The politics of manic depression in the Japanese empire

Since the last decade, scholarship on colonial psychiatry has become extensive enough to allow for comparative research. ² Although Japan has often been overlooked in such studies, imperialism certainly shaped discussions of mental health in the country. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Japan acquired an extensive and multiethnic empire, gaining control over Hokkaido (1873), the Ryukyu Islands (1879), Taiwan (1895), Korea (1910), and Manchuria (1932). As in other empires, ideas about racial and ethnic hierarchies were used to justify rule. Unlike its European counterparts, however, Japan often shared physical traits and cultural traditions of the peoples whom they colonized. There was thus a greater reliance on other methods of setting colonizers above the colonized—methods that psychiatrists were demonstrably eager to provide through the depiction of mental disorders and differences in susceptibility based on race and ethnicity.