For this issue, we are pleased to curate a series of articles centered on Japan, though the geography is hardly the only intersection between these pieces. They resonate with each other in multiple ways on topics such as facilitation of health information to the public and the presence of the “West” in constructing the Japanese national identity. The articles are also situated in various moments in history, from the mid-Meiji period, the interwar period, and the Japanese Empire, through to contemporary Japan, helping us paint a picture of a layered history of STS in Japan.
In chronological order, we begin with “Reinventing ‘Hygiene’: The Sanitary Society of Japan and Public Health Reform during the Mid-Meiji Period” by Kerry Shannon. The Sanitary Society of Japan was founded by leading figures in medicine and the medical social sciences in 1883, at a time when Japan was under constant pressure to be on a par with Western societal standards. In this piece, Shannon uses speeches and articles published by the Society to examine how public health policy as well as the concept of hygiene itself developed in Japan during these transformative years.
In discussing the liminal position of the Sanitary Society as being somewhere between the private and the public sphere, this article raises an important question that is explored by the following articles as well: who serves as the facilitators of public health? While it may have been an exclusive organization for medical elites that took the lead during the mid-Meiji period, a plethora of platforms had emerged decades later, such as the mass magazines we see in our next article.
In “‘Can Respectable People also be Infected with Gonorrhea?’: Questions to a Japanese Women’s Magazine in the Interwar Period,” Hou and Nakamura explore a rather unexpected venue for medical advice: a health consultation column in a popular women’s magazine, Shufu no tomo 主婦の友 (“Housewife’s Companion”), founded in the 1910s. Domestic hygiene was one of the central themes of Shufu no tomo, and the health column was flooded with anxious letters from readers about sexual health, particularly with concerns over how STDs may influence one’s fertility. The article examines these inquiries and responses written by the magazine’s health consultant Yayoi Yoshioka, who was a conservative female doctor. In one way, the dialogue served to provide sexual education to women, enabling them to further engage in questions on sexual morality.
There was a nationalist ring to anxieties about infertility. STDs were considered a potential threat to the Japanese Empire that could adversely affect both the quality and quantity of children in future generations. The intersection of empire and medicine is a topic carried into our next piece, “Andō’s Ambiguities in Malaya: The Life of a Japanese Medical Doctor between British and Japanese Empires” by Sandra Khor Manickam. This article traces the life of Kōzō Andō, who hailed from a Japanese immigrant family that settled in British-occupied Malaya at the turn of the twentieth century. Andō studied at King Edward VII Medical College, established under British colonial rule, and practiced medicine locally after graduating in 1912. After Japan’s invasion, he served as the Chief Medical Officer of Singapore until his retirement in 1943. Manickam suggests how Andō’s life is illustrative of the multiple positionalities of medicine and medical practitioners in Malaya that were inflected by the ideas of race and colonial power relations shifting between the two empires.
The three articles discussed above all exemplify a form of “science communication” in one way or another, whether facilitating health information to the public through speeches, magazines, or doctor-to-patient communication. Fast forward to today, where online technologies have opened different avenues for scientific information to be transmitted rapidly and with mass reach. In our final article, “Constitutive and Material: An Empirical Analysis of the Two Dimensions of the Communication on Microplastics in Japanese Journals,” Fu et al. examine how the scientific knowledge of microplastics is communicated, a topic that has enjoyed a high profile in scientific publications, media outlets, and public debates. The article analyzes the trend in which microplastics and their impact on health have appeared in journal articles and online news, and how they become meddled in an intricate network of this “science communication industry” where different stakeholders compete for the power of definition.
Finally, we will cap off the issue with the essay “4S 2010 and JSSTS Joint Conference in Tokyo: Negotiation and Preparation Process” by Yuko Fujigaki, as a contribution to our series on Informal Histories of STS in East Asia. The essay takes us back all the way to 2005, when the late Bruno Latour, as outgoing president of 4S, expressed an interest in holding a 4S meeting in Tokyo. The joint conference that was eventually held in 2010 triggered the internationalization and di-centralization of 4S, opening the door for STS concepts to travel outside of the Western academic sphere. Professor Fujigaki, who was the program chair, raised a question during the meeting: “Can STS concepts based mainly on European and U.S. contexts be applied to a Japanese context? Is every STS concept available for all nations?” The conference thus became a starting point to test out and challenge the applicability and transmutability of West-centered concepts.
Questions on the universality, cultural relativity, and localization of STS concepts have resurfaced last year during the 4S meeting 2022 in Cholula, Mexico. 4S plans to hold a joint meeting with the Taiwan STS Association in 2027, as the essay mentions at its end. In what will be the second 4S meeting in Asia, we look forward to continuing to ask and update these questions in the Asian context.