During the last decades of the nineteenth century, public health policy in Japan transformed from a stricter focus on anti-disease measures to a more discursive and long-term strategy, one that attempted to train local and prefectural administrators to implement top-down directives regarding hygiene (eisei 衛生). This paper uses the early speeches and articles published by The Sanitary Society of Japan (Dai Nippon Shiritsu Eiseikai 大日本私立衛生会, lit. “Great Japan Private Hygiene Association”), the nation’s largest forum for the discussion and dissemination of knowledge related to hygiene, to analyze how and why this change took place. Founded in 1883 by leading figures in medicine and the medical social sciences, the Society attempted to reformulate popular understandings of hygiene and health after widespread manipulation of the government’s early public health programs.
I argue that the Society repurposed and reformulated supposedly native Japanese healing practices in order to ground unfamiliar medical concepts, including the term “hygiene” (eisei) itself, within the familiar vocabulary of supposedly shared medical traditions. In recuperating and mobilizing these ideas, the organization broadened the discourse of hygiene while also immuring the concept within a circle of medical elites.
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On 27 May 1883, approximately 1,250 doctors, bureaucrats, and statesmen gathered in the Meiji Kaidō, Tokyo’s grand, newly renovated lecture hall, for the first meeting of the Dai Nippon shiritsu eiseikai 大日本私立衛生会 (lit. Greater Japan Private Hygiene Association), which adopted the English moniker Sanitary Society of Japan. Those in audience represented the elite of Japan’s medical bureaucracy as they arrived from high positions in prefectural offices and public hospitals to, as the Society’s guidelines stated, “discuss and investigate the means for protecting and increasing the health [and] life expectancy of the people” (Dai Nippon Shiritsu Eiseikai 大日本私立衛生会 Citation1883: 20–21). The occasion was seemingly celebratory. The Society’s establishment marked Japan’s emergence from over a decade of epidemics, instigated by newly opened ports, rebellions by disgruntled samurai, and an increasingly interwoven domestic economy.Footnote1 Although a multitude of diseases, from cholera to dysentery, continued to wreck the country well into the twentieth century, the promulgation of a central Hygiene Bureau, the creation of a nationwide network of hospitals and clinics, the delineation of maritime quarantine boundaries, and the advent of biomedical training programs had ostensibly established an elaborate modern medical infrastructure, one designed to combat outbreaks with alacrity and nurse the afflicted back to health.Footnote2 And, indeed, much evidence carefully amalgamated by the government suggested that, overall, Japan’s modernization would now be a relatively healthy one.
