| This study will show how science and technology become driving forces to recreate and invent the image of "traditional medicine" and related products, and how state governments, intellectuals, and commercial industries in marginal states of Japan, such as Toyama and Okinawa, use science and technology in order to promote the nationwide consumption of their local/original products as well as to develop autonomous state economic power.;More specifically, first, I will demonstrate how these local medical practices reacted to the nationwide modernization and institutionalization of medical and pharmaceutical practices since the introduction of "Western" science and technology along with German medicine in the mid 19th century; how this in turn re-invents the context of "traditional medicine" and promotes the consumption and delivery of so-called "local-traditional" medicines.;Second, I demonstrate how the Health and Welfare ministry invented a new type of national disease, "life-style related disease," as a way of managing national attitudes about illness, and how the economic, political, and medical leaders in Toyama scientifically reformulated their "traditional" Toyama medicine in order to deal with this new disease.;Third, I illustrate how Okinawan political and economic leaders have attempted to reconstruct Okinawan identity as a response to the impact of the post-colonial regime of the two economic and political super powers, the US and mainland Japan. I show how they use the longevity of Okinawans to promote the nationwide consumption of Okinawan food and medicinal herbs. At the same time I show how certain Tokyo based dominant culture industries---politicians and the mass media---produced a new image of Okinawa through science and technology, and how local Okinawan political and economic leaders accepted and consumed the invented image as their own in order to promote the nationwide consumption of Okinawa and its traditions and health products. |
