Government policies were far more intrusive when it came to new measures for the promotion of public hygiene and the prevention of disease. Again, Yokohama was a laboratory for the introduction of such measures. While the foreigners may have been responsible for introducing diseases like cholera and also for further spreading endemic diseases such as smallpox and syphilis, Western medical practitioners were also highly active in introducing facilities and regulations to control these diseases, albeit based on limited understanding of the diseases themselves (the cholera bacillus was not identified until 1883, and John Snow’s theory of the relationship between cholera and drinking-water contamination was only just becoming widely known).129
Until the arrival of a large number of foreigners in the 1860s, health had been treated mostly as a private matter. But as Japanese doctors began to learn about foreign concepts of public health, they came to realize that, as Nagayo Sensai described it, “words such as ‘sanitary’ and ‘health’ … referred to a special public administrative system that was responsible for the protection of the health of all citizens of the nation.”130 New systems of sanitation, quarantine, hospitalization, and isolation were required to ensure the development of a healthy and well-regulated nation.
From the perspective of worried foreigners, there was a need for public-health measures to protect the foreign communities—if no one else—against disease. In Yokohama, foreigners advocated the creation of a municipal sanitation system in order to improve the air and water quality of the town. Through the 1860s Yokohama had no street lighting, no running water, no sewage system, and no trash-disposal system. Conditions in the Japanese town were considered particularly unsanitary—thus putting the entire community at risk of disease. As John Black described the situation, “The small canals … became black and offensive; and it was often as much as could be endured to pass them … Yet houses were not only built on their banks, but actually overhanging … these fetid, miasmatic canals; and it was often remarked that the rarity of any epidemic attacking the inhabitants, almost gave the lie to those who contend that stagnant pools, unripe fruit, and what foreigners would esteem low diet, are the generators of such diseases.”131
In September 1863, the foreign community called on the Kanagawa commissioners to install proper drains in the streets of the foreign settlement, offering to pay to bring an engineer in from one of the Chinese ports. And in 1864, the foreign community organized itself to conduct a regular “scavenger hunt” “that should daily clear the streets, drains and Bund, of any offensive rubbish, and remove it to a suitable distance from the settlement; and, the formation of a corps of boats, of which one was to be at the end of each street leading to the Bund, in order to receive and convey away all the rubbish collected by the scavengers and by the coolies of private houses.”132 At the end of 1864, the Kanagawa commissioners agreed to turn over a portion of the land rents to a newly formed Municipal Council run by the foreign community. The membership of the council was apportioned according to the ratios of population among the different treaty powers, with the British, Americans, and French having the strongest representation. The council received income of about six thousand dollars a year from a 20 percent share of the land rents, together with license fees and fines that the consuls made over to the council. The council began energetically enacting measures to rid the settlement of stray dogs and forbidding the slaughter of animals and the storage of explosives within the foreign settlement. A police force was created to enforce the ordinances. However, the council soon lost its energy. By its third meeting, only eight members put in an appearance—fewer than were needed to pass a vote. The council also suffered from meddling by the consuls, who had a tendency to overrule its decisions.133 Eventually, the management of the town’s infrastructure was returned to the Japanese, with renewed pleas for them to undertake steps to improve sanitation. In 1867, the Kanagawa government finally began deepening the main canals to a depth of at least four feet at low tide so that they no longer appeared to be “hotbeds of malaria and its concomitant evils.”134
However, in spite of all efforts, the sanitary conditions of Yokohama remained far short of what the foreign community felt was desirable. As John Black reflected in 1879, “Even now, the drainage is imperfect, the streets are requiring repairs, and the streets of the foreign settlement are dark at night,” even though “the adjoining native settlement is brilliantly lighted with gas.”135
Japanese officials took a strong interest in foreign ideas on urban infrastructure, health, and hygiene. Increasingly, Japanese elites had access to firsthand accounts of foreign cities and their sophisticated infrastructure. Japanese doctors, who had a long tradition of studying Western medical practices, were particularly interested in foreign practices relating to public health. Thus, when foreign military officials asked the Yokohama government to consider implementing compulsory medical inspections of prostitutes, with forced quarantine for those found to be infected with syphilis, the government readily agreed, even though the system would be supervised by foreign doctors and was designed primarily to improve the health of foreign soldiers, who might logically be seen as potential enemies. In February 1871, in the midst of a smallpox outbreak, the governor of Kanagawa accepted the advice of foreign doctors to begin a campaign of compulsory vaccination. In 1874, the central government extended this to the entire Japanese population. And in August 1870, the Kanagawa authorities appealed to the central government to help them create a public hospital in Yokohama. In their memorial, they pointed to the success of the foreign hospitals in both treating the sick and controlling contagious diseases through hospitalization. In the end, the large cost of construction and equipment was subscribed mostly by the Yokohama merchant community, Japanese and foreign. The hospital, which cost almost thirty thousand ryō to build and equip, was completed in 1873. It hired an American missionary doctor, Duane Simmons, as its first chief medical officer at a salary of three hundred twenty yen per month.136
On the surface, Chūemon was at his most conservative when it came to changes in bodily practice, particularly medicine and the treatment of disease. Chūemon mentions health and disease frequently in his letters—whether writing about his own family’s struggles with scabies, or worrying about his frailer family members, or expressing his concern about regional epidemics. Chūemon clearly considered himself something of an authority on medicine and the treatment of disease: on several occasions he sent medicines to his family or advised them on medical techniques. But in spite of his connections with the foreign community and his location in Japan’s main center of Western medical practice, generally Chūemon used his wealth and contact networks to provide information and medicines based on more familiar East Asian medical practices.
For example, in 1862, when measles was spreading rapidly throughout Japan and thousands were dying, Chūemon sent his son a detailed sketch showing the most effective way to prevent the disease using moxibustion—the application of burning mugwort to the skin. Chūemon clearly believed that, thanks to his access to highly educated medical practitioners in the Edo-Yokohama area, his medical knowledge was superior to that of his fellow villagers in Kōshū. After explaining how to apply burning mogusa (mugwort) in eight different places surrounding the navel, Chūemon asks his son to “tell everyone in the village about this.”137
In 1864, hearing of a serious illness in the family of his cousin (and investor) Iemon in Nishijō village, Chūemon sent a medicine that “cures everyone without exception. When I was sick last autumn, I took three doses and I was immediately cured. There is no need for any payment for this. If they want to use it again, they should let me know and I will send more.”138 And in 1865, when Seitarō was recovering from a serious illness, Chūemon sent him “one small jar of seal.” Chūemon explains, “I have been requesting this for a long time from the household of the lord of Matsumae. Now his lordship has released a small amount of his personal supply, so finally I am able to send you a little. Please give it t
o Seitarō. Give him three grains in the morning with hot water. Even in Edo, it is quite hard to get hold of this.”139 The use of the gallbladder and penis of the fur seal originated in Ainu medicine, and they were used by the Matsumae domain in gift exchanges and trade with the Japanese mainland. The penis was considered a potent aphrodisiac and enhancer of sexual power. Probably Chūemon obtained the gallbladder, which had more general medicinal qualities.140
In all these interventions, Chūemon placed a high value on known East Asian practices, spending freely and using his extensive contact network to obtain medicines with the highest reputation for effectiveness. Yet in spite of his conservatism, Chūemon’s letters do hint at increasing exposure to Western medical practice, and even a reluctant acceptance of its place in his family’s medical treatment. In 1864, Chūemon mentioned that his newborn granddaughter had been vaccinated against smallpox.141 Following its introduction through Nagasaki, the practice of vaccination had spread in Japan even before the opening of the ports, with the first vaccination clinic opening in Edo in 1858. By the mid-1860s, smallpox vaccination was probably quite well established in the consciousness of educated Japanese, and it may not have appeared to Chūemon as a particularly “foreign” practice.142 But in early 1869, Chūemon was somewhat taken aback when his relative, old Mr. Okamura, came to Yokohama and asked Chūemon’s help in arranging a visit to a foreign doctor. Chūemon had been supplying Okamura with some hard-to-obtain medicine, but, “the [foreign] doctor told him he had been taking completely the wrong medicine.” Chūemon added, a little resentfully, “That is a famous medicine from Edo!”143 Nevertheless, he seemed to accept that Yokohama was a center where both foreign and Japanese practices could be tried: adherence to one method did not necessarily preclude experimentation with another. Indeed, it was this increasing comfort with imported commodities and hybridized lifestyles that set Yokohama apart as a center for the transformation of Japanese lifestyles.
Many of the changes in food, clothing, housing, hygiene, and medical practice that originated in Yokohama and eventually spread throughout Japan were intimately connected to the city’s vibrant commercial marketplace. While some of the health measures were government sponsored (though with merchant financing), most of the changes in the daily lives of Yokohama residents—and, subsequently, of people throughout Japan—were stimulated by the vigorous efforts of merchants like Chūemon to import, manufacture, and sell foreign commodities such as steamships and horse-drawn carriages, food and textiles, for profit.
KŌSHŪ TRANSFORMED
In the years following the Meiji Restoration, the new government embarked on an immensely ambitious program of administrative and social reforms, aimed at building a powerful centralized state. The reforms included the abolition of the feudal domains and the samurai class; the introduction of a national taxation system; the introduction of conscription and a national military force; and the introduction of a compulsory universal education system. These reforms, and many others in the fields of banking, finance, commerce, law, and civil administration, can be seen as the culmination of Japan’s painful search for an effective response to the threat of foreign encroachment. Yokohama continued to play an important role, providing as it did much of the knowledge base and personnel for the reform program, as well as the foreign exchange that made possible measures (such as military development) that required extensive imports of foreign technology. But by this point the process had moved beyond the local. Many Japanese officials now had direct experience of foreign travel, and the government was developing a global network of knowledge and contacts that made it less dependent on the resources that happened to be available in Yokohama.
Indeed, beginning at the turn of the 1870s, the excitement that was so palpable in Chūemon’s earlier correspondence—even amid his many trials—seems to fade. Chūemon himself, of course, was now in his sixties, and he was feeling his age. But there is also a sense from Chūemon’s letters that the world he had known—the world of the shogunal order and of established and largely self-governing village elites—was fading, the old certainties gone. While in the 1860s Chūemon often expresses his excitement at the immense opportunities opened up by Yokohama and foreign trade, in his letters from the early 1870s there is more of a sense of threat. Part of his concern undoubtedly came from the ongoing distress in the countryside, which continued to suffer from high taxation and additional exactions from the new government. One village headman addressed a poem in 1869 to the governor of Kanagawa:
The starving old and young cry out in anguish
When will the spring winds come to our desolate village?
To you I plead, take heed of the word benevolence
Make sure these people receive the imperial favor.144
When the government abolished the feudal domains in August 1871 and announced the termination of the feudal class system, Chūemon concluded that the samurai would now have to become either merchants or farmers. But if the samurai were to become farmers, where would they obtain land to farm? Chūemon reported a rumor that “farmers will have their excess land confiscated and distributed to the people of the villages or the country as a whole.” In the light of this rumor, he advises his son, “If you have lent money by taking mortgages on property … you should sell them if possible. If this measure is enacted, no one will want to buy [the mortgages] from you … I am telling you this secretly. After you have read it, please burn this. It is said that each region will undertake a strict assessment of all rice fields, dry fields, and uncultivated land. Also of all houses and other buildings. This will certainly be perplexing and will cause many problems.”145
In the end the government did not confiscate surplus land from farmers (that policy had to wait for the U.S.-mandated land reform of 1946). But it did undertake a comprehensive survey of village land, for the purpose of assessing a uniform tax based on land valuation. Whereas in the past villages had been assessed a village-wide tax, which they had then been left to apportion as they saw fit, the new law would introduce a cash tax based on individual landholdings. This left much less wiggle room to exert family influence to reduce one’s tax burden or to hide land from the government.
In conjunction with the new system of land registration and taxation, the government introduced a new, standardized national system of household registration. During the Tokugawa period, families had been required to register with a temple, but practices were inconsistent and the information collected was very incomplete. In the new system, every household was required to register its address, property ownership, social status (nobleman, former samurai, commoner, or “new commoner,” meaning former outcast), occupation, name of the family head, birth years and ages of each family member, and relationship to the family head, as well as former names and parentage for wives or adopted children.146 This procedure clearly left many families perplexed, as family records often did not match the categories of the form they had to fill out. In Chūemon’s case, he had been adopted by his older brother in order to inherit the family headship after his brother’s early death. Shōjirō, filling out the forms in Higashi-Aburakawa, had to figure out all these relationships from his own point of view as family head. As Chūemon pointed out, the forms were even more complicated for residents of Yokohama, where “most people come from somewhere else, so they probably won’t be able to get very full details. However,” Chūemon continued, “from now on they will enforce it very strictly.”147
Chūemon worried a great deal about the profound changes in village administration enacted by the government. During the Tokugawa era, villages under shogunal administration had generally been allowed a high degree of self-government, so long as they complied with their tax and labor obligations. Villages varied considerably in their governance: most combined a relatively inclusive village assembly with a smaller group of elite families that held hereditary (and government-sanctioned) office. The village operated as a corporation, owning communal land and other community assets.148 Under
the new regime, the central government claimed a great deal more direct oversight over village affairs. It achieved this by abolishing many autonomous village institutions, such as common lands and village assemblies, by assigning direct tax responsibility to individual families rather than to the village as a whole, and by taking greater control over and standardizing village government. In the interest of both fiscal efficiency and control, the government amalgamated small villages into larger ones and limited the number of officials who would be recognized in each village. As Chūemon described the first set of reforms, “no matter how many village officials there were, from now on there will be only one nanushi [headman] and one toshiyori [elder]. Any public works such as river levees will no longer be owned by the village … [This] will cause great turmoil in the villages.”149
In another letter, Chūemon comments on the merging of villages for the sake of economic efficiency: “Many villages are to be merged into Kōfu [town], and the Isawa post station is to be abolished and its functions transferred to Kawada village. This may be profitable for the villages, but it will be a huge problem for Isawa. I feel terrible for them there. If possible, I wish they could just leave things as they were. But since these are orders from on high, there is nothing anyone can do.”150
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