Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Modern Japanese Empire

David G. Wittner, Philip C Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317444350
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Science, technology, and medicine all contributed to the emerging modern Japanese empire and conditioned key elements of post-war development. As the only emerging non-Western country that was a colonial power in its own right, Japan utilized these fields not only to define itself as racially different from other Asian countries and thus justify its imperialist activities, but also to position itself within the civilized and enlightened world with the advantages of modern science, technologies, and medicine.

This book explores the ways in which scientists, engineers and physicians worked directly and indirectly to support the creation of a new Japanese empire, focussing on the eve of World War I and linking their efforts to later post-war developments. By claiming status as a modern, internationally-engaged country, the Japanese government was faced with having to control pathogens that might otherwise not have threatened the nation. Through the use of traditional and innovative techniques, this volume shows how the government was able to fulfil the state's responsibility to protect society to varying degrees.

Chapter 14 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1 On science and faith in the life of a Meiji engineer

Aleksandra Kobiljski

Introduction

In a recent article, James Bartholomew raised a fundamental question regarding research and writing the history of Japan’s scientists with Christian affiliations.¹ The irony of an article on Catholic scientists starting with “a confession” by the author can hardly be lost on readers, yet it reveals the intellectual integrity of the scholar whose work this volume honors. “It is with some trepidation that I write … on Japan’s Christian scientists,” writes Bartholomew. “I have had misgivings … because the topic poses serious intellectual challenges of definition and explanation… .”² This article has been an encouragement and a challenge because I share Bartholomew’s misgivings about writing on Japan’s Christian scientists.

That I now address the intersections of religiosity and science here resulted from a particular event in my own research. In spring 2009, while doing dissertation research, I was given access to 25 boxes containing the uncatalogued papers of Shimomura Kōtarō (1863–1937). This turned out to be a remarkable wealth of material on an engineer who was a member of Dōshisha’s first graduating class and went on to become first the dean of the Harris School of Science before a remarkable career in the chemical industry. This rich and hitherto unknown pool of sources removed one of two obstacles identified by Bartholomew—an absence of sources.

The intellectual challenge of articulating the stakes of such an inquiry remains. What can an examination of the relationship between religion and science (and technology) mean in Meiji Japan, knowing that the very notion of these categories was in flux? In addition, “religion” in Meiji Japan was not solely an intellectual category but also a legal concept. The word (shukyō 宗教) was elaborated in the context of political and legal negotiations for revision of the unequal treaties, which installed extraterritorially and limited Japan’s power to make legal decisions about its tariffs, customs, and trade transactions. The elaboration of the notion of religion also resonated with domestic reconfiguration of religious sites to create a version of Shinto as a dominant state religion.³ What is the relevance of a study limited to Christian scientists, a fraction of the 1 percent of Japanese who had any affiliation with Christian institutions at the time?

The school and the congregation

Meiji Japan was the theater for a peculiar connection between classroom and congregation. Three groups of converts—the Yokohama, Sapporo, and Kumamoto “bands”—embodied the strong link between class and congregation: two out of the three groups of converts literarily came out of a classroom. The Kumamoto and Sapporo bands, which emerged in the first half of the 1870s, were both inspired and led by two teachers, not missionaries, hired by the local government. Both were veterans of the American Civil War and were chosen with an expectation that they would emanate an atmosphere resembling the training of military cadets to strengthen the students physically as much as intellectually. Both were practicing Protestants. Both were hired to teach modern science, and in Sapporo, civil engineering. The program of study at both the Kumamoto School for Western Learning and the Sapporo Agricultural College were similar in spirit and both teachers built a strong personal relationship with students.

Irwin Scheiner showed that becoming a Christian was a way of making sense of the socio-political earthquake that was the Meiji Restoration and the start of the modern nation-state. This was particularly so for former samurai who lost privilege and their sense of purpose. For this group, a turn towards Christianity was a way of dealing with a crisis of identity. Men from former feudal domains who had no natural allegiance to the new Meiji government. Christianity was a way to structure their relationship to the new order and their horizontal and vertical social relationships within it. In a world in which their former rank mattered little, a congregational affiliation put new ground under their feet.

To Scheiner’s analysis, I would add a more practical set of concerns. Pre-Restoration institutions had, to a degree, secured the livelihood of samurai. The new order left many middle and lower-ranking samurai in a state of economic deprivation.⁴ For young and disoriented samurai youth, a connection to Christian missionaries or lay Christian teachers could serve also as a pathway to new skills and an education that was both a metaphorical and material toolkit for weathering the transition. Language skills and training thus acquired constituted a ticket to new, modern professional possibilities.

What stands out about early Imperial Meiji Japan is that mastery of modern science and technology was often paved with Bible instruction and prayer meetings. It may be tempting to draw parallels to the way the work of some European luminaries of modern science was structured by theological concerns. But this was not comparable with the situation in Meiji Japan. At first connections between the Bible and scientific knowledge were less organic. Scores of impoverished young men pursued Western science and technology to restore their family’s livelihoods without needing an explanation for Biblical miracles. However, the path to that knowledge often went through reception rooms, homeroom schools, and formal academies run by foreign missionaries. Hence, ambitious and curious Japanese youth without connections or the knowledge necessary to obtain scholarships in rare government high schools found themselves learning English by reading the Bible and taking an interest in the precepts that ostensibly shaped the conduct of their foreign teachers, a sign of respect and courtesy as much as curiosity. Missionaries were in fact busier teaching than preaching. Those who received baptism while attending high school or college are often referred to as “student Christians” because of the time and site of conversion and because their commitment to Christianity faded later in life. This tendency reinforces the sense that Christian affiliation had a stronger connection with the figure of the teacher than with the acquisition of guiding principles for life.

We need to labor towards a more subtle and nuanced understanding of what it meant to be a Christian and a scientist or an engineer in the Meiji period as we write histories of science and technology and histories of Christianity in modern Japan. A good start may be to grasp the possibility or likelihood that some “student Christians” embraced Christianity in the same way one mimics the intellectual habits of a beloved teacher and mentor. Furthermore, it may be useful to view the turn to Christianity in terms of it being not only a new value system with some structural similarities to the past order but also a means to make sense of the new Japan by acquiring new skills and social networks consistent with the emerging conceptualizations of “civilization.” For most, conversion was a result of multiple factors in a range of motivations. Further, positioning the conversion as the pivotal moment would be misguided in as much as it would render invisible many who did not technically convert or who distanced themselves from Christianity but cultivated relationships with Christian mentors and friends and manifested commitment to certain Christian institutions. Such was the complex and nuanced world of the overlap between Meiji Protestant and scientific milieus, and this ostensibly odd configuration of the science–religion trope during the last third of the nineteenth century constitutes an instance of Meiji’s lost possibilities.⁵ As the dust of the Meiji earthquake settled, it became increasingly difficult to manifest oneself as a Christian scientist.

Beyond the question of availability of sources, one reason why little attention has been paid to early Meiji converts with careers in science and engineering has to do with the fact that their existence was recast as an oxymoron. On a personal level, for an engineer to make public his religious affiliation seems to have been as unproductive as early Meiji geishas’ attempts to associate themselves with enlightenment ideas of femininity. On an intellectual level, the small but rich (and complicated) world of Meiji Christian scientists is often relegated to the margins of historical interest. To the historians of Christianity, scientists are of limited interest because they were discreet or less public about their faith, and because making sense of their careers requires the ability to digest its technical aspects.

A final complicating point is the tendency of Meiji engineers to keep a low profile even when their work was staring everyone in the face. As Ken Alder has shown in France, the nature of technocratic rule led engineers to deny that their activities involved political judgments and power. The resulting cloak made engineers appear transparent, mere conduits for external forces. Beyond the question of visibility what is most interesting about Meiji Christian engineers may be precisely the context which enabled them to emerge and remain a category of actors—a generation of young men embracing configurations of ideas which, although defunct today, were productive at the time.

Meiji Christian engineers’ interesting role and connection to building the new Japan can only be captured if the history of engineering and history of Christianity are joined. Concern with engineering is central to the renewed interest in understanding the materiality of how the Meiji transformation actually worked. By shifting attention from intellectual and cultural aspects of the period, engineers invite us to the world of those who were literally building the new Japan while often eschewing the limelight.

The Kumamoto School for Western Learning: catching up with the Restoration

In January 1875, a group of about forty young men, students of the Kumamoto School for Western Learning, climbed Mt. Hanaoka on the island of Kyushu, read a covenant and proclaimed their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Accompanied by American teacher Captain Leroy Janes, they descended the mountain and met the wrath of parents and school authorities. Many of them nonetheless remained steadfast in their new faith and came to be known as the Kumamoto boys, one of three groups of converts that marked the birth of Protestant Christianity in Japan. Several months later, most moved to Kyoto to continue their studies at the newly founded, ambitious missionary endeavour, Dōshisha English School. Among them were future journalists, social reformers, men of letters, one banker, and two scientists, one of whom was Shimomura Kōtarō, our protagonist.

In September 1872, at age nine, Shimomura was given the exceptional opportunity to attend the Kumamoto School for Western Learning. There, he was guaranteed an intellectual encounter with the basic science curriculum as taught to comparably aged children in the United States. Shimomura was four years younger than the average student and, as with many of his peers, Janes was the first foreigner he had encountered. The school was a fresh invention, the result of an initiative of the Kumamoto domain’s neo-Confucian scholars and proponents of “practical learning” with the support of their reform-minded daimyō. It sought to combine Japan’s Confucian ethics with Western science and technology, especially military strategy and tactics, to provide a stronger foundation for Kumamoto, in the post-Restoration order.

A graduate of West Point and a Civil War veteran, Janes had accepted a tall order: live in the Japanese interior, as only a handful of foreigners could, and teach the brightest of one of Japan’s conservative domains, which aimed to catch up with the times and claim a reform image by seeking to uphold the “Eastern Ethics, Western Science” objectives of domain intellectuals. In following this prescription, Janes was to bring a set of competencies indispensable in a cocktail intended to immunize Japan from military and technological weakness. Teachers of the “Eastern ethics” were in good supply in Kumamoto in the 1870s; Janes was to deliver the science component. Accordingly, students’ days were divided between instruction in English language, physics, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, geography, and military drills on the one hand, and a relatively classical, abridged Confucian curriculum on the other.

This mission of grafting modern science onto Confucian ethics did not proceed as smoothly as planned. Captain Janes and Takezaki sensei, the school’s famous Confucian scholar, found themselves in competition. Each knew little of the other and each was prejudiced against the world of the other. Takezaki referred to Christianity as an evil religion.⁶ Janes went into his students’ dormitory rooms and snatched their “Chinese books.” Janes never learned much Japanese and spoke only English to his students, regardless of their level of comprehension. While his Japanese counterparts tried to monitor and restrain Janes’ influence, he pursued the English section of the curriculum as if the Confucian classics section did not exist. Thus, his students were living and learning in two languages, each with its own cultural logic that they had to try to harmonize.

In practice, there were also two visions of the place of science and technology in culture at work in the school. Japanese scholars argued that it was possible (and necessary) to take one aspect of American intellectual culture—military academy-style science—and add it to a curriculum based on neo-Confucian precepts without destabilizing the latter. Janes, however, came to believe that one simply could not learn and apply Western technolog...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgement
• Note on transliteration
• Introduction
• 1. On science and faith in the life of a Meiji engineer
• 2. Academia–industry relations: interpreting the role of Nagai Nagayoshi in the development of new businesses in the Meiji period and beyond
• 3. An emperor’s chemist in war and peace: Sakurai Jōji during the Russo-Japanese War and World War I
• 4. Buddhism contra cholera: how the Meiji state recruited religion against epidemic disease
• 5. The influenza pandemic of 1918, Taishō Democracy and freedom of the press during the Siberian Intervention
• 6. The politics of manic depression in the Japanese empire
• 7. A colony or a sanitorium? A comparative history of segregation politics of Hansen’s disease in modern Japan
• 8. “They are not human”: Hansen’s disease and medical responses to Hōjō Tamio
• 9. Dr. Baelz’s Mongolian spot: German medicine, discourse of race in Meiji Japan, and the local response
• 10. When precision obscures: disease categories related to cholera during the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895)
• 11. Kampō in wartime Sino-Japanese relations: the Association of East Asian Medicine and the search for a tripartite medical partnership
• 12. The question of research in prewar Japanese physics
• 13. Architects of ABC weapons for the Japanese empire: microbiologists and theoretical physicists
• 14. The science of population and birth control in post-war Japan
• Afterword: is there anything unique about modern Japanese science?
• Bibliography
• Index