Moral Nation by Kingsberg Miriam

Author:Kingsberg, Miriam
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520276734
Publisher: University of California Press

LEGITIMIZING THE NATION IN THE IMPERIAL LABORATORY

In the early 1930s, scientific and political factors contrived to undermine the global community of addiction researchers. In many Western nations, shifting demographics of the narcotics consumer population eroded medical interest in drug dependence. Young male immigrant and minority “outsiders,” who came to dominate the new cohort of users, commanded less public sympathy than prototypical opium addicts of the past. Drug dependence, like syphilis and other sexually transmitted infections, came to be seen as a “vice disease”: the outcome of irresponsible and degenerate behavior on the part of afflicted individuals. Distaste for these “deviants” accelerated the retreat of European and American physicians from the study of narcotics.55

As the physiological basis of addiction came under attack, the field of psychiatry reformulated drug dependence as a psychological disorder. Psychiatrists, typically considered latecomers to the “professionalization revolution” of scientific medicine, took up the study of narcotics as part of a broader investigation of social deviancy. They sought to account for the appeal of opium in terms of psychopathology, degeneracy theory, eugenics, and personality science. By the mid-1930s, psychiatrists had positioned themselves at the forefront of addiction research in the West.56 In Japan, by contrast, the discipline of psychiatry was neither well established nor greatly respected during the high imperial age. Psychotherapy, which dominated research and practice in Europe and the United States, generally failed to resonate within the East Asian cultural milieu. Moreover, compared to many medical subfields, Japanese psychiatry was relatively independent of state control—a circumstance that did not suit the politically entangled study of addiction.57 Imperial Japan, which was determined to find a biological signifier of moral deficiency in the addict, invested the physiological model of drug dependence with inalienable legitimacy.

During the 1930s, global political rifts further undermined cooperation and interest in scholarly interchange between Japanese and Western researchers. In an age when nationalism was a key inspiration for science, the research world naturally reflected the polarization of states. Following the refusal of the League of Nations to recognize the sovereignty of Manchukuo, Japanese scientists grew increasingly isolated. Many disengaged from interactions with colleagues abroad, redirecting their energies toward developing an imperial network of colleagues. Perhaps they were grateful for the opportunity to exit the global scientific community: they generally did not share their Western counterparts’ interest in psychiatry, and the rise of anti-Japanese attitudes throughout the world sparked various professional, personal, and perceived attacks on Japanese scholars. Periodicals that had once featured articles by imperial researchers on the physiology and pharmacology of addiction now drew attention to drug trafficking instead. “Not content with misleading the world in their relentless campaign of subjugating China through Manchuria, Shanghai and Jehol,” the Chinese Medical Journal declared, “the Japanese Government and their propaganda machine have enlisted the help of even the medical profession.”58 For their part, Japanese who had formerly collaborated with scientists in the Chinese Republic now disdained the quality of their work. One research group in Dairen criticized Chinese scholars for “having failed to apply the scientific method to [their] own discoveries.

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