Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan by Hoi-Eun Kim (review)

The broader trends in historical scholarship that have deconstructed older national and Eurocentric frameworks have also impacted the writing of modern German history. For example, Kris Manjapra’s Age of Entanglement (2014) and Young-sun Hong’s Cold War Germany, The Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime (2015) have transcended the conventional boundaries of modern German history by examining the social, cultural, and intellectual connections between Central Europe and the colonial and postcolonial worlds. Hoi-Eun Kim’s new monograph, Doctors of Empire, exemplifies this transnational turn by examining the “Germanization” of medicine in Meiji Japan, a state-mandated process that brought dozens of German doctors to Japanese medical facilities and hundreds of Japanese students to universities in the Kaiserreich. What ultimately distinguishes Kim’s work from several other examples of transnational history, however, is his emphasis on “reciprocity” instead of networks and mobility. Thus, rather than simply confirming that there were connections between Germany and Japan, the author argues that both countries influenced and were in turn impacted by these medical and cultural encounters.

Kim’s book begins with a statement by the president of Tokyo Imperial University, Aoyama Tanemichi, who claimed in 1907: “when it comes to medical science, our nation is a German colony” (3). The author seeks to explain how this mutually advantageous form of intellectual colonialism developed and how it transformed the individuals who traveled between the two countries before the outbreak of World War I. Kim improves upon earlier histories of the German-Japanese medical relationship not only by considering both sides of this exchange but also by connecting this particular story to the larger narratives of modernization and empire building. Engaging with a variety of German, Japanese, and English sources, he deploys three separate but overlapping analytical tools: transnational history, postcolonial research, and double prosopography. While his transnational approach stresses reciprocity and Japanese agency, his postcolonial approach emphasizes the “soft power” of the German empire. Conversely, the use of double prosopography incorporates the perspectives of “ordinary or less heroic” historical characters by analyzing biographical data and the patterns that it reveals (10). The result is an engaging account of intellectual exchange and occasional friction set in the universities, hospitals, boarding houses, and beer halls of two ambitious empires.

This tightly structured book covers the origins, evolution, and implications of this intellectual exchange. Kim begins by addressing the reciprocal decision making behind the Japanese adoption of German medical science, a project justified by one empire’s desire to embrace modern Western learning and another empire’s desire to exert informal influence in East Asia. Turning to the individuals who traveled between the two empires, Kim details how a small group of German doctors established the foundations of modern medical science in Japan before the turn of the century. Utilizing a prosopographical approach, Kim also shows how academically mediocre Japanese medical students at German universities acquired scientific knowledge and social capital while forging connections with fellow expatriates. Venturing beyond the universities and hospitals, Kim recounts several instances of friction in the cultural exchanges between Meiji Japan and imperial Germany, emphasizing the unintended consequences of the Germanization of Japanese medicine. Especially noteworthy is the conflict between German geologist Edmund Naumann and visiting Japanese physician Mori Rintarō, who engaged in a vitriolic and public debate about popular misconceptions of Japanese culture. Mori’s refusal to tolerate orientalist defamations of his native country confirms, in Kim’s words, that the Japanese “disciples of modern medicine . . . were never devoid of national pride” (100). Conversely, German doctors in Japan treated their disciples with “imperial condescension,” for instance, by using anthropological observations and even cranial measurements to verify the subordinate status of Japan’s culture and people. The inherent racism of physical anthropology may have been disagreeable to the Japanese, but it also provided them with a methodology for confirming the biological inferiority...