SpringerLink
Log in

Disability History of Modern East Asia: An Overview

  • Living reference work entry
  • Latest version View entry history
  • First Online:
Handbook of Disability

  • 58 Accesses

Abstract

A disability-based approach to history (disability history) gives us perspectives on historical ideas of disability in modern East Asian societies. This chapter will emphasize three main areas: (1) disability, science, and medicine; (2) disability, law, and activism; and (3) disability and popular culture. In this chapter, the modern period is taken to mean the nineteenth century and thereafter, and the focus will be on China, Japan, and South Korea.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Adams, R., Reiss, B., & Serlin, D. (2015). Disability. In R. Adams, B. Reiss, & D. Serlin (Eds.), Keywords for disability studies (pp. 5–11). New York University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Arakawa, I., Ōi, S., & Nakano, Y. (1976). Nihon shōgaiji kyōikushi (the history of the education of children with disabilities in Japan). Fukumura Shuppan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Arlington, C. (2016). Accidental activists: Victim movements and government accountability in Japan and South Korea. Cornell University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Arlington, C. (2020). Legal mobilization and the transformation of state-society relations in South Korea in the realm of disability policy. In D. Chiavacci, S. Grano, & J. Obinger (Eds.), Civil society and the state in democratic East Asia: Between entanglement and contention in post high growth (pp. 297–323). Amsterdam University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baum, E. (2018). The invention of madness: State, society, and the insane in modern China. University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Burns, S. L. (1997). Contemplating places: The hospital as modern experience in Meiji Japan. In H. Hardacre & A. L. Kern (Eds.), New directions in the study of Meiji Japan (pp. 702–718). Brill.

    Google Scholar 

  • Burns, S. L. (2013). Gender in the arena of the courts: The prosecution of abortion and infanticide in early Meiji Japan. In S. L. Burns & B. J. Brooks (Eds.), Gender and law in the Japanese imperium (pp. 81–108). University of Hawai’i Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Burns, S. L. (2019). Kingdom of the sick: A history of leprosy and Japan. University of Hawai’i Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Burns, S. L. (2012). Rethinking “leprosy prevention”: Entrepreneurial doctors, popular journalism, and the civic origins of biopolitics. Journal of Japanese Studies, 38(2), 297–323. https://doi.org/10.1353/jjs.2012.0062

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Caprio, M. E. (2009). Japanese assimilation policies in colonial Korea, 1910–1945. University of Washington Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Choe, S. (2019, April 11). South Korea rules anti-abortion law unconstitutional. The New York Times.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chung, Y. J. (2014). Better science and better race? Social Darwinism and Chinese eugenics. Isis, 105(4), 793–802. https://doi.org/10.1086/679426

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cook, H. J. (2020). Introduction: Translating Chinese medical ways in the early modern period. In H. J. Cook (Ed.), Translation at work: Chinese medicine in the first global age (pp. 1–22). Brill.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Cross, S. (1996). Prestige and comfort: The development of social Darwinism in early Meiji Japan, and the role of Edward Sylvester Morse. Annals of Science, 53(4), 323–344. https://doi.org/10.1080/00033799608560820

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Daidoji, K. (2013). Treating emotion-related disorders in Japanese traditional medicine: Language, patients, and doctors. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 37, 59–80. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-012-9297-4

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dauncey, S. (2020). Disability in contemporary China: Citizenship, identity and culture. Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Dauncey, S. (2007). Screening disability in the PRC: The politics of looking good. China Information, 21(3), 481–506. https://doi.org/10.1177/0920203X07083324

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • David, M. (2018). Female gynecologists and their birth control clinics: Eugenics in practice in 1920s–1930s China. Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 35(1), 32–62. https://doi.org/10.3138/cbmh.200-022017

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fjeld, H., & Sagli, G. (2011). Disability, poverty, and healthcare: Changes in the Canji (‘disability’) policies in the history of the People’s Republic of China. In A. H. Eide & B. Ingstad (Eds.), Disability and poverty: A global challenge. Bristol University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Godart, G. C. (2017). Darwin, dharma, and the divine: Evolutionary theory and religion in modern Japan. University of Hawai’i Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Groemer, G. (2001). The guild of the blind in Tokugawa Japan. Monumenta Nipponica, 56(3), 349–380. https://doi.org/10.2307/3096791

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Heyer, K. (2015). Rights enabled: The disability revolution, from the US, to Germany and Japan, to the United Nations. University of Michigan Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Kang, X. (2006). The cult of the fox: Power, gender, and popular religion in late imperial and modern China. Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kato, M. (2009). Women’s rights? The politics of eugenic abortion in modern Japan. Amsterdam University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kawashima, S. (2013). Nachisu yūsei seisaku to Nihon e no eikyō: Idenbyō shison yobō hō kara Kokumin yūsei hō e (Nazi eugenic policies and the influence on Japan: From the law on the prevention of progeny with hereditary diseases to the National Eugenics Law). In K. Yamazaki (Ed.), Seimei no rinri, vol. 3: Yūsei seisaku no keifu (the ethics of life, vol. 3: The genealogy of eugenic policies) (pp. 193–222). Kyūshū Daigaku Shuppankai.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kim, E. (2017). Curative violence: Rehabilitating disability, gender, and sexuality in modern Korea. Duke University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Kim, H. (2014). Doctors of empire: Medical and cultural encounters between imperial Germany and Meiji Japan. University of Toronto Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Kim, S. (2008). “Limiting birth”: Birth control in colonial Korea (1910–1945). East Asian Science, Technology, and Society: An International Journal, 2(3), 335–359. https://doi.org/10.1215/s12280-008-9064-3

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kim, Y. (2018). Seeing cages: Home confinement in early twentieth-century Japan. Journal of Asian Studies, 77(3), 635–658. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911818000475

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kitanaka, J. (2010). Reading emotions in the body: Translating depression at the intersections of Japanese and Western medicines. In W. Ernst & T. Mueller (Eds.), Transnational psychiatries: Social and cultural histories of psychiatry in comparative perspective c. 1800–2000 (pp. 1–23). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kohrman, M. (2005). Bodies of difference: Experiences of disability and institutional advocacy in the making of modern China. University of California Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Kuriyama, S. (2006). The expressiveness of the body and the divergence of Greek and Chinese medicine (3rd printing). Zone Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leung, A. K. C. (2009). Leprosy in China: A history. Columbia University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Mashimo, Y. (2018). If lessons are to be learned: Depiction of disability in Mienai Bakudan (the invisible bomb). Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 12(3), 269–285. https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2018.22

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nakamura, K. (2013). A disability of the soul: An ethnography of schizophrenia and mental illness in contemporary Japan. Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nakamura, K. (2006). Deaf in Japan: Signing and the politics of identity. Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Okuyama, Y. (2020). Reframing disability in manga. University of Hawai’i Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Otsubo, S. (2005). Engendering eugenics: Feminists and marriage restriction legislation in the 1920s. In B. Molony & K. Uno (Eds.), Gendering modern Japanese history (pp. 225–256). Harvard University Asia Center.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Pennington, L. K. (2015). Casualties of history: Wounded Japanese servicemen and the second world war. Cornell University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Prince, S. (2018). A dream of resistance: The cinema of Kobayashi Masaki. Rutgers University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Riep, S. L. (2018). Disability in modern Chinese cinema. In M. Rembis, C. Kudlick, & K. E. Nielsen (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of disability history (pp. 407–423). Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Robertson, J. (2002). Blood talks: Eugenic modernity and the creation of new Japanese. History and Anthropology, 13(3), 191–216. https://doi.org/10.1080/0275720022000025547

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scheid, V. (2015). Transmitting Chinese medicine: Changing perceptions of body, pathology, and treatment in late Imperial China. Asian Medicine, 8(2), 299–360. https://doi.org/10.1163/15734218-12341319

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shek-Noble, L. (2019). A (not so) personal matter: Understanding disability in Kenzaburō Ōe’s early novels. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 13(4), 429–443. https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2019.32

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shibata, Y. (2019). Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Literature, film, and transnational politics. University of Hawai’i Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stevens, C. S. (2013). Disability in Japan. Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Suh, S. (2017). Naming the local: Medicine, language, and identity in Korea since the fifteenth century. Harvard University Asia Center.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Suzuki, A. (2010). Global theory, local practice: Shock therapies in Japanese psychiatry, 1920–1945. In W. Ernst & T. Mueller (Eds.), Transnational Psychiatries: Social and cultural histories of psychiatry in comparative perspective c. 1800–2000 (pp. 116–141). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tan, W. Y. W. (2019). Disability, text, and performance: The significance of one blind musician’s career in Tokugawa Japan. Journal of Japanese Studies, 45(1), 91–119. https://doi.org/10.1353/jjs.2019.0004

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thornber, K. L. (2012). Ecoambiguity: Environmental crises and East Asian literatures. University of Michigan Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Tikhonov, V. (2016). Social Darwinism as history and reality: “Competition” and “the weak” in early twentieth-century Korea. Critical Asian Studies, 48(3), 315–337. https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2016.1189839

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Trambaiolo, D. (2013). Native and foreign in Tokugawa medicine. Journal of Japanese Studies, 39(2), 299–324. https://doi.org/10.1353/jjs.2013.0040

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Waldschmidt, A. (2018). Disability-culture-society: Strengths and weaknesses of a cultural model of dis/ability. ALTER, European Journal of Disability Research, 12, 67–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.alter.2018.04.003

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wee, S. (2021, May 31; updated June 1) China says it will allow couples to have 3 children, up from 2. The New York Times.

    Google Scholar 

  • White, T. (2006). China’s longest campaign: Birth planning in the People’s Republic, 1949–2005. Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Yamada, A. (2013). Tsūshi: Nihon no shōgaisha: Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa (a complete history: People with disabilities in Japan: The Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa periods). Akashi Shoten.

    Google Scholar 

  • Yoo, T. J. (2016). It’s madness: The politics of mental health in colonial Korea. University of California Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hope College, Holland, MI, USA

    Wei Yu Wayne Tan

Authors
  1. Wei Yu Wayne Tan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wei Yu Wayne Tan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Health, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Marcia H. Rioux

  2. Advocacy Director, International Disability Alliance, Toronto, ON, Canada

    José Viera

  3. School of Rehabilitation Science, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada

    Alexis Buettgen

  4. Department of Anthropology, University at Buffalo, State University, Buffalo, NY, USA

    Ezra Zubrow

Section Editor information

  1. York University, Toronto, Canada

    Geoffrey Reaume

  2. Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore, United States

    Sara Scalenghe

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

About this entry

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this entry

Tan, W.Y.W. (2022). Disability History of Modern East Asia: An Overview. In: Rioux, M.H., Viera, J., Buettgen, A., Zubrow, E. (eds) Handbook of Disability. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1278-7_3-2

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1278-7_3-2

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-16-1278-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-16-1278-7

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Chapter history

  1. Latest

    Disability History of Modern East Asia: An Overview
    Published:
    24 August 2022

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1278-7_3-2

  2. Original

    Disability History of Modern East Asia: An Overview
    Published:
    28 May 2022

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1278-7_3-1

Search

Navigation