Please join us for the next Modern Japan History Workshop on May 10th at 6:00pm in KIBER 110. The presenter this month will be Nicole Gaglia (Ph.D. Candidate, Duke University), who will give a presentation titled, “Spectacular Health: Japan at the 1911 International Hygiene Exhibition.”

In 1911, the Japanese government sent an architectural model of Tokyo’s Institute for Infectious Disease to Dresden, Germany. This model was part of its entry into the First International Hygiene Exhibition, one of the most important exhibitions for scientifically based concepts of health in the early twentieth century. Japan’s collection of objects, from samples to specimens and diagrams to dioramas, was one node in the complex network of visual culture that represented public health in Japan. In my dissertation, “Visualizing Bodies: Public Health and the Medicalized Everyday in Modern Japan,” I investigate these nodes to explicate the role of images in constructing social conceptions of modern health during this period. I examine images to ask how visuality shaped public discourses on health, the body, and sociality in modern Japan within four distinct spheres: hygiene exhibitions, enlightenment posters, prints of the active female body, and modernist painting. Through the encounter between medical science and the viewer, I address the themes of space, translation, and pleasure. How was public health visualized and transmitted in public and everyday space? How were abstract scientific concepts made legible for public consumption? How did these concepts change through consumption? How did sensuous experience operate within the visual language of public health?

In this conference paper, based on research for the first chapter of my project, I examine the visual apparatus of health constructed by the Japanese government through the lens of the international exhibition. I argue that the simultaneously instructive and titillating sensory experience of health reveals a transformation in knowledge production in the fantastic space of the exhibition. Further, I identify the objects, spaces, and images as agents imbricated in the construction of a medicalized everyday—a scientific rationalization of everyday life rooted in the body.