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?
I think part of the problem is comparative: it’s hard to tell how significant these outbreaks are, historically speaking, without knowing what disease events were like elsewhere. Generally, my impression is that the late 19c is a time of struggle everywhere in the industrialized world against these kinds of disease events: they are well-documented but prevention is hard to implement.
Certainly, if the foreign community in Japan thought that the disease outbreaks were greater than they were used to at home, they rarely seemed to complain or note the problem.
Thank you for the comment, Jon.
My complaint isn’t that I can’t find English language sources on the spread of cholera. There are immigration reports from ports in the U.S. that note ships that are turned back from Japan because of the fear of cholera. (One of my students found this kind of information in an afternoon of research.) So there is stuff out there about outbreaks of cholera and typhus.
Towards the end of the post, I realized that what frustrates me about the absence of things like disasters and events of mass death in history textbooks on modern Japan. I am trying to figure out why things reported weekly in the papers for a nearly a decade isn’t worth writing about historically — by professional historians. I think at the end I — rightly or wrongly — took this as something that suggested that there is little desire to push back on what is taken as “factual.” Maybe I should have drove this point home a little more. So what would happen if historians looked at something like cholera outbreaks in Japan? Would it help of think about the limits of statist power? Would it help us think about connectivity? About the problems of administering heterotopic places like treaty ports, which were administered not by one statist actor but by many?
Good to hear that you’re feeling better. I encountered a similar problem when I was working on a museum exhibit in the summer of 1994. Part of the exhibit involved a typhoid fever outbreak in Ottawa in 1910. There was virtually nothing about it in the local histories I read, but it was front page news for much of early 191o, and it was a watershed event in the way that the city obtained and treated it’s drinking water. I wonder if scale has something to do with it. The death toll from the 1910 outbreak was relatively small, less than 1000 if remember correctly (I can’t find the death toll online). The diseases that get print are those that kill millions: think of the bubonic plague in Europe and Asia in the 1340s or the world-wide influenzia pandemic of 1918-1920. Illness is a regular part of life, even if it isn’t fatal. Unless there is something to make it unique, it an outbreak simply passes by. That said, looking at it through the limits of statist power might be fruitful. I admit I don’t know much about Meiji Japan, but wasn’t the country in a rush to reinvent itself as a modern, Western, industrial nation? Perhaps noting persistent cholera outbreaks would tarnish the achievements of the period, and make Japan seem backwards compared to what it strived to be.