The Center for Integrated Japanese Studies (CIJS) will feature a talk by Dr. Alexander Bay titled “The Construction of Folk Medicine in Modern Japan: Discourse and Practice” at 14:30–16:00 on Friday, November 13, 2026 as the inaugural event of the Multi-Life Humanities Seminar Series. Please see details below.

Event Description
Is “folk medicine” simply a passive product of “tradition,” or is there more to its formation? In this talk, Dr. Alexander Bay examines the development and practice of using medicinal plant for treatments in the early-modern and modern eras. Popular science writers define folk medicine as treatments for illness that have been administered by the masses and passed down among the people. Dr. Bay’s research unpacks the constructed nature of folk medicine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and argues that this “tradition” was a product of the 1920s, and that the earlier we go into the historical record, the more we realize that the roots of folk medicine are firmly planted in the Sino-centric world of Edo-period learned medicine. Using a genealogical approach, his study follows folk medicine discourse, and at times practice, based on health survey data, from current assumptions concerning folk medicine to Edo-period famine relief and materia medica texts. In the 1920s, folk medicine proponents, a group he calls minkanyaku intellectuals, drew uncritically upon a premodern archive to critique Japan’s reliance on imported Westen medicine. Regardless of folk medicine’s constructed nature, the texts Dr. Bay explores argue that the roots of a national identity were to be found in the history and culture of using Japanese medicinal plants.

 

About the Speaker 
Dr. Alexander Bay is a historian of public health, medicine, and disease of modern Japan and the Chair of the Department of History at Chapman University. In addition to journal articles on waste management, disease prevention, and parasites, among other topics, his monograph Beriberi in Modern Japan: The Making of a National Disease (University of Rochester Press, 2012) traces the interplay between scientific debates, public health, and the building of the Japanese empire. Dr. Bay is currently working on a project about the history of folk medicine in Japan. 

About the Multi-Life Humanities Seminar Series
As an initiative of the CIJS collaborative research project “Multi-Life Humanities: Possibilities and Challenges,” this seminar series engages with multispecies and posthumanist perspectives to explore different forms of “living” and “life,” especially those that defy the species-based taxonomy of biology. In particular, it aims to facilitate intellectual dialogues about the role of the “nonhuman”—be they understood as plants, animals, microbes, cloned embryos, artificial intelligence, or supernatural beings—in shaping the history, society, and culture of Japan and beyond.