Building a Modern Japan

Transcription

1 Building a Modern Japan

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3 Building a Modern Japan Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Meiji Era and Beyond Edited by Morris Low

4 BUILDING A MODERN JAPAN Selection, editorial matter, Introduction Morris Low 2005; Chapter 1 Christian Oberländer 2005; Chapter 2 Sabine Frühstück 2005; Chapter 3 Sumiko Otsubo 2005; Chapter 4 Yuki Terazawa 2005; Chapter 5 Robert J. Perrins 2005; Chapter 6 David G. Wittner 2005; Chapter 7 Martha Chaiklin 2005; Chapter 8 Gregory Clancey 2005; Chapter 9 W. Miles Fletcher III A version of chapter 2 was published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Vol. 15, no. 1 [2005]). We thank the society for permission to reprint it here. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Building a modern Japan : science, technology, and medicine in the Meiji era and beyond / edited by Morris Low. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Japan History Medicine Japan History. 3. Science Japan History. I. Low, Morris. DS881.9.B dc A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May

5 C ontents List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Preface vii ix xiii Introduction 1 Morris Low Part 1 Science, Medicine, and a Healthy Nation The Rise of Western Scientific Medicine in Japan: Bacteriology and Beriberi 13 Christian Oberländer 2. Male Anxieties: Nerve Force, Nation, and the Power of Sexual Knowledge 37 Sabine Frühstück 3. The Female Body and Eugenic Thought in Meiji Japan 61 Sumiko Otsubo 4. Racializing Bodies through Science in Meiji Japan: The Rise of Race-Based Research in Gynecology 83 Yuki Terazawa 5. Doctors, Disease, and Development: Engineering Colonial Public Health in Southern Manchuria, Robert John Perrins Part 2 Technology, Industry, and Nation The Mechanization of Japan s Silk Industry and the Quest for Progress and Civilization, David G. Wittner 7. AMiracle of Industry: The Struggle to Produce Sheet Glass in Modernizing Japan 161 Martha Chaiklin

6 vi Contents 8. Modernity and Carpenters: Daiku Technique and Meiji Technocracy 183 Gregory Clancey 9. The Impact of the Great Depression: The Japan Spinners Association, W. Miles Fletcher III Index 233

7 L ist of I llustrations Figures 2.1 A pamphlet advertising a 20-volume, abridged Japanese version of Havelock Ellis s Studies in the Psychology of Sex An advertisement for techniques to lengthen the body promising that Even Short Men Will Become Tall The home medical handbook Katei ryphp hyakka jiten (1952) Manchuria and the South Manchuria Railway Planned layout of Dairen, ca. late 1910s The New South Manchuria Railway Hospital, ca Floor plans of the New South Manchuria Railway Hospital in Dairen, ca Detail of samples of a filature s exterior Chambon method of croisure A tavelle Production by the cylinder method Iwasaki Toshiya Amagasaki Factory 174 Tables 4.1 Average age of menarche for Japanese, Ainu, Ryukyuan, and Chinese women Average age of menarche for Japanese women of different categories at the Kumamoto Prefectural Hospital 94

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9 N otes on C ontributors Morris Low, the editor, is Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University where he is the Bo Jung and Soon Young Kim Professor of East Asian Sciences and Technology. He has previously taught and conducted research at the University of Queensland, the Australian National University, and Monash University. He is coauthor of Science, Technology and Society in Contemporary Japan (CUP, 1999) and coeditor of Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of Manhood in China and Japan (Routledge Curzon, 2003). He has edited special issues of several journals including Osiris (University of Chicago Press), History and Anthropology (Harwood), Asian Studies Review (Blackwell), and History and Technology (Taylor and Francis). His three-volume anthology Science, Technology and R&D in Japan (Routledge, 2001) has attracted considerable attention. Martha Chaiklin is Curator of Asian History at the Milwaukee Public Museum. Her Ph.D. was awarded from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. She is the author of Cultural Commerce and Dutch Commercial Culture The Influence of European Material Culture on Japan, (Leiden: CNWS, 2003) and several articles and translations. Gregory Clancey is Assistant Professor of History at the National University of Singapore. He has been a Fulbright Graduate Fellow at the University of Tokyo, and a Lars Hierta Fellow at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Clancey has coedited Major Problems in the History of American Technology (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1998) and Historical Perspectives on East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (Singapore: Singapore University Press & World Scientific, 2002). His most recent book, Foreign Knowledge: The Cultural Economy of Japanese Earthquakes, is forthcoming from the University of California Press. W. Miles Fletcher III received his M.A. in East Asian Studies and his Ph.D. in History in 1975 from Yale University, where he specialized in modern Japanese history. He is now Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he has served as chair of the Curriculum in Asian Studies. His first book, The Search for a New Order: Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar Japan (University of North Carolina Press, 1982), focused on intellectual and political history, while his second monograph, The Japanese Business Community and National Trade Policy, (University of North Carolina Press, 1989) dealt with business history. Since that time, his research has centred on the history of Japanese industrialization with a focus

10 x Notes on Contributors on the Japanese textile industry, about which he has written several articles. His current project examines the recovery of that sector after the Pacific War. Sabine Frühstück is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her academic interests include modern Japanese cultural studies, history and anthropology, the theory and history of sexuality and gender, knowledge systems, post/colonialism, and military societal relations. She is the author of Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (2003), and the coeditor of The Culture of Japan as Seen through Its Leisure (1998), and Neue Geschichte der Sexualität: Beispiele aus Ostasien und Zentraleuropa (1999). Frühstück has also published in Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Japanese Studies, American Ethnologist and Jinbun Gakuhp, among others. She is currently completing a monograph on the armed forces, Japan Avant-garde: The Army of the Future. Christian Oberländer is Professor in the Department for Japanese Studies at the University Halle-Wittenberg and Visiting Scientist at The University of Tokyo. He previously taught at the University of Bonn. His publications include Between Tradition and Modernity: The Movement for the Preservation of Kanpo Medicine in Japan (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1995), and Technology and Innovation in Japan coedited with Martin Hemmert (London: Routledge, 1998). Sumiko Otsubo completed her Ph.D. at Ohio State University and has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Reischauer Institute, Harvard University, and taught at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. Currently she is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Publications include Eugenics in Japan: Some Ironies of Modernity, , (with James R. Bartholomew), Science in Context (Vol. 11, nos. 3 4 [1998]); and Feminist Maternal Eugenics in Wartime Japan, U.S.-Japan Women s Journal (English Supplement, no. 17 [1999]). Robert Perrins is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Classics, at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada, where he is also the Director of the university s Northeast Asia Research Centre. He completed his Ph.D. in modern Chinese at York University, Toronto. His doctoral thesis was entitled: Great Connections : The Creation of a City, Dalian, : China and Japan on the Liaodong Peninsula. He has been the editor of the China Facts and Figures Annual Handbook (published by Academic Press International), since He is currently completing a project on the history of disease and Japanese colonial medicine in Manchuria under the sponsorship of the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine. Yuki Terazawa received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she completed her dissertation entitled, Gender, Knowledge, and Power: Reproductive Medicine in Japan, She currently teaches at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York.

11 Notes on Contributors xi David Wittner completed his Ph.D. at Ohio State University. He is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Utica College, New York. His recent publications include Chilling Before the Blast: A Comparative Case Study in Technology Transfer in the American and Japanese Iron Industries, Kinzoku kpzan kenkyu (no. 77 [May 2000]) and Commodore Matthew C. Perry and the Perry Expedition to Japan, The Library of American Lives and Times (New York: Rosen Publishing Group, 2004).

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13 P reface A special report in The Economist of April 10, 2004 was ironically entitled (Still) Made in Japan. The article related how Japan s manufacturing continued to move overseas, especially to China. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry had recently encouraged the electronics giant NEC to sell its plasma-display business to a local firm, Pioneer, rather than to a foreign company and risk the technology being transferred abroad. 1 While the booming trade within Asia was something to be celebrated, there was real concern that Japan needed to hold on to some of its know-how. There was, however, some cause for celebration. In February 2004, Japan s trade surplus with Asia exceeded that with the United States for the first time. For the first time in almost a decade, Japan registered a trade surplus with China. Sales of electronic components, semiconductors, and general machinery are said to have been key factors in the improved figures. 2 This has led some commentators to write of Asia s Eclipse of the West and the emergence of an Asian-dominated world order centered on China. 3 Back in the late nineteenth century, the reverse occurred. Japan left what had been a China-centered East Asian system to enter a global system of knowledge dominated by the West. This book throws light on that earlier period of globalization when the Japanese dealt with the new ideas and concepts, and the technologies that were introduced from the West. The first part deals with the role of science and medicine in creating a healthy nation. The second part is devoted to examining the role of technology, and business state relations in building a modern Japan. It will be seen that it was not a simple process of direct translation of Western know-how. The introduction of Western forms of knowledge certainly helped Japan enter into trade, participate in the international scientific community, and build Western-style buildings, but the way these methods, theories, and systems of knowledge were taken up was arguably Japanese. As Tessa Morris-Suzuki has argued, local content and cultural heritage helped create a difference. 4 The Meiji era ( ) has long fascinated students of Japanese history. This volume revisits that period and the decades immediately after. The book effectively brings together state-of-the-art scholarship on the impact of science and technology in Japan s modernization, with studies concerning medicine and the health of the Japanese people. Hitherto, these have tended to be treated in isolation from each other. There are books on Japanese technology such as Erich Pauer s edited collection of papers entitled Papers on the History of Industry and Technology of Japan, 3 vols (Marburg, Germany: Förderverein Marburger Japan-Reihe, 1995), in which each paper tends to

14 xiv Preface be discrete and focuses on the technology itself. In The Technological Transformation of Japan (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), Tessa Morris-Suzuki weaves her case studies into a more coherent whole, using the concept of social networks to help explain the transition from small-scale factories and workshops to large modern enterprises. This book builds on her work and her interest in social concerns, but rather than limiting itself to technology, we also look at the contribution of science and medicine in helping to shape modern Japan and the very bodies of the people themselves. There are books such as William Johnston s The Modern Epidemic: A History of Tuberculosis in Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1995), but unlike that volume, we examine a variety of diseases and ailments, and how the state sought to deal with them. Versions of some of the chapters included in this book were presented at annual meetings of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS). We are grateful to the AAS for providing a forum for our ideas. The contributors to this book also acknowledge the support of their respective institutions. This book was completed while the editor was Senior Lecturer in Asian Studies at the University of Queensland. Following normal East Asian practice, Japanese and Chinese surnames precede given names, except for those authors who choose to use the Western order when writing in English. Macrons have been omitted from well-known place names such as Tokyo. In chapter 5, the term Manchuria is used to refer to the northeast China provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Fengtian, now referred to as Dongbei, the Northeast. The Japanese name for Dairen is used instead of the city s Chinese name of Dalian. Finally, we wish to express our warm thanks to Anthony Wahl, Heather Van Dusen, and Alan Bradshaw at Palgrave Macmillan, and Maran Elancheran and the copy editor at Newgen Imaging Systems who worked on this project. Without their interest, support, and patience, this book would not have been possible. Comments from an anonymous referee were also useful in revising the chapters for publication. MORRIS LOW Notes 1. The Economist, (Still) Made in Japan, April 10, 2004, esp. p Brendan Pearson, Boom in Japanese Sales to Asia, The Australian Financial Review, March 26, 2004, James F. Hoge, Preparing for Asia s Eclipse of the West, The Australian Financial Review, June 25, 2004, Review supplement, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Re-Inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), pp