4B Kim Space

Session Title: Space and Medicine

Session Organizer: Jeong-Ran KIM (Oxford)

Chair: TBA

1) Jeong-Ran KIM (Oxford)

Making a Sanitary Metropolis: A Comparative Study of two Imperial Ports - Busan and Bombay

2) Chester PROSHAN (Toyo University)

“[An] indictment for manslaughter against the society in which it occurs….”: Suicide in the Yokohama Treaty Port

Jeong-Ran KIM is now a Postdoctoral research assistant of Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine. Her doctoral thesis focuses on Japanese sanitary policies in Busan during the opening port period, particularly the sanitary administration led by the Japanese settlers. She is now working on the project “The Challenge of Urbanization: Health and the Global City (India and South Korea)” at University of Oxford. Particulary, her research examines health issues related to economic migration into Korea from an historical perspective.

Chester PROSHAN retired in spring 2012 from Bunka Gakuen University, where he was Professor of American Studies and former Director of the Program in European and American Studies. Currently he is a lecturer, American Studies, at Toyo University. His areas of interest include immigration history and modern Jewish history. He is currently researching intergroup contact and the Yokohama Treaty Port. Work he has done on the topic includes “’Though we live in a heathen land’: Francis Hall’s Encounter with ‘Sacred Time’ in Newly-Opened Japan, 1859-1866,” Journal of Tsuda College, 44 (2012) and “Where Everyone was Other”: Jews in the Yokohama Treaty Port, 1859-1899,” Proceedings of the 1st Asian Conference on Asian Studies, International Academic Forum, Osaka, 2011.

Making a Sanitary Metropolis:

A Comparative Study of two Imperial Ports - Busan and Bombay

Kim Jeong-Ran

This paper illuminates some of the singular aspects of Japanese imperialism through an investigation of sanitary policies in Busan, where the first treaty port of Korea opened by Japan in 1876. It compares Busan with Bombay, through which was shipped much of India’s trade with European countries and which was a departure point for pilgrims going to Mecca and Medina. The paper focuses on a transformative period in the sanitary administration of both cities during the late the nineteenth century and the early the twentieth century.

   Facing Western influences which threatened not only Japan’s economic independence but its political sovereignty, the Japanese government began to rebuild its sovereign power, its goal being to become “A rich country with a strong army”. To achieve this aim, the Japanese government found the answer in a simultaneous process of internal modernization and external expansion. Through the establishment of ‘informal’ and, later ‘formal’ colonies, Japan attempted to build up wealth and power in eastern Asia. To open Korea forcibly and build the Japanese settlement in Busan was the first step in this process. Busan was the nearest major port to Japan and a place with which it had a strong connection extending back to the time of the Shogunate. In 1876, Japan forced Korea to make unequal treaty which was very unfavourable to Korea; a treaty which fully opened the ports of Busan, Wonsan (opened in 1880) and Incheon (opened in 1883) to Japanese trade. The following year, a Japanese settlement (hereafter, ‘the settlement’) was built on Busan; this settlement became not only the centre of the trade between Korea and Japan but also a bridgehead for Japanese expansion into continental Asia even before Korea became the Japanese colony in 1910.

After the opening of the port,  however, Busan was seen as the main route for the movement of diseases such as cholera and rinderpest. As one Japanese doctor pointed out, cholera generally spread from Japan to Busan and then to Seoul, whereas rinderpest spread from Busan with imported cows to Japan. Cholera and rinderpest pandemics were a consequence of the movement of troops and the expansion of trade during nineteenth century. These infectious diseases caused extensive damage to Korea as well as to Japan.

In addition, when Japan tried to expand its influence into neighbouring countries, it emphasized the social superiority of its people as a way of justifying imperial rule. One of the means by which it did so was to display its hygienic modernity, incorporating the laboratory-oriented medicine of imperial Germany. Thus, in the same year in which the settlement was built, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs built the state hospital (the so called ‘Saisei Iing’) in at the settlement, not only to treat settlers and foreigners, including Koreans but to display Japan’s medical achievements.

The year 1905 saw the opening of a railway between Busan and Seoul and a large ferry began to ply between Busan and Shimonoseki. This modern transportation network helped Japan to expand its power into the Asian continent. In other words, Busan became a bridgehead between Japan and Asia, even before Japan had become a colonial power in a formal sense. Busan therefore needed to be transformed into an imperial port city and the sanitary implications of this had to be recognized if it was to function effectively.

In the meantime, Bombay was becoming the centre of British political power in western India and gained an extensive hinterland. After 1819, Bombay developed rapidly as a port trading with Europe and became the main point of departure for pilgrims on the Hadj. Accordingly, British sanitary policies in Bombay correlated with colonial policy and commercial interests, as well as the diplomatic relations. As a result of the Indian mutiny and rebellion of 1857, the British East India Company was abolished and, in the following year, the administration of India was transferred to the Crown. The number of British military and settlers increased and sanitary measures, including water supply, housing and reforming medical system became a matter of great urgency. The need for better urban infrastructure became even more apparent as Bombay grew more rapidly from the 1860s and after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Bombay became India’s principal trading port and the main point of entry and departure for mail and troops.  However, it was through the port of Bombay that cholera generally spread from India and that plague was later to enter India from Hong Kong, threatening other parts of Asia. Sanitary reform thus became one of the most important issues for the colonial government in Bombay, for disease threatened to jeopardize its status as a port.

   Although Busan and Bombay occupied similarly important positions within Japanese and British spheres of influence, there were of course many differences between them, as well as in the nature of British and Japanese imperialism.  When Japan recovered control over its tariffs from foreign powers in 1911 it finally achieved full sovereignty and up to that point it exercised control over neighbouring countries indirectly. That is to say, Japan was an ‘informal empire’, unlike Britain which had already built powerful and enormous empire. For example, Japanese influence extended over Busan before it annexed Korea in 1910, even though Korea was officially an independent country. Thus, when the settlers and the Japanese authorities in the settlement tried to carry out sanitary work and other activities, they had to negotiate with Korean counterparts and sometimes with foreign officials, too. Moreover, there is another big difference between the relationship of Busan to Japan and Bombay to Britain: distance. In view of its proximity to Japan, there was more danger of direct infection of homeland from Busan, or a perceived danger at least. Bombay was too far distant from Britain to arouse such fears but other countries were very much concerned about infection from that port and their actions impeded connections between Britain and India and between Bombay and other parts of the world.

This comparative study illuminates the dynamics of urban change of Busan and Bombay, but within the broader framework of global and imperial history. In doing so, it reveals the unique features of Japanese imperialism as well as peculiar aspects of modern port cities. And I hope that, through this research, I will make a new contribution to maritime historiography.

“an indictment for manslaughter against the society in which it occurs….”: Suicide in the Yokohama Treaty Port

Chester Proshan

Toyo University

   The Yokohama Treaty Port (1859-1899) was the main site for international trade in Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century. The treaty port was quasi-colonial, forced on Japan by Western Powers, and polyglot, drawing migrants globally. The port was a setting for intense economic competition, nation-state rivalry, and ethnocultural conflict. As one migrant wrote, “There are too many kinds of us….You can’t do much uniting in a community that is Chinese, English, American, German…Dutch, Indian, Parsee….” As a Japanese newspaper editorialized, the international migrant “regards the Japanese much as he would regard dirt or a savage.” A main arena in which the striking contestation made itself evident in everyday life in Yokohama was public health.

   The paper examines suicide in the treaty port in the context of the socioeconomic and cultural factors which prevailed in daily life. What is known about the demography of suicide in the port? What were causes of suicide? How did the local population—Japanese and international migrants—respond to the deaths? In an environment of marked contestation and difference, how did people make sense of and come to terms with suicide in their daily affairs?

   The paper draws on surviving primary sources, including government records, personal papers, the medical literature, and newspaper coverage.