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Moral Nation
Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History
By Miriam Kingsberg UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2014 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95748-0
CHAPTER 1
Moral Crusade in Meiji Japan
"How came any reasonable being," the writer Thomas De Quincey asked in 1821, "to subject himself to such a yoke of misery, voluntarily to incur a captivity so servile, and knowingly fetter himself with such a seven-fold chain?" De Quincey's captor was opium, and his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater became a classic of Victorian literature and the forerunner of a new genre, still vibrant today: the addict memoir. The comparison of addiction to slavery, one of the most controversial issues of the nineteenth century, invested opium with particular political significance. In an age that defined sovereignty in opposition to the contemporary reality of unfree labor, dependence of any kind appeared incompatible with nationhood. Given this resonance, opium was a logical moral target during crises of political legitimacy.
De Quincey specifically identified himself as an "English" opium eater because his compatriots typically associated enslavement to drugs with "Orientals," subjects of empire building by Europeans and Americans. Nineteenth-century Japan, taking its cue from Britain's subordination of China in the Opium War of 1839–42, came to view the exclusion of narcotics as a precondition of maintaining independence. But mere rejection of opium was not enough to "leave Asia [datsu-A] "—that is, to distinguish a sovereign Japan from a colonizable "Orient." During the crisis of legitimacy caused by the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, moral entrepreneurs used positive abstinence from narcotics to signify the civilization of the Japanese nation. Attributing the weakness of the vanquished Qing empire to opium, they sought to sever Japan's attachment to a continent enslaved by narcotics. The acquisition of Taiwan, a spoil of war, transformed the state into an empire akin to the great powers of the West, and provided further opportunities to demonstrate adherence to global norms of nationhood by suppressing the opium market. By the time the moral crusade against narcotics subsided around the turn of the twentieth century, Japan had, in the eyes of many, achieved its goal of "entering the West [nyu-O]." Perhaps even more importantly, the state won the right to participate in framing the standards of civilization. The moral nation was drug-free.
"LEAVING ASIA"
In the late eighteenth century, China under the Qing dynasty grew rich exporting tea, silk, and ceramics to Great Britain. Facing a steadily worsening trade deficit, the island empire was relieved to discover a latent demand for opium in the Chinese market. The East India Company, which administered South Asia on behalf of the British government, allocated large tracts of colonized territory for poppy cultivation, selling opium to the Qing in exchange for goods desired by consumers in the metropole. By the 1830s, this so-called triangular trade had brought about a balance of exchange unfavorable to China, prompting the state to attempt to ban the drug. Britain's determination to continue the traffic ultimately enmeshed the two empires in the Opium War. Following China's defeat, the Treaty of Nanjing legalized British narcotics exports and conferred other privileges on the victor, including possession of Hong Kong island, extraterritoriality, reparations, and trade concessions.
From the perspective of early nineteenth-century China and Britain, the primary danger of opium was its financial cost to the state. After 1842, rising circulation of the drug in the Qing empire prompted attention to its social impact. Although numerous Britons and Americans earned considerable fortunes selling narcotics in China, in the decade after the Opium War, many Western observers came to consider the business unsavory, associating both traders and consumers with immorality and Otherness. Christian missionaries in China returned home to spread a gospel of horror that specifically emphasized the dangers of smoking opium, an unfamiliar practice that violated Euro-American notions of propriety. Although opium consumption was common throughout the West, the drug was generally ingested orally, in laudanum, patent medicines, or other beverages. The pipe distinguished "Oriental" narcotics use as particularly recreational and degenerate. Long after most Chinese consumers had given up smoking in favor of injecting drugs, stereotypes of dazed, recumbent "yellow" specimens wreathed in fumes continued to furnish evidence of "Oriental deviance" to the Western public.
In the context of rising public opposition to opium trafficking, in 1853 the United States dispatched Commodore Matthew C. Perry to initiate trade and diplomatic relations with Japan, then officially closed to most foreign contact. The following year, the Treaty of Kanagawa opened five Japanese ports and political intercourse between the two states. In a critical follow-up agreement in 1858, the United States pledged to refrain from exporting opium to the archipelago. Despite its seclusion, Japan had received news of the Opium War and had come to view a ban on drugs as a necessary safeguard of sovereignty. The antinarcotics stance of Japanese negotiators, however, would likely have had little impact had America not been willing to voluntarily eschew the traffic. While the Second Opium (Arrow) War of 1856–60 raged between Qing China on one side and Great Britain and France on the other, the United States embraced the opportunity to assert its moral superiority over European rivals. Moreover, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, some Americans feared that demand for opium might reduce Japan's ability to purchase the manufactured products they wished to export. Most European powers, including Great Britain, Holland, France, and Russia, followed the American example in signing treaties prohibiting their citizens from bringing opium to Japan. China alone did not consent to voluntary export restrictions, on the grounds that the Qing government had itself forfeited such protection by the terms of the Treaty of Nanjing.
Having observed the impact of opium on China's financial solvency and international standing, many Japanese hoped to proscribe it completely. Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the new government proclaimed, "Opium is a product that decreases a person's energy and shortens life.... [I]t will lead to disaster if it spreads among the public." However, the drug was too deeply embedded in the domestic medical tradition to reject altogether. Legislation in 1870 required doctors and pharmacists to record and report quantities of opium sold as medicine. Following a nationwide survey in 1874–75, the government restricted poppy cultivation to its own permit holders. The newly created Sanitation Bureau took charge of procuring raw opium (mostly from Persia and Turkey), processing it into paste, and distributing the output through a network of offices in Japan's major cities. In the wake of a series of well-publicized violations, the 1880 Criminal Code set forth penalties for the illicit import, manufacture, sale, possession, and use of opium and smoking paraphernalia. Japanese violators faced fines and prison terms. Cases involving Westerners, granted extraterritoriality by the terms of the unequal treaties of the 1850s, were decided in consular courts. The state deported Chinese offenders.
The near exclusion of opium from the home islands made the drug available as a marker of difference between Japan and its neighbors. Establishing Japan as an independent nation-state entailed "leaving Asia": separating the country from an "Orient" defined by backwardness, even barbarity, in the Western mindset, and from China in the domestic conception. In the premodern period, Japanese intellectuals had periodically attempted to distill a native essence from the contributions of Chinese civilization. This effort reached new heights at the end of the nineteenth century. Sinologists were among the first critics of opium as the origin and outcome of China's weakness. Many Japanese scholars who visited the Qing empire in its final decades professed alarm and horror at the impact of the drug on their country's historical cultural mentor. Oka Senjin (1832–1913) spent nearly a year in China in 1884–85. Although initially reverential toward Sinic civilization, Oka became disillusioned when he learned that the prominent Chinese reformer Wang Tao, whom he had long admired, was an opium smoker. Oka abhorred the sight of public smoking in Shanghai and other treaty ports. He gazed in wonder at drug users who lay prone "as though sleeping ... as though drunk ... or as though dead." His 1886 travelogue concluded by urging Japan to "secede [ridatsu]" from China.
With the exception of a few elites—like Oka, who could afford continental travel—the impressions of most Meiji-era Japanese regarding China were shaped at home by encounters with Qing migrants, either directly or through the media. Following the abrogation of Japan's seclusion policy, Chinese accompanied Westerners as compradors, domestic servants, and translators to treaty ports throughout the archipelago. By the mid-1890s, about five thousand Qing subjects resided in the home islands. As a percentage of all nineteenth-century Chinese emigrants, and by comparison with the number of settlers in the American West, this community was all but insignificant. Nonetheless, Chinese denizens represented the largest "foreigner" population in Japan at the time. As in Europe and the United States, Qing subjects became defined by the unfamiliar practice of opium smoking. "Of all the immoral customs of Chinese migrants, opium smoking and gambling are the most egregious and hardest to correct," lamented one Japanese sinologist.
The nineteenth-century nation demanded a rationally organized population, delineated through the negative labeling and exclusion of the Other as a deviant or social problem (shakai mondai). In the language of social Darwinism, which was introduced to Japan in the late 1870s and achieved near hegemony among the intellectual elite, the prohibition of opium in the home islands demonstrated the "fitness" of the nation and its divergence from a shamed and dependent China. Social Darwinism also supplied various biological metaphors for narcotics. The analogy of poison, an especial preoccupation of nineteenth-century society, dominated early presentations of opium in Japan. The word chudoku (literally, "internal poisoning") emerged as a translation of the Western concept of opium addiction. Oka Senjin attributed Qing China's decline in part to suffering from the disease of smoke poisoning (endoku). "If the poisons of smoking and traditional thought are not wiped out, China will become completely impotent," he warned.
In the late nineteenth century, the steady replacement of the miasma paradigm of disease with germ theory in the new state-led science of public health generated various metaphors involving contagion. For moral entrepreneurs of the 1890s and beyond, contagion (densen), like poison, was associated with impurity, pollution, and the corruption of the body. "The drug evil," bureaucrat Ando Akimichi asserted, "spreads from China like cholera and the plague." In the words of Tazawa Shingo, head of an industrial research institute, opium was a literal vermin (mushi): "In the human body it is said that there are many germs, and in the smoker there is also the germ of opium." According to these writers, opium and the Chinese alike had to be contained for Japan to survive.
A few well-publicized instances of Westerners spreading drugs in Japan also provoked the domestic public. The outrage of these cases, however, derived not from fears of contagion, but rather from the defendant's right to be tried in a consular court and, presumably, escape justice. In the most famous incident, beginning in late 1877, Japanese customs officials apprehended British merchant John Hartley attempting to smuggle fifteen catties of opium into the treaty port of Yokohama. The British authorities put Hartley on trial, but Japanese observers reacted with fury when the judge accepted his defense that the contraband was intended for use as medicine (an exception to the ban). While the verdict was pending, Hartley was arrested a second time for further dealings in opium. In response to the public outcry, the British tried him again. The case ultimately produced no clear judgment for Hartley.
From the Japanese perspective, European and American opium smugglers were merely opportunists taking advantage of a system that could not punish them. By contrast, given Japan's fraught relationship with China, migrant Chinese smokers appeared to pose an acute biological hazard. After several Japanese prostitutes died upon ingesting opium allegedly furnished by Chinese, Japanese foreign minister Mutsu Munemitsu proposed stricter procedures for the suppression of drugs. Among other measures, he authorized police to enter the homes of Chinese denizens without search warrants. This policy resulted in several violent confrontations between Qing migrants and Japanese law enforcement. In the treaty port of Nagasaki in 1883, police killed one individual and wounded five others when a mob attempted to prevent an arrest. The Chinese consulate in Japan protested the incident, but Mutsu's policy remained unchanged.
As tension mounted in the years leading up to the Sino-Japanese War, nascent moral entrepreneurs effectively mobilized the new forum of newspapers to spread public awareness of the threat posed by Chinese opium smokers. Although the first newspaper had appeared in Japan in 1862, at that time few Japanese could read it or understand its purpose. Over the ensuing decades, however, literacy increased thanks to compulsory education, and the circulation of dailies skyrocketed. Spokesmen for the state, Meiji newspapers wooed readers with chauvinistic nationalism and advice on "civilized" behavior. As one collective voice among many in the quest to distinguish a modern Japan from a backward Asia, moral entrepreneurs in the press denounced rising levels of opium cultivation and consumption in the Qing empire, as well as the discovery of drugs handled by migrant Chinese in treaty ports or on British or American ships passing through the home islands on their way to the Americas. Many of the accused were conscripted laborers who had become dependent on narcotics during the long voyage to indentured servitude in the West. Rather than representing these hapless smokers as victims, journalists highlighted their potential to contaminate the drug-free domestic population.
In 1894, the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War provoked a crisis of legitimacy in Japan. Incipient alarm over opium flared into a full-fledged moral crusade. To moral entrepreneurs, the conflict between Japan and China was nothing less than a challenge to civilization by barbarian soldiers drained by drug use. The Japanese army allegedly forced captured Chinese opium smokers to detoxify and executed drug users among its own troops to prevent them from returning home to spread their habit. Japan's victory, which shocked its opponent and the world, intensified global convictions that opium had sapped the racial fitness and capacity for nationhood of the Chinese people. The great powers at last came to positively differentiate the Japanese from an imagined mass of "Orientals." In the words of one American writer, "the wide-spread prevalence of the opium habit among all classes of the population" was the source of Chinese inferiority, while "the superiority of Japan in energy and progress" derived from abstinence from narcotics.
Also as a result of the war, the rate of Chinese immigration to Japan slowed considerably and permanently. Many long-term merchants repatriated to the mainland, their businesses ruined by nationalist boycotts of Japanese products and their services no longer required by Western traders. Migrants who remained became the object of the "mixed residence debate [zakkyo mondai]." Japan's victory allowed the nation to reconsider the terms upon which Chinese would be allowed to settle in the home islands. Policymakers considered banning immigration from the mainland altogether or restricting Chinese to segregated neighborhoods. Opponents of these proposals objected to singling out Qing subjects from other foreigners for particular discrimination. They also cited practical obstacles: given the ethnic and geographic proximity of the Japanese and Chinese, one reporter declared, "it is not possible to hold ourselves a thousand miles apart from the Chinese race." Allowing Qing migrants to live among the domestic population, however, risked spreading "unhygienic, evil customs," including drug use, to "impressionable" Japanese. Moral entrepreneurs viewed the burgeoning population of industrial laborers, so important to the national economy, as particularly vulnerable to contamination. Narcotics, they pointed out, could compromise worker efficiency at the very moment of Japan's economic takeoff. "The Chinese who come to our country to live must be controlled according to our hygiene regulations, and their harmful behavior [using drugs] must be prohibited," one writer concluded.
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Excerpted from Moral Nation by Miriam Kingsberg. Copyright © 2014 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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