By William Wetherall
One-hundred-million hybrids, also called Blending in Japan, originated on this website on 1 October 2008 with 17 pages, which grew to the 25 pages on the menu to the right. These pages were removed from Yosha Bunko in 2016 and entirely revised and expanded into Konketsuji, a dedicated website launched on 23 March 2017. The menu and the following introduction remain on this website for reference purposes. All pages on the menu link to the top of the Konketsuji website.
Confluences of blood
In the natural world, every child is born a mixture of its mother's and father's genetic bloods. Akihito, the present emperor of Japan, is a mixture of his mother's blood and his father's blood. His father was Hirohito. His mother was Nagako. He was born because Hirohito and Nagako mixed their bloods in sexual union.
Akihito's parents, too, were products of sexual unions that resulted in mixtures of their mother's and father's bloods. Without exception, every ancestor in their branching lineages, back to ages immemorial, in what is now Japan and elsewhere, were mixtures of parental bloods.
Along the way to the present, from an indefinite past through legendary and historical times, Akihito's ancestral roots tangled with others whenever geographical, demographic, social, political, and other such conditions conspired to bring the men and women in their respective lines together in sexual union.
Every child is similarly a product of a sexual act which propagates the human race by mixing parental bloods. Every mixture is at once different and identical -- different because every combination of parental genes is unique, and identical because all such combinations are singularly and purely human.
Imperatives of mixture
Human blood, as a metaphor for the genetic matter of human life, mixes whenever two parental streams flow together to make a new stream. Some streams flow easier than others in a given demographic terrain. And some streams flow more readily than others from one genetic watershed to another.
All streams, though, flow according to the same sexual and genetic imperatives. And no population in one terrain is capable of remaining human without periodic or continual mixture with populations in other terrains.
Forces of sexual attraction have little regard for socially or politically erected barriers between populations defined in terms of nationality, race, religion, class, caste, or taste in music. Attraction across such artificial borders is a natural defense against attempts to segregate people into subspecies and prevent them from sexually mixing.
Interracial rape and romance
Race however defined -- biologically or ethnically -- is merely one kind of barrier that impedes the flow of genetic blood across socially and politically defined populations. While racial prejudice against sexual unions and reproduction between putatively different races can be very strong, sexual attractions between men and women of different races can be stronger.
Interracial sexual attraction is in fact the most persuasive evidence that sexuality -- which compels people to sexually engage whether for pleasure or reproduction -- trumps race, however defined. Even definitions of race that have genetic significance are secondary artifacts -- i.e., sociopolitical consequences -- of the primary sexual imperatives that essentially define humans as a species.
Whether sexual unions result from forceful lust, bartering, arrangement, or consensual courtship is a matter for sociopolitical (ethical, moral) consideration. Biologically, all sexual acts potentially result in conception and childbirth. On these grounds, too, all children are equal in the sense that, whether a child was wanted or unwanted by one or the other or both of its parents, no child sought to be born.
Biological equality also deems that all children are "mixed bloods" whether born between parents of the same race or of putatively different races. All children are the result their mother's and father's genes mixing in a sexual union, whatever its circumstances, whether love, arrangement, impulse, commerce, or coercion. All children are thus blessed, or cursed, with life.
The continuity of blending
Today, "race" and its several synonyms have gained more currency than ever in English, and equivalents in other languages have become no less fashionable among their speakers. "Internationalization" and "globalization" have replaced "colonization" as descriptions of the economic and political forces that are increasing the confluences of "races" however defined in the world's demographic terrains.
Interracial unions have become so common, and generally accepted in the more cosmopolitan places of the world, that urbanites now pay little attention to the sight of an interracial couple or multiracial people in public. "Sighting" is the key word here, since race is so commonly defined by the eye, whether in terms of skin, hair, or eye color, or as a matter of dress or coiffure or other visible emblems of raciality.
Being conspicuous for whatever reason is a stigma for all people with traits that attract attention. Extreme beauty can be as much a problem as extreme ugliness for those who have to endure the stares of others. The ugly may envy the beautiful, and the beautiful may be grateful they are not ugly, but unwanted attention is unwanted attention. Everyone in between may also dwell on a features about their face or body they wish were a little more this or a little less that, as they face themselves in the mirror and compare themselves with others.
Today, though, raciality sells and mixture is fashionable. This is clear in the meat markets of the fashion, cosmetics, and entertainment industries. It is also evident in the academic world, where entire fields of study are built around social issues, like multiraciality.
The line between curiosity and exploitation is subtle. Are photographic exhibitions or books featuring photographs of mixed couples and offspring about just publicity, or are they more about profit? Whose "interests" are served by studies and reports that shine spotlights on people that first have to be labeled? Does shining a spotlight on oneself justify shining it on others?
It is fashionable to observe that multiracial people are on the increase as interracial unions become more common. Mixture, though, is nothing new, nor is its acceptability particularly novel. The human condition today is predicated on the essentially continuous process of racial mixing in the past. In other words, racial mixing has never not taken place for any truly significant period of time, and all human populations today are evidence that, in the past as well, mixture has been accepted.
For as long as there have been geographical races, there have been many forms of intercourse between such races, in the form of commerce if not war, and inevitably sexual unions if not also marriage, and at times even romance. Societies have differed, and continue to differ, as to the extent they encourage some unions and discourage others. But no miscegenation taboos have prevented humans from mixing.