From Prussia to China: Japanese Colonial Medicine and Gotō Shinpei’s Combination of Medical Police and Local Self-Administration

Recent historical investigation into the rise of ‘biopolitical modernity’ in China has shed some surprising light. While it was long thought that British public health initiatives entered China via Hong Kong, the recent work of Ruth Rogaski, Philippe Chemouilli and others has established that it was actually early Japanese colonialism that played the crucial role. It was the Meiji Empire’s hygiene reform projects in Taiwan and Manchuria that provided the model for Republican China. Curiously overlooked by medical historians has been one of themajor early works of Japanese public health that directly inspired and guided this colonial medical enterprise. This was that of the Japanese health reformer and colonial officer, Got o Shinpei (1857–1929), and it was undertaken in Munich as a doctoral thesis under the supervision ofMax von Pettenkofer. In this article, I focus on the way in which Shinpei dealt in his thesis with the relations between centralisation and local self-administration as one of the key issues facing hygienic modernisation and colonial biopolitical control. Shinpei was the archetypal figure of Japanese colonialism. Born in 1857, his career as a Japanese statesman ran parallel to the development of the Meiji Period (1868–1912) that transformed a fragmented and parochial Japan into an industrialised modern world power. From the early 1880s, in particular, Japan experienced major governmental and scientific innovations, which were ushered in through European luminaries and soon spread to the new colonies in China. Before his death in 1929, Got o officiated in posts as diverse as Chief Civilian Administrator of Taiwan, Director General of the South Manchurian Railway, Mayor of Tokyo, and Home Minister of Japan. By the age of twenty-five, his academic excellence and allegiance to the Emperor was such that he was appointed the Chancellor of Nagoya Medical School. Medical historians have recently provided some important insights into the contributions of Got o Shinpei to the introduction of Japanese colonial medicine and public health in China. Shiyung Liu (2008) has demonstrated how Got o’s placement as Minsei Chôkan [Chief Civil Administrator] of Taiwan in 1898 opened the way for pupils of Japan’s leading medical scientist, Kitasato, to remove themselves from direct state