Talking about Disease – Past and Present

I wanted to write the post earlier, but my body wasn’t cooperating. For the past couple of weeks, I have suffered through a high fever, a cough, the aches caused by respiratory syncytical virus (RS-virus).

The only reason that I knew what virus caused my misery was that my doctor tested me for it. This is probably because RS-virus is in the top ten list of  contagious illnesses in Japan. (Really.)  Every winter, RSV makes people sick in Japan and hospitalizes thousands of infants in Japan.  Most adults can shake the fever and cough off with the help of medication.  But the virus for babies under a year old causes enough irritability that they will stop feeding and have to be admitted to hospital for intravenous feeding.

The reason that I know all of this is because of the availability of information on RSV online.  There are hundreds of medical studies published in Japanese and English about the costs of RS-virus in Japan.  When I first looked up the what RS-virus was — because the explanation that I received from the doctor  was pretty vague — the first phrase in the search engine to come up was “RS-virus Japan.”  There is a lot of information on RS-virus in Japan because of the rates of infection are high.  It also, it seems, costs the government a ton of money because 0-6 month old infants are usually hospitalized if they contract the virus.

How much energy do states have to put into preventing and controlling the spread of communicable diseases? When communicable illnesses like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and “Swine Flu” breakout in Japan, public health officials in Japan don’t fool around.   Japanese health officials, following advice from health officers from the Infectious Disease Surveillance Center and the American Center for Disease Control, go to incredible lengths to prevent contaminative people and things from entering the country.  I can get tons of information on the ways in which current governments maintain their biosecurity.

Getting historical information on what made people sick is a little more difficult.  Where’s the stuff on the management of disease during the early years of the Meiji period (1868-1912)? Anyone?

I can’t find it in English, despite the central place that modern hygienic control had in regulating East Asian ports in the late-nineteenth century.   In the early years of the modern shipping and border control, some of the most difficult places that Japanese government officials had to regulate and control were transnational spaces of ports.  Sometimes when read secondary sources on the history of the treaty port system in Japan, I wish that there was more information on disease.  (I know that I wish for the strangest things.)

This isn’t just because of my interest in environmental history.  (Though that is a big part of it.)  It’s bigger than that.  In fact, disease was big news in the early years of the Meiji period (1868-1912).  Look at most Japanese newspaper index from the 1870s and 1880s, and there are two types of stories that appear a lot.   The first are about fires, which sometimes raised tens of thousands of houses and businesses at a time.  The second type news was about cholera outbreaks, which killed tens of thousands of people at a time.  Both are pretty important pieces of news that don’t work their way into you standard — even innovative — modern Japanese history textbooks.

Fighting Cholera in 1877

But I am pretty persistent.  Here is what I managed to cull from some of the newspaper indexes that I looked at a couple of weeks ago.  In Japan, the first major outbreak of cholera began in Osaka in August 1876. One year later, the an outbreak of cholera killed 8,027 people and infected 13,816 others in Nagasaki in the summer.    In July 1878, another outbreak in Nagasaki killed 511 people.

By the end of the decade, outbreaks were front page news in most papers. It’s hard to miss the headlines.  By the middle of 1879, a nationwide epidemic of cholera, even with strict entry conditions of ships coming into Japanese ports, killed 105,758 and infected 162,647 people.  By July 1880, the Bureau of Hygiene began to survey the spreads of disease more systematically, and brought in legislation to prevent the spread of tuberculous, typhus, cholera, dysentery, and diphtheria.  It may have worked for a time, but in 1882 there was another outbreak which killed 33,784 people.

You would think that people would write histories of these outbreaks.  But nope.   There aren’t many.

I am not concerned that outbreaks of cholera, tuberculous, and typhus haven’t been covered  much in a large monograph on the treaty port system in Japan.  It would be nice to have something that I could reference when I teach or write about biosecurity in the mid- to late-nineteenth century.  But I get it.  People are busy, and there is always another intellectual or cultural history of the meaning of modernity that needs to be written.  (I’m serious.  There is no shortage of good stuff that could be written on modernity.)

That’s not what bothers me.  What bothers me is that I that I can’t remember reading anything on these incredible outbreaks in standard modern Japanese history textbooks.  Why not? Is it because outbreaks killing thousands of people wasn’t important?  It certainly seems like it was important — and sensational — to the press and governments at the time.  Or is it because things like disease do not fit neatly within historical geography of the field?

Talking Shit with my Students

Apologies for not posting anything for the past couple of months. Along with dissertation writing, I have had trouble managing my teaching load. I have a new class in modern Japanese history and am reworking an older class on the history of Edo-Tokyo.

For the “History of Tokyo” class, I have been — with varying degrees of success — trying to bring in more environmental history into the lectures. I failed in illustrating how changes in land taxes changed land use in prefectures like Kanagawa and Saitama. I thought that it was fascinating. My students weren’t that impressed. On the other hand, I succeeded in talking shit with my students. My students seem to love talking shit with me.

In a lecture on construction of road and water systems in the Tokugawa period (1603-1867), I talked with my students about use and market values of human excreta. The use value of human waste, particularly faeces, was as a source of nitrogen for farming. Getting access to green fertilizers (plants) in the early seventeenth century was difficult, as the forests were often off-limits to farmers. (See Conrad Totman’s Green Archipelago for this.) Night soil (human excreta) was less regulated and much more available to farmers, particularly for those who lived near large urban centres like Osaka.

The practice of using night soil (human excreta) for fertilizer was big business in Osaka. There farmers had dependency on urban centres for the supply of human excreta for the fertilizing of fields in villages surrounding Osaka and Kyoto. Nitrogen rich fecal matter was much easier to obtain, as long as you had the rights to collect it. As fertilizers rose in value, so did the value of night soil. The value of certain types of excreta was so high that the rights of collection areas were assigned and regulated by local governments. Susan Hanley wrote in her article on preindustrial sanitation in Japan that competition for rights to collect night soil was so intense that there were turf wars (riots) over the rights to scoop from certain neighbourhoods in 1724. The reason was that 10 households of night soil could bring in ½ ryô of gold per year. (1 ryô of gold could buy a family a year’s supply of grain.)

One of the reasons for the increase in demand for night soil in Osaka, especially fecal matter, was because of the growth of the city of Edo and its dearth of night soil. In the city’s first century of growth, farmers had a need of Osaka’s supply of night soil to fertilize their crops. The night soil, which was mostly faeces because it was easier to transport than urine, was brought from Osaka to Edo by water.

As the population grew, market places and farmers on the edge of the city became increasingly dependent on Edo for night soil. Agreements of exchange between daimyo (domainal lords) manors — which were often the size of small towns — and villages outside of the city assured farmers that they would have a steady supply of nitrogen for their crops. For daimyo, the agreements brought in money to help fund their biannual stays in the city of Edo.

Works Cited:

Hanley, Susan. “Urban Sanitation in Preindustrial Japan.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18, no. 1 (1987): 1-26.

Totman, Conrad D. The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan. Berkeley: University of California, 1989.

We are the children of light, who have put aside the world of darkness

While I have often thought, written, and taught about how human beings have engineered the land of around them through the building of dams, freeway systems, and sky scrapers, the most monumental engineering project in Japan has to be the conquest of darkness with artificial light.  Over most cities of Japan, the artificial light blanks out the  nighttime sky, emptying it of stars.

Photo by C. Tyner

I am less interested in the neon lighting in urban centres than in the lighting in homes and offices.  Neon might be he rock star of lighting in Japan.  It’s the most photogenic and brands places like Sibuya, Shinjuku, and Ginza.  It may not be as sexy, but I am more interested in the light that saturates the every night in Japan: fluorescent lighting.

Toshiba Corporation claims that a “warm, relaxing mood and enhancing people’s environment [has come] through the use of lighting” in Japan since the premodern times.  But the truth is that the brightening of most households in Japan didn’t begin until the 1950s, when there was a wide introduction of fluorescent light bulbs.  Electronic giants like Matsushita Electronics (Panasonic) and Toshiba Corporation promoted the introduction of fluorescent lighting with the promise it they would create brighter, more efficient households.

Photo courtesy of NASA

Flourescent lights certainly helped to produced brighter households.   More efficient and longer lasting than incandescent light bulbs, fluorescent lights are the bulb of choice in Japan.  They make up most of the 1.6 million lights in Japan, and produce a particular light signature.  Viewed from space, mercury-vapor filled fluorescent lights used in households and street lighting give off a gentle blue-green glow that makes the lighting signature of Japan’s cities particular from cities in North America and Europe, which glow yellow from sodium-vapor street lighting.

Inside people’s homes and offices, fluorescent lighting produces a more intense glow, enhanced by the white walls of most buildings.  With the dimming of the lights after 11 March 2011, I have thought about how I felt overwhelmed by the fluorescent lighting in my apartment.  I sometimes suggest to my wife that I would like to paint the walls of the house in a colour other than white, or remove some of the lighting, to give my eyes a break from the blinding light.  Boxed in the white walls, the lights chases back darkness or shadow into the corners of each room.

Inside people’s homes artificial light illuminate how people have made their lives “brighter” through electric appliances and modern building techniques.  With chemical detergents and cleaners white is no long a color for special occasions.   White may have been symbolic with purity and religious practices in Japan.  Now it seems to be a little too commonplace for that. It something that seems to be symbolic of modern, hygienic living that everyone had access to.    White is the color of secularity.  It is the color of the everyday.

Most people living in Japan see the dimming of lights as necessary with threat of blackouts, but some of my friends seemed unsettled with the muting of Tokyo of its signature lighting.  Perhaps the dimming of light is a visible reminder of the nuclear crisis in Fukushima?  The darker streets and stations may also make us feel uncomfortable because they help to illuminate how much we have become dependent on artificial light in our everyday lives.  Perhaps the  increased darkness reminds us we how much we have tried to cheat our diurnal natures?

What would it take to write an environmental history of artificial light?  Can it be done?

Sources:

For more on the making of the “bright life” in postwar Japan see Simon Partner’s  Assembled Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.