ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“Forklift Disease”: The Making of an Occupational Illness in Postwar Japan

• In Event: Hazards, Accidents, and Knowledge Production in Modern Industry

English Abstract

This paper uses the case of “forklift disease” (fōkurifuto-byō) in postwar Japan to explore how occupational illness came to be conceived and contested in an era of logistical capitalism. Emerging in the port city of Kobe in the late 1960s, forklift disease referred to a cluster of concurrent ailments from lower back pain to gastrointestinal trouble reported by dockworkers who had shifted from hook-and-rope cargo handling to operating gasoline and later diesel forklifts on newly paved wharves. The paper reconstructs how labor activists, physicians, and engineers framed these complaints as a distinctive work-related disorder that stemmed from the bodily burdens of mechanized cargo handling. Forklift disease would soon travel beyond Kobe, spurring further medical investigations at other Japanese ports, experiments with seat and suspension design, and epidemiological studies on whole-body vibration. By the 1980s, the diagnostic label was increasingly eclipsed by international categories of vibration-related musculoskeletal disorder, even as the underlying injuries persisted and expanded to new groups of logistic workers. By situating this trajectory within concurrent developments in port labor relations, containerization, and state regulation of industrial health, this paper shows how postwar Japan’s pursuit of industrial rationalization reshaped both dockside workscapes and the diagnosis terrain of occupational disease.

Author

• Victor Seow, Harvard University