<div>As increasing attention is drawn to globalization, questions arise about the fate of "the nation," a political and social unit that for centuries has seemed the common-sense way to organize the world. In Nation Work, Timothy Brook and André Schmid draw together eight essays that use historical examples from Asian countries--China, India, Korea, and Japan--to enrich our understandings of the origin and growth of nations.<br></div><div>Asia provides fertile ground for this inquiry, the volume argues, because in Asia the history of the modern nation has been inseparable from global influences in the form of Western imperialism. Yet, while the impetus for building a modern national identity may have come from the need to fashion a favorable place in a world system dominated by Western nations, those engaged in nationalist enterprises found their particular voices more often in relation to tensions within Asia than in relation to more generic tensions between Asia and the West.<br></div><div>With topics ranging from public health measures in nineteenth-century Japan through textual scholarship of Tamil intellectuals, the willful division of Korea's history from China's, the development of China's cotton industry, and the meaning of "postnational-ism" for Chinese artists, the essays reveal the fascinating array of sites at which nation work can take place.<br></div><div>This will be essential reading for historians and social scientists interested in Asia.<br></div><div>Timothy Brook is Professor of History, Stanford University. André Schmid is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto.<br></div>
Nation Work
Asian Elites and National IdentitiesThe University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2000University of Michigan
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-472-11032-2 Contents
Introduction: Nations and Identities in Asia Timothy Brook and Andre Schmid......................................................1Constructing the National Body: Public Health and the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Japan Susan L. Burns..........................17Discourses of Empowerment: Missionary Orientalism in the Development of Dravidian Nationalism V. Ravindiran......................51Decentering the "Middle Kingdom": The Problem of China in Korean Nationalist Thought, 1895-1910 Andre Schmid.....................83Two Kinds of Nation, What Kind of State? R. Bin Wong.............................................................................109Chen Gongbo and the Construction of a Modern Nation in 1930s China Margherita Zanasi.............................................125Collaborationist Nationalism in Occupied Wartime China Timothy Brook.............................................................159The Incoherent Nation: An Exploration of Chinese "Postnationalism" Xiaoping Li...................................................191Nation and Postnation in Japan: Global Capitalism and the Idea of National History Thomas Keirstead..............................219Bibliography......................................................................................................................241Contributors......................................................................................................................263Index.............................................................................................................................265
Chapter One
Constructing the National Body: Public Health and the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Japan Susan L. Burns
The Body in Question
In 1883, Nagayo Sensai, who headed the Board of Hygiene within the Home Ministry of the Japanese government, wrote a short article entitled "Correcting the Mistaken Understanding of Hygiene." In this work, Nagayo attempted to clarify the meaning of the term eisei, which, while usually translated as "hygiene," is also part of the compound koshu eisei, or "public health." He had chosen the compound eisei from the Chinese classics a little more than a decade before to translate the German term Gesundheitspflege, and it had quickly become one of the most popular of the Meiji neologisms, appearing in the titles of a host of health handbooks and in the advertisements of patent medicines. Nagayo, however, was not pleased with the popular understanding of this term. Throughout his short piece, he emphasized the social benefits, rather than the individual pleasures, of hygienic practices. Hygiene, he asserted, did not refer to the pursuit of "easy living, delicious foods, or luxury," as many people seemed to think. Rather, its aim was "to discipline the body," "to strengthen the soldiers' vitality," and "to make the flesh able to withstand bad weather and humble living" (Nagayo 1883, 32-33).
Nagayo's concern for the public understanding of eisei, which had come to signify a wide range of "healthy" practices from brushing one's teeth to quarantining the sick, is revealing of the Japanese government's interest in the bodies of its citizens, an interest that was intimately tied to the pursuit of the new national goals of "Increase Production and Promote Industry" and "Rich Nation, Strong Military," as popular slogans of the day put it. A subordinate of Nagayo's made this relation even more explicit when he declared, also in 1883, that "healthy bodies and active spirits are the single great foundation of Japan's wealth and power" (Matsuyama 1883, 2).
This essay explores the place of the body in the Japanese government's project of nation building in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Soon after its establishment in 1868, the new government of the Meiji emperor made improving the health of its citizens a state priority, and to that end it began not only to exercise its authority over medical knowledge, practice, and institutions but also to create a system of public health. Bureaucrats in charge of state medical policy such as Nagayo Sensai viewed sickness and disease as threats to the well-being of the "national body"-the literal rendering of the Japanese term kokutai, or "national polity," which had a central place in the ideology of the emperor-centered state (Gluck 1985, chap. 5). The medical system that emerged in the 1870s and 1880s was organized around the principles of policing and confinement, as the primary means of dealing with the "danger" that disease posed to the creation of a large healthy population of potential workers and soldiers. The process of constructing the new medical and public health system was, however, not easy. The government in articulating state medical policy made reference to notions of social benefit and national necessity, but popular contestation greeted attempts to implement the new public health policies, which suggests that the notion of an easy metonymic relationship between the "national" and individual bodies was one not shared by all Japanese. The debate over the nature of the relation between individuals and the national body is the subject of this essay.
I begin by exploring the rise of public health as idea, policy, and administrative system and then turn to examining how the concept of public health was applied to two very different diseases, syphilis and mental illness. I have chosen these two diseases out of the many that were addressed by public health policy in the nineteenth century for several reasons. First, in early modern Japan the "culture" of both diseases differed dramatically from the understanding of them that emanated from the Meiji state. By examining them, we can catch a glimpse of how the new medical policy entered into popular culture and with what consequences. Second, the two allow us to explore how public health discourse intersected with other discursive forms that also emanated from the state. For example, as we shall see, public health discourse on syphilis was never purely "medical" but was also implicated in and ordered by notions of sexuality and gender roles. Finally, the different natures of the diseases themselves make them useful for purposes of comparison and contrast. Proceeding in this way, I hope to expose the terms and the limits of the debate on the nature of the body. By the end of the Meiji period, the concept of "public health" had to some degree been naturalized but not in ways that clearly confirmed the relation between the individual and national bodies that the state envisioned.
The Meiji State and Medicine: Rendering Health "Public"
The new Japanese government's first statement on medical policy was issued in December 1868, only two months after the emperor's triumphant entry into his newly renamed capital of Tokyo. A proclamation of the Council of State announced that because of his "benevolence and affection" the emperor could no longer ignore the abuse of human life that characterized much of contemporary medical practice and thus he had decided to regulate the practice of medicine (Koseisho imukyoku 1955, 1). The evocation of the emperor's interest and concern is significant because throughout the Meiji period the government legitimated reform efforts by identifying them with the imperial will-and by extension with the national good. But what this early proclamation also reveals is the...
