Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan by Hoi-Eun Kim

Abstract

Reviewed by: Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan by Hoi-Eun Kim Ellen Nakamura Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan. By Hoi-Eun Kim. University of Toronto Press, 2014. 249 pages. Hardcover $55.00; softcover $29.95. Doctors of Empire begins with an evocative scene of the unveiling of two bronze busts on the campus of Tokyo Imperial University in 1907—a lively event, attended by members of the academic and diplomatic communities, that provides an excellent entry into Hoi-Eun Kim’s study of the medical and cultural encounters between Germany and Japan. In honor of the two German physicians whose contributions were being celebrated that day—Erwin Baelz and Julius Scriba—the dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Aoyama Tanemichi, rose to give a speech in fluent German that emphasized the strength of German medicine in Japan and suggested that the relationship between Japan and Germany was a colonial one, at least as far as medical science was concerned. While some attendees were reportedly displeased by Aoyama’s assessment of Japan’s status as “colonial,” historians in recent years have found colonial and postcolonial examinations to be a productive way of considering the history of Japanese medicine.1 In this book, Kim covers well-trodden ground but with a specialized focus on German-Japanese relations. His highly readable discussion of the significance of the German model for Japanese medicine provides a welcome new addition to scholarly literature in English while also taking into account the historiography in German. Kim tries to emphasize both sides of this reciprocal yet unequal relationship, writing with a fresh eye for the multifaceted cultural encounters that it engendered. According to Kim’s research, between 1,150 and 1,200 Japanese students (he cites different figures on pages 5 and 61 of the book) learned medicine in Germany and other German-speaking regions in Europe between the years 1868 and 1914. Even larger numbers of students came into contact with German medicine in Japan through the [End Page 169] German teachers who taught in the country or their German-trained students. These teachers and physicians, the “doctors of empire” referred to in the title, were at the core of the Germanization of Japanese medicine. As outlined in the introduction, Kim explores these doctors using three analytical tools. First, he is interested in transnational history, in the flow of ideas and peoples as they cut across national borders. While acknowledging that the German physicians who were invited to Japan were modernizers, Kim emphasizes not their technical transfer of knowledge but rather the reciprocal nature of their interactions with Japan and their place within larger global processes. Second, the postcolonial aspect of his analysis seeks to place the activities of German physicians in Japan within the broader context of Germany’s colonial ambitions in East Asia. Turning to the anthropological studies undertaken by many German physicians in Japan, Kim shows how they helped to foster a new scientific racism that became influential in Japan’s own colonial expansion. Even as he claims to reject the concept of colonialism as a way of explaining the Germanization of Japanese medicine, his use of “soft power” as an alternative has much in common with the idea of “self-colonization” put forward by others.2 Kim’s third analytical tool is “double prosopography,” the collective study of the lives of doctors in two different countries, with particular attention to “the kaleidoscopic lives of ordinary or less-heroic Japanese medical students in Germany” (p. 10). Finally, interwoven into his analysis is a concern with broader issues within German-Japanese historiography. Kim is at pains to dismiss exceptionalist narratives that try to see in the German-style modernization of Japanese medicine a “fatal affinity” leading inevitably to the medical atrocities committed at Auschwitz and Unit 731. Ultimately, Kim is unable to completely fulfill his ambitious agenda within the pages of this slim volume; indeed, any one of his analytical frameworks could have formed the basis for a more detailed and perhaps more satisfying study. Nevertheless, the book contributes to an understudied area of the field and raises interesting...