UC Santa Barbara

How did the dead bodies that scientists of imperial Japan examined become both empirical objects and suprahuman representations of entire peoples? And how and why did human remains become re-animated outside of the boundaries of scientific treatises and institutions? This dissertation examines both questions by tracing the intertwined journeys of living scientists and the deceased bodies that they examined, measured, dissected, collected, and traded in imperial Japan. I argue that the bodies/body parts of marginalized peoples in the Japanese empire – particularly women, criminalized people, impoverished people, and colonized people – became material evidence for scientific theories that hierarchically ranked and racialized populations. Their flesh, blood, and bones informed a wide range of scientific fields, including anatomy, phrenology, craniometry, anthropology, and bacteriology. Scientists also treated disempowered people’s remains as commodities, forming a bone trade network that encompassed the US, Japanese, and Western European empires, as well as various anatomical laboratories and museums. These human remains experienced multiple recontextualizations (including de-individuated scientific objects and/or representatives of entire genders, classes, and ethnic groups) through the processes of scientific collection, examination, and exchange. The corpses under scientific observation did not merely act as objects. They also had the power to influence living communities. Within scientific communities, bodies could generate fear and discomfort, or even jeopardize the bodily safety of those who examined them. In contrast, marginalized communities in the former Japanese empire have found hope and decolonial potential through repatriating remains held in scientific institutions. The journeys of the people who became scientific objects therefore reveal the agency that dead bodies exert upon the worlds of the living.