Postdoc Delivers Talk on Japan

Timothy M. Yang, a postdoctoral fellow in Harvard’s Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, examined the influence of private drug companies on the Japanese colonial sphere during the interwar period in a talk on Tuesday afternoon at the Center for Government and International Studies.

“The general question of medicine today in the global economy and in the world of the 19th and 20th century is really important, and I think he’s doing interesting work,” said History professor Andrew D. Gordon ’75 in an interview before the event.

Yang painted a picture of Japan’s imperial expansion through economic means and the consolidation of the Japanese Empire through public medicine by focusing on one case study: Hoshi Pharmaceuticals and its dealings in the quinine market.

The presentation shed light on three main themes: the role of relationships between public and private interests, the impact of global influences on local issues, and the Japanese Empire’s self-sufficiency. Ultimately, Yang argued that Hoshi served as a prime historical case in examining globalization today.

Yang, whose dissertation focused on the company, is officially a modern Japanese historian, but also has knowledge of Chinese and Taiwanese history, calling himself a “Transnational Historian of East Asia.”

For his dissertation, Yang mainly researched in Japan at the Hoshi University Archive, but also travelled to Taiwan and China. In an interview after the event, he said that his work is relevant to modern globalization, which he calls “one of the buzzwords of today.”

Globalization, he emphasized, is not just a phenomenon of the past: “like any other multinational firm, [Hoshi] has issues and global reach through a global network.”

Yang said his goal is to complete a manuscript by the end of the year and turn his dissertation into a book. After his fellowship, he said he will serve as an Assistant Professor at Pacific University in Oregon and is tentatively considering pursuing a project about Japanese and Chinese immigration to the West Coast of the United States.

According to Gordon, the purpose of Harvard’s program on U.S.-Japan relations is to bring together “a mixture of scholars and practitioners…to learn about social science, to learn about issues they deal with in their professional life back in Japan, [and] to interact with our students.”

“It’s a great benefit to our students because a lot of these organizations host our students as interns, so there’s kind of a reciprocal relationship that’s developed after the last 30 or 40 years,” he said.

Yang also had kind words for Harvard’s U.S.-Japan program.

“It’s a great opportunity for people like me—who are academics—to have the time and space to research at a university like Harvard, which has the best resources in the world on almost anything related to East Asia and probably the best university library system in the world,” he said.