From Cholera to COVID-19: A History of Hygiene in Modern Japan

FAIN: FO-294200-24

Alexander Bay
Chapman University (Orange, CA 92866-1011)

Research and writing leading to a book on Japan's construction and popularization of a culture of hygiene, based on its responses to public health crises from 1858 to 2020. 

My book project, "From Cholera to COVID-19," examines the Japanese responses to public health crises from 1858 to 2020 through an examination of the construction and popularization of a culture of hygiene, from government administrative policies to the social and material practices experienced on the ground and in local communities. The policy-relevant message is that Japan achieved disease prevention without nation-wide sewer systems (which were built later in the 1970s) and its conclusions promise to inform the ongoing challenge of how to deliver health and sanitation to one-quarter of the world’s population that does not have access to flush-toilets, sewer systems or daily sanitation facilities. It is a case study of how policy, education, and the medical marketplace were aligned to create hygienic modernity and will serve as the first English-language book to examine the history of Japanese hygiene from a medical, environmental, and material-culture perspective.