Japan – Decolonising Global Health Archive

By Aya Homei

Twenty-first-century Japan is known for the world’s most aged population. Faced with this challenge, Japan has been a pioneer in using science to find ways of managing a declining birth rate. Science for Governing Japan’s Population considers the question of why these population phenomena have been seen as problematic. What roles have population experts played in turning this demographic trend into a government concern? Aya Homei examines the medico-scientific fields around the notion of population that developed in Japan from the 1860s to the 1960s, analyzing the role of the population experts in the government’s effort to manage its population. She argues that the formation of population sciences in modern Japan had a symbiotic relationship with the development of the neologism, ‘population’ (jinkō), and with the transformation of Japan into a modern sovereign power. Through this history, Homei unpacks assumptions about links between population, sovereignty, and science.

Read the book here.

By Jieun Kim

While Japan boasts a universal healthcare system and state-of-the-art medical technology, healthcare has often been denied to those who do not conform to moral ideals of a deserving patient. In underclass enclaves known as yoseba (day laborers’ quarter), patients have been frequently turned away or blacklisted on grounds of their abnormality and non-compliance. As much as healthcare was enmeshed in the normative bonds of family and community sanctioned by the state, yoseba men were considered as outsiders who neglected their duties of care, thus, undeserving of any form of care themselves. Focusing on the struggle for healthcare in a yoseba enclave in Yokohama over the past three decades, this paper explores how various practices of care have been improvised in this last refuge for the underclass men. The relentless endeavor pursued by local medical activists reveals how attending to yoseba patients required creative techniques of spatio-temporal attunement to make healthcare a communal project. Here, a form of “embodied belonging” was sought through bodily care coordinated among various agents and things, rather than through claims for membership in a bounded entity.