Organizer and Chair: Jennifer Robertson, University of Michigan
Discussant: Takie S. Lebra, University of Hawai'i, Honolulu
A dictionary definition of hygiene identifies it as the science of the establishment and maintenance of health, but the standard and concept of "health" varies geographically, culturally, and historically and "hygiene" itself is no less slippery. At the turn of this century, anthropologists and sociologists-Durkheim and Robertson Smith, for example-argued that magic rites were a form of "primitive hygiene," a notion that others, notably Mary Douglas (in Purity and Danger) criticized as mere medical materialism-a fruitless approach "because of a failure to confront our own ideas of hygiene."
Around the same time that Durkheim was consolidating his ideas about religion, magic, and hygiene (Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912), Japanese social scientists, government bureaucrats, and colonial administrators were developing social engineering strategies within the conceptual and rhetorical framework of hygiene (eisei). As a rubric, hygiene covered diet, physical education, sex education and sexual practices, eugenics, the colonial policy of assimilation (dôka), and forms of entertainment and recreation, among others. During the wartime years 1931-45, the manifold discourse of hygiene amplified as the state attempted to mobilize and control both the local population as well as peoples colonized by Japan. To a significant degree, these wartime ideas about hygiene continue to inform certain social practices today-sports training methods, for example.
My proposed panel, consisting of scholars from the U.S. and Europe, extends Douglas' anthropological challenge and explores the ideas of hygiene salient in wartime and postwar Japan. Each panelist addresses an overlapping and intersecting group of ideas and practices concerning social hygiene in Japan: colonial administration and the Japanese medical empire (Ming-cheng Lo); the popularization of military dietary and nutritional standards (Katarzyna Cwiertka); ambivalent approaches to sexology, sex education, and eugenics (Sabine Frühstück); and the construction through sports training of the female "soccer body" (Elise Edwards).
Taming the Colonial Body: Placing Taiwan within the Japanese Medical Empire
Ming-cheng Lo, University of Michigan
This paper studies the political and social significance of the construction of the Japanese "medical empire" during the first half of this century. I begin by tracing the shifting borders of this medical empire. How do "medical borders" justify, consolidate, and sometimes even enlarge the political borders of an empire? By carefully examining immunization laws on the borders between Taiwan, Japan, China, and South Asia, I document how, in Japanese eyes, Taiwan was transformed from a "sick zone" into a "healthy land," and eventually into the bastion for conquering the new sick zones of China and South Asia. I then discuss the ways in which the colonized body was disciplined and contained within the Japanese medical empire. My particular focus here is on how Taiwanese physicians were trained as agents of and for the medical empire through the wearing of Japanese clothes, speaking of Japanese, and playing of Japanese sports. These practices may have marked the cosmopolitan Taiwanese physicians as "Japanizable," but the colonial regime and physicians both considered their Taiwanese-ness to have been merely domesticated and not purged completely. In critically examining the borders of the Japanese medical empire, I show that the Taiwanese colonial body was regarded as a territory to be marked and conquered but which ultimately remained unknowable.
Good Sex, Pure Science and Ambivalent Politics
Sabine Frühstück, University of Vienna
The beginning of the 20th century was marked by an increase in and diversification of discourses on sex pursued by the Euro-American founders of modern sexology. The most influential among them wrote huge compendia of medical knowledge, such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), Magnus Hirschfeld's Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (1914), Havelock Ellis' multivolume Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897-1910). Equally important was Sigmund Freud's memoirs, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905). In Japan, Yamamoto Senji and Yasuda Tokutarô followed with their controversial study on the sex life of young adult males (Wakai otoko no seseikatsu, 1923). All of these researchers, along with their less famous contemporaries, were more or less consciously seeking to create a new medical specialty within psychiatry enriched by data drawn from psychology, anthropology, history and the arts, but with its foundation anchored firmly in medicine and its auxiliary sciences.
Motivated by the attempt to improve the Japanese "race" in quantity and quality, the Home Ministry initiated studies on public hygiene (kôshû eisei) soon after its founding in 1873. Among the main concerns of these studies were the dissemination of venereal diseases (karyûbyô) and the high infant mortality rate. Positive agitation for sex education was begun early in the 20th century by medical doctors and biologists. Calling themselves "sexologists" (seigakusha or seikagakusha), they addressed a variety of problematic issues, such as masturbation, birth control, and the pros and cons of prostitution. They also believed in the power of sex education in improving individual lives and family relationships.
In this paper I will focus on the ambivalent interest on the part of both the state and the scientific community in accumulating and disseminating sexual knowledge. Their ambivalence stemmed from the potential for conflict on two different levels: the significance of sexual "knowledge" itself, and the sexual education of the public.
Fighting Foods: Popularizing a Military Diet in Wartime Japan
Katarzyna Cwiertka, Leiden University, The Netherlands
Once the Conscription Law was promulgated in 1873, the Japanese armed forces began to pay careful attention to dietary matters. They were especially concerned with improving soldiers' nutrition, and toward this end initiated a large-scale adoption of western food, evident in publications for internal use, such as military school textbooks. In this paper, I will deal with two aspects of nutrition in wartime (1930s and 1940s) Japan. First, I will examine the dietary changes following the military's importation of western nutritional knowledge and foods. Second, I will investigate transformations of the Japanese diet in general accompanying the militarization of the society.
Generally speaking, the military's influence on the nation's diet was exerted in two ways. During their three-year conscription, young men acquired a taste for the new, western foods introduced by the military. Once they returned home, they persuaded their wives and mothers to prepare the new meals on a daily basis-men exercised a decisive voice in food choices although women were responsible for the actual preparation. The military's ideas about a healthy diet were also transmitted to the public through popular (women's) publications dealing with public health and hygiene, such as Ie no Hikari (Light of the Household), Ryôri no Tomo (Cook's Friend), and Shufu no Tomo (Housewife's Friend), which regularly carried articles by military dieticians. To the superiority of the military's nutrition program was attributed Japanese victories during the Sino-Japanese, Russo-Japanese, and First World wars. Although it is difficult to measure precisely the extent to which military dietary ideas and practices actually were adopted, it is clear that the military played a key role in transforming the Japanese diet during the wartime period.
Discipline and Practice: The Construction of "Soccer Bodies" in the
Japanese Ladies Soccer League
Elise Edwards, University of Michigan
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault investigates the nature of the discipline of military training as a coercive machine into which a human body enters and subsequently is broken down and rearranged into a skillful and efficient tool of war. The notion of discipline is usefully extended beyond the battlefields of war to the less gruesome but equally competitive fields of modern sport. Inspired by Foucault's analysis of methods of military discipline that elicit the "bodily rhetoric" of the ideal soldier, I will explore both the discipline of soccer training in the currently thriving Japan Ladies Soccer League (JLSL) and the notions of the ideal female "soccer body" which this training aims to produce. In this connection, I will review the amount of time devoted to training, practice regimens and the nature of specific drills, and nutrition and other issues of physical hygiene. Examining notions of "correct training" as well as the physical bodies constructed through such discipline, I will highlight visions of the ideal female soccer athlete informing training ideology in Japan. In addition, I will explore how the physical ideal of the female soccer player competes with and possibly contradicts mainstream gender (femininity) ideals in Japan.