Abstract
The Home Islands of Japan witnessed incredible changes during the Meiji era as Japanese society, politics, foreign relations, and industry were transformed and modernized. Physical manifestations of modernization, such as railways, factories, and Westernized urban landscapes, were not the only evidence of the changes taking place in Japan in the latter half of the nineteenth century A new nationalism also arose during this period—an ideology that, in part, came to be related to extending Japan’s presence abroad through the acquisition of colonies. In 1895, following the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), Taiwan became Japan’s first colony. This was quickly followed by the acquisition of the Guandong (Kwantung) leasehold in southern Manchuria in 1905 and the annexation of Korea in 1910. Within only a few decades of embarking on its modernization drive, Japan had emerged, by the turn of the twentieth century, as a growing imperial power in East Asia.1
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Notes
For an introduction to the history of Japanese imperialism and colonial adventures during the Meiji and early Taisho periods see Marius B. Jansen, “Japanese Imperialism: Late Meiji Perspectives,” in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945, ed. Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 61–79; Mark R. Peattie, “Japanese Attitudes Toward Colonialism, 1895–1945,” in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945, ed. Myers and Peattie, pp. 80–127;
and William G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism 1894–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
On the debates over the concepts of “modernity,” “East Asian modernity,” and “colonial modernity” (and many other forms of “modernity”) and their application to an analysis of the histories of post-Meiji Japan and its colonies see several of the essays in both Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson, eds., Colonial Modernity in Korea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999);
and Sharon A. Minichiello, ed., Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, 1900–1930 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998).
On the history of Japan’s creation and development of the puppet state of Manzhouguo see Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998);
and Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publisher, 2004). For a more detailed analysis of Dairen’s pre-1931 history see Robert Perrins, “Great Connections: The Creation of a City, Dalian, 1905–1931,” unpublished Ph.D. diss., Department of History, York University, Toronto, 1998.
The most complete histories of Dairen during the period of Japanese rule are: Gu Mingyi et al., Riben qinzhan Luda sishinian shi (A 40-year history of Japan’s occupation of Lushun and Dalian) (hereafter cited as RQLSS) (Shenyang: Liaoning renmin chubanshe, 1991);
and Inoue Kenzaburō, ed., Dairen-shi shi (The history of the city of Dairen) (Dairen: Dairen-shi yakusho, 1936).
For a comprehensive review of the departments and equipment housed in the new SMR hospital in Dairen see Report on Progress in Manchuria (hereafter cited as ROP) (Dairen: SMR, 1929 ed.), pp. 164–167; “Dairen Hospital,” MDNMS July 1, 1927, 10–13; and Sun Chengdai and Xu Yuanchen, Diguozhuyi qinlue Dalian shi congshu weisheng juan (A collection of materials on imperialist aggression and Dalian’s history: Health issues) (hereafter cited as DSCW) (Dalian: Dalian chubanshe, 1999).
The classic study of the relationship between technology and the creation and development of colonial empires is Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
For an introduction to the scholarship on the history of medicine in the European colonies in Asia see David Arnold, ed. Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988);
Roy Macleod and Milton Lewis, eds., Disease, Medicine, and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1988);
Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
and Lenore Manderson, Sickness and the State: Health and Illness in Colonial Malaya, 1870–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
See Liu, “Medical Reform in Colonial Taiwan” (2000); and Ming-cheng Lo, Doctors within Borders: Profession, Ethnicity, and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
On the history of the various Guandong administrations see Kantō-kyoku shisei sanjūnen shi (A 30-year history of the Guandong Bureau) (hereafter cited as KKSSS) (Tokyo: Toppan insatsu kabushiki kaisha, 1936), pp. 61–78; RQLSS, pp. 39–42 and 68–77; and Kwantung (Guandong) Government, The Kwantung Government: Its Functions and Works (hereafter cited as KGFW) (Dairen: Manchuria Daily News, 1929 ed.), pp. 16–21.
Great Britain, Foreign Office and Board of Trade, Diplomatic and Consular Reports: Japan, Dairen (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1907, Report no. 3857), p. 8.
Koshizawa Akira, Shokuminchi Manshū no toshi keikaku (Urban development in colonial Manchuria) (Tokyo: Ajia Keizai Kenkyūjo, 1978), pp. 50–53;
and Y. Konishio, Port of Dairen (Dairen: Research Office of the South Manchuria Railway Company, 1923), p. 4.
See Kantō-shū Chō Chobokuka (Department of Public Works, Government of the Guandong Territory), comp., Dairen toshi kekaku gaiyō (A summary of Dairen’s city planning) (Dairen: Dairen-shi yakusho, 1938), pp. 1–4;
and Liu Zhongquan and Gui Qingxi, eds., Guanyu Dalian weilai chengshi xingtai de yanjiu (A study regarding the future of Dalian’s urban morphology) (Dalian: Dalian shi ruan kexue keti, 1996), pp. 34–40.
Adachi Kinnosuke, Manchuria: A Survey (New York: Robert M. McBride & Co., 1925), p. 72.
On the Russian era in Manchuria the reader is referred to Rosemary Quested, Matey Imperialist? The Tsarist Russians in Manchuria, 1895–1917 (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong, 1982);
David Wolff, To the Harbin Station. The Liberal Alternative in Russian Manchuria, 1898–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999);
and Soren Clausen and Stig Thogersen, The Making of a Chinese City: History and Historiography in Harbin (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), pp. 23–52.
On the history of the “Garden City” movement in Japan during the early twentieth century see Watanabe Shun-ichi, “Nihonteki Denen toshi ron no kenkyū II: Naimushō chihō kyoku yūshi: Denen toshi (1907) o megutte” (“Studies of the ‘Garden City’ Japanese style no. 2: An analysis of the introduction of the ‘Garden City’ concept to Japan in 1907 by the Minister of the Interior”), Nihon Toshi Keikaku Gakkai gakujutsu kenkyū happyōkai ronbunshū (The Journal of the City Planning Institute of Japan) 1978, 13: 283–288; and André Sorensen, The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning from Edo to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 89 and 137–142.
On the history of the plague in China see Carol Benedict, Bubonic Plague in Nineteenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 1–15;
and Iijima Wataru, Pesuto to kindai Chūgoku (Plague and modern China) (Tokyo: Kenbun Shuppan, 2000).
Carl F. Nathan, Plague Prevention and Politics in Manchuria, 1910–1931 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 1–41.
Kantō totokum rinji bōrekibu (Guandong Temporary Municipal Sanitation Bureau), Meiji yonjū-sen yonen minami Manshū, pesto ryukō shi furoku (An account of the plague in Southern Manchuria, 1910–1911) (Dairen: Manshū hibi shinbunsha, 1912); and Kimura Ryoji, Dairen monogatari (An account of Dairen) (Tokyo: Kenkōsha, 1983), pp. 26–28.
See Richard P. Strong, Erich Martini, G. F. Petrie, and A. Stanley, eds., Report of the International Plague Conference Held at Mukden, April 1911 (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1912), pp. 33–34;
Kantō-kyoku (The Guandong Bureau), Kantōkyoku tōkei sanjūnen shi (Thirty years of statistical records of the Guandong administration) (Dairen: Kantō-kyoku, 1935), pp. 648–651.
For more detailed accounts of the plague outbreak in Manchuria during the early twentieth century see Nathan, Plague Prevention and Politics in Manchuria, 1910–1931 (1967); ROP (1929 ed.), pp. 171–177; DSCW, pp. 48–56; Wolff, To the Harbin Station, pp. 92–95; and the autobiography of Wu Liande, the Chinese physician who headed the North Manchurian Plague Prevention Service for much of the early twentieth century,
Wu Lien-teh, Plague Fighter: Autobiography of a Chinese Physician (Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons, 1959).
FER, August 1914, p. 85. For more on the importance of the SMR to the development of the prewar Japanese colony in Manchuria see Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka, The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904–1932 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001).
See William Johnston, The Modern Epidemic: A History of Tuberculosis in Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Council of East Asia Studies, Harvard University, 1995), pp. 70–90.
“Hygiene of South Manchuria,” The Light of Manchuria, August 1, 1922, 40–41; DSCW, pp. 99–125; and Kinoshita Suzuo, Dairen Seiai Iin Nijūgoshūnen shi (A 25-year history of the Dairen Seiai Hospital) (Dairen: n.p., 1931).
A few of the standard works on the history of the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic are Richard Collier, The Plague of the Spanish Lady: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919 (London: Macmillan, 1974);
Alfred W. Crosby, Epidemic and Peace, 1918–1919 (Westport: Greenwood, 1976);
and Howard Phillips and David Killingray’s edited volume, The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19: New Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2003).
See MDN, October 28 and 30, 1918; and November 2, 4, and 7, 1918. On efforts in Japan to combat the influenza see Edwina Palmer and Geoffrey W. Rice, “‘Divine Wind versus Devil Wind’: Popular Responses to Pandemic Influenza in Japan, 1918–1919,” Japan Forum 1992, 4 (2): 317–328;
and Geoffrey W. Rice, “Japan and New Zealand in the 1918 Influenza Pandemic: Comparative Perspectives on Official Responses and Crisis Management,” in The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19: New Perspectives, ed. Howard Phillips and David Killingray (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 73–85.
The fact that Fuller and Company was chosen to design and build the new SMR facility in Dairen, despite the fact that the firm had never before worked on a hospital project, was not an uncommon story in the history of hospital architecture in the early twentieth century. Even in North America before the 1950s many architectural firms designed hospitals without prior experience or having hospital design specialists on staff. See Stephen Verderber and David J. Fine, Healthcare Architecture in an Era of Radical Transformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
“New General Hospital of [the] SMR Co.: Building Lessons from the Tokyo Disaster,” FER January 1924, p. 28. On the history of the construction of business buildings in the Marunouchi district during the Meiji and Taishō periods see Dallas Finn, Meiji Revisited: The Sites of Victorian Japan (New York: Weatherhill, 1995), pp. 188–191.
Regarding the refitting of the region’s railways, and the SMR’s (and Meiji Japan’s) purchase and use of American railway technology between 1906 and the early 1920s, see George Bronson Rea, “Daylight in Manchuria,” FER, November 1920, pp. 3–18; Ramon H. Myers, “Japanese Imperialism in Manchuria: The South Manchuria Railway Company, 1906–1933,” in The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937, ed. Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R Peattie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 122–123; Matsusaka, The Making of Japanese Manchuria, pp. 126–148; and Finn, Meiji Revisited, pp. 49–50 and 138–142.
R. O. Matheson, Modern Manchuria: A Series of Articles Written for the Chicago Tribune (Dairen: Manshū nichi-nichi shinbun, 1926), p. 8.
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Perrins, R.J. (2005). Doctors, Disease, and Development: Engineering Colonial Public Health in Southern Manchuria, 1905–1926. In: Low, M. (eds) Building a Modern Japan. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981110_6
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