ASCJ program 2012 ASCJ 2012 The Sixteenth Asian Studies Conference Japan (ASCJ) ABSTRACTS These lightly edited abstracts come to nearly 140 pages. As a printed version will not be distributed at the conference, we suggest that you save it to disk or print the pages of sessions that interest you. The abstracts are in the order of the program available on the ASCJ website: http://www.meijigakuin.ac.jp/~ascj/2012/Abstracts%202012.pdf The PDF file can be searched online or after downloading. For your convenience in browsing and printing, each session begins on a new page. Changes to the abstracts can be sent by Word attachment to [email protected]. We will make necessary alterations and substitutions to this online version before the conference begins. The PDF file of abstracts will remain on the ASCJ website as a record of the conference at International Christian University, Tokyo, June 25–26, 2011: http://www.meijigakuin.ac.jp/~ascj/2012/ASCJ_2012_abstracts.pdf ASCJ Executive Committee Tokyo, June 25, 2012 1 ASCJ program 2012 The Sixteenth Asian Studies Conference Japan (ASCJ) ABSTRACTS Session 1: Room A-301 A Muck Time: Environmental Hygiene and Human Waste Disposal in Japan across the Twentieth Century Organizer/Chair: Alexander R. Bay, Chapman University 1) Alexander R. Bay, Chapman University Nation from the Bottom up: Disease, Toilets and Waste Management in Modern Japan 2) Ichikawa Tomo, Shanghai Jiaotong University What is an Ideal Toilet? The Development and Diffusion of Public Toilets in Meiji Japan, 1868–1912 3) Roderick Wilson, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Dirty Water: An Environmental History of Tokyo’s Waterways and Bay, 1888–1964 4) Hoshino Takanori, Keio University Prewar Reformation of the Night-soil Circulation Network in the Suburbs of Tokyo Discussant: Nagashima Takeshi, Senshu University A Muck Time: Environmental Hygiene and Human Waste Disposal in Japan across the Twentieth Century Organizer/Chair: Alexander R. Bay, Chapman University Medical and environmental history as written over the past twenty-years has argued convincingly that humans are irrevocably intertwined within their surroundings. The idea of a dichotomy between separate natural and human realms has been thoroughly debunked. From chemicals sprayed on fruit to mercury-poisoned fish, the products of human development have an uncanny way of coming back to affect us. Our panel on Japanese environmental hygiene and waste disposal practices examines how the medical community, government and industry responded to public health crises within ever-changing environments during the twentieth century. Wilson examines the decrease in Tokyo’s water quality, affecting those who depended on waterways for livelihood, as the city became a modern metropolitan center. Bay looks at environmentally dependent diseases like hemorrhoids, typhoid fever and schistosomiasis and how the toilet emerged as a site for hygienic modernity. Economic and cultural factors, however, limited the spread of this sanitary technology. Ichikawa also examines the development of the toilet in terms of cholera prevention through the career of public health technocrat Takano Rokuro. Ichikawa reveals how the initial attempts to diffuse modern toiletry were staged at sites infused with state authority: schools and city halls. Hoshino studies the relationship between the city government of Tokyo and outlaying agricultural 2 ASCJ program 2012 communities as it dealt with the world depression and the increase of fecal-oral route diseases like dysentery, showing how the city cultivated customers for its never-ending supply of human waste. 1) Alexander Bay, Chapman University Nation from the Bottom up: Disease, Toilets and Waste Management in Modern Japan I explore the history of environmental hygiene and digestive-system diseases (dysentery, typhoid fever, hemorrhoids) and parasite-diseases (schistosomiasis) as well as the technology of waste-management in Japan from 1900 to 1980, and examine how the medical community, government and industry responded to public health crises within ever-changing environments during the twentieth-century. I look at how engineers reworked the landscape to stop the spread of disease and modernize the nation. The reforms I am interested in include irrigation construction, architectural improvements, toilet and septic tank design and waste removal policies. Environmental resources were mobilized to support “holy war” on the continent in the late 1930s, while environments, both rural and urban, were “disciplined” to construct a “cultured” Japan in the postwar era. As reformers remade the Japanese environment, the disease ecology also changed. Contagious diseases like dysentery disappeared while cancer morbidity rose. Progress did not always translate into increased fitness. In short, I examine how doctors, public health, and government officials engineered more hygienic environments. What were their strategies for removing harmful, disease-causing waste? Japan is currently involved in two massive clean-up projects, removing the rubble in the wake of the Tohoku tsunami and radioactive materials from the Fukushima reactors. My project informs an understanding of the history of such challenges. 2) Ichikawa Tomo, Shanghai Jiaotong University What is an Ideal Toilet? The Development and Diffusion of Public Toilets in Meiji Japan, 1868-1912 In this paper, I analyze the history, using the words of public health technocrat Takano Rokuro, of the “development of toilet.” I also discuss the planning, installation and diffusion of public toilets in Japanese treaty ports such as Yokohama, Kobe and Nagasaki. It is well known that people made use of the night soil as fertilizer in many Asian areas. Therefore, we can recognize that the main role of toilet in Asian society was to pool resources for agriculture. After modernization, toilets took on another new role: to control human waste in a sanitary fashion. The main purpose of the public toilet construction was as a preventive measure against the cholera epidemics in modern Japan. Because cholera regularly killed over 10,000 people every few years during the Meiji era, the government was invested in managing night soil to stop the spread of this disease. Also, as chemical fertilizer became popular, the value of night soil fell, so the toilet was no longer a conduit for collecting agricultural fertilizer. Hygienic toilets did not diffuse immediately to every household. The government needed to introduce and demonstrate the sanitary toilet to the people through public schools and city 3 ASCJ program 2012 halls as well as public restrooms on the street. Many professionals of public health, civil engineering and agriculture researched what toilet was ideal. In this way, through public health improvement, the traditional toilet was changed into an artifact of Japan’s hygienic modernity. 3) Roderick Wilson, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Dirty Water: An Environmental History of Tokyo’s Waterways and Bay, 1888-1964 From the late-nineteenth century, city planners and politicians primarily looked upon Tokyo’s waterways as conduits of commerce and paid little attention to the deteriorating water quality in the city’s rivers, canals, and bay. The result was that as the city grew and industrialized, its waterways became increasingly polluted with effluent coming from the city’s homes, businesses, and factories. By the 1950s, many of these waterways were so polluted that few balked as the government began burying or covering over many of these open waters in preparation for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. In the first section of this paper, I discuss the plans and projects carried out along the city’s waterways and bay during the Tokyo Municipal Reform Projects (1888-1918) and after the destruction caused by the 1923 Kanto Earthquake. In doing so, I focus on the economic and public health imperatives within which these plans were drafted and carried out. In the second section of the paper, I shift my focus to the waters flowing into and out of the city to show how a toxic combination of biological and chemical pollutants led to the frequent closure of waterside swimming areas and regular die-offs of fish and seaweed beds in the bay. Focused on a period before the municipal government regularly monitored water quality in its waterways and bay, this paper also discusses how a meaningful measure of water quality can be reconstructed through a nuanced reading of newspapers articles and literary works that describe the city’s dirty waters. 4) Hoshino Takanori, Keio University Prewar Reformation of the Night-soil Circulation Network in the Suburbs of Tokyo During the latter half of the 1910s, the network of night-soil circulation between cities and suburban villages, formed in early modern period, collapsed, causing severe problems of night-soil disposal in the Tokyo metropolitan area. Hence night-soil treatment was municipalized to solve these problems. Previous studies have shown that in Tokyo, night-soil disposal led to epidemic problems because of the dependency on human waste removing systems between the city and suburban farm villages. However, these studies have not focused on the relation between the policy of Tokyo city government and farm villages. This paper focuses on the policy of the city government in 1930’s and examines how it drummed up potential demand for human waste in suburban farm villages and reformed the network of night-soil removal. Also, I re-examine the significance of the municipalization of human waste treatment