While we are familiar with how ideas of neo-Malthusianism, eugenics and imperial hubris played out in population control policies in much of the Third World, this is a deeply engaging book that turns the spotlight on Japan. Margaret Sanger, the messiah of medicalized birth control, was a pioneer in this, as she was in placing population control on the world stage with the help of international NGOs, funded by robber barons, and the assistance of assorted eugenicists. In the initial years of her career, Sanger worked with radical feminists who believed that women should determine whether or not they wanted marriage and whether or not they wanted to be mothers. This would be possible if contraceptives – then banned – were freely available. Sanger undertook a triumphant tour of Japan in 1922, where birth control was deeply controversial, as it was in the United States. Indeed, the “Japanese parliament had just passed a bill that censored ‘foreign thoughts,’ particularly radical socialist and communist ideas” (35).

The 1920s was a period of great eugenic anxiety in the US. “Declining birth rates in Western European countries, as well as among the ‘native stock’ population in the United States, triggered discussions on race degeneracy and ‘race suicide’” (84). Thus was coined the phrase “yellow peril” and the US passed the 1924 Immigration Act restricting immigration to the US to the so-called Nordic races. At the same time, Japan, industrializing and modernizing, was going through a phase of rapid population growth. It was felt that it was only natural that Japan should colonize countries, just as the Western nations had, as she gobbled up Korea and Manchuria. The government was acutely aware of eugenic concerns: the better should breed more so that the nation could be stronger.

Eugenics thus held great appeal on both sides of the Atlantic, as eugenic societies were formed in many countries, and networking took place at international conferences. Many of these events received financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, and others, such as the Gamble Foundation and the Milbank Memorial Fund. Frederick H. Osborn, with funding from the Milbank Fund, established the Office of Population Research in Princeton in 1936 as a consequence of the promotional work of the prominent eugenicist Frederick Osborn. The OPR became the fountainhead of neo-Malthusian population policy studies, bringing out Kinsley Davis's The Population of India and Pakistan (1951) and Irene B. Taeuber's The Population of Japan (1958), books that would set the political agenda for the study of demography throughout the world. The discipline now shed its social-science heritage of trying to understand a problem, and got involved with doing something about a problem it thought it understood.

Eugenics was discredited not so much by science, which did indeed discredit it, but by the horrors of the Holocaust. Eugenicists now turned their attention to population control, with Margaret Sanger as the leader, divested as she now was of her feminist concerns. In the Cold War years that followed the Second World War, population control was a tool to fight communism. In the postwar period, the US was careful to only work behind the scenes to introduce population control in Japan. The occupying forces were acutely aware that the Soviet Union would use any obvious meddling in population control as yet another instance of imperial overreach. But they nevertheless funded the study of Japanese scholars in the US.

In 1948, Japan passed the Eugenic Protection Law that permitted abortion for eugenic reasons. We are not adequately told what it was that prompted the Japanese Diet to legalize abortion, although the oral contraceptive pill had to wait decades before it was legalized. Abortion was, of course, on the agenda of radical feminists and socialists, but these were too few in number to enable the bill's passage in the Diet. The final push came from conservatives and doctors. Was it that patriarchy in Japan, combined with eugenic fears, overcame moral and medical scruples?

In 1952 Rockefeller established the Population Council that was to set the agenda for the creation of fears of overpopulation and the template to control it around the world. Central to this was Kinsley Davis's argument that death rates in Japan and India had declined due to the diffusion of death-control technologies and not the social and economic changes that underlay the decline of death rates in the West. Thus the argument now was for “an immediate reduction of birth rates through the dissemination of birth control without waiting for the long and tedious process of social and economic development” (146, original emphasis).

After reaching a peak in 1947, birth rates in Japan started to decline. “Few of the endeavours sought to expand women's reproductive choices or to promote women's health. Rather, their main goal was to reduce the fertility of the masses in the most effective – and least costly – way possible through the power of Western science and technology” (200). As the author demonstrates, it was not these technologies that led to the decline of the birth rate in Japan.

In the Epilogue, writing of the US retreat from population control activities during the Reagan years, and the tumultuous recent history of every Republican government implementing a “gag rule” to be rescinded by a subsequent Democratic government and the fight for reproductive rights today, the author is not quite correct to argue that it was Catholic influence that led to this turn with “Reagan allegedly needing the support of Pope John Paul II in maintaining sanctions against communist regimes and combating revolution in Central America” (212). It was instead a groundswell of the religious far right, primarily Evangelicals and Christian Zionists, that brought Reagan to power. It is this group of Protestants, supporters today of Trump, fearful of women's freedoms and of immigration, that is chipping away at women's reproductive rights, in the US and around the world.

It is not possible to do justice to this masterful work in a short review. Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci uses a vast amount of archival material, supplemented by a magnificent reading of the secondary literature, to make her arguments. This astonishing book is necessary reading for scholars in a wide range of disciplines: population studies, gender studies, public health and international relations.