Nation from the Bottom Up : Disease, Toilets and Waste Management in Prewar Japan(<Special Issue>Social History of Medicine in Modern Japan)
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概要
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The 1940 inaugural issue of the Japanese Journal of Proctology highlighted the role of healthy anuses in Japan's on-going holy war. Japan was the pillar of the Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, and it would culturally enlighten and direct development on the continent. First, however, it was necessary to conquer the national diseases related to the rectum. As early as the 1920s, medical discourse framed hemorrhoids as a national disease. By 1940, public health officials focused on larger problems like tuberculosis or beriberi and on minor ones such as hemorrhoids. And, needless to say, the point was to eradicate these diseases to strengthen the socio-political body. The focus of this paper is on the historical processes through which hygienic rectums became a prerequisite for national strenght. I examine the medical discourse that argued how the Japanese toilet caused rectal disorders; I also examine the history of the toilet and waste-management strateties. While doctors stressed the importance of hygiene for hemorrhoid prevention, public health officials focused on fecal-oral route diseases such as dysentery, typhoid fever, and schistosomiasis, stemming from water contaminated by untreated sewage. My study highlights how doctors understood the disease ecology of the rectum, and exposes their technological interventions aimed at medicalizing it and its waste. The arena for this particular project of modernization was the bathroom. Borrowing from John Pickstone, we could say that Japanese toilets were "knowledge-commodities" produced by technoscience. Science constructed meanings and understanding of things. It also informed how things were made. In the late 1930s, I reveal how scientists engineered hygienic toilets to support total war.
- 2012-12-31