A Medicated Empire

Winner of the 2022 Hagley Prize in Business History

In A Medicated Empire, Timothy M. Yang explores the history of Japan's pharmaceutical industry in the early twentieth century through a close account of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals, one of East Asia's most influential drug companies from the late 1910s through the early 1950s. Focusing on Hoshi's connections to Japan's emerging nation-state and empire as well as the ways in which it embraced an ideology of modern medicine as a humanitarian endeavor, Yang shows how the industry promoted a hygienic middle-class culture that was part of Japan's national development and imperial expansion.

Yang demonstrates that the company's fortunes had less to do with scientific breakthroughs and medical innovations than with Japan's web of social, political, and economic relations. He lays bare Hoshi's business strategies and its connections with politicians and bureaucrats, and he describes how public health authorities dismissed many of its products as placebos at best and poisons at worst. Combining global histories of business, medicine, and imperialism, A Medicated Empire illuminates how the development of the pharmaceutical industry simultaneously supported and subverted regimes of public health at home and abroad.

Timothy M. Yang is Associate Professor of History at the University of Georgia.

In an era when big pharma is frequently the subject of news media, either as a panacea for or a catalyst of epidemics, Timothy M. Yang's book, A Medicated Empire: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Modern Japan, is a welcome reminder that the connections between the industry and the state, which relies upon and benefits from the industry's workings, are nearly as old as the nations the industry undergirds.

Yang's exciting and innovative text looks at how Hoshi Pharmaceuticals and the consumer medicine industry created a disciplined citizenry capable of monitoring its own health through over-the-counter drugs. The production of a populace that could manage its own health gave individuals the impression of autonomy, even as it further enmeshed them in the state's promotion of capitalist development. In this fashion, a focus on Hoshi allows Yang to connect histories of biopolitics and social control with histories of consumption and capitalism.

Yang's work is important in understanding the extent to which companies acted as agents of modernity and imperial expansion. Given the attention that the pharmaceutical industry has received over the past few years, this book comes at an important time.

Beautifully written and packed with insights that remain relevant for today, A Medicated Empire seamlessly weaves together the global histories of drugs, capitalism, and imperialism. The book is essential reading for scholars of modern Japan and the history of science and medicine. Business students may also find Hoshi an instructive case of the dangers of overextension, reputational damage, and the failure to plan for corporate succession.

A Medicated Empire is a significant addition to the scholarship in modern Japanese history and the history of the Japanese Empire. Yang's work is also pioneering in the history of medicine in Japan, since scholars have tended to focus on doctors and governmental medical policy while paying little attention to the pharmaceutical industry.

A Medicated Empire provides an important addition to our knowledge of the so-called self-made men of the Meiji period.

Drawing from the archives of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals, Yang has written a thought-provoking history of the pharmaceutical industry in Japan. This important and readable book provides insights into the history of not only Japan but the modern world.

Hoi-eun Kim, Texas A&M University, author of Doctors of Empire:

A Medicated Empire is much more than a probing analysis of the entrepreneurial innovations of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals, Japan's preeminent medicinal enterprise. By situating it at the nexus of medical capitalism and the burgeoning imperial state, Timothy M. Yang forcefully testifies to the centrality of medicine and its business for Japan's imperial aspirations. A must read for students of Japan and of the history of medicine and pharmaceuticals.

Sarah Thal, University of Wisconsin Madison, author of Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods:

This book does a truly stellar job of telling a narrative. The research is strong, the writing is vivid, the contextual analysis and interpretive points are relevant and well done. This is an exceptional work.

Miriam Kingsberg Kadia, University of Colorado, author of Moral Nation:

Within the recent spate of exciting contributions to the history of Japanese imperialism, A Medicated Empire stands out for its careful delineation of linkages between the worlds of pharmacy and medicine on the one hand, and the development of entrepreneurial capitalism and commercialism on the other.