2023-24 Academic Catalog

How do Shintoism view childbirth and death? How do Buddhism and biotechnology intersect in the making of Japan? How do Japanese perceptions about health and medicine evolve with settler colonialism? This course examines the meaning of body, health, and medicine in Japan’s recent past when biomedicine came to replace classical Chinese medicine and to gradually occupy a hegemonic position in its pharmaceutical regime. Reading materials are drawn from illustrations, travelogues, and poems, as well as medical journals and reports. Themes include body and modern self, family and reproductive justice, medical colonialism, hygienic modernity, narcotics and ethnopsychology, and national healthcare system.