Hoshi Pharmaceuticals in the Interwar Years Timothy M. Yang Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of Th
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Market, Medicine, and Empire: Hoshi Pharmaceuticals in the Interwar Years Timothy M. Yang Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2013 Timothy M. Yang All rights reserved ABSTRACT Market, Medicine, and Empire: Hoshi Pharmaceuticals in the Interwar Years Timothy M. Yang This dissertation examines the connections between global capitalism, modern medicine, and empire through a close study of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals during the interwar years. As one of the leading drug companies in East Asia at the time, Hoshi embodied Japan's imperial aspirations, rapid industrial development, and burgeoning consumer culture. The company attempted to control every part of its supply and distribution chain: it managed plantations in the mountains of Taiwan and Peru for growing coca and cinchona (the raw material for quinine) and contracted Turkish poppy farmers to supply raw opium for government-owned refineries in Taiwan. Hoshi also helped shape modern consumer culture in Japan and its colonies, and indeed, became an emblem for it. At its peak in the early 1920s, Hoshi had a network of chain stores across Asia that sold Hoshi-brand patent medicines, hygiene products, and household goods. In 1925, however, the company's fortunes turned for the worse when an opium trading violation raised suspicions of Hoshi as a front for the smuggling of narcotics through Manchuria and China. Although the company was a key supplier of medicines to Japan's military during World War Two, it could not financially recover from the fallout of the opium scandal. In 1952, the industrialist Ōtani Yonetarō seized control of the company from the Hoshi family. By tracing Hoshi's activities across Japan's expanding empire and beyond, this dissertation shows how private, transnational drug companies such as Hoshi played a vital role in manufacturing and selling Japan as a modern nation and empire. Like many other transnational corporations during the autarkic global climate of the interwar years, Hoshi constantly looked abroad to learn about, borrow, and translate technologies that were circulating across the globe to support the "business" of empire building. Hoshi Pharmaceuticals embodied the symbiotic connections between government and business interests; an ideology of cooperation where the "interests of capital and labor are one"; and adaptations of global, particularly American, technologies of management. Table of Contents List of Figures………………………………………………………………………. ii Acknowledgements. ………………………………………………………………... iv Chapter One: The Origins of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals…………………………………...… 1 Chapter Two: Selling Civilization: Patent Medicines and Chain Store Networks……….... 63 Chapter Three: The Scandal of Opium…………………………………………………….... 130 Chapter Four: Crisis and the Limits of Cooperation……………………………………..… 167 Chapter Five: Selling the Science of Quinine Self-Sufficiency……………………………. 209 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….. 254 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………… 264 i List of Figures Chapter One: Fig. 1.1: Japan and America, vol. 1, no. 1 (July 1901)…………………………….. 49 Chapter Two: Fig. 2.1: Advertisement from Tokyo asahi shinbun, May 3, 1923…………………. 84 Fig. 2.2: Advertisement from Yomiuri shinbun, August 26, 1918, morning edition.. 87 Fig. 2.3: Advertisement from Yomiuri shinbun, April 12, 1919, morning edition…. 88 Fig. 2.4: Advertisement from Yomiuri shinbun, July 8, 1922, morning edition……. 89 Fig. 2.5: Advertisement from Tokyo asahi shinbun, March 22, 1919, morning ed… 90 Fig. 2.6: Advertisement from Tokyo asahi shinbun, March 30, 1918, morning ed… 91 Fig. 2.7: Advertisement from Tokyo asahi shinbun, January 5, 1919, morning ed… 92 Fig. 2.8: Advertisement from Taiwan nichi nichi shinpō, May 15, 1919………… 94 Fig. 2.9: Advertisement from Taiwan nichi nichi shinpō, March 13, 1921………… 95 Fig. 2.10: Advertisement from Tonga ilbo, November 7, 1922…………………….. 96 Fig. 2.11: Advertisement from Tonga ilbo, January 9, 1924……………………….. 96 Fig. 2.12: Seimei enchō: Hoshi no seihin, 1924…………………………………….. 97 Fig. 2.13: Advertisement from Yomiuri shinbun, June 11, 1919, morning edition… 98 Fig. 2.14: Advertisement from Yomiuri shinbun, March 7, 1921, morning edition... 98 Fig. 2.15: Advertisement from Tokyo asashi shinbun, March 24, 1935, evening ed. 100 Fig. 2.16: "Kenkō wa i kara!" from Yakuten keiei, July 9, 1941…………………… 102 Fig. 2.17: Wholesale Distribution Network………………………………………… 106 Fig. 2.18: Picture from "Beikoku no kusuriya," October 1, 1917…………………... 109 Fig. 2.19: Blueprint from "Kōtetsu-sei Hoshi-shiki kumitate tenpo," Feb. 1, 1917... 109 Fig. 2.20: Hoshi's Original Chain Store Network…………………………………... 112 Fig. 2.21: Hoshi's Amended Chain Store Network…………………………………. 112 Fig. 2.22: "Jijokai no unyō zu," January 1, 1923…………………………………… 116 Fig. 2.23: "Tokuyaku ten dai-bōshū" in Tokyo Asahi shinbun, February 4, 1913...... 123 Chapter Three: Fig. 3.1: "Import Permit (Yūnyū menjō)"………………………………………….... 156 Chapter Four: Fig. 4.1: Hoshi Pharmaceuticals' Income, Operating Expenses, and Profit………… 173 Fig. 4.2: Sankyō Pharmaceuticals' Income, Operating Expenses, and Profit………. 174 Fig. 4.3: Hoshi versus Sankyō……………………………………………………… 174 Fig. 4.4: "Futa-boshi ichōyaku" from Tokyo no baiyaku, January 15, 1937………... 193 Fig. 4.5: Hoshi Strike Poster, June 20, 1930………………………………………... 204 ii Chapter Five: Fig. 5.1: The 1934 roundtable discussion at the Taiwan Railway Hotel…………… 213 Fig. 5.2: Advertisement from Oil, Paint and Drug Reporter, January 17, 1921…… 224 Fig. 5.3: "Hoshi Pharmaceuticals' Cinchona Cultivation in Taiwan" 233 iii Acknowledgements Many people have helped me in the writing of this dissertation. First, I thank Carol Gluck. She's the best advisor anyone can hope to have, and I am lucky to have been her student. I am deeply grateful to Eugenia Lean, Kim Brandt, Madeleine Zelin, Paul Gootenberg, and Victoria de Grazia for their patience, understanding, and piercing comments and questions. Many thanks to Okamoto Kōichi, Gotō Ken'ichi, Iijima Wataru, Michael Shi-yung Liu, Chang Che-chia, Liu Bi-rong, and Hiromi Mizuno for their help and advice during the research process. Thanks to Steve Ericson, Dennis Washburn, and Jim Dorsey for believing in me. My dissertation would not have been possible without generous outside funding from the Blakemore Foundation, the Japan Foundation, Social Science Research Council's International Dissertation Research Fellowship Program, and the Konosuke Matsushita Memorial Foundation. I have also greatly benefited from internal Columbia University support including the Mellon Foundation Harriet Zuckerman Dissertation Fellowship, the History Department's Shawn Summer Fellowship, Weatherhead East Asia Institute's Ph.D. Training Grant, and the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship. I want to thank the staff at a number of libraries and research centers including Columbia University's Starr East Asian Library and Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, the New York Public Library, the Modern Japanese Political History Materials Room of Japan's National Diet Library, Tokyo Metropolitan Library, Waseda University Library, the Library of the Tokyo University of Pharmacy and Life Sciences, Academia Sinica, National Taiwan Library, iv National Chung Hsing Library, and National Taiwan University Library. I am indebted in particular to Misawa Miwa, Satō Shiro, and Suzuki Akihiro of Hoshi University. Finally, I'd like to thank my family and friends. Cheers to my crazy and brilliant cohort at Columbia including Adam Bronson, Chad Diehl, Christopher Craig, Ramona Bajema, Eric Han, Liza Lawrence, Dan Asen, Bryan Tsui, Arunabh Ghosh, Abhishek Kaicker, Stacey Van Vleet, Andy Liu, Buyun Chen, Peiting Li, Sara Kile, Sayaka Chatani, Chelsea Schieder, Colin Jaundrill, Michael McCarty, Jenny Wang-Medina, Nate Shockey, Rob Tuck, Hitomi Yoshio, Greg Patterson, Yurou Zhong, Yumi Kim, and many others. Thanks to Oda Toshika, Fukushi Yuki, Inoue Hiroki, Sugano Atsushi, as well as to members of the Modern Japan History Workshop at Waseda, Gotō Ken'ichi's seminar, and the Asia Society for the Social History of Medicine for good company. And appreciation to my parents Cheng-Hsin and Rebecca, my brother Ted, and to the Yang, Chiu, Satō, and Minami families across the U.S., Canada, Taiwan, and Japan for putting up with me. Most of all, thanks to Mi-Ryong Shim. This dissertation is for you. v Introduction Japan's pharmaceuticals industry did not fully emerge until World War One. Although some businessmen had begun importing Western medicines as early as the mid- nineteenth century (at a time when the majority sold Chinese herbal medicines), most drug merchants became manufacturers only after the outbreak of the First World War disrupted imports of European, particularly German, medicines. With Europe mired in conflict, Japanese companies seized the moment to manufacture their own Western-style medicines.1 Under the banner of "self-sufficiency" (jikyū jisoku), which identified the shortage of essential medicines as a threat to national security, the Home Ministry voided overseas patent rights, ordered state laboratories to reveal drug formulae, and provided 1 Maki Umemura, The Japanese Pharmaceutical Industry: Its Evolution and Current Challenges (London, UK: Routledge, 2011); Nihon yakushi gakkai, ed., Nihon iyakuhin sangyōshi (Tokyo: Yakushi nippōsha, 1995); Nihon no shinyaku hankō kai, ed., Nihon no shinyaku