Investigating Impairment in Prewar Japan, 1868–1937

In this presentation, I examine how some blind elites’ efforts to combat government regulation of ‘unhygienic’ trades like acupuncture and massage in Japan during the Meiji period (1868–1912) helped facilitate the rise of advocacy networks and shape welfare policies before World War II. To begin, I demonstrate how Meiji authorities’ attempts to protect the health of Japanese citizens, which included restricting the practice of ‘unscientific’ and ‘unsafe’ medical arts, had adverse effects for many blind tradespeople who historically had monopolized and benefitted from them. I then explain how the development of Japanese braille in 1890 and erection of schools for the blind at the turn of the twentieth century helped unite blind tradespeople and facilitate the rise of regional opposition movements, which tried and failed to overturn government policies regarding traditional trades. I argue that the failure of such movements can be attributed to multiple factors: notably, their small size and mobilization of a nineteenth-century logic of class when engaging legislators, which did not sit well with an emerging twentieth-century political order premised on democratic ideals. I suggest that the aftermath of World War I was a watershed moment for many of Japan’s blind movements, which began to capitalize on industrial innovations in transportation and communications to consolidate their regional associations into national organizations. And by the 1930s, those organizations had amassed enough resources to dispatch researchers overseas and recruit charismatic, internationally renowned figures such as Helen Keller to aid their cause. In 1937, Keller visited Japan, bolstering the activities of organizations of the blind and bringing them to the attention of state officials by speaking to some 250,000 people across the imperium. Thanks in part to her visit, blind elites gained privileged access to policy makers during wartime.