UC Berkeley

In the late nineteenth century, a global revolution in the practice of health impinged upon Korea and Japan. New understandings about the causes and spread of disease played a formative role in the modernization of both countries. Through the medium of public health—the science and practice of disease prevention and prolonging life—the Japanese and Korean governments sought to harness and manipulate a host of new technologies so as to engender fealty to the nation and mobilize populations on behalf of the state. For Japan, public health also became the foremost means of perpetuating and justifying imperial expansion. For Korea, public health functioned as a vehicle for preserving territorial sovereignty. And for both countries, the discipline became a barometer whereby Korean and Japanese leaders measured levels of national “progress” against the world and each other.

Drawing from archival materials housed in three countries, this dissertation uses public health in order to critically reexamine the making of modern state-society relations in Japan and Korea, and the relationship between these two countries. I argue that public health functioned as a way of internally strengthening somatic control over populations while externally broadcasting the nation’s achievement of a higher level of civilization.

In the 1870s and 1880s, medically-minded intellectuals and bureaucrats in Korea and Japan held similar visions of “hygienic modernity,” or the condition whereby the health of populations connoted national strength and civilizational advancement. Implementing and showcasing the adoption of supposedly universal and normative standards of clean behavior would, it was thought, convince Western imperial powers that Japan and Korea were their equal. In an effort to “heal the nation,” these elites issued laws, penned editorials and delivered popular lectures designed to reform everyday health praxis. Oftentimes for these reformers, the ability to exhibit improvements in health—whether through urban beautification programs, reforming bodily comportment, or the construction of grand medical facilities—mattered more than the elimination or prevention of disease. I refer to this act of displaying hygiene as cleanliness, or a condition whereby the home, the body, and the state all transformed so as to convince foreign and domestic audiences of the nation’s teleological progress.

By taking an integrative and comparative approach to the history of Korea and Japan, this project also attempts to broaden the analytical frames through which these two histories have traditionally been examined. My study calls attention to the relationship between anti-disease measures, struggles over sovereignty, and how health reforms helped shape notions of national belonging. Most fundamentally, my project helps re-integrate the modern histories of Korea and Japan—two fields frequently conceived in exclusively national terms—into both a broader regional context as well as into the larger history of the early twentieth century world.