Related Papers
Nursing History Review
Midwife and Public Health Nurse Tatsuyo Amari and a State-Endorsed Birth Control Campaign in 1950s Japan
2016 •
Aya Homei
Mrs. Tatsuyo Amari, a qualified midwife and nurse, served Japan’s state-endorsed birth control campaign as a “birth control field instructor” in rural Minamoto Village of Yamanashi Prefecture just west of Tokyo. Her work sheds light on the role of female health-care workers in health and population governance in 1950s Japan. Amari not only facilitated the “top-down” transfer of the state-sanctioned idea of birth control and contraceptives, as did other birth control field instructors, but also enabled the “bottom-up” flow of knowledge about people’s reproductive lives through her participation in the policy-oriented birth control research called the “three model-village study.” Contextualizing Amari’s engagement with the study elucidates how the state relied on the established role of female health-care workers as intermediaries between the state and the people. Finally, Amari’s contribution to the scientific aspect of the campaign may motivate historians to recognize the politics a...
East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal
Between the West and Asia: “Humanistic” Japanese Family Planning in the Cold War
2016 •
Aya Homei
Japan Forum
Birth control survey research, technical bureaucrats and the imagining of Japan’s population, 1945–60
2020 •
Aya Homei
The science of population and birth control in post-war Japan
2015 •
Aya Homei
Actors of International Cooperation in Prewar Japan
2018 •
Terada Kuniyuki
East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal
Racializing Chōsenjin: Science and Biological Speculations in Colonial Korea
2019 •
Jaehwan Hyun
Recent literature on the history of medicine in colonial Korea has revealed that Japanese medical scientists studied Korean bodies to expose racial differences between the Japanese and Koreans and justify Japanese colonial rule. Previous scholars , however, have focused mainly on finding a connection between colonial medical research and eugenics. This article attempts to consider things as yet underinvestigated, in particular, the way in which medical research on Koreans emerged and was intertwined with Japanese colonialism in other ways, separate from contemporary eugenics projects. The article examines the emergence and development of what we now considered as "racial sciences"-physical anthropology, serological anthropology,
Social History of Medicine
Integrating Parasite Eradication with Family Planning: The Colonial Legacy in Post-War Medical Cooperation in East Asia
2020 •
Aya Homei
Summary This article depicts how anti-parasite and family planning campaigns developed in Japan and Korea independently after the Second World War, as specifically domestic public health initiatives that directly contributed to the post-war reconstruction (Japan) and nation-building (South Korea) exercises, and examines how they were later incorporated into development aid projects from the 1960s. By juxtaposing domestic histories of Japan as a former coloniser, and South Korea as its former colony, the article explores colonial legacies in post-war medical cooperation in East Asia. Furthermore, by clarifying how Japanese and South Korean development aid projects both grew from the links that existed in their respective domestic histories, the article aims to highlight complexities engrained in the history and to shed new light on a historiography that often locates the origins of development aid in colonial history.
Interrogating the 'Population Problem' of the Non- Western Empire: Japanese Colonialism, the Korean Peninsula, and the Global Geopolitics of Race
Jin-kyung Park (박진경)
This paper examines the colonial discourse of the global population problem in Korea under Japanese rule (1910–1945). I consider the recent call of Alison Bashford to draw attention to the geopolitical and spatial dimensions of the colonial population discourse in the non-Western Japanese Empire and to interrogate global population from the perspective of East Asian imperialism in the twentieth century. By opening up the colonial archives on population through an examination of colonial state and pro-state magazines in Korea, such as Chōsen (Korea) and Chōsen oyobi Manchu (Korea and Manchuria), I demonstrate how metropolitan and colonial elites, including imperial and colonial state officials, politicians, intellectuals, physicians and so on, at pains to build Japan’s empire, engaged in the debates on jinkō mondai (population problem) in 1920s and 1930s Korea. The details of the debate bring to light the ways in which the management of the population problem undergirded the complex issues of the peninsula and the empire at large, including emigration, Japanese settlement, the cultivation of Manchuria, the development of mining and heavy chemical industries, the Sino-Japanese War, Western imperial rule, and the emancipation of the coloured populations/races. Further, I delineate how these details were deeply imbedded in the racialized struggle between the Japanese race/coloured races vs. the white race in the global governance of the population and territory in the final phase of Japanese imperial aggression. By going beyond the Western, Anglo-Saxon debates on population, this paper seeks to showcase how East Asian imperial power responded to the white, Western discourse of ‘race suicide vs. the yellow peril’.
Historical Journal
Japan's passport system and the opening of borders, 1866-1878
2017 •
Takahiro Yamamoto
This article sheds new light on the opening of Japan in the late nineteenth century focusing on the legalization of overseas travel and the introduction of passports. It argues that the Tokugawa shogunate introduced passports as a belated endorsem*nt of the increasingly common practice of undercover border-crossing as it feared losing the political grip. Once the new regulation was in place, most travellers went to China or Korea as petty merchants or low-skill labourers, in part recruited by Western merchants and consuls. The foreign ministry, fearing that unrestricted emigration of labourers and mercenaries might harm the country's international reputation and political stability, limited the number of passports to distribute to the treaty ports. Japan's passport system thus focused more on regulating the overseas travel than promoting it, in contrast to the positive light in which the opening of Japan is commonly portrayed. The government largely succeeded in preventing the unwanted emigration, but never fully controlled the process because of the less vigilant port officials and the ambiguity on some of the borders' exact location. Overall, the investigation into the first two decades of the Japanese passport travellers leads to a more complex understanding of modern Japan's opening of borders.
"The Ruralist Paradigm: Social Work Bureaucrats in Colonial Korea and Japan's Assimilationism in the Interwar Period," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 58 no.4 (October 2016): 1004-1031.
Sayaka Chatani
How did the Japanese Empire, while adamantly adhering to assimilationism, manage the politics of colonial difference in the interwar years? How should we situate the seemingly exceptional conduct of Japanese colonial rule from a comparative perspective? To examine these questions, this article analyzes the mindsets of mid-level colonial bureaucrats who specialized in social work. Social work became a major field of political contestation in the post-World War I period around the globe. Policies on social work tested colonial officials regarding their assumptions about state-society relationships and Japan's assimilationist goals. Their debates on social work reveal that by the end of the 1920s colonial officials in Korea had reached a tacit consensus to use a particular analytical lens and ideological goal that I call “ruralism.” In the ruralist paradigm, these officials viewed Korean society as consisting of “rural peasants” and understood Korean social problems as primarily “rural problems.” Ruralism was a product of many overlapping factors, including pressures to integrate colonial society into the imperial system, the empire-wide popularity of agrarian nationalism, global discourses that increasingly dichotomized the “rural” and the “industrial,” and the rivalry between the colonial government and the metropole. How social work officials re-conceptualized the colonial masses and attempted to engage with social problems under the rhetoric of assimilationism showed a similar dynamic to the “developmental colonialism” that prevailed in the French and British empires after World War II.
