Disability in Asian Studies: Blindness and Leprosy in Early Modern Japan
Tuesday, February 18th, 2025 from 3:00-5:00 pm ET
Virtual Event via Zoom
About the event:
This presentation will explore the cultural and historical contexts of blindness in early modern Japan (1600-1868), and asks: What was blindness, and how did people live with blindness? Featuring examples of early modern Japanese medical culture and social history, Professors Wayne Tan will explain how the methods of disability studies/history enhance our understanding of disability in Japanese society, and why we need new approaches to expand the coverage of current disability studies/history.
From Bad Karma to Bad Blood: The Medicalization of Leprosy in Early Modern Japan with Professor Susan L. Burns
Raibyō or “leprosy,” a disease category that likely included both true leprosy (as defined by the presence of M. leprae) and other disfiguring skin diseases, was a highly stigmatized disease in Japan from ancient times. In the early modern period, it became the object of an explosion of medical writing in the form of treatises and case studies, as doctors debated its causes, curability, and the possibility of treatment. In this presentation, Professor Susan Burns will explore the medicalization of leprosy and its social and cultural effects. She argues that medicalization did not lessen the stigma of the leprosy but in fact heightened it. As leprosy came to be understood as a disease of “bad blood,” not only individual sufferers but also their family members were subject to discrimination.
About the Speakers
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Wei Yu Wayne Tan is Professor of History at Hope College in Michigan. He is a historian of disability, science, and medicine in Japan and East Asia. His first book, Blind in Early Modern Japan: Disability, Medicine, and Identity (University of Michigan Press, 2022), received awards and honors from the American Historical Association, the Disability History Association, and the Social Science History Association. His current research focuses on the intersection of disability, science, and race in the interconnected histories of Asians and Asian Americans. |
Susan Burns is a historian of Japan’s “long” nineteenth century (1780s–1910s), interested in the social history of intellectual and cultural practices and the continuities and ruptures between what conventional periodization terms Japan’s “early modern” and “modern” eras. Her first book, Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan (Duke, 2003) examined the nativist discourse of the late Tokugawa period. It traced the efforts of early nineteenth century intellectuals to define the nature of “Japan” as a locus of personal and cultural identity and the appropriation of aspects of this discourse by modern scholars who sought to define the contours of modern Japanese nationalism. With the completion of this project, she turned to a new set of questions related to the history of the body as it came to be conceptualized within medical and legal discourses. Her second monograph, Kingdom of the Sick: Leprosy, Citizenship, and Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2019) explores the long history of leprosy in Japan from the late medieval period when it was identified as a “karmic retribution disease” to the modern period when attempts to control the disease prompted the creation of a system of public sanitaria. She argues that in the modern era leprosy, a particularly stigmatized disease, became the object of an intense debate on the place of the chronically ill and disabled within the Japanese nation.
She is currently working on two additional monographs. The first explores the intellectual and professional world of an early modern doctor who practiced in the villages in Akita in the 1830s and ’40s. It seeks to explore the impact of new forms of knowledge, techniques, and materia medica for medical practice and considers the implications of the “medical revolution” of the early nineteenth century for the state-sponsored introduction of Western biomedicine after 1870. The second builds on her research on medical commodities, alternative therapies, and psychiatric practice and explores the impact of the new medical marketplace on ideas about mental health in Japan from c. 1880–1940. She is also working on a digital project called Mapping Medical Tokyo that seeks to visualize and analyze the spatial dimensions of health, disease, and medical care in the Meiji-era city.
