By Miriam Kingsberg

This trailblazing learn examines the historical past of narcotics in Japan to provide an explanation for the improvement of worldwide standards for political legitimacy in international locations and empires within the 19th and 20th centuries.

Japan underwent 3 particular crises of sovereignty in its sleek background: within the Eighteen Nineties, through the interwar interval, and within the Fifties. each one quandary provoked successively escalating crusades opposed to opium and different medications, within which ethical entrepreneurs--bureaucrats, cultural manufacturers, retailers, legislations enforcement, scientists, and medical professionals, between others--focused on drug use as a method of distinguishing among populations healthy and undeserving for self-rule. Moral Nation strains the instrumental function of ideologies approximately narcotics within the country's efforts to reestablish its legitimacy as a kingdom and empire.

As Kingsberg demonstrates, Japan's transforming into prestige as an Asian energy and a "moral country" multiplied the proposal of "civilization" from an solely Western worth to a common one. students and scholars of jap historical past, Asian reviews, global heritage, and worldwide experiences will achieve an in-depth figuring out of the way Japan's event with narcotics inspired international criteria for sovereignty and shifted the purpose of country construction, making it now not a strictly political task but in addition an ethical legal responsibility to society.

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Goto- also pointed out the legal contradiction in severely punishing opium consumption among some imperial subjects (the Japanese), while condoning such behavior among others (the Taiwanese). The obvious way to eliminate this inconsistency and prevent the contagion of smoking to troops and civilian migrants from the home islands was to prohibit opium immediately, absolutely, and without exception (genkin shugi). 55 Having established his opposition to opium and explained the inadvisability of an absolute ban, Goto- introduced his solution: gradual suppression (zenkin shugi) by means of a government monopoly.

As in Europe and the United States, Qing subjects became defined by the unfamiliar practice of opium smoking. 14 Social Darwinism also supplied various biological metaphors for narcotics. The analogy of poison, an especial preoccupation of nineteenth-century society, dominated early presentations of opium in Japan. 15 Oka Senjin attributed Qing China’s decline in part to suffering from the disease of smoke poisoning (endoku). 16 In the late nineteenth century, the steady replacement of the miasma paradigm of disease with germ theory in the new state-led science of public health generated various metaphors involving contagion.

23 In 1894, the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War provoked a crisis of legitimacy in Japan. Incipient alarm over opium flared into a full-fledged moral crusade. 25 Japan’s victory, which shocked its opponent and the world, intensified global convictions that opium had sapped the racial fitness and capacity for nationhood of the Chinese people. 26 Also as a result of the war, the rate of Chinese immigration to Japan slowed considerably and permanently. ” Japan’s victory allowed the nation to reconsider the terms upon which Chinese would be allowed to settle in the home islands.

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Moral nation : modern Japan and narcotics in global history by Miriam Kingsberg
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