Organizer: Alexander R. Bay, Stanford University, History Department

Chair: Akihito Suzuki, Keio University, School of Economics, Japan

Discussant: Wataru Iijima, Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan

Bringing together scholars of China and Japan, this panel examines the role of medicine in building and maintaining the Japanese empire from 1894 to 1945. Previous scholarship on medicine and empire has focused on how advances in medicine allowed Europeans to conquer and colonize the tropics (Headrick, 1981), and how medicine was used to inscribe European hegemony onto the bodies of indigenous peoples (Arnold, 1993). Our panel draws from this historiography but moves beyond it in several different ways. Perrins uses public health and social history sources to uncover how the Kwantung Government's plague and cholera related quarantines worked to mitigate against the effects of acute infectious disease in Manchuria as well as how the local Chinese population reacted to and resisted against these quarantine policies. Bay focuses on the vitamin deficiency disease beriberi during Japan's first two wars of empire: The Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05). Military doctors drew off of, in part, the Chinese medical tradition in establishing an effective prevention plan. Ichikawa explores the history of plague in Taiwan and Japan in the late 19th century. In a clear case of using the colony as a Petri dish, Japan set up and tested a quarantine system in Taiwan and then imported and implemented it against plague on the home front. Suzuki looks at the study of medicine dealing with Japanese bodies and indigenous locales, arguing that by the 1940s, colonial medicine came to incorporate an approach that was concerned with race, physiology and environment.

Robert J. Perrins, Acadia University, Canada

Although a relative newcomer to the imperial club, Japan acquired a number of overseas territories during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Under the influence of senior colonial administrators and planners such as Gotô Shinpei, the first Governor of Taiwan as well as the founding President of the South Manchuria Railway Company (Mantetsu), Japan sought to bring a 'rational' and 'scientific' approach to ruling its new overseas possessions. Along with efforts to develop agricultural products such as rice and sugar, along with railways, mines, and heavy industries, Japanese colonial rulers were determined to utilize all of the tools associated with 'modern' medicine in order to create a healthy and prosperous empire. An important element in this effort was the development of infrastructures and regulations related to monitoring and enforcing public health and quarantine. Utilizing a wide variety of primary source materials, including reports and harbour regulations published by the Kwantung Government (Kantô-chô) and the Mantetsu giant, British and American consular files, Japanese Foreign Ministry files, and contemporary Chinese and Japanese newspapers, this paper examines the history of quarantine efforts in Manchuria during the early twentieth century, and specifically during the pneumonic plague epidemic of 1910-1911 and the numerous cholera outbreaks of the late 1910s and 1920s. This paper explores the issues surrounding the economics of empire (the necessity of keeping trade flowing) and the science of 'modern' scientific medicine (knowledge of germ theory and contagion), and ultimately the political and social conflicts that erupted when these two forces clashed.

Tomoo Ichikawa, Yokohama National University, Japan

Scholarship on colonialism recognizes that many kinds of "knowledge" were unilaterally transferred from suzerain states to their colonies. For example, the establishment of higher education schools in the colonies, as well as sending indigenous students to Europe, were important to the solidification and legitimization of colonial rule. However, in the field of science and technology, this theory is not always applicable. Specifically in Japan, the origins of tropical medicine occurred not in Tokyo but rather in the colonies. Because Japan was a mild climate and there were few cases of tropical disease like malaria, except for Okinawa, epidemiologists had to carry out research in places like Taiwan. That is, the colonial experience for Japan was the stage for advances in scientific medicine. In this paper, I examine the establishment of plague prevention in Taiwan and Japan. This case is of particular importance because plaque struck colonial Taiwan before coming to Japan. The government and medical institutes dispatched doctors to Taiwan in order to control and study bubonic plague. I argue that a system for plague prevention was established first in colonial Taiwan and then was imported to Japan. While I will consider how public health officials adapted the Taiwan model to Japan, in the final analysis, Taiwan served as a testing ground for Japan's anti-plague campaigns. It was a case where experiences in the colony shaped advances in scientific knowledge for the suzerain state.

Alexander R. Bay, Stanford University, History Department

In modern Japan, beriberi was a major public health issue: The Meiji Emperor had it, it was endemic in the military, and so prevalent that it was called "the people's plague" (kokuminbyo). Beriberi was not only a disease of the people, but it was also a disease of empire, one that afflicted the army as Japan established and held its imperial enclaves. My paper looks at the role of medicine in empire by examining beriberi prevention during the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05). This was crucial for empire building. For example, after taking Taiwan in 1895, there was a 107% infection rate for beriberi among the Japanese occupation forces. The medical corps began adding barley to the soldiers' diet in 1896; the infection rate began to fall, and by 1900 it was down to 7%. The army used a similar treatment for the 300,000 plus cases of the disease during the Russo-Japanese War. Barley had been used on beriberi patients since the Edo period, and was part of the practice of Chinese medicine. In Tools of Empire, Daniel Headrick posits that the development of quinine for malaria made it possible for Europeans to expand into the tropical world. For the Japanese military in Asia, beriberi prevention was equally important as malaria prophylaxis was for European colonizers in West Africa. I argue that barley, like quinine, was a "tool of empire," and that this tool stemmed in part from the Chinese medical tradition.

Akihito Suzuki, Keio University, School of Economics, Japan

This paper explores the historical intersection of medicine, climate and global immigration in the Japanese Empire in 1930-1945. Particular emphasis is laid on how Japanese colonial medicine conceptualized the malleability of human body in different climates in order to approve Japanese immigration to the ever-widening sphere of the Empire. History of colonial medicine has focused upon tropical or indigenous diseases, how the climates, inhabitants, and societies of colonies were conceptualized as a dangerous and pathological "Other". Colonial medicine had, however, another important element of studying the adaptability of the immigrants to the local climates: whether the Western bodies could acculturate themselves to tropical climates. Colonial medicine thus had to deal with the two distinct or almost contradictory aims of arguing the Otherness of the tropics and of claiming the possibility of human bodies to overcome the climactic barriers. The latter problem was particularly acute for the colonial medicine of the Japanese Empire, since it extended over the vast realm from extremely cold Manchukuo to the typically tropical Pacific islands and countries in South Eastern Asia. This paper will examine how Japanese doctors tackled the question of the acculturation of the Japanese body in the diverse climates of its Empire. Their attempts to draw evidences from various disciplines such as geography, climatology, population studies, and archeology of early humans will be discussed. Through coagulating those diverse disciplines, I would like to argue, a segment Japanese colonial medicine was transformed into the total and interdisciplinary study of the environment, climate, and civilization.