The Regulation of Public Health

To maintain the circulation of goods, both the control of population and health become imperative.Here, I discuss another agenda of biopolitics: public health. To discuss the regulation of public health, I take the “Healthy Manchuria Policy” as an

example. The gymnastic festivals, related facilities and public health advocacy not only ensure an endless supply of labor, but also imply an expected life.

To comb out the correlation between life and politics, we have to consider the

“body natural” as well as “body politic.” Body politic, according to Eugene Thacker, is “a way of thinking about politics as a living, vital order” (Thacker 143) and it (body politic) governs and regulates the body natural, which is open to disease and decay.

Such governance aims to regulate the epidemic, pestilence and other “diseases” like war, rebellion, and conflicts. To avoid diseases, physical examination, preventive injection, inspection of hygienic condition become indispensible, and should be practiced regularly. Thacker’s concept on body politic corresponds to Foucault’s comments on the management of public health: while the leprosy in the Middle Ages symbolizes the sovereignty’s power to exclude, the smallpox in the seventeenth century marks the new power based on apparatus of security, which does not forbid, but aims to “let things be” and to “regulate the networks, flows, circulations and to calculate probabilities in an effort to effectively intervene” (Thacker 153). The regulation of health, thus, unifies individuals into a coherent political body, and establishes a “natural” relation of control and subordination among the constitution of body. In this way, health becomes a unit of production to sustain a greater whole.

The “Healthy Manchuria Policy,” proposed as the branch of national defense system since the inception of Manchukuo, embodies the endless spiral of life and politics. The policy aims to strengthen the “body of state” (kokutai), and at the same time, makes people regulate their own bodies. Prevention serves as the fundamental constituents in the Healthy Manchuria Policy. The Manchurian settlers pay attention to public health and personal hygiene, and this also ensure the national vitality. The policy contains a wide spectrum, and I divide it into facilities, festivals and laws, from which we can see body has become a hybrid biopolitical formation.

First, the athletic facilities rivals in other massive constructions. While nowadays we relate to athletic facilities with respect to leisure activities, the

Manchukuo government considers the establishment of the athletic associations as the dominant objective of administration. Depending on the “Healthy Manchuria Policy,”

the “plan of sport revitalization” contributes to the rapid growth of health centers, clinics, army hospitals, the Research Institute of Health, the Red Cross Club. These health-related measures concentrate along the railway, so that the government can put infectious diseases on the periphery of the Manchuria under comprehensive control.

Second, the sport festivals account for large proportion of the Manchukuo calendar. Through the festivals and rituals, the policy enters into the life of

Manchurian migrants. The calendars consist of National Gymnastic Day, gymnastic assembly, and other forms of commemoration. In picture B,⁷ the National Gymnastic Day has advertised the business of health to the level of national campaign. When Manchurian children sing the “anthem for health” as familiarly as humming the popular songs, and regularly practice the physical education, it becomes clear that the

“Healthy Manchuria Policy” and related strategies have been inseparable from people’s lives.

Third, the “Healthy Manchuria Policy” integrates with laws and decrees as well.

For example, after the outbreak of the Pacific War, the National Health Insurance Law (1938), the Physical Force Law (1942) and the Conscript Law targeting the robust teenagers are proposed and promulgated by the Japanese government, and these laws all regard health as the important administrative objective which can affect the future of Manchukuo. In picture C,⁸ the stamps, with an impression of a virile and athletic figure transformed from a real young soldier, positively visualize the Physical Force

7 See picture B on page 92, from Toshihiko Kishi’s The Visual Media in Manchuria, page 164

8 See picture C on page 93, from Toshihiko Kishi’s The Visual Media in Manchuria, page 172

Law. From the visual media then, we learn that the sovereign power has inscribed the admiration of law into people’s lives for the purpose of governing the population and production efficiently.

The athletic facilities, gymnastic festivals and the related laws revere health as the necessity for a body. Hence, health becomes a good way of life and the guarantee of an endless supply of labor in Manchukuo. Under the “Healthy Manchuria Policy,”

the unhealthy migrants receive attention for delivering less energy for the body of state. In fact, during WWⅡ, the critical decisions founded on the health are not rare:

The experimental wave of the Manchurian pioneers in early 1930s do not consist of the sturdy teenagers, but the old and weak veterans. Similarly, in the contemporary West, the Holocaust weeds out the disabled and diseased Germans.

Apart from the “Healthy Manchuria Policy,” various qualified stamps on the Manchurian migrants’ passports reveal that the practice of disinfestation with DTT remains an important symbol of health for the migration. The woodcut from Kitaoka Fumio (1918-2007) showed in picture D,⁹ for example, carves out the bad conditions of the Manchurian migrants after 1945 (long days in ill-ventilated ships, escaping with babies in rains, people crying beside their dying friends, people crawling thirstily for water, the fragile children in the shelters, and so on), and in his woodcut, we see Fumio picks up the scene of spreading DDT powders as an important and recordable thing at that time. However, immunity is in fact a “trickster,” since it is “mapped onto the organism itself as its own militarized form of self-defense” (Cohen 203). While preventing the circulation of disease, these practices express a deeper political concern: the public health allows long-run circulation of goods and flows of people.

The program of immunization guarantees the nation’s power by governing even the microorganisms. Esposito observes the exercise of biopower with a comparison of

9 See picture D on page 93, from Takayama Sumiko’s “Dear, Let’s Go to Meet Mr. Budda!”, page 224

external and inner thresholds: “human life here becomes the terrain of decisions that have to do with not only its external thresholds (the difference from animals) . . . but also inner thresholds” (Esposito 72). Here, inner thresholds mean that politics is allowed to decide what a biologically better life is, and to employ, exploit such life while strengthening it. Therefore, the technique of health has constituted biopolitical conditions of existence, and assists the sovereign power not only to manage life, but to make it proliferate.

In this way, biopolitical power reassures the relationship of complete obedience through the body, where life and politics are intermingled. Health becomes an object of governance, which shows a transmutation from a biological life to a biopolitical life. A healthy form of life promises the maintenance of production and circulation.

Moreover, the new art of governmentality, by structuring a technique of investigation and self-examination, makes the governed people live in “a world of indefinite regulation, of permanent, continually renewed, and increasingly detailed regulation”

(Foucault, Security, 340). When people conduct their lives through the technique of health, they have become governable objects. Those who are judged as weak, unclean or ill become unfavorable groups for the state, and that’s why the Manchukuo women who repatriate Japan frequently feel abandoned again for their uncleanness.