Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2021. xv, 335 pp. (Table, figure, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$55.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5017-5624-5.
Hoshi Pharmaceutical Company (Hoshi Seiyaku) in the mid-1920s was the largest drug company in Japan. In terms of capitalization, it was more than four times larger than its nearest rival, Sankyo. Few Japanese citizens would not have heard of its signature product, Hoshi Ichōyaku (a digestive medicine), and many at the time were taking it regularly, even daily. Its sales network was firmly established throughout Japan and across the colonial states of Korea and Taiwan. The digestive medicine was making inroads in Southeast Asia and even among the Japanese diaspora in Hawai‘i and California. Yet it is barely remembered today. In 1925, its founder, Hoshi Hajime, was arrested for violation of narcotics laws. He was ultimately acquitted but the trial irrevocably damaged the company’s reputation, which had been constructed around the guiding motto, “Kindness First.” At the time, Hoshi himself, and later apologists for the company—including his son Hoshi Shinichi who became a successful science-fiction novelist—would argue that Hoshi was the victim of a conspiracy against someone perceived as a nouveau riche (narikin) who dared to challenge the dominance of the elite. In fact, author Timothy Yang hints that on the contrary, it was Hoshi’s links with members of the elite that enabled him to make his initial breakthrough. Then in the 1930s, support from right-wing ideologues such as Toyama Mitsuru helped Hoshi continue in business despite the damage to his personal reputation as well as the company’s.
Hoshi was arrested again in 1932, this time on charges of bribing tax officials. He was found guilty and imprisoned for three months. This all happened while his now-failing company teetered on the edge of insolvency without actually being wound up. To restore its fortunes, in 1934, he proposed to his elite acquaintances the establishment of a vast cinchona plantation in a mountainous region of Taiwan and to make use of the cheap labour from the aboriginal villages located there. This would ensure a domestic source of quinine, which is made from the bark of the cinchona tree. With the Japanese army now active in south China and plans being formulated for a southern advance, prophylaxis against malaria was an urgent issue. Hoshi’s plan was not a great success but it did enable the company to survive the war and continue to sell its patent medicines. A further blow came in November 1945, when a surprise inspection by a US officer of a Hoshi Pharmaceutical factory found that it was producing morphine in direct violation of a SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers) prohibition. The drugs were immediately destroyed and Hoshi Pharmaceutical was forbidden to produce medicine. These restrictions were partially relaxed in 1948, and Hoshi himself resumed his career as a politician, standing in the 1946 and 1948 elections. He died in Los Angeles in 1951 en route to Peru where he hoped to re-establish a cinchona plantation.
The first half of the book rattles along describing the ten years Hoshi spent in the United States, where he not only earned a degree (in political science) at Columbia University but also befriended several of the great men of Meiji Japan—Itō Hirobumi, Nitobe Inazō, and Gotō Shimpei, to name a few. Returning to Japan in 1906, he had to decide on a business direction. Rejecting shoes and hardware, he settled on patent medicine and launched as his first product an anti-inflammatory ointment which apparently “…cures everything from corns to consumption” (58). An initial investment of ¥400 turned a profit of ¥1200, and the company was ready to take off. At the same time, Hoshi launched his political career standing successfully for the Lower House of the Diet in 1908. A few years later he would launch the digestive medicine that would comprise more than half of the company’s total sales by the mid-1920s. However, Hoshi’s success derived less from the medicines the company marketed than from his innovative sales network and marketing practices in the shops through which he sold his medicines. He cut out the wholesale distributors used by other drug companies to retain control of prices and profits. He wanted his drugstores to seem no different from a general store, well-lit and easy to enter.
Yang’s explanation of the opium scandal in 1925 is well done. He emphasizes that its impact on the company was particularly severe because it coincided with when the company was at its most highly leveraged. The subsequent technical explanation of these financial difficulties, though necessary, will be a challenge for an average reader (as it was for this reviewer). The later chapter on the attempt to create a domestic source of quinine in Taiwan I found ultimately unsatisfactory. I was unsure whether the strategy, though plagued with difficulty, had been a partial success or complete failure. Or was it just too soon to say given that it takes 10 years before a cinchona tree is ready for harvest?
The story of Hoshi Hajime and his company provides Yang with what he calls a “microhistory” through which he illustrates a number of broader themes: the development of the pharmaceutical industry from Tokugawa era to the mid-twentieth century, the evolution of Japan’s colonial policy particularly, but not only, in Taiwan, and the relationship between the formation of health care regimes and the creation of the modern state. He shows how Hoshi Hajime sailed close to the wind throughout his career, pushing the boundaries of what was legal and legitimate business practice. A Medicated Empire provides an important addition to our knowledge of the so-called self-made men of the Meiji period.
Ian Neary
University of Oxford, Oxford