Events & Calendars Symbiotic Deracialization in Transwar Japan (1920–1970s): Hirano Imao, Anarchist Sciences, and the “Mixed-Race Children Relief Campaign”

This lecture will excavate the symbiotic thought and action of “mixed-race” polymath Hirano Imao (1900–1986) in transnational Japan from the 1920s to the 1970s and how they uprooted the concept of race itself—what the lecturer calls “symbiotic/anarchist deracialization.” This deracialization points to a non-violent anarchist epistemology and praxis that escape the conceptual paradigms of multiculturalism, intersectional identity politics, post-colonial strategic essentialism, and “color-blind” apathy. Through a transdisciplinary approach that synthesizes Hirano’s transwar non-imperial sciences on dung beetles and microbes with his postwar relief campaign for “mixed-race children” and their mothers, this lecture presents a fresh perspective into anti-racist politics and the transnational history of non-state actors in modern Japan. The lecture will also entail a reflexive storytelling of how the lecturer arrived at his research project through his own intellectual experiences.

Toma-Jin Morikawa-Fouquet, recipient of the Rufus B. Kellogg University Fellowship (2021–2024) and a 2021 graduate of Amherst College, is currently a doctorate student in history at the University of Oxford, where he is a Clarendon and Oxford-Kobe scholar.He completed an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge (Trinity College) and an MSc in Japanese Studies at Oxford (St. Catherine’s College). At Amherst, he majored in political science and anthropology. Before transferring to Amherst, he spent three and a half years enrolled at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. He spent one of those years at U.C. Berkeley as an exchange student.