As editor Morris Low deftly outlines in his introduction, the collected essays in this volume challenge the tidy picture of smooth, government-directed modernization leading to industrialization, nationhood, and empire by the end of the Meiji period in Japan. Building on the influential work of Carol Gluck, James Bartholomew, and Tessa Morris-Suzuki, the authors of the assembled chapters develop the common theme that modernization was often haphazard, irrational, poorly planned, and fraught with social biases regarding gender and race.
The first part of the book includes essays that investigate the role played by science and medicine in the national discourse on modernization. Christian Oberländer's essay examines Meiji efforts to determine the cause of beriberi. The government made improved medicine a priority because it viewed disease in general, and beriberi in particular, as a threat to the development of the modern military and industrial sectors. However, the process of developing scientific medicine...
