Japanese Doctors in Colonial Korea (1910-1945): Medicine as Business, Education, and Imperial Collaboration

FAIN: HB-289452-23

Hoi-eun Kim
Texas A & M University, College Station (College Station, TX 77843-0001)

Research and writing leading to a book about the lives and activities of Japanese doctors in colonial Korea prior to World War II (1910-1945).

This book project examines the lives and activities of Japanese doctors in colonial Korea (1910-1945). Despite their centrality to Japan’s imperial project as researchers, educators, and private practitioners, Japanese physicians have not received much attention from historians of Japan or Korea. My intervention is at once quantitative and qualitative. By creating a database of the entire population of Japanese doctors in Korea (1,194 in 1943) from six different directories, I provide an accurate prosopographical analysis. In turn, using historical documents on and by Japanese doctors, such as autobiographical accounts, medical periodicals, alumni magazines, and popular journals, I discuss Japanese doctors as transnational agents of empire-building. A multilingual project that requires analysis of primary sources in three languages including German, this book will contribute to scholarship on the co-constitutive development of medicine and colonialism in Asia.