ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Where epidemiology failed: plague, facemasks and the crisis of the Japanese imperial hygiene in 1940 Manchuria

• In Event: Science and Empire in the Anthropocene: Towards an Environmental Shift 4 - Imperial Medicine Contested

English Abstract

In September 1940, a severe outbreak of pneumonic plague struck Shinkyo (now Changchun), the capital of Manchukuo (a Japanese client state). The Japanese military’s bacteriological corps quickly assumed control, imposing unprecedented massive compulsory masking, quarantine, lockdowns, and contact tracing—measures celebrated in official propaganda. Yet the outbreak soon revealed troubling inconsistencies: transmission chains could not be identified and infections appeared in urban environments presumed to be hygienic and well-protected. These difficulties led some Japanese epidemiologists and physicians to rethink the effectiveness of technical solutions in epidemic prevention. This paper argues that the Shinkyo plague constituted an epistemological rupture within Japan’s imperial hygiene regime. The crisis exposed the fragility of an ideology that had long privileged bacteriology and military-style sanitary policing while systematically marginalising the social, economic, and environmental determinants of disease prevalent among the colonised population. Drawing on medical reports, internal memoranda, and Japanese archives, this study demonstrates that the 1940 crisis opened a crucial, yet brief, space for a nascent social medicine perspective to rise as a direct challenge to technocratic authority. In doing so, the paper not only complicates the prevailing view that Japan’s imperial medical ideology reached its zenith during the war, but provides a critical historical precedent for understanding how socioeconomic inequality undermines a technological empire.

Author

• Meng Zhang, University of Manchester