Reinventing “Hygiene”: The Sanitary Society of Japan and Public Health Reform During the Mid-Meiji Period

Abstract

During the last decades of the nineteenth century, public health policy in Japan transformed from a stricter focus on anti-disease measures to a more discursive and long-term strategy, one that attempted to train local and prefectural administrators to implement top-down directives regarding hygiene (eisei 衛生). This paper uses the early speeches and articles published by The Sanitary Society of Japan (Dai Nippon Shiritsu Eiseikai 大日本私立衛生会, lit. “Great Japan Private Hygiene Association”), the nation’s largest forum for the discussion and dissemination of knowledge related to hygiene, to analyze how and why this change took place. Founded in 1883 by leading figures in medicine and the medical social sciences, the Society attempted to reformulate popular understandings of hygiene and health after widespread manipulation of the government’s early public health programs. I argue that the Society repurposed and reformulated supposedly native Japanese healing practices in order to ground unfamiliar medical concepts, including the term “hygiene” (eisei) itself, within the familiar vocabulary of supposedly shared medical traditions. In recuperating and mobilizing these ideas, the organization broadened the discourse of hygiene while also immuring the concept within a circle of medical elites.