Miriam Kingsberg‘s fascinating new book offers both a political and social history of modern Japan and a global history of narcotics in the modern world. Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History (University of California Press, 2013) locates the emergence of a series of three “moral crusades” against narcotics that each accompanied a perceived crisis in collective values and political legitimacy in nineteenth and twentieth century Japan.
In the first moral crisis after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5, opium became a symbol of difference between Japan and an “Other” epitomized by Qing China, as Japan sought to “leave Asia” and “enter” the West. Here, Kingsberg traces a series of attempts to regulate drug use in Taiwan in the wake of Japan’s transformation into a formal empire. Between the end of WWI and Japan’s defeat in WWII, Japan saw its second moral crisis as it navigated the most protracted and intense moral crusade against narcotics in its history. The central chapters of Kingsberg’s book trace this second crisis, paying special attention to Japanese colonial rule in Korea and in the Kwantung Leased Territory (KLT) in southern Manchuria as Korea became the “global capital of morphine” and the KLT port handled “the second-highest volume of banned drugs in the world.” The third moral crisis brings us to the end of Moral Nation and the thick of the “hiropon age” of the 1950s, when methamphetamine production and usage skyrocketed in postwar Japan and the nation saw its first full-fledged domestic drug plight. Kingsberg locates a changing cast of “moral entrepreneurs” who motivated these three crises, shedding light on the formative roles of merchants and mass society in this chapter of global narcotic history. It is a wonderful, meticulously researched book that contributes significantly to the histories of Japan, of drugs, and of global politics. Enjoy!
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Hi, I captain We even have an automated notification for all pod managers when they go live They use Monday calm to keep their teamwork sharp their communication clear and their goals in sight Monday calm for whatever you run even orcas go to Monday calm to dive deeper Hello everybody, this is Marshall Poe on the editor of the new books network And I'd like to tell you that we have a new and improved website It has two new features that we think you'll love one of them is a vastly improved search engine So that when you type in keywords, you'll get a bunch of episodes really quick The other is the ability to create a listener account and in that listener account You can save episodes for later listening so you can create a kind of listening list We think these features are neat and we think you'll enjoy them. Please visit the site today Hi, I'm Carla Navi and this is new books in East Asian studies. Welcome and thanks for joining us today I just finished talking with Miriam Kingsburg about her really exciting new book Moral Nation modern Japan and narcotics and global history this came out with the University of California press in 2015 So just recently now the book looks at the intersection between a history of Narcotics and drug use and a history of ideas of civilization Society Empire and the institutions and the kinds of texts and documents and practices Through which and from which these different social categories and ways of being a society emerged From the late 19th century through the late 20th century. It's a quite extensive interview So I'll keep this relatively brief because I'd much rather you listen to Miriam talk about the book She's quite eloquent and articulate about it But I will say that it's it was particularly exciting for me to read this book in part because among many other things not only is it based on really really careful very engaged very very precise archival research into the kinds of documents that produce not just a Clean narrative, but also some really useful data that brings together our understanding of the history of demography And sort of demographic trends with history cultural social political. It's a story as well that very clearly speaks to multiple disciplines and so Historians of science and medicine in particular who may not otherwise imagine themselves reading a book about Japan or about Really in this context. It's kind of a transnational history that includes Japan China and Korea Might want to pay special attention to at least some of the chapters in the book because there's a really clear story about the history of science and medicine and the laboratory as a sort of important space for Undiscourses of the histories of narcotics and the nation in modern Japan So it's a really great book. It was really wonderful talking with Miriam about it I hope you have a chance to read the book. I highly recommend it and I hope you enjoy our conversation I'm here today to talk with Miriam Kingsburg about her new book and a great great new book It is moral nation modern Japan and narcotics and global history Welcome to new books and East Asian studies Miriam and thanks very very very very much for making time to talk with me today I learned so much about the book. I love the book and I'm really grateful that you're willing to take time to talk about it So welcome. Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here So Miriam, can you start us off as is traditional for the channel by saying just a little bit about what brought you to the field? And specifically, how did you come to work on modern Japanese history? Sure Well, I grew up in Japan actually my family moved there when I was eight years old my dad works in finance And we lived there until I was 16. So my relationship with Japan and interest really began at a very early informative time, but then when I went to college, I studied history and In the course of writing my senior thesis I realized how much I loved the research process and wanted to make a career out of it So when I was applying to grad school, I looked to merge my interest in a career that somehow took me back to Asia with with an interest in history and so I ended up at Berkeley and I studied modern Japanese history So the book that we're talking about today explores the intersection between Narcotic history and we'll talk a whole lot more about what that means and the emergence of a kind of moral crusade or a spike in the Concern for the welfare of society that was prompted by a perceived crisis and collective values in the 19th and 20th Century in Japan and in fact a series of three Emergent crises and we'll talk about all of those. I'm sure over the course of our conversation So can you talk a little bit about how you come to work came to work on this particular topic? What brought you to narcotic history in the context of modern Japan? Actually, it was entirely by chance When I started graduate school, I also began learning Chinese Just to have a second Asian language, and so this really focused my interest on China and particularly Sino-Japanese relations my original intention for my dissertation was to write an urban history of data in the city of Delhi and in contemporary PRC and I Wanted to do this sort of as an exploration of Japan's Longest held possession on the Asian mainland, which was also a laboratory for various different kinds of modernity I thought I might focus on urban planning and architecture But in the course of researching that project I came across information that Diane also during the 1920s and early 1930s was the point of greatest narcotic consumption in the world and second highest volume of trafficking and that seemed like a fact worth following up on and It completely diverted me in the end that totally blew my mind by the way, so a listener should know we were talking a little bit before this and I Mentioned that I teach global history of drugs Occasionally at UBC and reading this completely transformed how I'm going to be doing that and how I think about this whole topic So really I think this is a book that is going to be really transformative Both for people who work on Sino-Japanese history and Japanese history on Chinese history But also for people interested more broadly in the history of medicine and drugs I mean just totally mind-blowing in terms of the the data and the archival material that you're digging up here And it's relation to a larger global story So wow, thank you No, it's true. It's true So Miriam this did start off as a dissertation. Is that right? Yes, so can you talk a little bit about that? Transition and the transformation from this project in the form of a district dissertation to the book that we're talking about today Were there any major? Transformations in terms of either the shape of the project the narrative and or the kinds of arguments that you were making from one form to another I? Think it would be fair to say that though The products are very very different. I'd be surprised if there was even one sentence that survived intact in the transition from the dissertation to the book For the dissertation, I was very much focused on diet and and I was particularly inclined to write the The work as an anatomy of an urban drug economy So I structured it around collective actors drug users I didn't call them moral entrepreneurs at the time, but that's who they eventually became And doctors and also merchants, which wasn't a term that I used until the manuscript stage either But my interest was really in showing how this played out as both a form of imperial legitimization and social control So that was really where the dissertation was and was very much focused on on Diane and the Gondome lease territory But for the book what I wanted to do was something a little bit more broad and deep as well, so I Felt that the story was larger than what I had done in the dissertation So the book is really more a story from the 1850s to the 1950s and geographically the scope is wider I did additional research in Taiwan and Korea and in other archives in China and Japan as well and I Also introduced more of a chronological structure to it initially I Resisted that actually because I thought that it was more important to highlight actor agency or collective actor agency in the dissertation But as I became more attentive to chronology, I started noticing these waves these Successive crises and that ultimately became a really important theme and organizing factor in the book so that was another major change and then the argument itself is different the language of moral crusade and moral panic and The idea of the moral entrepreneur as a social agent and all of a sort of the the overarching theme that Narcotics were a platform for Japan to enter this universal conversation about what constitutes legitimacy Political legitimacy and nations and empires, so it was a lot of work to advise Well, the product is fabulous and you've already mentioned an important part of that product, which is this idea of moral entrepreneurs So that's probably I think a good place to start to bring us into The text itself and that the materiality of the text itself So this category of moral entrepreneurs recurs throughout the book and you introduce it right at the very beginning You mentioned that moral entrepreneurs were really at the forefront of these moral crusades and these sort of moral crises That give the book its narrative arc So let's start off if you wouldn't mind by talking a little bit about that category who are moral entrepreneurs and what is that? Category of actor mean for you in the context of this study Sure, well It's a very evolving category and basically moral entrepreneurs. This is a concept that I borrowed from sociology And they foment moral panic or moral crisis This idea that there is disproportionate concern Allocated to a social phenomenon that may or may not be essentially problematic And so the moral entrepreneurs that I look at there are three different Periods during which they come to the forefront and for them the narcotic crisis is really an opportunity to gain social influence and social power political power as well And so during the 1890s the first moral crisis that I deal with it's very much limited to elites it's it's an elite conversation about drugs and a way of formulating a national and imperial identity for Japan through these very literate to very educated elites who see in drugs a way of gaining social power over society and then in the second moral panic a moral crisis, sorry what we see is is the emergence of a mass society or a middle class even that allows greater participation in this idea of moral entrepreneurship so they're much wider social and professional categories and I describe them as cultural producers and merchants and law enforcement and doctors and scientific researchers during this time and then finally during the 1950s when moral panic over drugs comes home to Japan it's it's very much a mass society phenomenon and I Talk about how the ordinary people came to participate in this crisis and resolving the crisis of methamphetamine as a means of self-empowerment and restoring agency to society after this perception that there was none during the wartime era Great. Thank you so much. That actually really beautifully sets out the narrative arc for our conversation as well So over the course of the story as you've mentioned already, really I think very articulately and much more articulately than I thought it was great The nation of Japan experiences three crises of political legitimacy and each of these triggers as you've already mentioned a kind of moral crusade Against narcotics, so we're gonna look at these in turn and as does the book the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and 1895 provokes this first episode in the first major moral crisis in this context Japan's victory changes It's perceived place in the kind of more kind of global hierarchy of states and OPM in this context Really really interestingly becomes a symbolic marker of difference between Japan and the other and what constitutes that other Kind of changes a little bit over the story and it's more multiple Than listeners might immediately think so in this context And and here's where I'm going to sort of open this up and ask you to speak a little bit too Some of the really fascinating Elements of the narrow that come up as you're talking about this first crisis in this context moral entrepreneurs And we've already talked about who those were those are predominantly elites in this first context, they're using abstinence from Opium to kind of talk through to signify and to help create an idea of the Civilization of the Japanese nation, so can you maybe start us off in this part of the story by talking a little bit about that this connection between Discourses of civilization of nation nationhood and the ways that Opium discourse and abstinence in particular Kind of help formulate this and what their relationship between civilization and Opium basically is in this context Sure so in in the way I've interpreted it basically Opium is associated with with China on in the Western mindset and This is not to say that Opium wasn't strenuously consumed in the West as well it was but in China it was smoked which came to be a practice that was stigmatized as somehow recreational and deviant in Contrast to consuming it in laudanum or beverage forum as a sort of a purportedly medical way in Europe and America in the late 19th century and so the association of China with Opium and this sort of Oriental deviance I'm using Oriental in quotation marks but there's this perception that China was somehow degenerate was very useful to the Western powers in denying the Sovereign legitimacy of China which was a source of profit for everybody So when Japan opened up to the Western powers it was very keen to make sure that Opium did not come in it was able to secure voluntary export restrictions on Opium to the home islands and then this became available as a marker of difference between the strong and legitimate nation state of Japan and the degenerate civilization of China so then abstinence from Opium or alleged abstinence from Opium became a way for Japan to Identify itself with the Western powers and enter into this conversation on what constituted legitimate sovereignty in nations and The fact that Japan was able to join this Club of Great Powers gave civilization meaning abstinence credibility as a universal rather than simply Western value so the What I'd like to suggest in this chapter is is the idea that Opium was more than just Opium that it wasn't just a drug But it was also a symbolic marker of difference between Japan and China between China and the West That was that Japan was able to use to quote unquote leave Asia and enter the West That's right. And you talk I think really interestingly here for those who are interested in the history of Science actually a history of social science and Darwinism in particular. You also talk in this part of the book about the use of the language of social Darwinism to portray Opium smoking as a kind of cause of China's defeat but also a sign of the racial inferiority of China so that's a really interesting part of this story and You talk as you've mentioned about Japan's sort of leaving Asia and seeking to enter the West now The war itself is also transformed Japan into a formal Empire and you talk about the consequences of this for the larger story that the book is telling about the history of narcotics and its Imprecation with the history of the nation and the history of morality in that context the Treaty of Shimonoseki shifted Taiwan from China to Japan and that Taiwan becomes as of this point in this story and continues to be a Really really central part of this history. So can you talk a little bit about this? How you describe Japan dealing with Taiwan in this early part of the story as it's dealing with Taiwan as a colony of drug users So this is a fascinating element of the story Can you talk a little bit about Taiwan as a colony of drug users in this context? How is this become important in this part of the story for sure? So the real Taiwan really triggers the first moral crisis over drugs and in Meiji Japan Japan has successfully identified itself with the value of abstinence and Portrayed itself as a legitimate nation on these terms But then by taking over the colony of Taiwan, which is also necessary to show Power as as an empire on power with the Western powers The problem becomes that the Taiwan is actually a colony of opium smokers and that opium smoking is quite a prevalent and entrenched and Unstigmatized custom in Taiwan in the late 19th century So Japan in taking over this colony faces a transition from an abstinent nation to an empire of addicts which won't fly with the With the prevailing rhetoric of legitimacy that has been used so far So the problem becomes how to suppress opium in a way that makes the Taiwanese into Japanese the Taiwanese were Incorporated into the Japanese Empire as as Japanese subjects. They were Sort of given the same rights and responsibilities under the Meiji Constitution as Japanese subjects in the home islands But in order to become Japanese, they must also be abstinent from drugs so the problem becomes how to how to accomplish that and to manage the problem of opium in a way that is not ruinously financially expensive and Doesn't simply the problem with with the Empire is that there's legitimacy both in difference between Japan and its colonial subjects and The eradication of that difference by anti-opium campaigns so Managing to do both at the same time is also a really important element of how Japan ultimately comes to Interact with the problem of narcotics in Taiwan So you talk about in this part of the book this kind of negotiation between arguments for gradual versus immediate and Kind of more dramatic regimes of prohibition in this context and talk about the emergence of an opium monopoly as well Can you speak a little bit to that? Because that's also a really fascinating part of the story. Sure. Um, so the The amaze this course is mobilized a lot of different categories of moral entrepreneurs from all spectrums of of professional Professions just because they cut across so many different categories the idea was that Initially Japan came to Taiwan with the idea that opium had to be suppressed and had that had to be accomplished as quickly as possible That that it was an unsustainable habit that it was contributing to the social Darwinist elimination of the Taiwanese Making them unfit for anything let alone Japanese subject to it And that it was ruining Japan's image to have a colony of opium smokers So the idea initially was that opium would be suppressed very strictly then It also came to the attention of the authorities and I talk primarily about Goto Shinte But other actors were involved on who would probably be familiar to scholars of of me to Japan like Ishiguro Pada Moni for example other people came to suggest that there was profit to be had in the opium economy And that if the state took control of it they could on the one hand benefit from the fact that people Needed to consume it and on the other hand they could gradually cut down consumption by making less available Less opium available in circulation so I think ultimately this argument proved extremely persuasive because the medical establishment and the sort of financial interests were both behind it that this created roles new roles for medical practitioners to become addiction doctors and supply expertise to the state at the same time as it created jobs for opium retailers Not just among the Japanese migrants to Taiwan but also among Taiwanese elites who were then brought on board in the colonization project co-opted if you will and So ultimately gradual suppression prevails as a strategy What's interesting is that then this state opium monopoly that is implemented as the crowning element of gradual suppression is then also brought to the home island So I think this is a really nice example of how change in an innovation in the colonies also brings about change in the Metropole Thank you so much now by the end of the 20th century drug regulation in Taiwan and you've just talked a little bit about the complexities of this and the really transformations inherent in that collection of processes they brought Japan's first moral crusade against narcotics to a close which brings us to the second crusade against narcotics and this second kind of part of the book between the end of World War One and Japan's defeat in World War Two as you Show in the book we see the most protracted and intense moral crusade as you put it against narcotics in Japanese history and this is a really really fascinating set of case studies that you bring us into in this part of the story in 1905 Japan establishes a protectorate over Korea and takes control as well over quantung least territory And so for listeners when I refer later on to quantung least territory I'm going to use the acronym KLT as as is done in the book They established this in southern Manchuria and they adopt modified versions of the kinds of drug regulation Processes the kind of regime and they had used in Taiwan in both cases within 20 years as we'll see in the story Korea emerges as the global capital of morphine and the KLT port city of Diron as you have mentioned earlier And we'll talk a lot more about Diron Diron emerges as the sort of handling the second highest volume as we put it in the book of band drugs in the world Crazy eye-opening totally mind-blowing part of this story, so let's get there, but let's talk about Let's talk about the KLT So as you put it in the book Japan held the KLT from 1905 to 1945 and again, we're in the context of Manchuria right now Let's start off. I'm exploring this part of the story by talking about Diron By the 1920s, Diron had the world's highest rate of narcotics consumption and second highest volume of trafficking after Shanghai Wow, so to understand this I need to kind of tell us a little bit about Diron What do we need to know about this city? What do we need to know about Diron as a place in order to understand its significance As the center of drug use and drug trafficking in this part of the story Sure, so Diron comes into Japanese possession after the research Japanese war It was originally taken by Japan and the Sino-Japanese war, but then Japan had to return it Thanks to the triple intervention and Russia subsequently leased it for itself And in following the research Japanese war Japan took it back It was originally scheduled to go back to China in 1923, but then the lease was extended to 99 years so The actual handover would have been quite recent if that schedule had been followed Because Diron was Diron was initially important both to Japan and Russia as a warm water port It doesn't freeze over in winter, which was a defining goal of Russian foreign policy during this time But also made the city useful to Japan not just as a transit point for drugs, but other commodities as well ultimately It came to handle most of the port traffic of northeast China during the early 20th century So it was useful in that sense It was also a zone of very fragmented sovereignty because the KLT was not a Formal colony and never became a formal colony and was never incorporated into Manchukuo There were so many competing contenders for authority that it was easy for the drug trade to grow in the interstices and for various different competitors to become involved in the drug trade as a way of Trying to establish supremacy So initially Diron is not much of a city, but under Japanese control There's a large migrant population from the homelands who settle there It also comes to host a lot of Chinese migrant laborers particularly from Shandong and Rebe who Are drawn there by the opportunity to work And so population growth is quite rapid during that time, but there's a great deal of transients, which I think also facilitates the consumption and encroachment of the drug economy Now in this part of the book in this part of the story You talk about the importance of the use of quantitative data as a means to not just know about but also control KLT subjects and the environment and this brings us to not only a really fascinating aspect of the story You're telling but equally a fascinating aspect of the way you've chosen to tell it So that you bring us here into statistical gazetteers data, and this is part of a larger kind of methodological choice you've made here to blend more kind of a social sciences sorts of approaches to working with data to demographic history with this larger context of cultural and social And political history and the confluence of these at least two types of histories This is one of the really beautiful things about the book and one of the ways that the book really makes profound contributions to both of these kinds of histories So could you talk a little bit about your use of and treatment of data in the context of this book project? What did that involve for you, and how do you think about that in terms of the larger goals of the book and your methodology in the book? So in terms of data the really important set that I had to work with was from the political issue the Guangdong statistical gazetteer and Japan Japan's empire can and I think has been quite appropriately described as an information empire that the Imperial administrators went with the idea that to know is to rule and They wanted as much information as possible in order to be able to design the most effective Most fit in social Darwinist terms administration that they possibly could so it was When I first started this project what one of the ways that my attention was directed to died in And the reason why it's it remains a really important epicenter of the history that I ultimately came to write is because It turned out that data on drugs was better there than any that was ever collected in the early 20th century world Because narcotics are illegal we even to this day don't have great data on it but back in the early 20th century or before most most states were not engaged in the process of either controlling or collecting information on consumption or trafficking so the Guangdong least territory was really anomalous in that respect a What became more clear to me as I started to look closely at this data is a couple of things first of all But it was not collected with the intention to be used that Indicators changed from year to year which made the construction of chronological data sets really longitudinal data sets really difficult and that sort of the categories weren't constant and Ways of measuring weren't explicated. So this this data was I really struggled with how to make something interesting out of it the second really interesting thing to come out of the data was that it really didn't support anything that the moral Entrepreneurs were saying so moral entrepreneurs promoted this image of the Patigmatic addict as a Chinese Cooley and he required the benevolence of Japan Benevolent ruled by Japan in order to save him from social Darwinist elimination that he was this degraded figure But by looking at the data that Japanese statisticians themselves collected one of the most interesting and surprising findings that I came to was that actually most of the users of the of Particularly refined narcotics and I haven't mentioned this yet in the course of our conversation But during the second moral panic this really becomes a problem of refined narcotics especially moral morphine and heroin rather than traditional smoking opium as was the case during the 1890s moral crisis But most of the consumers ended up being Japanese And so that was another really surprising finding and made me wonder about how the fact that data was collected to provide an illusion of legitimacy for the regime But using it could destabilize the frameworks upon which legitimacy was predicated That's fabulous. Thank you. And also I'll mention for listeners the kind of data work that you've done in your research for the book Also, it's generated some really useful graphs that that punctuate elements of the the narrative text and the prose text So that's also really useful. I'm just from the perspective of a reader Now you've already mentioned I'm just now the transformation from smoked to refined narcotics And this went hand-in-hand with the transformation from smoking to injecting Narcotics and so this the importance of injection as a material practice is something that you talk about At various points in this part of the book. You also talk in this part of the book and I'll just mark this for readers or for listeners either before we move on you talk about the element of that in that you mentioned very briefly Already when you introduced the importance of that in as a place and that is died in as a city of migrants And you talk about opium being used as a kind of weapon of the week in this context, which is another really I think interesting part of the story So during the interwar period the this renewed moral crusade that you described in this part of the book provides a context for the emergence of an Ideology of what you call not just benevolence, but benevolent government as a justification for empire So can you talk a little bit about the idea of benevolent government as it shapes the kinds of? Phenomena that are happening around narcotics in this part of the book Sure, so the idea of benevolence is is quite deeply rooted in Japanese and East Asian philosophy It comes out of the writings of Confucius, but it's fundamentally the idea that the state is responsible for its subjects and It's legitimacy depends on the fact that it's able to rule them well That subjects owe an absolute loyalty and obedience in exchange for the greater knowledge and protection of the state So this is this is actually quite Similar to the mission to civilize of the Western powers So these these philosophies come to guide I think Japanese colonial and imperial philosophy during the interwar period the idea that civilization the civilization of the colonial subject is a project of benevolence and the way that the Japanese government epitomizes its rule over in Northeast Asia and so the Narcotic the regulation of the narcotic economy Must look benevolent in order for it to be legitimate so the ultimate end of all of these competing forces is to Direct the discourses around the narcotic economy in a way that make regulation seem benevolent whether whether it can be so considered or not but in in some instances it becomes quite hypocritical We've already talked a little bit about the establishment of the opium monopoly. That's meant to be And during the second moral panic the one we're talking about now as well the opium monopoly is meant to be an institution of benevolence that Japan is carefully allowing Narcotics users to wean themselves off opium slowly as a means of caring for their health Whereas it's really also deriving significant financial profit from the from allowing the narcotic economy to continue to flourish now opium is also Deeply implicated in racial politics in this context and you talk about the importance of opium in this part of the book is a marker for Racial differentiation that distinguished Chinese users from colonial subjects and specifically from Korean and Taiwanese colonial subjects So can you talk a little bit about that part of the story how? Does understanding the discourse of opium and opium use and opium regulation coming out of Japanese empire in this context shed light on? larger categories of racial differentiation that emerge from this Sure, this was actually one of the hardest things to get a grip on because it evolved so much over time so What I came to realize in the course of working on this project was The Japanese were more or less Japanese of the home islands were more or less Absolutely associated in the imperial mindset with abstinence And because abstinence was a marker of difference with China the Chinese were absolutely associated with addiction But between those poles Japan also was constructing an empire of subjects who were theoretically supposed to be assimilating Doka Moving towards a more Japanese identity and subject hoods So as they were fought to progress along that continuum They also were thought to move from addiction to abstinence so when Koreans and Taiwanese were colonized the idea was that they would shed their participation in an opium consumer identity and Sort of take on more Japanese quality of of abstinence But it becomes quite interesting for a number of reasons first of all colonial subjects embraced a lot of this rhetoric as well The one of one of the sort of the geminizing features of empire is the Japanese Imperial success in spreading these ideas among colonial subjects the idea that that Opium consumption or narcotics consumption would lead to their social Darwinist elimination so many of many colonial subjects or Chinese Taiwanese Koreans and others were actually very active as moral entrepreneurs in the Japanese Empire as well Another really interesting thing I found is is that there's a very spatial element to this That came out most cleanly in the case of the Koreans who were the most mobile subjects in Japan's Empire so Koreans in Korea were seen as steadily assimilating towards a Japanese identity But Koreans in Manchuria were valued as Japanese partners in imperialism They were legally Japanese citizens and could fulfill a lot of the tests of the Empire that the Japanese didn't want to do So whereas Koreans in Korea were seen as gradually taking on an abstinent Subjected Koreans in Manchuria were presented as being already there and it's ironic because Korean consumption of narcotics in Manchuria was Relatively speaking much higher and then Koreans who migrated to Japan there were about two million during the imperial age Were differentiated from the Japanese they were Japan's most salient other in the home islands And so they were represented as drug users in the same kind of virulent language that was used that was applied to the Chinese So in 1931 is at the height of this moral crusade against narcotics money from the opium trade that we've been talking about actually Finance Japanese military takeover of Manchuria now. There's a discourse that emerges out of this That's really really really interesting in which Japan is accused of drugging China into submission and using Manchuko as a kind of Narco state, so that's a really really interesting at least for me part of this story Just thinking about Manchuria as a narco state in that context. I think really opens up a very different perspective onto the global history of drug Trafficking of narcotics and so I just want to mark that for listeners now In fact during the interwar years the KLT as we've been talking about as you show in the book was actually a really important space For the continuing moral crusade against narcotics and when as you bring us further into this story you bring us into the a context in which we see merchants being focused on and being a really important part of the story as They become as you put it here entrepreneurs of morality So can you talk about merchants because they've they've come up before in the course of our conversation you mentioned them at the beginning They're really fascinating here So what do we need to understand about merchants as entrepreneurs of morality in order to understand the larger arguments that this part of the book is making? Sure the application of The label of moral entrepreneurs to merchants is something that came to me rather late in the process So it's kind of interesting and in that way most most scholars of moral panic have not usually considered merchants as architects of morality and in that sense so within this second crisis of Moral moral crusade against narcotics that takes place in the high imperial age from the from the end of World War one to the end of World War two the importance of merchants becomes I think increasingly defined in in articulating and identifying the regulation of the narcotics market with benevolent government so merchants are the legal purveyors of opium throughout the Japanese Empire and because there is this opium monopoly or precursors to it the state Thanks to the the strategy of gradual suppression, which was widely adopted There is this rule for opium to be benevolently sold and the state needs agents to do it What happens is because these individuals have so much Financial power the state is quite active in working with them. So One thing that I try to do in this chapter is look a little bit more closely at actual individuals who were important in regulating the narcotic economy so it's again focused on the one known least territory, but the initial initially Japan considered adopting an opium monopoly in the KLT along the lines of what took place in Taiwan but ultimately it was decided that the market was too small the population was infinitesimal and the expense would be too great so Basically the opium economy was farmed out. It's called a revenue farm Was farmed out to individuals who then were able to sell opium and simply paid taxes on it to the government But over time. Oh, sorry. No. No, go on. Oh, sure, but over time This sort of strategy which was adopted by the Western powers and their colonies throughout Asia and Southeast Asia as well this strategy came to seem was stigmatized by the Western powers as not being benevolent or not civilizing the local populations, so Japan had to discard it and replace it with an opium monopoly and this Monopoly strategy is also adopted in Manchuko where the sort of lines between merchants and Lawbreakers are entirely based on who has a license from the government, but the conduct ends up looking very similar I'm sorry for interrupting you before I was just very struck because you talk about you were just talking about the importance of a shift to focusing on individuals And I'm wondering if any of the individuals that you talked about in that context particularly strike you as being especially worthy of note in terms of bringing them to the attention of listeners so in other words that were you particularly fascinated with any of those individuals specifically that you'd like to share with us So one thing that struck me was that the collective Biographies is quite similar in all cases the revenue farmers the monopoly agents Most of them sort of founded their careers on military contacts They were unable to find positions in the Japanese home islands It would be fair to describe them as tidy good-owning Continental adventurers who came to China because there was really no place for them in the metropolitan economy and then depending on when they arrived and when they When they set up their businesses in the guandam lease territory, it was legal or not legal So essentially you have these very similar individuals Chinese as well as Japanese who are able to Avoid prosecution or get caught up in it Doing the same activities, but some of them are sanctioned by the state and some of them are not So as you move to this part of the book Also, you open up another element of this story for us. That's also really interesting that we haven't talked about in too much detail Up to now and that's the aspect of law enforcement So the Japanese government develops a system of law enforcement to deal with the problem of illicit dealers of sort of black market dealers in the KLT But you show in this part of the book that over time the dealers and the people who are Supposedly meant to be controlling them develop a kind of symbiotic relationship and law enforcement actually allows the drug market to flourish So let's talk about these sorts of offenses. How were legal or how were drug offenses? conceived in this part of the story as Punishable offenses and what kinds of punishments did addict who were punished under these contexts? Suffering and you mentioned also the importance of differential Prosecution according to racial categories. So maybe we can speak to that a little bit if you don't mind Sure, so the chapter online enforcement really looks at how the state creates a regime that it constructs as benevolent to prosecute the black market and the black market was particularly robust in the KLT and menturia because it the state didn't in contrast to Taiwan the state did not under price It's monopoly opium relative to the black market So there was very little incentive for opium users to buy from the state Which give rise to a very large parallel black market that created a lot of opportunities for other people to participate And it was very much across national collaboration. I talk about how Japanese sort of operated Consistently at the upper end of the traffic as importers and so forth and then Koreans were often distributors and Chinese were petty distributors and users and there were a lot of cross national partnerships with Western agents Who are active during this time as well? so the challenge of the state was to come up with a regime of prosecuting or sort of treating these offenses that was legitimate and benevolence was an ideology that didn't aim for equality but sought to was very race conscious in the sense that it sought to meet out treatment to the lawbreaker based on race. So the challenge was to construct a Judicial system that was extremely race conscious, but preserved stability in the black drug market Which was funneling so much money to the to the army and so forth so I Look at the sort of three levels that narcotics offenders encountered the state policing prosecution and punishment so the state basically led left the black market to grow on its own because it created a pretext to bring in more police who were ultimately important in fighting alongside the Guangdong army to subjugate the entirety of Manchuria then in terms of prosecution it was Sort of a foregone conclusion that the state would convict you because the benevolent state always had superior knowledge It couldn't blunder in bringing you to justice. So with conviction more or less a foregone conclusion I think over 95% of the cases that I had data on were Convictions, but with conviction of foregone conclusion what the lawbreaker was really interested in was soliciting benevolence or basically mercy from the state And that took different forms depending on your race So for Japanese offenders most of the prison population in the Guangdong Lee territory was Japanese because it was seen as a way of Civilizing the offender of restoring him as a penitent to the national community and then for Koreans who were Sort of aligned with the Japanese in Manchuria Often the strategy was to resettle them particularly in the 1930s when they were farmed out to various Agricultural colonies throughout the Manchuria in Hinterland is a way of subduing it. I'm for Chinese It was thought that they were incapable of civilization and so the best justice was vlogging Thank you. Thank you, Maryam. Now as we move into the sort of later chapters of the book We move into a part of the story. That's of deep interest I think and it's going to be of deep relevance to anybody interested in the history of science and medicine So you look you're looking at the history of science here both in terms of the production of drugs and in terms of the control of drugs and drug use You show here in this part of the book among other things that to meet the legal to the legal here demand For refined narcotics Japan actually sends chemists abroad to learn how to make opium alkaloids So this is a really fascinating breaking bad part of the story. Yeah, so for me as I was very interested in that Now by the late 1920s as a result imperial Japan actually becomes the world's leading Exporter of heroin and a significant global producer of morphine and cocaine Okay, so another really interesting part of this story But you also take us into laboratory contexts that look more closely at efforts to study, understand and control addiction as a result of this drug use And this is what I'd like to ask you to talk a little bit about In a moment or so. So you show in your study of how addiction is researched and treated actually as a scientific and medical problem here You show that there was actually a series of world-class laboratories and research facilities That was established as Japan becomes really really important in global studies of addiction science so can you talk about that part of this story the place of Japan here in the in the context of global addiction science and what was happening in these laboratories and research facilities? Sure, so During the early 20th century Japan really becomes one of the leading scientific producers of knowledge about opium and addiction I think When sort of this this is a conversation about legitimacy and this is a way for scientific researchers and medical researchers to represent to carve out a role within the state of Sort of legitimizing Japan as an empire and as a nation by producing world-class scientific knowledge on par with the Western powers And it's also a way of demonstrating benevolence to colonial subjects So legitimacy at home as well as abroad by looking into ways that can resolve addiction So this as a scientific topic offers a lot to doctors and to the state another reason why Addiction becomes such a robust area of inquiry in Japanese laboratories during this time is because it's such a it's a local problem Which gives Japan an advantage in researching it vis-a-vis the Western powers It's not coming later to the conversation and it has quite good access to addicts or drug users so the Sort of initial drive is to use What I've represented as colonial medicine as a justification of empire and I would say that Japan to a greater extent than any of the Western umpires really Attaches itself to colonial medicine as a justification of imperialism And brings not just a world-class Japanese doctors to mentor you to research addiction But also gradually comes to incorporate colonial subjects in this project as well So there's a lot of class national scientific collaboration going on in an effort to resolve this problem initially the quest to learn about and cure addiction is very much a way of justifying Japanese imperialism But after the formation of Man Chupo what happens is Japanese scientists become very disconnected from the Western world and scientific collaboration as collaboration in most endeavors during this time really ebbs and so they turn to the Empire for colleagues and the conversation the scientific conversation about addiction becomes interwoven into the effort to justify the state of Man Chupo as this cooperation among the races among the five races, so they bring Korean and Chinese scientific participants into this into the laboratories Now you show and also in this part of the book that the first scientific the first scientific medical addiction clinic in the world Is established in this time, and it brings us back into data So can you speak just briefly to what's happening in addiction clinics in this context in Japan? What kinds of what do we need to know about the kinds of practices that are happening there to understand? The larger argument you're making in this part of the book So the division between between laboratories and and clinics is to some extent artificial Research was very much the duty of every Japanese doctor and research took place in the clinics as well in then was the first the location of the first scientific medical opium addiction clinic in the world by which I mean the first addiction treatment center where research was carried out where there was an effort to find a new cure rather than simply applying existing knowledge and Western style scientific medicine was used to pursue this so Every patient who came through the door was also an experimental subject and that was a great deal of data collected about them and the addiction treatment clinic and dynamic became a model for The establishment of similar facilities throughout the Japanese Empire and the world We see the rise of addiction treatment clinics throughout the European empires in the United States as well During this time are with reference and in contact with the original facility in the end So this this very much is is part of a global wave But again the clinic is both a way of showing Japan's prowess in terms of scientific knowledge and medical treatment before the world and also a way of demonstrating benevolence to imperial subjects by adopting this medical strategy to treat a problem So Mary I can't let you go in good conscience without asking you to talk in just a little bit about the third The third of the three moral crises. So you show and in the last parts of the book How for almost seven years after the war Japan has occupied they're occupied by the US and its allies and upon the restoration of Sovereignty there's a kind of crisis of legitimacy right and you take us through the consequences of this now This was a context in which we see this third major moral crisis And this is the moral crisis in which as you described at the very beginning of our conversation Mass society becomes a kind of moral entrepreneur. This is a crisis in which a spike in Narcotics consumption starts taking a different kind of form we move here from a story about opium to a story about amphetamine, it's a super fascinating transition in part of the story you talk about this as Or in the context of a discussion of the hirapon age this lasts from about 1952 to 1956 and this is a context in which hundreds of Thousands of people are manufacturing and selling methamphetamine Roughly two million Japanese are using the drug regularly and this presents a different kind of a moral crisis now in contrast to the treatment of opium which we saw throughout the book being Consistently defined as a problem of the other capital O Hirapon was treated as really a Japanese issue a really a domestic drug crisis And the addict as you're showing here is transformed from a racial other capital O to self capital S So can you speak a little bit to that? What what do we need to understand about this hirapon crisis and can you talk a little bit about this kind of domestication of Of the addict figure in the context of the use of methamphetamine and the production thereof Sure, so this is depends first real moral panic over drugs and it's in some ways more visceral Just because it does affect the home islands rather than the vadish Empire one sort of important feature that I think the post-war historiography has overlooked a little bit is that the occupation was certainly a rupture and a moment of transition but the restoration of sovereignty in Japan was also an incredibly fraught moment that Created a new crisis of sovereignty. Japan had many tasks at this time to differentiate itself from what had come before to avoid becoming a US puppet and To restore agency to the population which was represented as having had none during the era of quote-unquote fascism and war and so In the context of this crisis of legitimacy once again a panic breaks out Over the issue of narcotics and this time it's methamphetamine There were stockpiles of methamphetamine throughout the world in fact The US and the Axis powers Distributed this drug as well. It wasn't the health risks were not as well understood as today and it wasn't necessarily controlled but the There are stocks of methamphetamine that are released among the population and then there becomes there is a demand created that is satisfied by popular manufacturing participation and it takes place from about 1952 the year in which Japan regained sovereignty through 1956 when it was brought under control and I would represent this as an opportunity for the Japanese public to Demonstrate to restore agency to itself by participating in this anti narcotics campaign So we see a lot of activism by groups that really haven't been active before like for example mothers associations and Psychiatrists who were largely absent from the medical conversation Beforehand as well as traditional actors like law enforcement and so forth And this is this is the world's first methamphetamine crisis methamphetamine outbreak and it's certainly Japan's first domestic drug experience on a wide scale and in the process of Bringing it under control Japan restores its identity as an abstinent nation and thereby it's sovereign legitimacy So Maryam, I would love to keep you for another That much more in the book that we could talk about I mean it's a it's a really extraordinarily rich study and we've really just talked about Moments or elements within a much larger narrative that you've given us here Because we don't have another Is there anything else in particular about the book that we didn't have a chance to talk about but that you'd like to mention and Perhaps especially for the sake of listeners who haven't had had a chance to read it Well, I guess um quite rightly we haven't really talked about the historiographical context of the book, but I guess I'd like to acknowledge that I gained a lot from this sort of burgeoning wave of scholarship that's coming out recently on drugs in Asia and Particularly Northeast Asia, I guess I would be thinking of Frank Dakota's book on narcotics in China and Mark Dreskull recently produced a study as well Norman Smith and so I have Been glad to situate myself in that conversation as well as sort of on the larger story algorithm of the Japanese Empire So now that the book is out Congratulations as I think I'm abundantly clear. It's a fabulous book and fabulous Not just in terms of the narrative that it's telling but in terms of their reach I think potentially of the narrative to multiple different disciplinary contacts that it informs So now that it's done. What's next for you? Are there any projects that are currently inspiring you? And what can we hope to read in the future? I've moved away from drugs My current project is on the history of Japanese anthropology and archaeology in the 20th century and I'm interested in in the history of social science as a way of looking at how Japan Framed its evolving national identity During these various contexts from about the 30s through the 70s So Imperial is a more occupation and then independence again And I'm doing it through the lens of one Anthropologist who was particularly influential not just in Japan, but globally He founded the Poldai cultural anthropology department And he was raised in colonial Korea. He did studies on behalf of the Japanese military in New Guinea and the larger region of Northeast Asia during World War two And then he was repatriated and worked on various projects in the home islands He created Japan's first ethnology museum. He wrote several encyclopedias for the public He was a real public intellectual and then he was Japan's first scholar to study the diaspora He was posted to Brazil in the 1950s to look at the largest immigrant population there and In the final phase of his career, he retrained at Harvard as an archaeologist and studied the endian civilization in Peru So through his career, I'm looking at the different ways that Japan interacted with wider global social science as well as There again with a capital O As a means of understanding his larger generational cohort and their accommodations with changing political Circumstances, well best of luck with that project. I'm sure we will be talking again And thank you very much Miriam for making the time It's a fabulous book and it's really been a pleasure to talk with you about it. So thank you. Thank you so much You've been listening to new books and East Asian studies. Thanks very much for joining us and we'll see you next time You . [MUSIC]
Miriam Kingsberg‘s fascinating new book offers both a political and social history of modern Japan and a global history of narcotics in the modern world. Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History (University of California Press, 2013) locates the emergence of a series of three “moral crusades” against narcotics that each accompanied a perceived crisis in collective values and political legitimacy in nineteenth and twentieth century Japan.
In the first moral crisis after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5, opium became a symbol of difference between Japan and an “Other” epitomized by Qing China, as Japan sought to “leave Asia” and “enter” the West. Here, Kingsberg traces a series of attempts to regulate drug use in Taiwan in the wake of Japan’s transformation into a formal empire. Between the end of WWI and Japan’s defeat in WWII, Japan saw its second moral crisis as it navigated the most protracted and intense moral crusade against narcotics in its history. The central chapters of Kingsberg’s book trace this second crisis, paying special attention to Japanese colonial rule in Korea and in the Kwantung Leased Territory (KLT) in southern Manchuria as Korea became the “global capital of morphine” and the KLT port handled “the second-highest volume of banned drugs in the world.” The third moral crisis brings us to the end of Moral Nation and the thick of the “hiropon age” of the 1950s, when methamphetamine production and usage skyrocketed in postwar Japan and the nation saw its first full-fledged domestic drug plight. Kingsberg locates a changing cast of “moral entrepreneurs” who motivated these three crises, shedding light on the formative roles of merchants and mass society in this chapter of global narcotic history. It is a wonderful, meticulously researched book that contributes significantly to the histories of Japan, of drugs, and of global politics. Enjoy!
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