Drugs and the politics of consumption in Japan / edited by Judith Vitale, Oleg Benesch and Miriam Kingsberg Kadia

• Superior document: Brill's Japanese Studies Library 74
• TeilnehmendeR: Benesch, Oleg; Kadia, Miriam Kingsberg; Vitale, Judith
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden, Boston : Brill, 2023; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Brill's Japanese Studies Library 74
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (300 pages) :; illustrations.

In early modern Japan, upper status groups coveted pills and powders made of exotic foreign ingredients such as mummy and rhinoceros horn. By the early twentieth century, over-the-counter-patent medicines, and, more alarmingly, morphine, had become mass commodities, fueling debates over opiates in Japan’s expanding imperial territories. The fall of the empire and the occupation of Japan by the United States created conditions favorable for heroin use, followed, in time, by glue sniffing and psychedelic mushroom ingestion. By illuminating the neglected history of drugs, this volume highlights both the transnational embeddedness and national peculiarities of the “politics of consumption” in Japan. Contributors are: Anna Andreeva, Oleg Benesch, William G. Clarence-Smith, Hung Bin Hsu, John Jennings, Miriam Kingsberg Kadia, William Marotti, Kōji Ozaki, Jonas Rüegg, Jesús Solís, Christopher W.A. Szpilman, Judith Vitale, and Timothy Yang.

Table of Contents

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Figures and Tables -- Introduction: Drugs and the Politics of Consumption in Japan -- Part 1 Drug Commerce and Consumption in the Early Modern Period -- Chapter 1 Early Modern Japan and the Problem of "Drugs" -- Chapter 2 Wondrous Worms and Exotic Drugs: Chasing the "Parasites of the Five Viscera" in a Nichibunken Manuscript -- Chapter 3 Peoples' Remedies or Social Poisons: Toyama Patent Medicines, Japan's Biomedical Regime, and the Problem of Consumer Capitalism -- Chapter 4 Opium Production in the Early Meiji Period: The Influence of the Traditional Distribution System -- Part 2 Opium and Empire -- Chapter 5 "Nothing Less Than Gentlemen": Social Activities and Spaces of Opium Smoking in Taiwan from the Qing Period to the Japanese Colonial Period -- Chapter 6 The House of Samuel: Opium Supplier to Taiwan and Manchuria, 1896-1926 -- Chapter 7 The Japanese Right Wing and the Drug Trade, 1923-1945 -- Chapter 8 Opiate Addiction in Prewar Japan -- Chapter 9 From Other to Self: Illegal Drug "Addicts" in Imperial and Post-Imperial Japanese Fiction -- Part 3 Drugs in Postwar Japan -- Chapter 10 The Drugs of War and Empire: Narcotics Consumption and Trafficking during the Occupation of Japan, 1945-1952 -- Chapter 11 The Politics of Violence, Glue-Sniffing, and Liberation: Exclusions and Possibilities in 1968 Japan -- Chapter 12 Japan's Magic Mushroom Moment: Legality, Morality, and Identity in the Heisei Era -- Conclusion: Early Scholarship on Drugs in Japanese History -- Index.