Selling an Imperial Dream: Japanese Pharmaceuticals, National Power, and the Science of Quinine Self-Sufficiency

Abstract

This article examines Hoshi Pharmaceuticals' attempt to cultivate cinchona, the raw material for the antimalarial drug quinine, in the mountains of Taiwan during the 1930s and 1940s. Hoshi Hajime, the founder and president of the company, pitched a “humanitarian” vision of quinine self-sufficiency for Japan's empire centered on providing indigenous tribes with food and education in exchange for their land and labor. This vision appealed to a wide range of actors, including police officials and government bureaucrats, who argued over how to civilize the aboriginal population; botanists and agricultural companies, who pondered over how to further exploit the untapped potential of the island's tropical environment; and doctors and bureaucrats concerned with the supply of quinine to civilian and military personnel as the wartime empire expanded into Southeast Asia. Hoshi's cinchona cultivation project was a metaphor for the technocratic and utopian promise of Japan's colonial empire. By tracing the project from its earliest beginnings to its postcolonial afterlife, I examine the complex connections between science, capitalism, and nationalism, situating colonial concerns in a web of global influences and inspirations.

Keywords:

• Medicine
• empire
• pharmaceutical industry
• science
• capitalism
• industry
• modernity

Acknowledgments

Research for this paper was conducted as part of a dissertation project that explores Japanese drug companies in the first half of the twentieth century. Thanks to Carol Gluck, Eugenia Lean, and Kim Brandt for their patience and encouragement throughout this project and to the Japan Foundation, the Social Science Research Council's International Dissertation Research Fellowship Program, and the Konosuke Matsushita Memorial Foundation for their generous financial support. I would like to express particular thanks to Iijima Wataru, Liu Shi-yung, Chang Che-chia, Liu Bi-rong, Gotô Ken'ichi, and Sugano Atsushi for their help and advice; to Misawa Miwa, Satô Shiro, and Suzuki Akihiro for access to important documents at Hoshi University; and to Hiromi Mizuno, Nakayama Shigeru, Daiwie Fu, Shiau-yun Chen, Sean Callaghan, Adam Bronson, Mi-Ryong Shim, and finally, to the two anonymous readers for their insightful comments and suggestions. Any mistakes are mine alone.

Notes

¹ Liu Bi-rong provides an excellent explication of these connections in her dissertation (Liu 2009).

² In his 1967 Bureaucrats Are Powerful; The People Are Weak, Shin'ichi blames the opium scandal on a conspiracy between the president of Sankyô, Shiobara Matasaku, and Prime Minister Katô Takaaki of the Kenseikai to attack Gotô Shinpei and his favored party, the Seiyûkai, because Gotô's political endeavors were reputedly funded by Hoshi (see Oyama 1949: 173–81; Hoshi Shin'ichi [1967] 2006: 99, 166–77). According to Tsurumi Shunsuke, “Hoshi Shin'ichi was unable to take revenge on this father's enemies in the business world... he carried out his revenge [only] after he entered the realm of literature” (1978: 307). The sociologist Daba Hiroshi, however, provides a different interpretation. In an analysis of Gotô Shinpei's political networks, he shows how the opium scandal resulted from increased government concern over Hoshi's monopoly of crude morphine from Taiwan, and it was, in fact, a Seiyûkai politician and former medical doctor, Tsuchiya Seizaburô, who in a meeting of the Diet in 1919 first officially questioned Hoshi's cozy relationship with colonial bureaucrats (Daba 2007: 140–44).

³ For more on the “Southward Advance Policy,” see Gotô 2003.

⁴ See Arnold 1988; Harrison 1994; and Curtin 1989, 1998. P. D. Curtin, for example, discusses how colonial medical authorities often debated the efficacy and side effects of bitter-tasting quinine and shows how mortality rates actually increased in the case of the “conquest of Africa,” even with the use of quinine and other preventative practices. Recent historiography concerning malaria in the Japanese empire similarly challenges the “tools of empire” thesis by emphasizing the importance of local interactions for shaping the trajectory of colonial medicine. Iijima Wataru, for example, argues that Japan's knowledge about malaria was intertwined with its encounter with Taiwan and describes how experiences in Taiwan served as a laboratory for development of tropical medicine both within Japan and throughout the rest of the empire (2005: 13). Ku Ya-wen (2004, 2005, 2009) finds fractures in the heroic portrayal of malarial policy as a conquest of nature and persuasively treats malaria as a constructed, “developo-genic” disease (開発原病): she shows how even though malaria was thought of—and handled—as a disease endemic to hostile, tropical environments, its severity in Taiwan resulted in large part from human development changing the environment (e.g., the spread of wet-rice agriculture and the growth of the camphor industry leading to deforestation).

⁵ For more on the hokô/baojia system, see Ts'ai 2009.

⁶ Paul Gootenberg (2008) mentions Hoshi's plantation in Peru in his monograph on Andean cocaine.

⁷ For more on how continental philosophers have viewed science in the context of the European Enlightenment, see Carson 2010, Vogel 1996, and Leiss 1972.

⁸ Horiuchi was a leading figure in the establishment of Western medicine in Taiwan, having served as a military doctor fighting tropical diseases such as cholera, malaria, and dysentery during the early years of Japan's colonization of Taiwan, and as director of the Taihoku Red Cross Hospital in the 1930s (Oda 1974: 13–14, 129). He is the main protagonist of one of the first accounts of Japanese colonial medicine in Taiwan, Oda Toshio's hagiographic Fifty Years of Medicine in Taiwan (Taiwan igaku 50-nen) (1974). Oda portrays Horiuchi and his colleague Takagi Tomoe as heroes whose research into tropical medicine, work in public sanitation, and leadership of Taiwanese medical education both set the postwar stage for Taiwan's medical system and allowed the continued close-knit ties between Japanese and Taiwanese doctors (and, by extension, what he views as the affinity that Taiwanese in general have for Japan and its people). Oda was also Horiuchi's son-in-law and disciple who succeeded Horiuchi's former positions of leadership in the Taiwan medical community.

⁹ For example, one of Taylor's primary disciples was a professor of accounting at the University of Chicago named James McKinsey, who founded the consulting firm that bears his name.

¹⁰ As Judith Merkle writes in her analysis of scientific management, “The core of Taylorism was clearly an explicit call for reconciliation between capital and labor, on the neutral ground of science and rationality. […] Power in the production process was to be transferred to the hands of those custodians who knew more about the system, and what was really good for it, through the aid of their scientific insight. In short, power would be in the hands of Taylor, the scientific managers, and the category of well-intentioned, rational, public-spirited, virtuous, middle-class technicians that they represented. This power was the essential condition for the imposition of their world-view upon the production situation” (1980: 15).

¹¹ Compared with Bandung in Java, which had an average high of 22.0 degrees Celsius year-round, the plantations in Zhiben and Laishe had an average annual temperature of 19.4 and 19.2 degrees Celsius, respectively. In Zhiben, the average high in the summer was 23.6, and the average low in the winter was 17.0 degrees Celsius. In Laishe, the average high in the summer was 23.9, and the average low in the winter was 16.3 degrees Celsius (Takagi 1943: 40–41). Rainfall, however, varied dramatically depending on location. Zhiben averaged between 2,000 and 3,000 millimeters of precipitation per year, while Laishe averaged between 5,000 and 6,000 millimeters of precipitation. For both locations, the highest rainfall occurred during the summer typhoon season (May to September), which accounted for well over half of an entire year's rainfall (Takagi 1943: 42–43). In contrast, Bandung averaged roughly 1,900 millimeters of rain, with the heaviest rainfall between November and April (Lin 1956: 75).Tropical weather also contributed to infestations of pests, such as the “tea mosquito,” Helopeltis antonii, which damaged the growth of cinchona trees by infecting their leaves (Takagi 1943: 28–29).

¹² Labor shortages in Taidong were a problem not only for Hoshi's plantations but also for those of his competitors, such as Takeda and Shionogi, as well as for “twenty to thirty small businesses with a capital of one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand yen.” Such businesses included coffee plantations, charcoal refineries, and Morinaga Candy's cocoa plantations (Miyamoto 1942b: 172–73, 182).

¹³ Compared with Zhiben, however, Laishe had relatively few labor problems. The plantation “advantageously” employed no Taiwanese at all, and the number of workers roughly stayed the same between December 1941 and October 1942, fluctuating between a low of fifty-four and a high of sixty (Takagi 1943: 87, 92).

¹⁴ It is important to note that the worldwide average for harvesting cinchona is approximately eight to twelve years. Hoshi planned on average to harvest mature cinchona trees after eight years of growth.

¹⁵ Hoshi was one of five companies entrusted with the takeover of the quinine industry in Java. The others were Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Shionogi Pharmaceuticals, Nankoku Industries, and Kyokunan Industries (Rikugunshô 1942).

¹⁶ At the end of the war, the two subsidiary companies of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals that oversaw the cinchona plantations, Taiwan Hoshi Pharmaceuticals and the Hoshi Cinchona Industry Company, had a capitalization of 2 million yen and 1.25 million yen, respectively (Nonglinchu 1945). Documents concerning the handover of Hoshi's plantations predicted that “from trees planted between 1937 and 1939, eighty-nine tons of cinchona bark could be harvested in 1946, 113 tons in 1947, 185 tons in 1948, and 151 tons in 1949” (Xing guina 1946).

¹⁷ In Dirlik's words, “Colonial modernity is best viewed as a structural relationship, dynamized by a capitalism emanating from Euro-America, that is a product of the dialectics between the structuring forces of capitalism that have been global in scope and reach (not universal or homogeneous for being global) and the many local forces that have been transformed by capitalism but that also transform it into many local guises, which then act back upon Euro-American societies with transformative effects of their own. […] The term colonial modernity was used in specifically colonial situations, but it may be productive in hindsight to view it as a defining characteristic of modernity in general, even where colonialism, technically speaking, did not exist” (2005: 20–21).

¹⁸ See Polanyi 1944 for his argument about the “self-regulating market” and how land, labor, and money are “false commodities.” Also see Grandin 2009 for an account of Henry Ford's rubber plantation in Brazil, “Fordlandia.” The parallels with Hoshi's cinchona venture are striking.