Number 017
Associate Professor Alexander Bay, “Roots of the Nation:Folk Medicine (minkanyaku) in Modern Japan”

【Date and Time】03 October 2025 (Friday) 17:30-19:00
【LANGUAGE】English (no interpretation)
【HOW TO PARTICIPATE】
IN-PERSON: Room 116, 1st Floor, Faculty of Law and Literature Building No. 1. The University of Tokyo
ONLINE ZOOM: ID: 829 280 0028
Passcode: 854145

Host: Department of Death & Life Studies and Practical Ethics
Grant : International Humanities Project, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology
Joint Host: Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology and Tokyo College

＊This event is part of both "Death & Life Studies and Practical Ethics Lecture Series"

【Speaker】
Associate Professor Alexander Bay（Chapman University, US）

【Abstract】
　　Currently, three medicinal plants, gennoshōko (Geranium thunbergii), senburi (Swertia japonica), and dokudami (Houttuynia cordata), are considered “The Big Three of Japanese Folk Medicine” (Nihon sandai minkanyaku). While these three are not prominent in the materia medica repertoire of kanpō medicine, all appear on the official, state-sanctioned list of pharmaceuticals. Popular science writers define “folk” medicine as “the treatments for illness and wounds that have been administered by the masses to themselves and passed down among this country’s people.” This chapter unpacks the constructed nature of “folk” medicine in the 19th and 20th-centuries and argues that the genre of “folk” medicine was a product of the 1920s, and that the earlier we go into the historical record, the roots of “folk” medicine are firmly planted in the Sino-Japan-centric world of Edo-period learned medicine. Using a genealogical approach, this chapter follows “folk” medicine discourse, and at times practice, based on health survey data, from the current assumptions concerning the “The Big Three of Japanese Folk Medicine” to Edo-period famine relief and materia medica texts. These texts may have been for “the people,” but they did not originate with “the people.” In the 1920s, folk medicine proponents drew, uncritically, upon this archive to critique Japan’s reliance on imported Western medicine. Regardless of “folk” medicine’s constructed nature, the texts I explore argue that the roots of a national identity were to be found in the history and tradition of using Japanese medicinal plants.