Introduction

The scientific field is a field of forces whose structure is defined by the continuous distribution of the specific capital possessed, at the given moment, by various agents or institutions operating in the field. It is also a field of struggle or a space of competition where agents or institutions who work at valorizing their own capital—by means of strategies or accumulation imposed by the competition and appropriate for determining the preservation or transformation of the structure—confront one another. (Pierre Bourdieu)

Struggle is established between agents who are unevenly endowed with specific capital and therefore unevenly able to appropriate the resources inherited from the past, and with that, the profits of the scientific work produced by all the competitors, through their objective collaboration in the implementation of the totality of available means of scientific production. (Pierre Bourdieu)

Defining science is an overdetermined process in that no single factor, person, or institution can be the sole provider of its definition or judge over legitimacy, and its nature is inherently universal in that no one person or group or country can impose its definition, as its very logic of legitimacy rests upon acceptance in a wider community. Science also needs to successfully mobilize various kinds of resources—financial, human, material, intellectual, political, and so forth—in order to be productive and effective, as it has become a costly business. Hence, when new members enter the field of science, when new economic and political resources become available, when new problems and issues emerge, they change the composition of the field of science and thus affect the struggle to define what is scientific.

Pierre Bourdieu once defined science as “a social field of forces, struggles, and relationships that is defined at every moment by the relations of power among the protagonists” (Bourdieu 1991: 3). Bioscience in Asia, a focus of the second of our “Science and Nationalism” subject issues, is precisely that kind of site. The rapid rise of bioscience in Asia has attracted much attention from media and scholars. An emerging body of scholarship on the topic, mainly by anthropologists at this point, has examined forces, struggles, and relationships among various protagonists, including state institutions, scientists and technicians, research institutions, national and international funding agencies, and global corporations such as Big Pharma; also included in some works are those humans who contribute their body parts and blood to research and those who make a business out of biotrafficking.

It is also a great site to think about the relevance of “Asia” in our discussion of science and nationalism. The bourgeoning scene of bioscience in Asia has often been analyzed with an emphasis on the perceived differences between the East and the West. In his introduction to the special issue of New Genetics and Society, “Biopolitics in Asia,” Herbert Gottweis identifies three dominant representations of Asia in such an analysis: (1) Asia where the strong state engineers technological, economic, and social development of the nation; (2) Asia as a “Wild East” where a difference in or lack of ethical standards allows more experimental bioscience such as embryonic stem cell research while ignoring international protocols of human rights and ethics; and (3) Asia where “bionationalism”—based on “Asian concepts of tradition, nationalism, population, ethnicity, and race”—characterizes trends and developments of the life and medical sciences (Gottweis 2009: 202). In these representations, it is possible to sense a fear of the West against the rise of Asia in bioscience, where the West has been the dominant protagonist, as Asia enters the field and starts to change the rules of the game. There may perhaps also be a sense of envy toward an Asia that seems to be freer from ethical and legal restrictions, which can easily turn into frustration against the wrongfully changing rules of the game. ¹

The two subject issues of “Science and Nationalism” were called for in order to collaboratively examine how science and nationalism have mobilized each other in various local contexts in East Asia. The first issue suggests that an examination of nationalism and science in modern Asia, whether bioscience or other kinds of science, involves two contextual axes: colonial/postcolonial and the Cold War/post–Cold War frameworks. Let me recapture this as a way to provide the contexts for the three “Science and Nationalism” articles in this issue of EASTS.

The colonial/postcolonial framework highlights the symbolic meaning science acquires when nationalism is concerned. Nineteenth-century colonialism, which threatened Asia and based on which Japan developed its colonial policies, rested its legitimacy in part on the colonizer's mastery in science and technology (Yang 2012). Therefore, it is not surprising that nationalisms in Asia that grew in response to such colonial threat and oppression exhibited a strong desire to be the producer of science and technology, rather than remain relegated to being the consumer or the mere supplier of materials for the colonizer's production of science and technology (Moon 2012). For those colonized and semicolonized Asian nations, to be scientific—whatever that definition may be—was a means to sovereignty. The connection between science and sovereignty, and its nationalist, subversive character under colonial rule, is demonstrated in the science movement in the 1930s in colonial Korea, for example. The intimate codependence among science, nationalism, and sovereignty has exhibited itself in postcolonial politics and aspirations too, at the level both of state policies and of individual scientists' subjectivity making, in those Asian nations (DiMoia 2012; Hudecek 2012). That this tie is still highly emotionally relevant in Korea, for example, was vividly seen in the case of the Hwan scandal (Hong 2008; Kim 2008).

The other axis, the Cold War/post–Cold War framework, urges us to examine this intimate tie between science and nationalism in Asia in relation to geopolitics and economy. It was during the height of the Cold War that the so-called Asian miracle took place. Japan and the Asian Tigers were the showcases of successful capitalist development, jump-started with the help of Asian “hot wars” of the Cold War (what the Korean War did to the Japanese economy, the Vietnam War did to the South Korean economy), promoted vigorously by American modernization theory and guided by US security interests. In South Korea and Taiwan, the United States took over the role of scientific leader from their former colonizer, Japan. This swift and radical transition to the American knowledge-making system did start many things anew, but it also helped revive lingering colonial legacies. Via the United States, Korean scientists such as Lee Tae-kyu could transform themselves from the model Japanese imperial subject to the father of chemistry in independent Korea (DiMoia 2012). As Bruce Cumings argued in 1984, South Korea and Taiwan of the Asian Tigers in fact demonstrated striking similarities to Imperial Japan (Cumings 1984), but what Cumings then critically called BAIR—bureaucratic authoritarian industrializing regime—was rather characterized as the “uniquely Asian” way of doing the business of national development.

Various discourses came along to theorize the economic success of Asian nations: the flying geese theory, the developmental state theory, the Asian value discourse, and so forth. Many of these theories emphasize the “Asian” characteristics, such as the strong state and/or bureaucracy, disciplined workers and their work ethic, and collective identity, to celebrate the Asian economic miracle. Asia itself participated in this Orientalist discourse. Confident in the economic performance of the nation, the Japanese produced the celebratory discourse of nihonjinron (theories on Japaneseness) that in the 1980s occupied a large section of any bookstore in the nation. Also empowered by the nation's ascending economic power, Chinese scholars have led the Confucian Revival discourse since the 1980s. These discourses were not merely about economic and financial structures of Asia; they were more importantly about how industrial and technoscience were strategized, promoted, and managed and how the biopolitics of the nation was geared toward winning the industrial and technoscientific competition of the Cold War and the market economy. Nationalism here inscribed both culture and ideology, blurring any distinction between description of culture and prescription of ideology. Asia has moved beyond the export economy to the knowledge economy in the 1980s and 1990s, but this intimacy between science and nationalism continues on in post–Cold War Asia.

When read together, the three “Science and Nationalism” articles in this issue raise questions that demonstrate that the body in Asia—the biological, material, and visible site of politics and governmentality—sits at the intersection of the double axes of the colonial/postcolonial and Cold War/post–Cold War frameworks.

Izumi Nakayama's article examines how posture became the measurement of Japan's progress in the civilization project of Meiji Japan. Schoolchildren's posture, for which data was collected from all over the nation and quantified for the first time in the 1890s, suddenly became the sign of Japanese premodernity. It also revealed the need to modernize and standardize the physical environment in order for the body to develop properly. Nakayama's article shows how standardization and nationalization of the body proceeded through the interconnected networks of technologies and discourses: the institution of compulsory education, policies regarding public and school hygiene, the increasing professionalization and specialization of medical experts, and the statistical understandings and problematization of the national health all contributed to the conviction that Japanese children's posture was being damaged by Japan's incomplete modernity. In turn, the Ministry of Education taught children to take better care of their bodies to fulfill the duty of filial piety to the Emperor, the father of the nation.

Here is an illustrative example of how becoming part of the global world (in this case, via forcefully opened up ports and treaties and participating in the global colonial and market competition) goes hand in hand with an insistence on the national. There was nothing particularly Japanese about this attention to school hygiene or to the children's physique. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was the time when school hygiene became a major discipline in the United States and Europe as well. The American School Hygiene Association, for example, was formed in 1906. Thus, it was not that Japan lagged behind in this branch of public hygiene, nor was Japan unique in focusing attention to these matters. The American school hygiene movement was part of the progressive movement's Americanization program; thus, Meiji Japan's attempt to educate about the link between the individual child's body and the national body was not unique either. Yet, precisely because the Japanese body could not be simply the modern body but needed to be the modern Japanese body and the modern Imperial body, meanings needed to be added to the everyday practice of school hygiene. Reflecting the political and intellectual milieu of the 1890s, Confucian ethics was heavily infused into school hygiene education. Works by Mishima Michiyoshi, the central figure in Nakayama's article, demonstrate this very well. Although Nakayama herself does not use Foucault's concept of biopolitics, attention to posture in Meiji Japan exemplifies modern governmentality over the body, the management of the body for the nation, for the survival and prosperity of the nation in the competitive colonial and capitalist world.

A century later, the Japanese body still carries a special function in the nationalist discourse. Kimberly Kelly and Mark Nichter's article looks at what they call “bionationalism” based on the discourse of the uniquely Japanese body in the twenty-first century. In 1998, Japan, the United States, and the European Union adopted the International Conference on Harmonization E5 guidelines in order to make the lengthy drug approval processes more efficient by sharing trial data among the three regions. Yet, signing the guidelines has not made the drug approval process shorter, as Japan requires additional studies called ethnobridging studies to look at specific “ethnic factors” to assure safety, effectiveness, and dose specificity for a specific ethnic population, the Japanese. Despite protests by Western and Japanese critics, including Japanese patients who desperately want access to new Western drugs more quickly, ethnobridging studies continue to be required on the basis that Japanese bodies have a unique constitution, taishitsu. In fact, as Kelly and Nichter carefully explain, some cases reveal that this claim is warranted; for example, Tamiflu has caused very severe side effects on some Japanese children, including hallucination and death. The problem, Kelly and Nichter maintain, is that while attention to local biology, such as how diet, environmental factors, and cultural practices interact with the body's perception of drugs, should be welcomed and indeed taken more seriously, ethnobridging studies actually do not look at the subtle dynamics of local biology but instead assume the static body type of the Japanese. Kelly and Nichter conclude that “by engaging with the competition that is inherent in the market of transnational clinical trials and actively creating bioidentities and then exploiting their biovalue, the government of Japan at once achieves its protectionist goals while simultaneously reproducing a sense of bionationalism.” While acknowledging that the Japanese sense of local biology had long existed, Kelly and Nichter consider contemporary Japanese bionationalism to be part of a new “Asian biopolitics.”

Nakayama's and Kelly and Nichter's articles cast an intriguing question of whether or how biopolitics in contemporary Japan is different from that in Meiji Japan. If Foucault's exploration of biopolitics that was based on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe can be applied to Asia today, which has been widely done, that assumes no fundamental difference between the nineteenth-century West and the twentieth-century (even twenty-first-century) Asia. But Kelly and Nichter seem to suggest that Asia is indeed developing a different kind of biopolitics. For them, ethnobridging studies provide a space where “new representations of bioidentity…meet new challenges in a high-stakes Pharma marketplace and a world rapidly becoming interconnected.” Is this because of some kind of Asian uniqueness, or is it because of the “postmodern” times we live in? Is the static body of the Japanese taishitsu in contemporary Japan different from the body in the Meiji discourse analyzed by Nakayama, and if so, how? It is up to the reader what conclusions are to be drawn.

Let me focus on a different set of factors that do characterize Asia: Asia is where Cold War divisions continue to shape politics and nationalism even after the end of the Cold War. Korea is still divided. Hang Reyol Na demonstrated nicely in the previous issue that the aspiration for a unified Korea is a driving force behind Korea's active participation in a transnational research collaborative (Na 2012). The issue between Taiwan and mainland China also lingers on. As Jennifer Liu's article in this issue shows, Taiwan's ambiguous place in geopolitics and resulting nationalism has strongly shaped its bioscience. In addition, many wartime issues that have remained unresolved due to Cold War geopolitics—such as the war compensation issues for individual victims and territorial issues of Tokdo/Takeshima, Senkaku Island, and Northern Territories—seriously threaten post–Cold War diplomatic relations among Japan, Korea, and China, escalating the fervency of nationalism in each country. At the same time, the trend for a more regionally integrated economy has become stronger in the post–Cold War global economy.

What Aihwa Ong identifies as “biotech nationalism” (Ong 2010: 23) and Gottweis calls bionationalism in the latest stage of bioscience in Asia, in my view, needs to be examined in this context. That is to say, while scholarly literature and mass media have liberally used such phrases as “Asian biotech” and “Asian bionationalism,” Asia is not one. Despite the Orientalist discourse's persistent assumption and Pan-Asianists' vision, Asia was never one. As far as Asia is not a geographical concept but rather a construct (Saaler and Szpilman 2011; Sakai 2000), nationalism of a nation could attempt to claim to legitimately represent Asia. Japan did that for the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, but the forced identification between Japan and Asia collapsed in 1945. Now in the twenty-first century the trend toward further regional economic integration is another reality of post–Cold War Asia that constitutes the field of science in a Bourdeauian sense and shapes the relationship between science and nationalism. Which “Asia” is evoked by whose nationalism? How does “Asia” serve the interest of nationalism? What kinds of capital are at stake? The developing discourses around bioscience in Asia should highlight this discrepancy between Asia and an Asian nationalism.

Let us come back to the colonial/postcolonial and Cold War/post–Cold War axes through stem cell research in Taiwan that Liu's article examines in this issue. Taiwan is not recognized by the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and other international bodies as an independent nation, which shapes the kind of nationalism there and policies that Taiwan employs due to limited access to international resources. William Keller and Richald Samuel have classified emerging biotech sites in Asia into the “technonational” style (represented by Korea's Hwan lab), the “technoglobal” style (Singapore's Biopolis), and those between, the “technohybrid” (Taiwan), emphasizing differences among Asian Tigers. While basing her analysis on this categorization, Liu nonetheless suggests using the classification flexibly, as all these sites demonstrate dynamic assemblages of various factors specific to the nation's past and present and proposes to think that global science operates with “technohybridity” anywhere, not just in Taiwan. In Liu's analysis, nationalism is as strong a component in Taiwan's stem cell research and Singaporian Biopolis as in Korea and is expressed within the space of technohybridity.

In the inaugural issue of EASTS, Daiwie Fu promoted postcolonial STS studies of Asia that pay central attention to the local, instead of conceptualizing Asia as an emulator of the dominant West, while cautioning against losing sight of Western dominance (Fu 2007). He also raised a question of how to think of difference. Will there be an Asian STS that is different from Western STS? If yes, how can we avoid contributing to the Orientalist discourse while pursuing an Asian STS or at least pay attention to specificities of Asia?

Take, for example, the statement made by two Taiwanese medical experts: “Human-heartedness has been at the centre of Asian civilization throughout history. Benevolence and compassion are the two magic words in Asian cultures” (Tai and Lin 2001: 51). The two doctors at Chungshan Medical and Dental College suggest that Asia needs to develop a culturally relevant bioethics specifically for Asian people based on Confucian ideas, because Western medical ethics do not fit well with Asian cultural values, namely, the Confucian emphasis on the family as opposed to “Western individualism.” I am not quoting this to argue that the family has no important place in Asia or that medical ethics should not consider cultural differences important. I am quoting this here in order to ask readers how to read such a statement. Is this a pragmatic solution by doctors who witness problems caused by the individual's refusal to be informed of his or her terminal illness? Is this a postcolonial Asian attempt to provincialize the West? Is this a cultural conservative's defense of the Confucian ideology?

Some argue that the concept of Orientalism is no longer useful as Asia has risen to a position of economic power. But I think Orientalism is still an important concept, not so much because Asia is still fetishized and emasculated by the West in the same nineteenth-century manner (although there exist such occasions) but because of two reasons. First, Orientalization has become a way to mobilize cultural capital by Asia itself, as seen in the above quote by two Taiwanese doctors; in fact, it is difficult to examine nationalism in Asian nations without discussing some kind of self-Orientalization. Second, it is because of the continuing asymmetry of power in the world that Orientalization by Asia emerges as an effective strategy. More important, it is because of this asymmetry of power that science continues to be a highly political site of nationalism in Asia (and in the rest of the non-Western world).

As I urge in the first “Science and Nationalism” subject issue, the making of science and the making of nationalism—science in action, nationalism in action—should be examined in material contexts (“sensuous activity of men”) rather than assuming the form and content of nationalism as an established set of ideologies and programs. As Warwick Anderson has suggested, postcolonial STS, whether in the area of bioscience or other sciences, has an advantage of grounding postcolonial analysis that has become too literature and culture oriented back onto material contexts (Anderson 2002).

Not addressed in this issue but nonetheless extremely important are intra-Asia circulations of technologies, engineers and scientists, ideas, and capital, that is, the intra-Asia techno-globalism that Nakayama Shigeru (2012) highlighted in the previous issue. Discussions of science in Asia and Orientalism tend to be preoccupied with the East versus West dichotomy, leading away from dynamic and massive movements of experts, technologies, ideas, and capital within Asia. How science and nationalism developed in each nation in Asia while intersecting with these flows is, in my view, understudied. To go back to Bourdieu's words, bioscience in contemporary Asia illustrates that the field of science is composed not only of power struggles between the East and the West but also of competing nations in Asia and competing forces within each Asian nation (thus competing visions of the nation and nationalism). This is true not only for contemporary bioscience but also for earlier periods in other areas of science. Only with this attention to intra-Asia interactions does it become possible to critically engage with Asia while avoiding falling into Orientalism or to insist on the category of Asia but refuse to relegate Asia to “case studies,” as in Takeuchi Yoshimi's “Asia as method” (Takeuchi 2005; Shih 2010). One of the most important contributions of EASTS, thanks to its coverage and vigor, indeed lies in the fact that it allows such attention. ² If the large number of proposals Nakayama and I received is an indication, there exists a strong interest in the topic of science and nationalism in Asia. I hope we continue to see new discussions develop on this topic.

Acknowledgments

I thank my coeditor, Nakayama Shigeru, for his teamwork, insight, and help along the way, which made both "Science and Nationalism" issues possible.

Notes

1 This is reminiscent of the “yellow fever” at the turn of the last century when the West perceived Asian immigrants and their cheap labor as a threat. An example of numerous media reports of the rise of Asian bioscience with this sense of fear and envy can be found in a 2005 Science report that quotes a Chinese researcher saying, “Asia has never dominated [any field in] cutting-edge biology.…This could be our chance,” and an American researcher stating, “I firmly believe they have an advantage” (Holdren, Normile, and Mann 2005: 660).

2 I congratulate the editorial staff on this important endeavor.