Abstract
In his 1908 paper discussing the reproductively active years of women of various ethnic backgrounds, physician Yamazaki Masashige (1872–1950) emphasizes the idea that many different “races” reside in the Japanese empire other than the Japanese race, which he describes as “the race descended from the imperial line” (tenson shuzoku).1 These so-called inferior races included the Ainu, the Chinese in Taiwan, Taiwanese aborigines, and the people who inhabited the Ryūkyū islands (the Ryūkyūans). Discussing the relations between the Japanese and these other races, Yamazaki draws on Social Darwinist thinking: “According to the law in which the superior conquers the inferior, weaker races will be subordinated by stronger ones. These [inferior] races would either assimilate to a superior one or perish. [As such,] they will never preserve the original racial characteristics.”2 Believing that these non-Japanese “races” would eventually become extinct, Yamazaki felt it urgent to study their racial traits, including differences among the different races in the onset of menstruation and menopause, while these racial groups still existed. Yamazaki was one of numerous Meiji scientists who appropriated from Europe and the United States the notion of race as a scientifically valid category along with Social Darwinist ideas. Focusing on Yamazaki’s paper, I examine the way sexed and racialized bodies emerged from scientific and medical discourses in Japanese history.
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Notes
Yamazaki Masashige, “Nihon, Ainu, Ryūkyū, oyobi Shina yon shuzoku fujin no gekkei ni tsuite,” Ogata fujin kagaku kiyū 1908, 2: 108–177, on pp. 110–113.
For the development of modern race science in Europe and the United States, see, e.g., Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1982);
Frank Spencer, “Anthropometry,” History of Physical Anthropology: An Encyclopedia, ed. Frank Spencer (New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1997), pp. 80–89;
Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1996);
Lee Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998);
John S. Haller, “Race and the Concept of Progress in Nineteenth Century American Ethnology,” American Anthropologist June 1971, 73 (3): 710–722;
Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism 1870–1945 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
Benoit Massin, “From Virchow to Fischer: Physical Anthropology and ‘Modern Race Theories’ in Wilhelmine Germany,” in Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, ed. George W. Stocking (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. 79–154.
Some scholars from the Tokugawa period engaged in ethnological studies of racial groups they considered to be different from the Japanese. Such studies, however, did not seem to have had a major influence on the type of scientific studies on race I consider in this chapter. It is possible that the views of race developed in the Tokugawa period had an impact in shaping the type of research Tsuboi Shōgorō and his followers developed in cultural anthropology. However, such a line of investigation is out of the scope of this paper. For ethnological studies in the Tokugawa period, see, Margarita Winkel, “Academic Traditions, Urban Dynamics and Colonial Threat: the Rise of Ethnography in Early Modern Japan,” in Anthropology and Colonialism in Asia and Oceania, eds. Jan van Bermen and Akitoshi Shimizu (Richmond, Great Britain: Curzon Press, 1999), pp. 40–64.
Morse had studied under the prominent naturalist Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) at Harvard University. In 1859, the year after Morse became Agassiz’s assistant, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Although Agassiz was highly skeptical of Darwin’s theory of evolution in its entirety, Morse, who was studying brachiopods, was intrigued by Darwin’s hypothesis. Yoshioka Ikuo, Nihon jinshu ron no makuake: Mōsu to Omori kaizuka (Tokyo: Kyōritsu Shuppan, 1987), pp. 32–33.
Morse’s lectures on Darwinism were transcribed and translated by Ishikawa Chiyomatsu (1860–1935), and published as Dōbutsu shinkaron (Animal evolutionism) (1883). Suzuki Zenji, Nihon no yūseigaku (Tokyo: Sankyō Shuppan, 1983), pp. 24–25.
Akira Nagazumi, “The Diffusion of the Idea of Social Darwinism in East and Southeast Asia,” Historia Scientiarum March 1983 (24): 1–18; Eikoh Shimao, “Darwinism in Japan, 1877–1927,” Annals of Science 1981, 38: 93–102;
Saitō Shōji, Nihon shakaigaku seiritsu shi no kenkyū (Tokyo: Fukumura Shuppan, 1976), pp. 111–206;
Unoura Hiroshi, “Samurai Darwinism: Hiroyuki Katō and the Reception of Darwin’s Theory in Modern Japan from the 1880s to the 1900s,” History and Anthropology 1999, 11 (2–3): 235–255; and “Kindai nihon ni okeru shakai dāwinizumu no juyō to tenkai,” in Kōza shinka vol. 2: Shinka shisō to shakai, ed. Shibatani Atsuhiro, Nagano Kei, Yōrō Takeshi (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1991), pp. 119–152;
Watanabe Masao, “Meiji Nihon ni okeru shinka ron no juyō,” Dāwin to shinkaron (Tokyo: Kyōritsu Shuppan, 1984), pp. 192–210. Regarding the reception of Darwinism in Japan, Watanabe stresses that Japanese intellectuals primarily accepted Darwinism as a simplified form of Social Darwinism to shape social scientific views, rather than a scientific theory to be discussed in the field of biology. Watanabe also asserts that Darwinism was readily accepted by Japanese students because there was very little opposition against Darwinian evolutionism based on Christian beliefs. Watanabe’s explanation seems still insufficient to account for the widespread influence of Darwinism in Meiji intellectual scenes, and more research is needed.
For a discussion of various appropriations of evolutionism by political theorists and activists during the Meiji period, see Julia A. Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 2001).
Shimoide Sōkichi, Meiji shakai shisō kenkyū (Tokyo: Asano Shoten, 1932), pp. 224–231. A critic who advocated interracial marriage between the Japanese and European races was Takahashi Yoshio, a student of Fukuzawa Yukichi. Katō Hiroyuki presented a counterargument against Takahashi’s assertion. Suzuki Zenji discusses this controversy in Suzuki (1983), pp. 32–44.
See also Takahashi Yoshio, Nihon jinshu kairyō ron (Tokyo: Jiji Shinpōsha, Maruzen, etc., 1884).
More on the debate on racial mixing in Meiji Japan, see Morris Low, “The Japanese Nation in Evolution: W. E. Griffis, Hybridity and the Whiteness of the Japanese Race,” History and Anthropology 1999, 11 (2–3): 203–204.
Terada Kazuo, Nihon no jinruigaku (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1981), p. 30;
Oguma Eiji, Tan’itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 1995), p. 22. See also, W. Dönitz, “Beobachtungen an Becken von Japanerinnen,” Mitt. d. Deutsch. Gesellschaft f. Natur-und Volkerkunde Ostasiens, Heft 11, November 1876.
This paper is cited in Ogata Masakiyo, Nihon sanka gakushi (Tokyo: Kagaku Shoin, 1980, reprint, originally published in 1914), pp. 1087–1089, 1228.
A partial Japanese translation of this paper is found in Yasui Hiroshi, Berutsu no shōgai (Kyoto: Shibunkaku, 1995), pp. 275–315.
See also Suzuki Hisashi, “Koganei Yoshikiyo sensei to Erwin von Baelz hakushi,” Jinruigaku zasshi March 1974, 82 (1): 6;
Kudō Masaki, Kenkyūshi: Nihon jinshu ron (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1979), pp. 67–69; Terada, Nihon no jinruigaku, p. 30; Oguma, Tan’itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen, pp. 22–23. Baelz’s research did not influence the development of anthropological studies in Japan extensively. This is partly because he only taught courses in medicine and did not teach anthropology to Japanese students or even meet with those who belonged to the anthropological study group at the university. Moreover, his measuring method was different from the one that was adopted in the 1882 Frankfurt agreement that established a standard measuring system. Suzuki Hisashi speculates that due to this fact Japanese anthropologists who were active after Baelz’s time could not use Baelz’s research results. Suzuki Hisashi, pp. 5–6.
About Baelz’s life in Japan, see Toku Berutsu, Berutsu no nikki (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1951–1955);
F. Shottorendā, Eruuin fon Berutsu (Tokyo: Ōzorasha, 1995, a Japanese translation of Erwin von Baelz by Felix Schottlaender, published in 1928); Yasui, Berutsu no shōgai, op.cit.;
Shumitto-Muraki Masumi, Hana Berutsu e no tabi (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993).
For example, Koganei believed that the Ainu race, which had once been the inhabitants of Japan, was expelled from Japan’s main island due to the invasion of the presumably stronger and superior Japanese race. As a result, they were living only in Hokkaidō by the time Koganei conducted his research. More specifically, he considered the Ainu as a declining racial group compared to the thriving Japanese race which he thought possessed a more advanced civilization than the one that the Ainu maintained. Kudō Masaki, “Ikakei jinruigaku no seiritsu to sono tokushitsu,” Tōhoku rekishi kan kenkyū kiyō 1978, 4: 4–5. For various representations of the Ainu as a “dying race,” see Richard Siddle, Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 76–112.
In Tan’itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen, Oguma Eiji makes a valuable contribution on this issue. Oguma (1995). See also his more recent work, Nihonjin no kyōkai: Okinawa, Ainu, Taiwan, Chōsen, shokuminchi shihai kara fukki undō made (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 1998). A discussion of Japanese appropriations of race theory and evolutionism in the larger context of the colonization of Asia and the Pacific is found in Christine Dureau and Morris Low, “The Politics of Knowledge: Science, Race and Evolution in Asia and the Pacific,” History and Anthropology 1999, 11 (2–3): 131–156.
Ibid., pp. 111–113. Whether the ezo from the eighth and ninth centuries was identical to the Ainu has been a point of contention among Japanese scholars. However, it is highly likely that Yamazaki assumed that the ezo was the ancestor of the Ainu from the Meiji period because the term, ezo, was used to indicate the Ainu since the thirteenth century. See William Wayne Farris, Heavenly Warriors: The Evolution of Japan’s Military, 500–1300 (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1995), pp. 82–83.
For health conditions of the Ainu in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, see, e.g., Fujino Yutaka, Nihon fashizumu to yūsei shisō (Kyoto: Kamogawa Shuppan, 1998), pp. 216–259.
Ibid., p. 111. For Japanese policy toward the Ainu during the Meiji (1868–1912) and Taishō (1912–1926) periods, see Enomori Susumu, Ainu no rekishi (Tokyo: Sanseidō, 1987)
and Takagi Hiroshi, “Ainu minzoku e no dōka seiseku no seiritsu,” in Kokumin kokka wo tou, ed. Rekishigaku Kenkyūkai (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1994), pp. 166–183;
Richard Siddle, “The Ainu and the Discourse of ‘Race’,” in The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan, ed. Frank Dikötter (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), pp. 136–157;
David L. Howell, “The Meiji State and the Logic of Ainu ‘Protection’,” in New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan, ed. Helen Hardacre, with Adam L. Kern (Leiden, New York, and Köln: Brill, 1997), pp. 612–634.
For Tokugawa state policy toward Ainu over the issue of vaccinations, see Brett L. Walker, “The Early Modern Japanese State and Ainu Vaccinations: Redefining the Body Politic 1799–1868,” Past & Present, May 1999, 163: 121–160.
See, e.g., Michael Weiner, “The Invention of Identity: Race and Nation in Pre-war Japan,” in The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan, ed. Frank Dikötter (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), pp. 96–117.
Tomiyama Ichirō, “Colonialism and the Sciences of the Tropical Zone: The Academic Analysis of Difference in ‘the Island Peoples,’” Positions 1995, 3 (2): 367–391; also, Tomiyama, “Sokutei to iu gihō: jinshu kara kokumin e,” Edo no shisō, July 1996 (4): 119–129.
On the question of how the issues of “jinshu” and “minzoku” were discussed during the early twentieth century, the 1930s and the World War II, see, e.g., Kevin M. Doak, “Culture, Ethnicity, and the State in Early Twentieth-Century Japan,” in Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, 1900–1930, ed. Sharon Minichiello (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998);
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Debating Racial Science in Wartime Japan,” in Osiris 1998, 13: 354–375; Sakano Tōru, “Kiyono Kenji no Nihon jinshu ron: Daitōwa kyōwaken to jinruigaku,” Kagakushi, kagaku tetsugaku kenkyū, 11: 85–99; “Jinruigakusha tachi no ‘minami’: senzen nihon ni okeru mikuroneshia jin kenkyū wo megutte, Part I,” Kagakushi kenkyū, January 1997 (200): 239–250; and “Jinruigakusha tachi no ‘minami’: senzen nihon ni okeru mikuroneshia jin kenkyū wo megutte, Part II,” Kagakushi kenkyū, April 1997 (201): 9–18;
Sumiko Otsubo and James R. Bartholomew, “Eugenics in Japan: Some Ironies of Modernity, 1883–1945,” Science in Context 1998, II (3–4): 133–146; Sumiko Otsubo Sitcawich, “Eugenics in Imperial Japan: Some Ironies of Modernity, 1883–1945,” unpublished Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1998;
Fujino, Nihon fashizumu to yūsei shisō, op.cit. (1998):
Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, Struggle For National Survival: Eugenics in Sino-Japanese Contexts, 1896–1945 (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).
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Terazawa, Y. (2005). Racializing Bodies through Science in Meiji Japan: The Rise of Race-Based Research in Gynecology. In: Low, M. (eds) Building a Modern Japan. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981110_5
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