2022 Volume 31 Issue 1 Pages 23-34
In view of recently rising expectations of traditional medicine, it is increasingly important to distinguish Japanese kanpo (herbal medicine) from acupuncture and moxibustion. In 1874, the Meiji government established the first law for the administration of medicine (J: isei), which recognized but clearly distinguished kanpo (herbal medicine) from acupuncture and moxibustion. Based on a review of the literature, this study discusses factors that led to differences of their institutionalization during the early days of the Meiji Era, proposing a new perspective on how their differences in therapeutic style were grounded in disparate conceptions of the human body. Nagayo Sensai and fellow founders of Japan’s law for the administration of medicine had aimed to integrate kanpo (herbal medicine) with acupuncture and moxibustion as the grounds for medical practice. Subsumed within modern materialist medicine, kanpo practitioners of bathing and herbal pharmacology opposed this unification, but the shortage of doctors in the early Meiji period left room for all available therapies. On the other hand, acupuncture and moxibustion were based on a pre-modern body concept that relied on the skill of the therapist to change the mind as well as body of the patient. The difficulty of demonstrating and communicating this psycho-somatic model both ideologically and practically impeded its integration into modern medicine. In short, the difference between the two therapies at the time of the unification of modern medicine in Japan is a logical consequence of the disparity between the materialist model undergirding modern allopathic medicine and kanpo, and the nonreductionist pre-modern conception of the body underlying acupuncture and moxibustion.
