Zwischen Tradition und Moderne: Die Bewegung fur den Fortbestand der Kanpo-Medizin in Japan (review)

This book relates a tale of decline and revival. In tracing the history of Kanpô (traditional East Asian) medicine in modern Japan, Oberländer finds two kinds of movements: the first for its preservation, the second for its revival.

The former movement, according to the author, ran from the Meiji Restoration in 1868 to the end of the nineteenth century; as the subtitle announces, most of the book concentrates on this period. Tracing the displacement of traditional Kanpô by modern Western medicine, Oberländer focuses on details of the struggle of Kanpô physicians to preserve their trade. He relates how they tried to gain official acknowledgment for their hospitals, schools, and therapeutic methods. In 1895, however, during the war with China, the Japanese Parliament finally rejected their petition. For Oberländer, this marks the end of the preservation movement. He sees the revival movement as covering the whole twentieth century. Fifteen years after the defeat of preservation efforts, Kanpô medicine began to assume a new identity—that of an alternative to Western medicine. Oberländer argues that the origin of this view, which persists to the present day, was related to the rise of Japanese nationalism.

The book has two aims, corresponding roughly to the two movements that it describes. First, it treats the decline of Kanpô medicine as a part of the modernization process—modernization not only of the Japanese medical system, but also of Kanpô medicine itself. This is why Oberländer highlights the changes in the self-image of Kanpô rather than its conflicts with Western medicine. He draws upon an impressive variety of sources to construct a full history of the preservation movement. Another strength of his study is its attention to regions beyond major cities like Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto. Secondly, the book underlines the historicity of the present view of Kanpô medicine, and criticizes some medical anthropologists for neglecting the historical background of contemporary practice.

This study might have been more interesting, however, if Oberländer had viewed the history of the two movements within the framework of a single history, looking more carefully at the continuities between the two. Indeed, the former movement prepared the way for the latter. It also seems to me that modernization theory is unnecessary, even misleading, in this study: by stressing the distinction between modern Western medicine and premodern Kanpô, Oberländer fails to capture the true character of traditional medicine. For example, it is a fact that Kanpô physicians, as he says, sometimes would have to calm patients’ symptoms as early as possible in order not to lose their clients—yet this is not why they did not investigate the cause of diseases. Indifference to causes—intrinsic to the traditional approach to healing—rather than a lack of time, kept them from speculating on what made people suffer. Relying upon a modern Western perspective, Oberländer often portrays an excessively negative picture of traditional medicine. He sees it in much the same way as an eighteenth-century Japanese physician he cites, who introduced Western medicine into Japan and criticized Kanpô from its viewpoint (pp. 40–41).

In contrast to his treatment of the preservation campaign, Oberländer’s account of revivalist efforts remains sketchy. He does not touch at all on issues that were essential to the movement, such as the rise of historical studies of Kanpô medicine, and the ties between Kanpô and the holistic philosophy of organism. The comparisons he draws with medicine in Nazi Germany are interesting, but only suggestive. One hopes that he will go on, in a fuller and more ambitious study, to treat the process of revival with the same thoroughness that he has devoted to the history of the preservation movement.