見なされることになった。

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The opening of Japan in the mid 19^th century encouraged Japanese women's emigration overseas.Because most of them engaged in prostitution abroad, the existence of these women, usually known as Karayuki, was the focal point of anti-prostitution criticisms in Japan from the early Meiji era. Moral advocates and anti-prostitution activists regarded their presence as a possible disgrace to the nation. However, their discursive circumstances changed in the Taisho era with the inflow and circulation of the ideas of eugenics, which were repeatedly featured in Kakusei, the official bulletin of Kakusei-kai, one of the most influential anti-prostitution organisations in Japan. In this paper I explore the way in which criticism of Karayuki by the anti-prostitution movement was incorporated into a narrative of eugenics, and how its discursive entity resulted in what can best be termed the alleged crisis of "blood purity" of the Japanese race in the Taisho era.

The ideas of eugenics provided theoretical background and offered a highly effective remedy for the anti-prostitution movement as an antidote against both licensed prostitution in the body politic of Japan and "unlicensed" prostitution abroad. By evoking hygienic images, the narratives of eugenics diagnosed prostitution and prostitutes as social pathogen. That is, as the main source of "venereal diseases" threatening "domestic purity." This perspective of racial contamination shaped a crucial aspect of anti-Karayuki criticism, which had never before been in focus: Karayuki's ignorance of interracial intercourse as a representation of an encroachment on the nation's racial purity. The scientific guise of eugenics manipulatively transformed the ethical discourse of sex and the moral discourse of prostitution into the obscure but evocative discourses of "blood," "race," and "national purity." Karayuki's sexual economy began to be imagined as the dismal locus of racial contamination, which then provoked severe assaults on Karayuki.

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This paper discusses the eugenics of Paul Kammerer (1880–1926), an Austrian biologist active from the early 20th century to the interwar period, in context of chance, population, and causality in science. After World War I, selective eugenics permeated Western society. Kammerer, however, asserted that creating good characteristics was more important than eliminating bad characteristics. Kammerer gravitated to Eugen Steinach (1861–1944) and his discovery: "Stainach Operation." When their spermatic ducts are ligated, menʼs bodies accumulate hormones that generate musculature and vitality. According to the theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, these patients might sire offspring who had improved abilities from their start. Kammerer advocated vasoligation as a method of his alternative claim: "productive eugenics." Kammerer was led to this curious advocacy by his obsession with causality and insufficient understanding of "population thinking." Population thinking, a new way of scientific thinking that Francis Galton (1822–1911) established, considers population phenomena not from the accumulation of individuals but from the whole populations themselves. Galton introduced statistical methods to analyze population phenomena and gave science new statistical laws to replace old Newtonian. Kammerer, however, resisted the concept of chance mutation and the application of statistics, and insisted that the highest aim of science was the clarification of the relationship between cause and effect. Kammererʼs bizarre productive eugenics and even his reappearance as the father of epigenetics show that the longing for causality is an inevitable trap for scientific thinking.

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