Interested in collaborations on a multidisciplinary project on multispecies and multi-life humanities? Please reach out to the Center for Integrated Japanese Studies (CIJS) at Tohoku University by email, where we have only recently launched such an initiative! Plant Knowledge in the Shadow of War Whereas others saw death in the carnage of World War I,…
Tag: Japan
When Medicine Met Diplomacy (Part III): The “Tokyo Project”
What was the Rockefeller Foundation’s “Tokyo Project”?
To Have and To Hold: The Clinical Significance of Getting Married in Interwar Japan
To Have: Marriage as an Etiology of Disease Entering matrimony can be a dauntingly momentous life decision to make. In Japan between the late 1910s and the 1930s, the significance of getting married at times went beyond uniting two individuals and manifested also through a drastic change in one party’s state of health. For the…
What Happened to Mrs. Taguchi? Reading Medical Pluralism in Imperial Japan
Trigger Warning: This essay discusses attempted suicide. What Happened in the Hallway? The story of “Mrs. Taguchi” had a happy ending. Having attempted suicide by hanging for a third time while an inpatient at the Tokyo Matsuzawa Hospital, an elite psychiatric facility where she received treatment in 1930, the 42-year-old’s symptoms took a sudden turn…
How to Feed the Sick: Hospital Meal and Patient Care in Modern Japan (part II: from the 1950s onward)
How has hospital meal changed in postwar Japan? What do the changes tell us about the hospital-patient relationship and patient care in Japan?
How to Feed the Sick: Hospital Meal and Patient Care in Modern Japan (part I: till 1950s)
How did hospital meal come into being in modern Japan? Why did it become a compulsory part of patient care at hospitals?
Some Are for the Poor and the Boor: The Hierarchy and Hierarchization of Materia Medica
All plant life are not made equal—at least not in the eyes of Japanese physcians during the Tokugawa period (1603–1868). This essay explores what was at stake when some plants were regarded as respectable medicinal herbs while others were dismissed as weeds for the poor.
Whose Words Are Those? Language, Identity, and Medical Texts in Tokugawa Japan
In the spring of 1795, Japanese physician Ōtsuki Gentaku (大槻玄沢,1757–1827) recalled the time he spent in his youth with Takebe Seian (建部清庵,1712–1782), his mentor in medicine. Through his career as a specialist in external medicine (geka), Seian developed an enthusiasm for Western learning and Dutch studies (rangaku) (Takebe, Sugita, and Sugita 1795, preface). Taking off…
Opening the Japanese Body
How did Japanese people view organs and body? How do you view the inside of your body?
Intercourse Has Not Been Enjoyable: Married Women’s Sexual Pleasure in Imperial Japan, 1920s–1930s
Classification matters in creating the rhetoric and reality of “female sexual dysfunction.” A woman got married, but she did not enjoy having sex with her husband. What would come next if she lived in imperial Japan?