| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Tiana Norgren. Abortion before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in Postwar Japan. (Studies of the East Asian Institute.) Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2001. Pp. xiii, 242. Cloth $45.00, paper $17.95.

In 1999, the Japanese Ministry for Health and Welfare finally approved the pill for contraceptive purposes. In his 1983 study, Family Planning in Japanese Society: Traditional Birth Control in a Modern Urban Culture, Samuel J. Coleman tried to explain the apparent anomaly of continued use of contraceptive technology from the 1930s in ultramodern Japan. Nearly twenty years later, Tiana Norgren is also concerned to make sense of this contradiction and, in particular, to explain why the Japanese government has put "abortion before birth control." 1

Coleman, an anthropologist, pointed to political and economic factors but explored social and cultural factors more deeply to explain Japanese birth control practices. Norgren, although having a "taste for straightforward, empirically grounded political research" (p. xii), criticizes Coleman's research for lacking systematic examination of the politics surrounding abortion and contraceptive policy making. Also rejecting religious explanations of abortion policy and practices by William R. LaFleur and Irene B. Taeuber, Norgren squarely focuses her study on explicating the roles of bureaucrats and politicians and, in contrast to most of the literature on Japanese politics, argues for the importance of interest groups in policy making. . . .

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