Hello everybody, this is Marshall Pell, I'm the editor-in-chief of the new books network, and school is about to begin, so I imagine many nbn listeners who are teachers are putting together a syllabi, and we'd like to encourage you to put the nbn on your syllabi. There are over 25,000 episodes in the nbn library, each of them an interview with an author who really knows what they're talking about. No matter what you teach, you'll probably find something there that will be interesting to your students, so put it in the resource section of your syllabus and encourage your students to go take a listen. Thanks very much. Welcome to the new books network. Welcome to the new books in Japanese Studies, a channel in the new books network. I'm your host, Rans Vagenberg, a store in Japan at Prince State and Cute University. Today, we'll be talking to Judith Vital, Miram Kingsberg, Padilla, and Oleg Benesch about her edited book drugs and reporting consumption in Japan, which came up with real last year in 2023. Judith, Mira and Olegs are friends and colleagues with whom I had a long quiz and I hope friendship. I learned much from their work on a range of topics from wartime anthropology, Miriam, and of course drugs, we'll talk about it later. Innovation and bishido history of Yoshipan and castle, something I wrote a book with Oleg above also, and the long history of memory and Mongol invasion of Japan and castle photography with Judith and which her book just came out with Harvard, but Mongol invasion breaks out about this. So I'm thrilled to have the model here today. Thank you for coming everybody. So let me start with a question we ask everybody. What brought you all to this story? Can you tell us more about your own background as well and what brought you to Japanese Studies also, except for Miriam. Those are new grounds for all of you now. Hello, Ran. By training about my background, I started as a medieval historian of Japan, and then for about the past 15 or 20 years I did views. The view on the Middle Ages in early modern and modern Japan through the lens of the Mongol invasion. So it was, as you mentioned, about the historical writing of the Mongol invasions in Edo, Japan, and Meichi, Japan, and drugs. I'm a very slow publisher and I started being interested in the topic already about over 10 years ago. I think it was when I was wandering through the library and I saw this title, Ahhen Sake Majan, so that would be an English opium, wine, and games by a Japanese author called Inoue Kobai. And I didn't look at the books at that time. So next time I went to Japan, I decided to look at it and I was expecting a book about Japanese drug culture, but actually it was about China. So of course that tells us a lot about the construction of China and Japan in the 1920s, but I was disappointed because it was not about Japanese drug culture. But then about the same time Asahi Shimbun went online, so I decided to cross search under the keyword opium and it turns out that there were loads of advertisements for opium in the newspaper in the Meichi period. And that was because there were epidemics of cholera, so it was used as a medicine. So that's from where my research started looking at the medical use of opium and other opiates. And if anybody was interested in this book by Inoue Kobai, Miriam has written about it in her book, Moral Nation. So, thank you. Good segue to Miriam. Well, thank you for the shout out. Yeah, I have been working on drugs for a pretty long time. So I had initially, for my doctoral dissertation many years ago, been interested in studying the history of Dain, Dalian, Japan's longest held territory on the Asian mainland, and obviously a site of settler colonialism and various kinds of imperial experimentation. But when I learned that Dain also had the highest rate of illegal drug consumption of any city ever recorded, that changed my focus a lot and really made drugs the primary objective of my dissertation. So that became my book, which was published 10 years ago in 2014. When I started working on the topic, I really couldn't have imagined that someday there would be enough people interested in it that we could have an edited collection like this. So when you do organized the initial workshop that led to this book in 2019, it was just so exciting for me. And then to be able to proceed to this edited collection was was a wonderful journey. Thank you. And like everybody here, like you also have so much range, you work around in so many different things afterwards, and I meet you in different contexts also in other work. So it's very hard to see you again, working on drugs. Yes, and maybe you can tell us about the workshop, where was it? Yeah, I mean, I can touch on that as well. I mean, I think similar to you to actually kind of start as a medievalist, I don't know if there's some kind of thing that leads naturally from medievalism to drugs, but I started there did a lot of work on, especially kind of images of the samurai in the imperial period. And then castles, obviously, we're working right on that. And that's quite the edith. And I think first I'm working together on castles as well. And in terms of kind of as a historian, becoming interested in drugs, I think, was reading probably John Jennings's work on King of the Opium Empire, which was also kind of foundational to the workshop. And then reading Miriam's book when that came out. But I mean, I guess my own interest goes back a bit further into the 1990s when I first went to Japan. And I mean, I was in a small town in Japan and randomly just going into a department store and coming across magic mushrooms and peyote for sale. And I asked my Japanese friends about this and none of them knew anything about these things. And they're like, Oh, what is that stuff legal? And it turns out it is legal. And it was just something I kind of noticed at the time. And then I remember the news in 2002 when magic mushrooms were made illegal. And then later, we're not doing my PhD in Vancouver in Canada. I remember there were a lot of debates about legalization of marijuana on the Japanese consulate. They're warning Japanese citizens in Canada that they shouldn't consume drugs that were illegal in Japan, even if they were legal in other places. And these dynamics, I guess got me interested in the history of drugs in Japan. And then when you did work putting together this wonderful workshop in Zurich in 2019, it wasn't a great opportunity to kind of investigate this history of drugs a bit for me. I don't know if you'd want to make it more about the workshop. Maybe I can say more about the workshop. It was actually because I never got funding for the drug project I had, which was meant to be a book project. And then I finally got a three-month day at Harvard University, where Jesus Solis, who is also observed in the book, contributed also, was commented in my paper. And then I talked to him if he would come. And then he originally, Miriam was, I think he took courses with Miriam. And I asked him, so do you think would Miriam come if I organized a workshop? So actually, I feel kind of lucky I didn't get the funding because it turned into a much better project this way, because so many people contributed. Yeah, we should sometimes think we should write, at least tell our students about how all those possible failures lead to a lot of good things. Sometimes you take different turns, we should bring it to good places. So I want to start with the title, actually, of the book and ask you about what do you mean by the drugs in a title? This is perhaps a counterintuitively, but we think we all know what drugs mean, but it's become very apparent in the first part with the chapters by Jonas Rug, that's how you say it. Dude, Anna and Riva and Tim Young. And those jobs are short as much crossover between different realms of drugs, socially, medically, and otherwise, in the early modern period. Can you tell us more about the conceptualization here? It's got to be a lot of your argument also. Yeah, that's an important question. I mean, when we talk about drugs nowadays, we usually think of illegal substances, but this kind of definition is very recent, historically, it probably goes back to the international conventions in the 1910s and 1920s when the prohibition regime evolved and made the access to these drugs more difficult globally. But before that period, drugs were I mean, what we think are now illegal substances were called poisonous drugs, so that were drugs which were medically very effective, but also dangerous. So even today, I mean, these substances are in pharmaceutical laws on the one hand and in criminal laws on the other, but it's always the same substances. And probably people think current debates are about illegalization, but it's more about how you want to regulate these substances. I mean, you don't want them completely legal. You still need them in medical spheres. And regulation is something already early modern states were concerned about regulation, including the early modern Japanese state. So I think it's very important to see these long journey to really understand how the whole regularity system developed in Japan and compared to other countries. I mean, there are several specificities in Japan, which I think can be explained from the longer history of drugs in Japan. So for the volume, I think it's great that we also had early modern historians like Jonas Riegg, Anand Reiva, and Ozaki Koji and Tim Young, who kind of looked at transition to meaty. Yes, Marilyn. I'm just building on what you did said. I think that that sort of long-dere was also built into the conception of the book just in terms of how we drew on drug studies for our definition of drugs. And drug studies has gotten so robust over the past 20 years or so in terms of its conceptualization of what we think of as a drug, sort of becoming more embracing of any kind of psychoactive or intoxicating substance. And we really wanted to gesture to that sort of conception in the book by showing the historical specificity of what constitutes a quote-unquote drug in any particular time. So bringing in the contributions of that historiography was, I think, really important to the three of us as well. Absolutely. Actually, if I can just add a little easter egg for people listening to the podcast, which is that, since we mentioned Jo and Oz lyrics are the chapter that that is open access and freely available. So please go to the website and definitely download that. Thank you. I should have mentioned it before. So, yeah, I was also thinking when I was reading Tim Young's book, Tim Young's chapter and others, and Jonas was Jonas the one wrote about Mami's. I don't remember, like the Mami powder. Like you can see, there's a lot of things that Japan has in common with other places, but also across space, right, between every mineral in Europe and more Japan, but also the use of drugs, but also across time, like the idea of what's illegal drug and who is a drug dealer, for example, you've seen with the drugs epidemic now in the US. I mean, what are drugs? What are the problematic drugs in the US now, which are not illegal? It makes one think about what drugs mean. So, I want to start with the consumption along the line we just talked about, because it's also, I'm very important part of your argument, right? First, what are drugs, but then like what you call the politics of consumption, right? You talk about consumption, also you talk about the other side, right? We just talk drug trade, right? Community chains and networks, and also, last but not least, the gender ring of drug discourses that kind of remain part of the argument, and the part from the previous work done on drugs. Can you expand a little bit on this? Yeah. So, by the politics of consumption, we meant that you always have two levels. You have the state, which does politics by regulating the access, but you can also understand it as the politics of consumption from below, the individual agency by adhering to laws or resisting to laws. So, that's the concept of politics of consumption. And so, of course, that means that you look at consumer types and the gender ring of drug discourse, it was just striking that at least three of the contributions are about the standard discourse. You have Miriam's contribution, which looks at how women change their association with drugs. Maybe she will tell more about it. And then Jesusoulis shows how in post-war Japan, women were especially a target of state repression. And Bill Maruti's contribution is about drugs in the '60s as means to construct women, but also men, masculinity by glue sniffing as a manly practice. About commodity chains and networks, I think if you talk about the politics of consumption, you must talk about the politics of production. It kind of goes together. You can't just look at consumers if you don't look at where the drugs come from. And that's maybe asking if we depart from previous work. I'm not sure readers will maybe find an answer. But for me, it was interesting. John Jennings wrote a great epilogue about the historiography of drugs when he was writing his book in the 1990s on Japan's opium empire. And there makes it very clear that the paradigm was the one set by the Tokyo trials, the on and on to the Nuremberg trials. It's the only military tribunal that ruled over the illegal drug trade. So at the time, the focus was really on the production side and trade side. And the challenge was to deconstruct total historiography that emerged from these Tokyo trials. But for me, I came in Switzerland. It's kind of the opposite. We had a huge drug problem in the 1980s. And for some reason, politicians and historians, sociologists, they all looked at consumers. And it was kind of meant to explain that people using drugs were resisting against conservative society. But the production side or the supply side was completely neglected. Nobody asked where these drugs came from. It's changing now. But from that perspective, it was natural for me to look at the consumers and not the producers. For me, not that I read so much about drugs before, but for me, that was new. The consumption focus. Yeah, Miriam? I think these cultural differences are just so interesting because in the United States, in terms of sort of taking on drugs as a quote unquote problem, the bias has been so strongly towards both regulation and controlling the supply side of it. So the historiography has really followed that too, to the point where I think our understanding of drug trading and drug trafficking and also of sort of the historiography of narcotics regulation is much more developed than our understanding of consumption. So in terms of making a historiographical contribution, I think that the fact that we've paid this kind of attention to users, really centered users in our collection is something that I'd like to call attention to. And I think some of the article's article in particular, "Hung Bean Shoes" article also really foreground those voices of users and try to extract them from the context in which they were sometimes compiled, which can be overlaid with the agendas of others and give them room to speak on their own. And to me, that's also an important function of what we're calling the politics of consumption. It's that time of the year. Your vacation is coming up. You can already hear the beach waves, feel the warm breeze, relax, and think about work. You really, really wanted all the work out while you're away. Monday.com gives you and the team that piece of mind. When all work is on one platform and everyone's in sync, things just flow wherever you are. Tap the banner to go to Monday.com. Yeah, and for me, I mean, there's so much to talk about in terms of consumption, in terms of state, not just regulation, but state, actually supplying of the trucks, which is, you know, for a lot of people, a lot of my students, when I taught this in the past where it was surprised, the fact that states were not regulating drugs, but actually selling in manufacturing drugs. I mean, of course, it's kind of obvious to people who know the day story, but for students, it's a big surprise. And of course, the number one state drug, in station number one drug, in East Asia, you can say, you know, this opium, right, known in photo of East Asia, no drug more opium dominated history and scholarship in Asia. I mean, you can, of course, like, de-war, the Joshua modernity, and you can argue in East Asia is the open war. And you have, according to, you have a lot of chapters that are dealing with this, right, Josey Uzaki, Kewing Hsu, who we already mentioned, William J. Clarence Smith, a chapter that I really interested in, the involvement of Jewish traders and their ethics in the drug raid. And also, we mentioned Judith, but in a way, everybody writes here about opium in their own way. Can we explore those different takes and how they add to the already, I would think, vast literature on opium in Asia? Well, when this collection was first composed, we saw, I think, representation in types of drugs being included in the book. But once the essays had come in and we were trying to organize them cardologically or thematically, we found that it made sense to cluster the writings on opium towards the middle of the book, because in the Meiji period, opium really was the big story for drugs in Japan. In some ways, this isn't surprising. At the time, opium was the most effective known analgesic form of pain relief. It's really only in the 1920s that we start to see morphine and heroin becoming widely available and widely used, supplanting opium because they're more intense and easier to use in some ways. So I think one thing that I really want to pull out about opium is the fact that we've contextualized it, yes, but also highlighted its salience in different realms of social and economic life. So the chapters, I think, do a really good job showing its penetration into different realms. Ozaki Koji's chapter is on domestic cultivation, showing how Japan attempted some import substitution. The primary sources he uses are really unclear and conflicting on when and where Japan started. It's a process of cultivating its own opium. And I think he goes to some trouble to make a ruling on this debate than Hombin Shou's chapter on Taiwan, sort of how opium was imbricated in this culture of what was in the process of becoming Japan. And just what I loved about that chapter was the inclusion of so many human stories, like the widow who was saved from having to remarry via donation from an opium smoker who is then repaid in opium, sort of showing that circularity and pervasiveness of the opium economy, and also hinting at its function as an article of money, the kind of drawing an implicit parallel with some of the narco states of today. And then William Clarence Smith's article on the British, but we should use the term British loosely because not all were equal representatives of Britishness. The British opium traders who were active in supplying opium to parts of the Japanese Empire, he comes through all of these diplomatic archives to suggest the precariousness of their stance on the boundary of legality and its shifting position in both the Japanese and British empires. So just all of these different ways in which opium found its way into the political and social fabric of late Meiji, early Tisho, Japan. Yes, sorry, I was muted. So I think it goes back to what Duet was saying about seeing opium in a paper is it's always when you go back to the historical record, it's surprised how much, you know, our modern ideas about what opium is and why it was, and it is being a social problem, which of course it became slowly, right? We're going to talk about it maybe a little bit later. I mean, it was what a normal drug, it wasn't different from other drugs, what we now see as legal drugs, right? In many ways. So I think for me, seeing this in all this work was very important, but on the other hand, also seeing the human stories, I think it's a really good contribution you see. When you focus on a consumption, like a lot of people here do, you see you look beyond a drug user, right? You detect and you can see beyond two people's life and you can see a lot of it in the stories that people bring. Yes, only. Okay, so, all right, something. Okay, so maybe we can carry on. So, yeah, so the middle part of the book talked about Meiji, but then a whole other part is where we have a whole bunch of other articles about the wartime, right? Because in wartime, this is where drug supplies, network or monitor networks really expand with the Japanese Empire. And you had Chris Billman work, Professor Judy Miriam, all focused on drug use during the war and beyond that. So I want to ask a very big question. Maybe we can ask it, maybe not. In what way did the Asia Pacific War impact the drug trade and in one hand a consumption and the other? And what was the long-term impact risk history on the post-war? And how does it connect to before and after? So, the war is a bit difficult because sources are so difficult to access. They disappear. There's a lot of— those are these have these meetings, prefectural meetings before the war, where they discuss drug problems and then during the war, these sources disappear. They might have been destroyed. So, it's not that easy to say, but it definitely continues with our chapters continue with opium. So, it's still opium is at the main focus and probably the pre-war and wartime period is so interesting because as Miriam mentioned, opium disappears and there's harder drugs, more pure drugs, more efficient drugs, easier to use because the dosage is precise. So, probably that makes East Asia so interesting because you have opium smoking, which is a part of the culture, but you also have this modern drug culture, which is very transnational and where people in East Asia also participate in it. So, the chapters which are about this pre-war time and post-war period, they show this from different angles. Prishpinman, I was also very excited that he participated. He's a well-known expert on the Japanese right wing parties and he accepted to kind of really make an article about the involvement of the right wing in the drug trade. It was—he really did research for our volume and in certain ways it ties into a book which was published a bit over 20 years ago called opium regimes where you see that all these regimes officially they're against drugs, but then they all trade in the drug because they just are dependent on the money. So, Chris shows that there were also right wing people who were drug traffickers from Manchuria to China to support the army but who also made a lot of money with the drug trade and the outlook is that it probably helped to accumulate finances also for the post-war political parties. My chapter is really because of the sources. It's really about the 20s and 30s when, for the first time, the Japanese began to be concerned about the medical use of drugs because authorities but also media realized that people were dependent because they were regular drug users and in a certain way it must be read together with Risou Solis chapter because he then takes the story to the media post-war period, the American occupation and there's continuities to trade like the drugs produced before the war spill into the post-war illegal market from the army directly into the civil life and then he also shows how trade routes change because Japan is connected to the US then. There's also continuities in the stigmatization of certain drug users, the foreign communities, so it's a Koreans before the war and they remain associated with drugs after the war. Probably Miriam can say more about her chapter. Yeah, sure. I guess my goal in the chapter was again to sort of delineate the lingering resonances of the wartime period in the post-war period by showing how the representation of the "addict" somebody's board needed to the hold of drugs, obviously a literary creation, how that figure of the addicts changed from the wartime period to the post-war period. Looking at sort of again we've brought up the idea of foreignness and gender but looking at how addiction was seen as this very foreign concept in Japan, very gendered in terms of almost transforming the male into a more dependent female. Obviously drawing on stereotypes about patriarchy and gender relations in that era but looking at how "addicts" were depicted as being these weak, feminized, dependent foreign creatures, mostly Chinese in the wartime era and then after Japan was defeated in 1945 we do see a sort of a shift in the representation of the addict to depict the self as a sort of a vanquished nation might be. These Japanese who had resisted characterization as "addicts" before 1945, for whom now it was suddenly a very useful and apt metaphor to sort of characterize their political, social and economic status and sort of the demise of that characterization as well in the 50s. Yeah I have to say that the ultra-rever chapter is actually in conversation with each other and I guess you read each other's chapters and it's really a pleasure as someone who you know been through the process of editing books and working with people. It was kind of a pleasure to kind of look at the conversation you have with each other especially Judith and Maria's chapters are talking to each other and then "addicts" in a different way also talk about the same thing about the idea of drugs as kind of like a mark of foreigners, a mark of otherness, a mark of social traits and you can see the way it shifts from the post-war and a pre-war. It's funny it was driving here, it's very early here in Japan and very late in Switzerland I have to say that all of you are in different time zones which was a fit to even get you to get when I'm very happy to get you. They were playing the very weirdly because it's 5am in Japan, Desai was some song, Desai songs in the radio which is very odd and very fitting also because I knew I'm going to talk to you about drugs and in the post-war. So I want to stay with war though because one thing that when I was teaching a course on war, or sleeping in the course of war, I was looking for work on drugs and drugs and kamikaze, the drugs and I'm going to talk a couple of years ago, it kept me thinking there was a very sensationalist account by a journalist named Norma Ula who blitzed drugs in a third while and it's book focused on use of perviting by German soldiers which basically meant pride and it made really exaggerated claims about its importance, it's like the only reason why France failed is because German soldiers were completely high on meth and they could drive their tanks everywhere without stopping, but it did start a debate on the role of stimulants in German context and met them in a forest as I'm sure was invented by Japanese scientists, Obata Akita and of course Mira and Mira worked in the herepong in the past, but I did not see it herepong, I mean you said that there is a move from herepong from Opium to other drugs, but herepong was for me was not mentioned as much, was this intentional? In what way is the herepong and opium different, and why maybe it just me not seeing it as much? Looking for my kamikaze, well there's a really practical reason for this, which is just that at the initial workshop event in Zurich in 2019 we did invite Jeff Alexander to present his work on Heropong, which he did via Zoom and the hope was to have his essay in our book, but it turned out not to be possible, so that's certainly a gap, but I think Heropong is already pretty well represented in the literature, in the early post-war period around the years following the occupation, so around 1952 to 1956, Heropong was so widely consumed that the media in its own time referred to the 1950s as the Heropong jidai, the Heropong age, and as best as we can estimate the drug was regularly used by several million people, and some of that was a holdover from the war, as you mentioned, there's evidence that Japanese workers were being provided with it to stimulate factory labor and kamikaze plilates, as you said, any kind of, any kind of, sorry I'm distracted by the chat now. I think responsibility for that. You have this widespread consumption of Heropong stemming from the pre-war period that continues into the post-war period, plus sort of a surge in production that it is an opportunity to earn money quickly in an age in which this was a very limited opportunity, so what I think is so extraordinary about Heropong compared with Heropong is that its initial popularity was so short-lived, that Heropong was really an artifact of recovery in a way that Heropong had never been. Obium had a medical purpose that shaded over into other types of motivations for use, but I think methamphetamine very much was a sort of a tool of recovery in the sense that mobilizing against it gave the organs of civil society agency back after having been disempowered during the years of fascism and war. So after the Heropong age, as the Japanese economy recovers, we start to see the traffic largely passing out of the hands of these mom and pop operators who have been producing and consuming most of their product, who then are able to find legitimate jobs in this recovering economy, and we see the Heropong traffic pass into the hands, mostly of the yaksa of the Japanese underworld, probably with the consent of the government. So it's remained a relatively popular drug in Japan to this day, popular illegal drug, but because it largely takes place out of sight in the yaksa underworld, it has not been a major policy concern for most of post-war Japanese history, so it hasn't threatened this idea that Japan is drug-free, which as we've tried to show is more myth than fact, but has nonetheless held considerable sway over public opinion. And I think that too is a big distinction with the significance of opium that excluding opium was so important to constructing the Japanese national identity. The state at its institutions were were dominant brokers in the traffic of opium. Heropong was never like this. Heropong was sort of a very fulfilled a certain time-limited function and then passed into the shadows where it was not anchored to national identity or national fisk. Yeah, and it's actually a good segue to my next question, which is about the yakuza. So you see this move from opium to here upon and to move from illegality, illegality, illegality, illegality, and then again to illegality in a post-war. And the yakuza, of course, is something that only started to get mentioned in a post-war. And we mentioned religious... how do you pronounce this name? She's a solace. I managed to pronounce also German names before, so equal opportunity. So this chapter in a black market, you know, and the yakuza organized crime, the official prominently here, but I feel it's especially after the war. And there's a connection to drugs emerging as being something outside of society, or something Japan even. It's foreign, that's something, again, continuity from the pre-war. And what is the significance? There's something you can see also in Oluk's work and all of the idea of drugs being foreign. How did this... we can see how it came about, but how does it go towards... how does it relate to the connection to the post-war? Well, I think we've already touched on this connection with drugs and foreignness a few times in this conversation, so I think it's really important to highlight that this connection is a major theme of the book, and we tried to address that in the introduction. And I think that this association between drugs and the outside world was present from the very beginning. We haven't said much about Anandre of a chapter yet, but she talks about, for instance, sourcing rhino horn, which by necessity had to come from outside of Japan. What I think is quite different in the in the trans-war period is that the association between drugs and the outside world passes to not places but people. So we start to see this association between narcotics, band drugs, and foreign nerves, which sort of develops a stigma of its own and is very much a product of the imperial age and the fact that Japan has to positively differentiate itself from its subjects, even all while asserting this kind of racial confraternity with Taiwanese, with Koreans, with other imperial subjects. So in my chapter, I talk a lot about the representation of the Chinese as "addicts" in literature. You'd eat rights about the stigmatization of Korean migrants to the home islands as drug users, and these associations very much carry over to the post-war period when the post-war narcotics market is seen as a product of devious foreign agents, like the Americans or like design each Koreans, as we see in Jesus' chapter. And then I think we also see this association between drugs and foreigners right up through the present oriented chapters by Bill Maraudian, also by Oleg. So maybe I should let Oleg talk about that. Yeah, I could move a bit into the post-war and I mean, I would actually, I was going to ask about how looking at Japan, the post-war, in their earlier periods, we were looking at Japan and Asia more or less, but when we go into the post-war, I think Ron mentioned something earlier, but like the US-Japan framework. And actually, I mean, Miriam puts this on to me, but I would actually like want to use Miriam's chapter as a segue for this, because I mean, you mentioned, you know, that's like, well, Samu, but, and you actually, you finish the chapter talking about Murakami Ryu's 1976 novel, I'm getting not too told by Nich-Kai-Bru, or almost transparent blue, I think, in English. And this really kind of, I think, is it sets up this kind of US-Japan framework that we're looking at in the post-war for a lot of these things, and I mean, Jesus saw these chapters, something similar looking at that framework. But I think what's interesting about Murakami's book, I mean, as Miriam points out, you know, this, the differences between these characters, I mean, they become really blurred in terms of gender, nationality, kind of ethnicity, as well as the drugs they're using. I think you point out using like nine or 10 different drugs in this, and also the geography, you know, they're kind of moving between kind of the Japanese sovereign space and also the US airbase, and like all of these, these things really becoming blurred kind of by the 70s. But I think, I think that interaction and that focus on kind of the US and Japan is quite key. And if we're, if we talk, look at like Bill Marotti's chapter, you know, he's really focusing on the period around 1968. He's specifically focusing on Shinjuku station, which he knows, I mean, Shinjuku, the whole was kind of really a site of a clash between kind of developers and politicians looking to kind of create a new kind of glass in steel Japan. I mean, I guess a lot of the Shinjuku, especially Nishishinjuku, that we have today. But you still have like the older aspects, you know, you have Golden Guy still, but also like Nightlife, you know, the sex trade, the former black market and all these things that they're trying to erase really the authorities. And it builds kind of looking not only how these things clash symbolically, but also physically, you have these people kind of from around Japan attracted to, I guess we could, what we kind of call a hippie counterculture, which is also a very transnational thing. But people are coming from around the country. Shinjuku, even as millions of tons of jet fuel are passing through the station to kind of support America's war in Vietnam. So, you know, these things are kind of going on above and below one another. And I think it's in this environment that Bill really focuses on this specific figure of that's kind of created by the media, but also the people there as known as the food tent. It's kind of an ambiguous term that kind of refers to idle, like kind of idlers or kind of rootless people who are dropping out from the mainstream of society. They're not working. They're engaging the counterculture and kind of conspicuous drug use, especially they're out in front of the station, you know, huffing paint thinner and things out of plastic bags and other substances. And this becomes a really, we have a lot of photographs of this, and this becomes just kind of a symbol on both sides, really people who kind of want to become part of this. And we talked earlier about kind of the gendering of this as well as performative drug use, but then also people want to kind of, you know, see this is a problem within society. And I think it's kind of important to note here that, you know, this is a time in the police and the state are really cracking down on illegal drug use in the 60s, but, you know, paint thinner isn't illegal. And huffing these substances isn't illegal in the 60s. I mean, some of this is banned in 1972, but it's just this kind of interaction. And I mean, Bill is arguing there for an existence of a kind of unique street politics that develops in Chijuku in '68. And I think one thing that's that's quite key there is when we're not just talking about like trans-nationally or international Japan and kind of the foreign, but I think what's really key is also the kind of urban and rural divide that we're looking at here. And I think Bill kind of highlights this in the chapter as well, where you have, you know, you have Chijuku as kind of the epicenter of a lot of these things. But you know, also Tokyo, Osaka, versus kind of the the heartland of Japan, you know, the real Japan out in the countryside. And I mean, that's something that I think I then see when I'm looking into it when moving to into my chapter on kind of magic mushrooms in the kind of 1980s and 1990s, you know, there's a shift in associations there where I mean, drugs are being seen more and more as being something, something foreign. And they're also seen as, you know, coming from other countries and going first to, you know, Chijuku, they're going to Shibuya. They're going to América Mura in Osaka. And from there, they're going out into the, you know, the real Japan, the heartland. And but I think there's also the foreness of the drug, especially when we're talking about things like magic mushrooms. We don't live right on marijuana, but it's, I think there's a similar dynamic. There's a big thing is the changing Japanese travel habits that happened from the 1980s, where, you know, you have the first Chijuku Noiruki Kata guidebook for individual travelers published in 1979. And, you know, it's just fairly similar time on the first lonely planet comes out, I think, in English. And you get a lot more independent travelers going around than you did before, rather than package tours. And I think the number of international travelers, you know, is from 1985, it triples up to 1996, kind of reaches a peak around 2000 and has gone down again since then. But a lot of these individual travelers, you know, they're going on a lot of the same circuits as a lot of, I think, western travelers are. They're encountering illicit substances on a lot of these journeys. You know, they're going to Southeast Asian Central America. They're going to these same countercultural places. They're seen as countercultural destinations by western tourists. You know, there's a narrative then that, you know, young Japanese are first encountering drugs in these places, which, you know, the Japanese press and associates with American and European hippies. I mean, that's a quote, essentially. And then they bring this drug used back home. And so the problem is coming from overseas and then coming back home. And I think then we see another shift in the early 2000s as we touched on a little bit before as various countries in Europe and the Americas are legalizing drugs. And then the association changes again, you know, you're not, unless you come to Central America, Southeast Asian, now you're going up to Canada or or Amsterdam or, you know, or Denver, and those are not the problematic places. Yeah, remember the AS in Denver a couple of years ago, and talk among some people I heard about how drugs are legal in Denver and so dangerous, like you know, you, you, you, like, it's so dangerous there. You, you over here, Japanese conversations sometimes, and Denver seems like a pretty decent and nice place for me at the time, especially downtown. I, but you know, they sell drugs here. I had, well, I won't talk about Asia though. I mean, we mentioned, I mean, in your comments now, what about, you know, drugs being associated with like American and Western hippies and the like, in the 60s, in the 60s. And again, the chapters, but the source also about America being like the market for Japanese drugs. I mean, kind of reversing this logic, right, in the post war. And it's a lot again, use Japan framework or Japan, West framework is very important here, Japan, US being the foreigner. But where does Asia go to? I mean, what's the role of Asia in all of this? Because Asia, of course, is the mark of foreigners in like, do it work in some of the metering works before. And where is Asia featured like this? What happened to Asia after the war? And what I think it probably depends quite a lot on the substance. I think there's, there's, I think you'd have to be touched on this, this a bit before. And I mean, I think that the kind of pre war view, especially of opium and this is something that comes through in the early chapters on opium, about how Japan is trying to, you know, see it separate itself distance itself from Asia by not having an dependency on opium and not having an opium issue, not allowing opium in and, and, and saying that that Japan is different in that way. And I think what we maybe have a transition probably in the early 20th century that something like morphine is then a bit different because that is an industrial modern product, right, the way that is produced is very different. So opioids in that sense are going to be quite different from, from smoking opium. And so I think that's the way you can, you can differentiate yourself from Asian in a way, even though if you're using a similar substance. And I think in the post war, then I think, you know, if we're looking at something like methamphetamine, again, this is very much Japanese. This is not, you know, the rest of something from the rest of Asian. I think if we, if we're looking into, you know, what I was working on, look at the kind of magic mushrooms in the 1990s in this, this kind of moment when they're legal, a lot of people are encountering these things in Asia, but it is very much through this Western lens. You know, they're going to the places where these Western tourists are, they're going to cause some of the way because that in Thailand, because that's where, you know, the Western there's already kind of paved the way. And that's, that's, you know, the guidebooks are all saying the same thing. There's also, I mean, an interesting distancing, I think, that goes on with things that are Japanese or not. You know, we mentioned, you know, obviously methamphetamine being, being invented by a Japanese scientist, but with mushrooms, for example, you know, there are, Japan has over a dozen different varieties of magic mushrooms growing naturally in the country. And there are all sorts of, there are Japanese names for these mushrooms. But actually, the word in Japanese for magic mushrooms that becomes dominant in 1990s, is "majuku mushroom." Right? I mean, it is, it is written in kapakan, and it is essentially using a foreign word for this. And you get people looking for ancient kind of, and, and continuities with older practices. So there's, there are people who cite, there's a 12th century text, which is cited quite a bit in this context where some Buddhist nuns come across some eating, eating some dancing mushrooms and having a grand old time. You have people like, um, I mean, I sort of said, Watson used to give a great, you know, college is kind of a magic mushroom, kind of efficient out of the 1960s coming to Japan, looking for Japan's ancient magic mushroom culture. And there are all these people looking for continuities that I don't think are really there. I don't think they're there in the West, either ultimately. So, you know, people came across these things, ate them every now and then, had a very bizarre time. But in the time before modern medicine and such, would you actually go back and do that thing again? Um, you would probably be happy that you survived whatever it was, and maybe not necessarily go back. So I think when people are looking for these ancient, um, kind of continuities, I think that, that gets a bit tricky. And so these things growing in Japan, but that kind of getting denied and these being seen as foreign. And I think a lot of the magic mushrooms that actually being sold in Japan in the 1990s are being imported from the Netherlands, actually, rather than actually being grown in Japan, which is quite odd there as well. And I mean, the last thing, which is kind of related to this, which I I just want to highlight here is there's a really interesting dichotomy that emerges in the 1990s. And there's some interesting ethnography that was done that really brings this out, which is where people are are really differentiating between drugs that are seen as natural and drugs that are being seen as chemical or, I mean, synthetic. And there are a lot of of users who, and I mean, this is not unique to Japan. There's something you get in other places as well, certainly. But people would be willing to, you know, use say magic mushrooms or marijuana as these there's, you know, found in nature, modern growing methods and fertilizers and things like that. But then they wouldn't use, you know, LSD or methamphetamine or, you know, sniffing glue, because these are seen as kind of manmade substances or chemicals and therefore unhealthy. I mean, you know, there are obviously plenty of things in nature that are that are pretty bad for you as well. But that's it's an interesting kind of dynamic there. Well, we actually see in other other places as well. So yeah, and Ron, did you. Yeah, I want to ask something. I'm kind of something most creepy. Yeah, Miriam, do you want to chip in? Oh, yeah. Just before we move on from the question about sort of the importance of Asia and the post war period that I think in the early post war period, I'll just come back to Jesus's article here. I think the backdrop of the Cold War is also really essential that we have this world that is being polarized or trifurcated in a sense into sort of the first world of countries aligned with the United States, the second world with the Soviet Union and then the non aligned or developing world. And I think that sort of the drug history very much sort of tends to follow along that polarization with the category of Asia being folded into and almost subordinated to those that trifurcations. So you have the, for instance, the argument throughout the pre war period that you alluded to that John Jennings took up in his chapter that that Asia is being poisoned by Japan that drugs are the medium through which Japan is attempting to subjugate Asia. In the early post war period, we have the aversion of that argument that now Red China is trying to subordinate Japan, which has been transformed into this Cold War ally of the United States through the medium of heroin that is now being pushed into Japan. It's all spurious, obviously, but it's potent rhetoric for this Cold War world that is looking for any evidence of the villainy of Mao Zedong. And I think that that importance of the Cold War context doesn't mean that Asia falls to the background, but it does mean that the sort of ideological significance of Asia to Japan is filtered through that Cold War context. Thank you. Yeah, it's really, I didn't think about it, but it shows again how drugs are so entangled which so many are changing and so many good drugs in many ways are basically a cultural product as much as they are, and particularly a signifier as much as they are substances. And speaking of culture, I think we've seen at least in the US, they're also in Germany and other places. A huge shift, at least in the role of at least towards marijuana and the consumption of marijuana and the production of marijuana just in the last two, three years. I mean, I spend my life a lot of going between Japan and the US and every time I come back, there's more dispensaries around my college town. It seems that they're going to suppress bars into two powers as the number one business in my town. None of it is remotely happening in Japan, no? I mean, is there a gap here between, especially in relation to marijuana, like I feel there is a big gap between the way Japan looked at marijuana and the way the rest of the world does. I mean, do you see any chance of deregulation? I mean, I know it's perilous to us historians about the future, but can we comment a little bit beyond the book about what's happening now? Okay. I want to, if I'm not mistaken, I think we predicted that Japan would never deregulate and stay firm, but I think the laws just changed and at hemp products, CBD is legal now in Japan. Just really recently, it was legalized and it's so that it was a really important point. You said that drugs are constructs, signifiers, cultural constructs. I mean hemp is a very traditional material in Japan. There's a lot all around the world now. There's nativist tendencies that you rediscover all products. Of course, industrial hemp was always used in Japan for ropes and chinto rituals, but cultivation was made illegal with the American occupation. And so now recently, I think they're deploring that there's not many farmers who know how to cultivate hemp. And the problem is, of course, that it's different varieties, the hemp that you smoke and hemp that you use for ropes, but they're not that easy to distinguish because they look the same, they smell the same. And so with this nativist discourse that you need to protect the old ways of cultivating and also the legalization of CBD now, CBD products, things might change in Japan as well. Excellent. Yeah, just to add to that, I mean, it's interesting because now, I think Denver was maybe the leader on this, but Oregon also recently have legalized, you know, magic mushrooms to a certain extent because people are looking at these, especially for psychotherapy and kind of PTSD treatments and various other things. And it's been an interesting development words in the Japanese case we're talking about laws and regulations. And there's something I discussed in the chapter in some depth is that looking at the discourses between politicians and the newspapers, which have this thing kind of moral panic around magic mushrooms, and then actually the documents are being produced by kind of the health and welfare ministry, where, you know, the doctors are saying, you know, we have no evidence to ban these things. We have no evidence that, you know, these are causing all this harm where the newspapers are saying, oh, well, they're making people jump off buildings, they're making, they're terrible for the children. And I mean, you dig down in these things, it doesn't, this doesn't, there actually aren't any cases of this. But it's interesting because even after they, when they decide to ban them in 2002, in January, I think they announced that we're gonna ban these things in June. So, you know, make sure you go through your stocks in the next six months, which seems to show that that, you know, maybe that it wasn't such a, such a crisis as that, if you're giving it six months. But even after they're made illegal, like, you know, there are, there's official documentation on the that ministry of health and welfare's website up until, you know, the early 2020 has been taken down now, which essentially says, you know, that, oh, yeah, these things are, are not dangerous, you know, if, if, if someone comes into your clinic and they've taken these things, you know, just put them in a corner for a few hours and they'll be fine. It's effectively the guidance that's in there. And that gets taken down. So it's, it's really interesting on regulation, seeing what the bureaucrats and kind of medical professionals are saying versus what the politicians and, and the media are saying. And I, you know, I, I'd be curious about any deregulation anytime soon. Yes. And no edibles sold in Harajuku by any time soon, right? So we're pushing beyond the one hour limit. And it's much so likely to talk more about this. I think for Julie is past midnight already. Right. Actually, just, yeah, sorry. Just, just because you just mentioned edibles there at the end. Last year, I remember seeing something in Japan that effectively, and this was in, in the news in a few different places that they had started selling various kind of gummies, edible kind of THC gummies, where they'd effectively managed to isolate a certain type of THC that wasn't covered by the drug laws at that time. And so you could buy these things that off Rakuten, I think, in other places, you could buy the, and this was effectively legal for a while. I think this lasted a few weeks or a couple of months. And then that loophole was closed and these things were banned. They didn't give them six months that time. I think they gave people a week or so. But I think, so there are responses to this sort of thing. So it's, it's, yeah, which makes me think, yeah, maybe not, no changes coming back quickly. Thank you. And of course, we, we should mention that alcohol, the legal drug is a, yeah, is, is, yeah, is causing way more damage, I guess, medically, socially and otherwise than any of those things, I guess. So, all right. So, yeah, so maybe we can wrap up. It's already very early for me to basically 720 woke up at five to get here. So I want to ask the last, and the last question is like, what, what's next for you? Again, Judith, I mentioned you just have any book coming out. So maybe you can start to get you to do it and tell us what you're going to work on now and what's next for you and when can I expect you back? So, Ron, you mentioned that we missed several substances like meth and hemp. We didn't have any tap drone hemp and cocaine also would have been important as an industrial drug before the war. And unfortunately, we, we don't have any tap drone cooking. So definitely, it would be nice to have a follow up. And, and, and, yeah, I'm hesitating. I would like to continue on drugs. And then, another project is, is connected to that is the plant trade and how foreign plants came to Japan. Also in the long journey since the 16th century, starting with sunflowers and tomatoes from the Americas and going up to the late 19th century or early 20th century. It's great. Yeah, Miriam. Yeah, Ron, I think we've talked about this. I'm working on two projects at the moment. One is the history of time use and time use surveys. So Japan was a really early adopter of these surveys beginning a few months before Pearl Harbor and continuing through to the present. It's collected every five years. So I'm interested in the evolution of the surveys as a form of knowledge and also in how the daily lives of various demographic groups have, have changed or, or not in some cases changed very much at all. And I'm also writing about the history of Japanese mountaineering, which more or less began dramatically abroad with, with the first descent of the world's eighth highest mountains in the Himalayas in 1956. And from that point, Japan really became the most active nation in the world in high altitude climbing. So I'm interested in mountaineering on its own terms, but also as a form of sports diplomacy. So I'm looking at how it served as a form of soft power to shape the national image and also relations with other states in the context of the Cold War. Nice. And I want to emphasize. Yeah, I know, I know, you know, I know. But our listeners don't. So I think, uh, I guess, yeah, still mainly work on as a project, because I mean, obviously previous work I've done with also with a couple of you on on kind of history of things like castles, samurai, and how medieval symbols are used in the modern period. And I'm, I'm working on a book manuscript on how putting that into a global context. Well, that'll be next. Yeah, putting kind of these medieval symbols into or how Japan used medieval symbols, putting that into a global context, how Japan is, is kind of really engaging with global discourses on, on the medieval and kind of medievalism is one thing. And somewhat related to this is the long term project I've been, I've been doing on kind of the Yasukuni Shrine's Yushukan military museum. I've just finished an article. Hopefully that will come out in the next few weeks. I'm trying to reconstruct the early Yushukan, which was built in, in the early 1880s as kind of an Italian asshole, and trying to reconstruct that military museum using postcards and various other things to see what it actually looked like and what function played in kind of Japan. I mean, it's actually a really early case of that. And so, yeah, those are, those are kind of the main things at the moment, but I don't know, there's always something shiny that takes my eye and, and distracts me for a while. Wasn't that this little business for the British Museum? You're, oh, yeah, there may be a, there may be a show on, on Samurai, I'm coming up at some point in the, in the next few years that we're working on. So, yeah, yeah, Samurai will never leave me. Okay, so, on this, on this note, I would like to, to conclude and want to thank you all for coming from different parts of the world, different time zone, especially good for what is 12.30 a.m. now for a very long day. You're taking today, right? So, so, thank you. And really enjoyed us. And I hope to see you here soon on mountaineering or plants, drugs, or samurai, or all of the above combined. Thank you. Thank you. [Music]
In early modern Japan, upper status groups coveted pills and powders made of exotic foreign ingredients such as mummy and rhinoceros horn. By the early twentieth century, over-the-counter-patent medicines, and, more alarmingly, morphine, had become mass commodities, fueling debates over opiates in Japan's expanding imperial territories.
The fall of the empire and the occupation of Japan by the United States created conditions favorable for heroin use, followed, in time, by glue sniffing and psychedelic mushroom ingestion.
By illuminating the neglected history of drugs, Drugs and the Politics of Consumption in Japan (Brill, 2023) highlights both the transnational embeddedness and national peculiarities of the "politics of consumption" in Japan.
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