Exploitation Through Healing: Colonial Histories of Subjugation beneath Imperial Japan

Abstract

Associations between medicine and healing are challenged through this investigation of Imperial Japan’s (1895–1945) history of implementing colonial healthcare. Through the lens of Foucault’s social theory term “biopower,” three focused inquiries (regarding economic history, social history, and women’s history) pertaining to Japan’s history of governing colonies serve to reveal and clarify complex networks of imperial intentions and outcomes, the colonies’ resistances and defeats, and the combined influences of Japan and its colonies over one another’s historical trajectories. Economic study reveals pre-imperial Japan’s biomedical, educational soft-power over China, positioning the nation for future conquests that implemented biopower. The colonies’ social histories reveal that Japan not only internationally imposed its own public health institutions to execute operations of biopower, but also that it appropriated institutions from native colony culture and used them to subjugate the bodies of colonial individuals and societies. The study of biopower over female bodies reveals the core sociopolitical sentiments which motivated and perpetuated Japan’s actions of forcible medical modernization throughout their half-century long imperial reign.