The Question of Opium: Money, Morality and Japan’s Transimperial Participation in Opium Regulation, 1868 – 1925
Abstract
‘The Opium Question’ was not a question, but rather it framed the issue of the under-regulated production, trade and consumption of opium in Asia throughout the nineteenth century. How did opium contribute to Japan’s imperial expansion? Furthermore, how did Japan learn from other imperial powers and use non-state epistemic knowledge to learn to expand its empire? Historians of drugs often use the term prohibition in relation to illicit drugs, when I argue that we should be discussing their regulation. Meiji Japan was faced with the issue of Chinese imperial subjects who were also dependent on opium. As part of the transimperial discourse on ‘The Opium Question’, Japan learned from other imperial powers like China, the United States and Britain, and learned from other powers how to modernize and expand its empire into the twentieth century.