INSTITUTIONALIZING IMAGINED TOYAMA: SELLING TRADITIONAL IMAGES OF TOYAMA MEDICINE THROUGH SCIENCE

Event details
Speaker : Dr Kensuke Sumii
               University of California, Berkeley
Date      : Friday, 25 January 2008
Time      : 11:30am - 1:00pm
Venue    : AS4/03-28 (JS Meeting Room)

Abstract

From the beginning of the 20th century until now, in many Asian countries, such as China, India, and Indonesia, nation-states and commercial industries have established the professional and commercial value of “traditional medicine.” Intellectuals and political leaders in these countries reformulate and standardize folk and local medical knowledge and practice, such as herbal medicine, knowledge of which locals often claim they have inherited within a family or local community from ancient times. Educational and research institutions have been developed to investigate the mechanisms and histories of these “traditional” medicine products. In this way, medicine is utilized to represent one of the distinctive elements demonstrating national identity.

This presentation describes how Toyama has responded to those global movements of the rediscovery of “traditional medicine,” and how the prefecture developed a project to establish educational and research facilities to make Toyama and its medical traditions known, by contextualizing, contrasting, and scientifically examining diverse forms of “traditional medicine” in the world. I also examine how political and economic leaders intended to develop a distinctive image of Toyama through its medical “tradition,” and reverse the decline in sales of those “traditional” medical products. My research will disclose (1) how they decided to use science in order to demonstrate and visualize the effectiveness of the key ingredients of Toyama medicine, while at the same time maintaining its traditional image; and (2) specifically how they use scientific data to increase the sale of medicine.

About the speaker

I have just completed a doctoral degree in Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. I worked for a Japanese pharmaceutical company after I graduated from the Department of Agricultural Chemistry at Kinki University, Japan. My research explores how science and technology become driving forces to re-create and invent the image of “traditional medicine” and related products, and how government, intellectuals, and commercial industries in marginal prefectures of Japan, such as Okinawa and Toyama, use science and technology to promote the nationwide consumption of their local products as well as to develop autonomous state economic power.