Pharmaceutical Empire: Continuity and Change in Quinine Manufacturing in the Japanese Empire during the Pacific War

• In Event: 23. Crossing the Medical Divide: Continuity and Change in Medicine in Japanese-Occupied Indonesia

Abstract

During the early months of World War II, the US suffered immensely from a lack of medicines to combat malaria, including in their defense of the Philippines. This led to a long, dramatic effort to find alternatives to the high quality quinine no longer available from Southeast Asia.
This paper examines the efforts of the Japanese to maintain the supply of quinine flowing from Indonesia during the Pacific War. It argues that the Japanese were able to maintain elements of the Dutch colonial quinine manufacturing chain, while altering it to suit the needs of the Japanese Empire in Asia. While the story of the US effort to find a replacement source for the natural anti-malarial is well-known, this paper shows a parallel effort to maintain the essential supply of anti-malarial pharmaceutical drugs within Japanese occupied Asia, focusing on the Japanese efforts to maintain the over 100 cinchona plantations on Java and the Bandung quinine factory, while altering the distribution to suit the needs of the Japanese empire. The global-quinine market, previously controlled out of Amsterdam, was eliminated, and replaced with a new distribution market, indicating that perhaps the experience of Japanese imperial efforts to produce and distribute quinine anticipated the arrival of monopolistic practices in the post-war pharmaceutical industry.

Author

• Andrew Goss, Augusta University