Eugenics and Representations of the Japanese This article attempts to examine how eugenics in Japan had been developed between 1920s and 1940s. Though anglo-american eugenics considered the Japanese racially inferior to western peoples, eugenic ideas achieved a remarkable popularity in Japan. Because Japanese eugenicists did not think the Japanese as ‘inferior type’ but as ‘superior one’, they had been trying to discover the distinct features as representation of the Japanese by examining their ‘superiority’ following ‘scientific’ method. Support for Japan`s imperial expansion in Asia was sometimes associated with a belief in the racial purity of the Japanese, but could also be sustained by quite different perspectives on race. Rather than simply adopting prevailing European theories of eugenics, the Japanese often seem to have deliberately sought out their own theories, embracing racial mixture with neighbor races. There could be found the paradox in the Japanese eugenics discourses.