Authorship：Corresponding author   Language：Korean  

This paper analyzes a Japanese physiologist’s activities and writings during the Sino-Japanese and the Pacific Wars. Uramoto Masasaburō (浦本政三郎, 1891-1965) was one of the leading physiologists of prewar Japan, whose expertise spanned from general physiology, reflex theory, kinesiology to sports medicine. As a founding member of the Physiological Society of Japan (PSJ) and physiology professor at the Tokyo Jikei University of Medicine, Uramoto actively engaged in the public discourse regarding the relationship between nation (minzoku), science, national vitality, and the role of physiology/medicine in society. Ultimately, he resonated with a group of his contemporaries who sought to construct nationally defined philosophy of science and medicine. This particularistic approach to science and medicine faced fierce criticism and was often labeled as “unscientific and irrational Japanism (nihonshugi)” by critically minded scientists, especially the Marxist scientist group. Although Uramoto and his like-minded physiologists have long been forgotten, his active involvement in the conceptual and institutional pursuit of wartime medical new order (ikai shintaisei) – centering on the role of a nation-state –left lasting legacies in postwar Japan.

Keywords: national vitality, physical fitness (tairyoku), totality, Japanese medicine, physiology

DOI： https://doi.org/10.24939/KJH.2022.8.58.205

Authorship：Corresponding author   Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

This article investigates Teruoka Gitō’s science of labor in the context of wartime rationalization of the labor regime in the Japanese Empire. In the face of unprecedented total war, social scientists and policy makers sought to reorganize the existing labor regime so that strengthened productivity could buttress the faltering wartime economy. Resonating with a call for creating willing subjects spontaneously working for the imperial nation, scientists also involved themselves in refashioning the wartime labor regime. Teruoka Gitō was one of those scientists. Teruoka started his lifetime career as the director of the Institute for the Science of Labor, the only private labor-related research institute of the time. The institute pioneered what Teruoka and his colleagues termed the science of labor (rōdō kagaku) by integrating methodologies in medicine, psychology and social scientific approaches. To build a new field of human sciences concerning all forms of human work, labor science’s agenda covered a wide array of issues ranging from labor physiology, industrial psychology, and household budget to nutrition, urban/rural hygiene, and work efficiency. As wartime labor mobilization intensified after 1938, its research agendas expanded into surveys on agricultural migrants to Manchuria and iron mine workers in Northern China and Kyūshū. What distinguishes labor science from general labor management, with its primary focus on profit maximization? How did Teruoka situate his research agendas in the context of social and/or racial hygiene? What are the implications of labor scientific intervention in settler colonialism under the name of settler science? By tackling these questions, this article scrutinizes the possibilities and limitations of labor science as a science for workers of a national community.

Authorship：Corresponding author   Language：Korean   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

Historians of science have noted that modern nation-states and capitalism necessitated the systematic creation and implementation of a wide array of knowledge and technologies to produce a more productive and robust population. Commonly labeled as biopolitical practices in Foucauldian sense, such endeavors have often been discussed in the realms of public hygiene, housing, birth control, and child mortality, among others. This article is an attempt to extend the scope of the discussion by exploring a relatively understudied domain of nutrition science as a critical case of social engineering and intervention, specifically during and after World War I in the case of Japan. Research and dissemination of knowledge on food and health in Japan, like other industrializing nation-states, centered on new public hygiene initiatives since the late nineteenth-century. However, in the aftermath of WWI, or more precisely, after the Rice Riots of 1918, a new trend began to dominate the discourse of nutrition and health. In the face of wartime inflation and the resultant nation-wide riots, physicians and social scientists alike began to view the food choice and budget issue as a solution to the middle class crisis. This new perception drew on the conceptual framework to understand food, metabolism, and cost in the language of quantifiable nutrition vis-à-vis monetary values. By analyzing how specific nutritional knowledge was translated into the tenets for public campaigns to reform everyday life, this paper ultimately sheds light on the institutionalization of a new area of research, nutrition (eiyō) in Japan.

Keywords: consumer; life-improvement; rationalization; the Rice Riots; nutrition.

DOI： https://doi.org/10.13081/kjmh.2018.27.447

Other Link： https://www.medhist.or.kr/upload/pdf/kjmh-27-3-447.pdf

Total pages：157   Responsible for pages：162   Language：English Book type：Scholarly book

The rise of modern public hygiene has been one of the major themes in the history of health and medicine in Japan. The existing historical accounts generally agree on the fact that the new concept of public hygiene was introduced and put into practice as an essential part of the Meiji government’s modernization initiatives.1 Often formulated as “from yōjō to eisei,” such mod- ernization endeavors involved the process in which the newer Western-style public hygienic and medical system represented with the term eisei replaced older notions and practices of health care, yōjō. This chapter attempts to provide a more complicated and nuanced account of this transformation by revealing the complexity contained in the concepts yōjō/eisei in the Meiji context as well as by tracing the fate of yōjō afterward. In so doing, I will argue that the realm of yōjō was not merely superseded by that of eisei, but was selectively reformulated into a new domain of mental and physical health in line with the Meiji family-state ideology.

DOI： 10.4324/9781003207771-25