The Emergence of an International Humanitarian Organization in Japan: The Tokugawa Origins of the Japanese Red Cross

要旨

Founded in 1887, the Japanese Red Cross Society (JRCS) was already the largest and among the most active and emulated national Red Cross societies in the world by the early twentieth century. The level of popular participation in the organization was unusually high by global standards. The French branch of the movement was the first national Red Cross Society in the world, and historians consider it to have been very successful in attracting volunteers for the patriotic defense of the nation.1 However, whereas the French society had 55,000 members in 1907, membership in the JRCS had already reached 900,000 four years earlier, in 1903. The success of the Japanese Red Cross led King Edward VII to personally send his head surgeon to Japan in the early twentieth century to study the organization so that the British society could be modeled after it.2 The American Red Cross, headed by Henry Davison, a partner in J. P. Morgan and Company, was regarded as a perfect example of the successes of American mass philanthropy, driven as a capitalist venture in social betterment by wealthy U.S. industrialists, and supported by the mass donations of millions of Americans of modest means. Yet in 1916, the American Red Cross was dismayed to learn that membership in Japan's Red Cross was 1.8 million, while its own organization had only 31,000 members. While the European societies saw severe declines in membership outside wartime, the JRCS maintained its membership even in times of peace.3 Histories of the rise of humanitarianism often begin with the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 1863. Given the size and influence of the Japanese branch of the Red Cross movement, the global history of humanitarianism cannot be written without incorporating the JRCS.4 Yet how are we to make sense of the JRCS when mid-nineteenth-century Japan lacked practically all those elements regarded as essential to the rise of leading Red Cross societies in the West: a Christian missionary base, tens of thousands of wealthy industrialists, and, according to some historians, a spirit of volunteerism?5 To answer this question, we must look beyond discussions that attribute the emergence of global humanitarianism and the idea of humanity to the development of evangelical Christianity, Enlightenment values, imperialism, and capitalism. Such distinctions limit from the outset the possibility to see humanitarianism as a truly global phenomenon with multiple intellectual sources and expressions. In the late Tokugawa period (1603–1868), a number of the leading figures in the wartime societies for medical aid were educated at or had close ties with private Dutch medical academies, most notably the influential Juntendō School of Medical Studies in Sakura. It was this group of physicians who, with their ethic and practice of “saving the people” through medical care, served as a bridge between the humanitarianism of late Tokugawa medical practitioners and the modern JRCS. In fact, the JRCS headquarters and Red Cross Hospital were later built on the estate of Juntendō patron and Sakura lord Hotta Masayoshi. The founding site of the JRCS was a physical tie to the society's Tokugawa inheritance that has been long forgotten. The epistemological premise of these physicians was that because nature was the first and only reliable source of knowledge, it must serve as the intellectual ground for moral practice in human affairs. Their belief that each individual human life was a gift from nature resulted in a conception of medical practice as a compassionate art of healing of the of and medical for humanity ethic and practice on the nature was among late Tokugawa was for the of the Red Cross in It was a from the humanitarianism and of this on nature as the first of and as the for their idea of humanitarianism was very from of the rise of global humanity as a from to global human a the development of the modern and and that have been to of a that in for a globa

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