Whilst most facets of the Occupation of Japan have attracted much scholarly debate in recent decades, this is not the case with reforms relating to public health. The few studies of this subject largely follow the celebratory account of US-inspired advances, strongly associated with Crawford Sams, the key figure in the Occupation charged with carrying them out. This book tests the validity of this dominant narrative, interrogating its chief claims, exploring the influences acting on it, and critically examining the reform’s broader significance for the Occupation and its legacies for both Japan and the US. The book argues that rather than presiding over a revolution in public health, the Public Health and Welfare Section, headed by Sams, recommended methods of epidemic disease control and prevention that were already established in Japan and were not the innovations that they were often claimed to be. Where high incidence of such endemic diseases as dysentery and tuberculosis reflected serious socio-economic problems or deficiencies in sanitary infrastructure, little was done in practice to tackle the fundamental problems of poor water quality, the continued use of night soil as fertilizer and pervasive malnutrition. Improvements in these areas followed the trajectory of recovery, growth and rising prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s. This book will be important reading for anyone studying Japanese History, the History of Medicine, Public Health in Asia and Asian Social Policy.

Sanitized Sex analyzes the development of new forms of regulation concerning prostitution, venereal disease, and intimacy during the American occupation of Japan after the Second World War, focusing on the period between 1945 and 1952. It contributes to the cultural and social history of the occupation of Japan by investigating the intersections of ordering principles like race, class, gender, and sexuality. It also reveals how sex and its regulation were not marginal but key issues in postwar empire-building, U.S.-Japanese relations, and American and Japanese self-imagery. The regulation of sexual encounters between occupiers and occupied was closely linked to the disintegration of the Japanese empire and the rise of U.S. hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region during the Cold War era. Shedding new light on the configuration of postwar Japan, the process of decolonization, the postcolonial formation of the Asia-Pacific region, and the particularities of postwar U.S. imperialism, Sanitized Sex offers a reading of the intimacies of empires—defeated and victorious.

Science, technology, and medicine all contributed to the emerging modern Japanese empire and conditioned key elements of post-war development. As the only emerging non-Western country that was a colonial power in its own right, Japan utilized these fields not only to define itself as racially different from other Asian countries and thus justify its imperialist activities, but also to position itself within the civilized and enlightened world with the advantages of modern science, technologies, and medicine. This book explores the ways in which scientists, engineers and physicians worked directly and indirectly to support the creation of a new Japanese empire, focussing on the eve of World War I and linking their efforts to later post-war developments. By claiming status as a modern, internationally-engaged country, the Japanese government was faced with having to control pathogens that might otherwise not have threatened the nation. Through the use of traditional and innovative techniques, this volume shows how the government was able to fulfil the state’s responsibility to protect society to varying degrees. Chapter 14 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the end of the American-led Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-52), The Allied Occupation of Japan is a sweeping history of the revolutionary reforms that transformed Japan and the remarkable men and women, American and Japanese, who implemented them.

This book, based on extensive original research, considers the transformation of public health systems in major East, South and Southeast Asian countries in the period following the Second World War. It examines how public health concepts, policies, institutions and practices were improved, shows how international health standards were implemented, sometimes through the direct intervention of transnational organisations, and explores how indigenous traditions and local social and cultural concerns affected developments, with, in some cases, the construction of public health systems forming an important part of nation-building in post-war and post-independence countries. Throughout, the book relates developments in public health systems to people’s health, demographic changes, and economic and social reconstruction projects.

Bu and her contributors illustrate the complexity of tensions and negotiations in the development of different types of public health systems in Asia during the early Cold War. Competing models of development with different political ideologies and economic enterprises increasingly influenced Asian countries in their efforts to build modern nations after World War II. Looking at examples from China, Japan, South and North Korea, India, and Indonesia, the contributors to this volume look at how a range of Asian countries handled this postcolonial challenge. Health became a pivotal area that sustained the political discourse of differentiating one type of society from the other and promoting each system’s advantages over the other’s during the Cold War. Central to the discourse of a just society and the well-being of citizens was the promotion of public health and welfare for the people. The right to health was considered a fundamental human right as well as an essential social justice. A healthy population was also a prerequisite for national economic prosperity. Public health in postwar Asia was, therefore, a sociopolitical matter as well as a concern for the well-being of individuals. The health of the people demonstrated the advancement of a nation and provided the insurance for economic productivity and national prosperity. An essential read for historians and policymakers of public health and historians of Asia during the Cold War.

In early modern Japan, upper status groups coveted pills and powders made of exotic foreign ingredients such as mummy and rhinoceros horn. By the early twentieth century, over-the-counter-patent medicines, and, more alarmingly, morphine, had become mass commodities, fueling debates over opiates in Japan’s expanding imperial territories. The fall of the empire and the occupation of Japan by the United States created conditions favorable for heroin use, followed, in time, by glue sniffing and psychedelic mushroom ingestion. By illuminating the neglected history of drugs, this volume highlights both the transnational embeddedness and national peculiarities of the “politics of consumption” in Japan. Contributors are: Anna Andreeva, Oleg Benesch, William G. Clarence-Smith, Hung Bin Hsu, John Jennings, Miriam Kingsberg Kadia, William Marotti, Kōji Ozaki, Jonas Rüegg, Jesús Solís, Christopher W.A. Szpilman, Judith Vitale, and Timothy Yang.