This article investigates Teruoka Gitō's science of labor in the context of wartime rationalization of the labor regime in the Japanese Empire. In the face of unprecedented total war, social scientists and policy makers sought to reorganize the existing labor regime so that strengthened productivity could buttress the faltering wartime economy. Resonating with a call for creating willing subjects spontaneously working for the imperial nation, scientists also involved themselves in refashioning the wartime labor regime. Teruoka Gitō was one of those scientists. Teruoka started his lifetime career as the director of the Institute for the Science of Labor, the only private labor-related research institute of the time. The institute pioneered what Teruoka and his colleagues termed the science of labor (rōdō kagaku) by integrating methodologies in medicine, psychology and social scientific approaches. To build a new field of human sciences concerning all forms of human work, labor science's agenda covered a wide array of issues ranging from labor physiology, industrial psychology, and household budget to nutrition, urban/rural hygiene, and work efficiency. As wartime labor mobilization intensified after 1938, its research agendas expanded into surveys on agricultural migrants to Manchuria and iron mine workers in Northern China and Kyūshū. What distinguishes labor science from general labor management, with its primary focus on profit maximization? How did Teruoka situate his research agendas in the context of social and/or racial hygiene? What are the implications of labor scientific intervention in settler colonialism under the name of settler science? By tackling these questions, this article scrutinizes the possibilities and limitations of labor science as a science for workers of a national community.

The Japanese and Korean sea women (Ama in Japanese and Haenyeo in Korean), female free-divers who make their living by harvesting shellfish and seaweed, have recently been spotlighted as examples of indigenous peoples that embody the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Focusing on the role of science in this envisioning, this paper explores how Japanese imperial research on the physiology of the woman divers was revitalized in the form of a trans-pacific scientific collaboration after World War II. In the prewar period, Gitō Teruoka (1889‒1966) studied the Japanese diving women as “primitive” industrial laborers from the perspective of German labor physiology (Arbeitsphysiologie). Hermann Rahn (1912‒1990) at the University of Buffalo, New York, revamped Terouka’s prewar research as part of his environmental physiology and created a research network, albeit a selective one, among US, Japanese, and South Korean physiologists in the postwar period. Examining the network-making process led by the founding scholar in environmental physiology through the 1965 symposium on the Ama of Japan, this paper will reveal that a shift in understanding of the “primitive” in the Cold War context renewed scientific interest in the diving women and played a central role in the formation of the trans-pacific network.

This paper examines the post-Occupation reconstruction of Japanese genetics by considering its relations with both US postwar interests and Japanese wartime activities in Asia. In the 1950s, the Rockefeller Foundation approached Kihara Hitoshi, a prominent Japanese plant geneticist, as part of their interests in a large agricultural project in Cold War Asia, which eventually developed into what is now known as the Green Revolution. Kihara used this opportunity to bring in necessary resources for Japanese geneticists, obtaining a grant from the foundation to research the origin of cultivated rice at the National Institute of Genetics (NIG). When the foundation established the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines in 1960, Kihara was named one of the trustees. Using the IRRI network, Kihara integrated the NIG into the international network and reestablished Japanese rice geneticists' authority internationally through the standardization of rice gene symbols. With the foundation's support, Japanese geneticists reentered fields in Asia soon after Japan began restoring its diplomatic relations. In this article, I show that Kihara's postwar reconstruction effort was a continuation of Japanese geneticists' longstanding development of resources, networks, and authority in Asia since wartime. I also suggest that examining interactions between the foundation/IRRI and the Japanese rice research community broadens our understanding of the history of rice science in Asia, including that of the Green Revolution, whose narrative is often centered on postwar US interests.

The trope of the village has long been used to connect the South Korean and South Vietnam contexts in the area of military medicine. American experts in psychological warfare deployed Filipino, Taiwanese, and Korean medical teams to South Vietnam on the basis of coordinating Asian-Asian relations. Specifically, the Koreans had rebuilt their own health system after the Korean War (1950‒1953), and on these material grounds, American experts argued they would develop a special relationship with the Vietnamese. This paper, however, argues that Koreans had their own set of aims, a goal of using South Vietnam as a learning experience to improve their own domestic circumstances. Tracking the KOPREM (Korean Preventive Medicine) program, the paper examines how Korean medical activities on the ground differed from an idealized American narrative, one emphasizing Asian cooperation. Ultimately, the Vietnam experience aided Koreans in exporting their medical practice, along with improving domestic care.