Discussion
On Oct 21. 2023, No.280 Japan Specialist Seminar was hosted via webinar. With 20 more participants, Assistant Professor Sugyeong Hong from Tsuda University made a presentation titled as “Imperial Japan's All-Out War and Working Body: Science, Nation, and Gender”. The summary is as below.
The presenter first introduced physiologists Teruoka Kito and the Kurashiki Labor Science Institute. Under his leadership, the Institute moved to Tokyo just before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. It transformed from a corporate-affiliated research institute and re-launched as the "Japan Labor Science Institute".
After the re-launch, it actively responded to the labor mobilization policy of the all-out war in terms of human science.
The presenter then interpreted labor science research as part of a wartime rationalization plan that focused on wartime social transformation and its post-war continuity, paying attention to the pattern of intervening in the boundary formation of working "people" in the industrial era.
After the presentation was over, a Q/A session continued. There was a question about the interface between the discourse on brown rice vegetation and the logic of conducting all-out war. The presenter responded that the brown rice vegetation discourse was a non-mainstream discourse to the end, but there were voices advocating brown rice in terms of material conservation, and in fact, the rationing rice was changed to brown rice.
In addition, the seminar was concluded after discussions on the context related to the proletarian movement and Marxism at the time, the context of the occurrence of the knowledge organization of 'labor science', and the status among institutionalized disciplines.
