Origins of the Hiropon Crisis

In 1888, the Japanese chemist Dr. Nagai Nagayoshi synthesized methamphetamine for the first time. The drug became commercially viable after World War I as a bronchodilator for asthmatics, but ultimately achieved market success in both Japan and the West for its stimulant properties. During World War II, the major belligerents, including Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and Japan, produced and stockpiled mass quantities of methamphetamine to distribute to pilots on long flights, soldiers in combat, and workers in factories (Rasmussen Reference Rasmussen1998, 53–85). After the war, the Occupation took control of Japan's drug caches, scattered throughout the archipelago in caves, supply depots, army and navy hospitals, and military and industrial bases. In late 1945, SCAP (the acronym usually used to refer to the Occupation administration, standing for Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers) confiscated and itemized these resources, allocating a limited quantity to public dispensaries for distribution as medicine (Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers 1952, 221). Evidence suggests that the remaining stockpiles, rather than undergoing destruction as planned, were secretly filtered to the black market (Friman Reference Friman1996b, 68).

In 1946, SCAP created the forty-person Narcotics Section (Mayaku bu) within the Ministry of Welfare (Kōseishō). More than two hundred American-trained Japanese agents were dispatched throughout the nation to enforce restrictions on nonmedical use of opiates and marijuana (Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers 1952, 226). Hiropon, by contrast, remained fully legal. The U.S. military personnel responsible for policymaking in Occupation-era Japan tended to perceive stimulants as benign. American troops had used methamphetamine extensively in recent combat, and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics did not yet recognize consumption of the drug as a health risk.

In the late 1940s, upwards of twenty Japanese companies produced and marketed hiropon as a cure for low blood pressure, sleepiness, and sluggishness (Shōji Reference Shōji1997, 17–18). Successful advertising and the absence of controls set the stage for the explosive popularity of methamphetamine. In 1949, in response to an ordinance prohibiting the production of stimulant powder and tablets, manufacturers began making methamphetamine in solution form, for delivery by syringe. The transformation of hiropon into an injectable drug greatly stimulated consumption among a population that valued the hypodermic needle both as a modern scientific technology and as a traditional tool of East Asian medicine (Dikötter Reference Dikötter2004, 173–91). One Occupation official marveled, “The hypodermic needle is on sale throughout the country, in enormous quantities, and is as commonly used as the towel or soap and water” (Deverall Reference Deverall1954b, 170). Nearly all methamphetamine users in early postwar Japan used syringes to consume the drug (Katō Reference Katō1969, 596).

Alarmed by the growing demand for hiropon, the Japanese Diet, convening for its tenth postwar session in June 1951, enacted a comprehensive proscription: the Kakuseizai torishimari hō (Ban on stimulant drugs). This legislation, which came into force the following month, stipulated fines and prison terms for the domestic production, distribution, use, and possession of methamphetamine. By December, police had arrested nearly ten thousand suspected violators, comprising more than 80 percent of the total number of drug offenders taken into custody in Japan that year (Hōmushō 1952). Beyond offenses involving direct contact with stimulants, hiropon was also implicated in various robbery, arson, rape, extortion, assault, fraud, and larceny cases. In two months of 1954 alone, police linked thirty-one murders to methamphetamine (Grinspoon and Hedblom Reference Grinspoon and Hedblom1975, 189).

As a growing consumer base exhausted wartime stockpiles of hiropon, dealers learned to manufacture the stimulant. In contrast to heroin, which gave rise to an international supply chain centered in Hong Kong, in the 1950s methamphetamine remained a domestic affair. On the evening of May 26, 1953, police searched the Tokyo residence of forty-six-year-old Tanaka Seiji and his common-law wife. Finding about ten thousand doses of stimulants and injection paraphernalia, they took the couple into custody. An investigation revealed that they had been making upwards of 1,500 doses of hiropon per day, each with a retail value of six to ten yen (Asahi shinbun May 27, 1953).Footnote ¹ The Tanaka couple typified the “mom and pop” nature of most methamphetamine operations. Of eighty-seven laboratories exposed by police in the city of Osaka in 1953, nearly a third employed only two people, and barely 10 percent involved more than four people. Production averaged 500 to 600 doses daily, with few factories capable of making more than 2,000 doses (Kondō Reference Kondō1955). The scale of some operations, however, shocked the public. In late 1955, police rounded up nearly seventy suspects in connection with a single production ring that had earned tens of millions of yen. The Tokyo-based group had manufactured methamphetamine in more than ten different locations, including a former air raid shelter, over a two-year period (Asahi shinbun October 3, 1955). Law enforcement also found methamphetamine labs hidden in factories for paint, tuberculosis remedies, ice cream, window casings, cold perm solution, cosmetics, hair dye, and chemicals. They even uncovered several plants for producing imitation hiropon. Drug manufacturers were not limited to chemists, pharmacists, and doctors, but spanned a cross-section of society, including Welfare Ministry officials, company presidents, University of Tokyo graduates, Manchurian repatriates, housewives, electronics repairmen, mechanics, noodle sellers, and the unemployed (Asahi shinbun 1951–57).

Suppliers and consumers in the methamphetamine market overlapped considerably. In 1952, 42.9 percent of those arrested for violating the Ban on Stimulant Drugs showed signs of hiropon use. This rate rose to 51 percent in 1952, 56.2 percent in 1953, and 58.1 percent in the first half of 1954 (Honda Reference Honda1955, 139). In May 1954, the Ministry of Welfare used anonymous census cards to conduct a national survey of drug consumption practices. Of 127,142 respondents, 9,108, or 7.5 percent, had sampled hiropon. Almost three-quarters of users injected five or more ampoules daily (Morimoto Reference Morimoto1957, 11). The Asahi shinbun, a national newspaper, estimated at the end of the year that 1.5 million Japanese were methamphetamine users, of whom 20 percent were so seriously dependent that they could not function without the drug (Asahi shinbun October 15, 1954).

Stimulants initially attracted prominent figures in the postwar creative world, including comedienne “Miss Wakana” (Kawamoto Kikuno) and writers Dazai Osamu, Sakaguchi Ango, Tanaka Hidemitsu, and Oda Sakunosuke. By 1955, these cultural luminaries had all succumbed to a death in which drugs were a contributing factor, and hiropon had passed into mainstream society (Lyons Reference Lyons1985; Nakano Reference Nakano1983; Ōkawa Reference Ōkawa2004; Slaymaker Reference Slaymaker2010). Free of the negative connotations of opium, the longtime scourge of mainland East Asia, methamphetamine spread rapidly through the population. Some students, factory technicians, company employees, entertainers, and night workers reported using stimulants to increase productivity and alertness on the job (philopon literally translates as “love of labor”). One drug expert attributed the taste for methamphetamine to the “hard-working Japanese national character” (Muro'o Reference Muro'o1982, 41). Amidst the urgency of domestic economic recovery, some users may have viewed hiropon consumption as almost an act of patriotism. Others took stimulants to kill hunger pangs, alleviate boredom, and face the disappointment and despair of life under the desperate conditions of the immediate postwar period. In late 1954, police arrested the elderly Dr. Masui Ryūhei for drug possession. Masui, who had earned a doctorate at the University of Chicago more than three decades earlier, was a renowned tuberculosis specialist. The war destroyed his world: his wife died of illness and his hospital was bombed into rubble. Unable to continue his career as a physician, he supported himself by selling drugs, and at some point became dependent on them. By the time Masui was picked up by police, he was living as a vagrant in a Tokyo park (Asahi shinbun December 1, 1954).

Meanings of Methamphetamine in Postwar Japan

National reconstruction in postwar Japan looked backwards to overcoming the past, as well as forwards to creating a new identity. During World War II, Chinese and Westerners controversially alleged that the Japanese empire had deliberately encouraged addiction to narcotics among conquered populations in order to undermine their capacity to resist. In 1942, in the wake of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics Harry J. Anslinger denounced the enemy, saying, “In every territory conquered by the Japanese, a large part of the people becomes enslaved with drugs. . . . This method of systematic poisoning is adopted by Japan to weaken Chinese resistance and to find traitors among the Chinese, because drug addicts will do anything to obtain drugs and are useless in the fight against the invaders” (Gayn Reference Gayn1944, 419–20).

Following Japan's defeat, however, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, consisting of representatives from the former Allies, declined to indict imperial traffickers as war criminals. In general, Japanese atrocities against other Asians received relatively little attention at the Tokyo Trials of 1945–48, owing both to a tendency to prioritize the prosecution of crimes against Westerners, and postwar geopolitical factors. As American relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated, SCAP came to prioritize the swift recovery and reconstitution of Japan as an effective ally against communism in East Asia (Jennings Reference Jennings1997; Totani Reference Totani2008). Rather than holding the Japanese accountable for past offenses, Occupation officials sought to absolve complicity on the part of “ordinary” citizens by presenting humanitarian offenses as the unsupported or unknown actions of an all-powerful military establishment. By the end of the Occupation, Anslinger's ideological ally, SCAP Secretary of Labor Richard Deverall, had shifted blame for the alleged imperial policy of drugging conquered Asians into submission from the Japanese people and nation to the army. In his view, “The opium-pushing activities of the Japanese Army in Korea, Manchuria, and, later, in China proper was [sic] part of the planning of a military group that at times behaved as if it were beyond the control of the civilian government in Tokyo” (Deverall Reference Deverall1954a, 7).

Having re-envisioned the Japanese as war victims, SCAP proceeded to blame a new enemy for the spike in hiropon consumption. In 1949, Mao Zedong, head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), proclaimed the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The passionately right-wing Deverall declared, “Thousands and tens of thousands of Japanese are becoming addicted to drugs smuggled in from Red China—and drugs that will surely kill them as if they were shot on the field of battle or died under an Atomic Bomb detonation” (Reference Deverall1954a, 53). The author added, “For indeed this dirty drug war of Mao Tse-tung and his compradores is in a sense infinitely worse than any Atom Bomb, for while the Bomb most certainly destroys the human body, the dirty drugs from Red China not only in time kill the body, but before that pervert, twist and all but destroy the will and the human spirit” (121). Through drugs, Deverall proposed a political script for the postwar period that aligned Japan and the United States, erstwhile enemies mutually forgiven, against an immoral communist world.

SCAP also attempted to tie the newly revived and increasingly popular Japan Communist Party (JCP) to the spread of drugs through the country. In the early 1950s, police uncovered a few methamphetamine rings implicating the JCP. In August 1952, they arrested a Tokyo-based communist organizer for manufacturing over one hundred thousand doses of hiropon and distributing them through Korean brokers (Asahi shinbun August 25, 1952). In another incident in June 1955, a group of twelve men and women, including a member of the JCP, were caught using stimulants (Asahi shinbun June 8, 1955). The Narcotics Section also charged one of its own typists with alerting communist traffickers of impending raids (Sams Reference Sams1998, 153–56). Nonetheless, evidence overwhelmingly indicated that party figures were responsible for only a tiny fraction of the hiropon in circulation in Japan, and the anti-communist ideology of SCAP did not strongly influence the domestic campaign against stimulants. The left-leaning Japan Teachers Union, replying to Deverall's depiction of the PRC as a narco-state, declared in 1954, “It is quite impossible for us, who visited Red China, though our trip was very short, to believe what he asserts” (Deverall Reference Deverall1954b, 4).Footnote ² By the end of the Occupation, Japan had come to see trade with the PRC as a potential solution to chronic deflation. Whatever the American agenda, the nation was not eager to inflame its mainland neighbor with unsubstantiated allegations about drugs.Footnote ³

In fact, to the Japanese of the mid-1950s, the occupiers appeared more complicit in the illegal drug trade than the communists. The Asahi shinbun, a national newspaper, characterized U.S. military bases in the home islands as “hiropon bases,” and accused GIs of spreading stimulants from large cities to small towns and even the countryside (Asahi shinbun April 17, 1955). Narcotics Section Chief Ishikawa Kazuo reported that 16 percent of all arrests for drug trafficking in 1953 (including 623 American soldiers) took place in the vicinity of the bases (Wildes Reference Wildes1954, 178). Films such as the 1953 Akasen kichi (Red line base) and 1954 Kyō en (Feast of maniacs) depicted the bases as nexuses of drugs and corruption. In response, Deverall wrote defensively, “Not military bases but the drug pushing of Red China to Japanese is the root of the problem. . . . [I]f every last GI were suddenly to leave the country, the narcotic drug traffic would be practically as bad as it is now.” In his view, “Addiction is spread among a small minority of troopers by men already addicted, by girl friends and prostitutes, and by peddlers who have a political motive. . . . Obviously, if the men had never come to the Far East most of them would never have fallen victim to the dirty drug habit (Deverall Reference Deverall1954b, 115–17, 119). The Japan Times, a conservative English-language newspaper, sought to reinforce the impression of American innocence through stories about troops led astray by immoral locals. In one such case, reported in 1956, third-class naval officer Waymond B. Teagle died from a heart attack after injecting himself with hiropon in the home of his Japanese girlfriend (Japan Times August 11, 1956).

In deference to censorship and U.S.-Japan friendship, drug scandals involving Americans received relatively little publicity in the mainstream Japanese press. Instead, some Japanese accused former imperial subjects in the home islands, euphemistically referred to as “third-country nationals” (dai san kokujin), of “polluting” the home islands with hiropon, among other offenses. The characterization of Korean and Chinese denizens as methamphetamine traffickers allowed postwar Japan to cast itself in a morally superior light, as the victim of former colonial subjects. It implicitly obviated the need to express guilt for wartime opium operations on the Asian mainland, where both state-sponsored and illegally operating dealers had spread narcotics throughout society. As the hiropon crisis reached its apex, the media provided almost daily coverage of narcotic “conspiracies” on the part of “depraved third-country nationals” (Ushikubo Reference Ushikubo1955, 3). On June 17, 1953, police arrested two unemployed males, one Japanese and one Korean, for the manufacture and sale of hiropon. The Asahi shinbun ran the story under the title, “Korean caught in manufacture of stimulants” (Asahi shinbun June 17, 1953). In mid-1955, the newspaper dubbed Korean-born Ryang Hae-ryong the “King of Hiropon” (hiropon ō) following the discovery of his enormous methamphetamine factory, containing 541,200,000 yen worth of raw materials and equipment. Ryang and seven collaborators, including Koreans and Japanese repatriated from Manchuria, produced stimulants for more than a year. In the chaos of the police raid that put an end to the operation, Ryang managed to flee the scene, remaining at large for over a month until the authorities found him living under a false name (Asahi shinbun May 27, 1955).

A police task force on methamphetamine concluded that third-country nationals “knew all too well the dangers of stimulants” but provided them to children anyway. According to one research organization, “Seventy percent of the manufacturers of hiropon are Korean, and they do not become addicted themselves—only among Japanese is addiction a problem” (Kokusai mondai kenkyū kyōkai 1954, 5). Others rejected this claim, drawing attention to drug consumption among Koreans and portraying them as equal victims of hiropon. One doctor noted, “The world believes that stimulant use in Japan is due to a Korean plot . . . but although the absolute number of Japanese addicts is higher, as a percentage of the total Korean population, the number of Korean addicts is unsurpassed.” Of the patients he had treated for drug dependence, Koreans made up 12 percent, a rate that far exceeded the representation of third-country nationals in the general population (Hirose Reference Hirose1955). Other authors defended the Koreans by arguing that they produced hiropon out of economic necessity. At the end of the Occupation, approximately six hundred thousand former imperial subjects who did not repatriate lost their Japanese citizenship and suffered exclusion from most types of legitimate employment (Koshiro Reference Koshiro1999; Morris-Suzuki Reference Morris-Suzuki2011; Watt Reference Watt2009). Beset by deprivation and discrimination, they, like many Japanese, supported themselves through the black market, including the drug traffic. In the words of one sympathetic observer:

Although foreigners were convenient scapegoats for hiropon, most Japanese acknowledged that methamphetamine was the symptom of a social malaise that was exploited and exacerbated, but not generated, by aliens. A government task force on stimulants reported, “After the end of the war, people lost their spirit, the country was catapulted into extreme economic disorder, and both hope for tomorrow and the dreams of the past were lost; so students drifted into nihilism and decadence, and turned to the powder that could make them forget [hiropon]” (Keishi-chō kakuseizai torishimari taisaku honbu 1955, 19). Novelist Dazai Osamu, a lifelong drug user who committed suicide several years before the peak of the hiropon age, furnished perhaps the most enduring representation of this “sickness of the spirit.” In his most famous work, Shayō (The setting sun, 1948), the author's lightly fictionalized alter ego, Naoji, a war veteran recently returned from combat in the Pacific, is tormented by

Redolent with the victim consciousness that suffused society, Shayō was an immediate bestseller (Dower Reference Dower1999, 158).

Despite occasional references to smaller outbreaks of stimulant use in Germany, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and other nations, the Japanese of the 1950s generally regarded the hiropon crisis as a unique national phenomenon—in the words of one minister of welfare, “our country's special situation” (waga kuni nomi no tokushu jijō) (Kawasaki Reference Kawasaki1955). “The methamphetamine epidemic was the first experience of epidemic drug use and dependence among the Japanese. This was also the first epidemic of methamphetamine abuse and dependence in the world,” Katō Masaaki, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Tokyo Medical College, informed participants in an international conference on drug abuse (Reference Katō and Zarafonetis1972, 67). Hiropon, as many realized, was an inextricable part of what historian John Dower has termed Japan's postwar “culture of defeat” (1999, 148–58). The “hiropon age,” as journalists dubbed the years from 1952 to 1956, coincided with the restoration of Japanese sovereignty after six years of occupation. Although the departure of SCAP occasioned national rejoicing, it also exposed deep-seated anxieties regarding the postwar state's ability to function as an independent nation. Addiction, long associated with the inability to exercise free will (Kingsberg Reference Kingsberg2009; Valverde Reference Valverde1998), dramatized this ambivalence. Following the departure of SCAP, a Tokyo professor wrote, “After losing the war, Japanese society has at last regained independence, but we cannot say that the social foundations are entirely solid; society as a whole is in a state of having lost confidence in itself” (Isomura Reference Isomura1955, 254). Kaneko Junji, head of Japan's National Association of Mental Hospitals (Nihon seishin byōin kyōkai), highlighted the appeal of stimulants, “a particular feature of postwar Japan,” to a population collectively slumped in “psychological powerlessness” (Reference Kaneko1955, 18). Salvation for the nation, anthropomorphized as an addict, lay in restoring an independent identity capable of functioning without stimulants. As one historian counseled, “We must steadfastly believe in the fact that Japan is an independent nation, and drive a wedge between ourselves and this source of extermination [hiropon]” (Ushikubo Reference Ushikubo1955, 66). The association of methamphetamine with the undesirable state of dependence elevated the drug above the many social crises faced by post-Occupation Japan in terms of urgency and public attention. To truly regain self-sovereignty, Japan had to be drug-free.

Stimulating Social Agency

The response to hiropon took three forms: a legal crackdown on trafficking, a publicity campaign to raise awareness about the dangers of stimulant dependence, and treatment for users. During the Occupation, SCAP, associating the police with wartime repression, decentralized public security and decommissioned former officers. Although the remainder of the force continued to patrol the home islands, American negativity towards law enforcement fostered a general loss of respect for authority among Japanese citizens. Offended by popular hostility and forced by inadequate pay to participate in the black market they were charged with eradicating, police suffered from low morale and ineffectiveness. In the 1950s, however, with American manpower strained by the outbreak of the Korean War, SCAP took steps to increase efficiency by reestablishing central control over internal security. In June 1954, one month after the killing of Hosoda Kyōko, the Japanese government continued this trend by consolidating municipal and prefectural law enforcement under a national agency (Aldous Reference Aldous1997, 208–16). At the same time, the Diet increased the scope of the Ban on Stimulant Drugs and mandated heavier punishments for violators.

Taking action against hiropon allowed Japan's police to jettison their prewar role as so-called “nursemaids of the people” (Kawaji Reference Kawaji and Kazuo1934, 132) in favor of a new image as defenders of democracy. Protecting the population from the threat of methamphetamine through highly publicized drug busts, patrolmen restored their public credibility and power. In evening raids on “hiropon nests” in the black markets of north Tokyo, they found drugs concealed in food, clothing, school satchels, fish baskets, and apple crates (Asahi shinbun 1953–54). One all-night investigation in Osaka in July 1954 mobilized two thousand officers to search nearly eight hundred buildings scattered through various neighborhoods, and netted over three hundred arrests (Asahi shinbun July 15, 1954). In 1954, the number of suspects taken into custody for violating the Ban on Stimulant Drugs increased more than 150 percent from the preceding year to peak at 54,104, representing over 96 percent of all drug crime in Japan, or 613 arrests per 100,000 population.Footnote ⁴ Approximately 70 percent of suspects were Korean (Isomura Reference Isomura1955, 252), a ratio that likely reflected discriminatory targeting of minorities. The rate of indictment also surged, from approximately 43 percent in 1953 to over 63 percent in 1954 and 1955. Almost all convicted offenders received penal sentences. Between 1951 and 1956, almost nine thousand violators of the Ban on Stimulant Drugs served time in prison (Hōmushō 1952–57).

The government supplemented this legal crackdown with a campaign to provide anti-drug education to citizens. In January 1955, the Ministry of Welfare established the General Headquarters for the Promotion of Policy Against Amphetamines (Kakuseizai taisaku honbu). Intended as a public advisory body and liaison between state and society, the staff of over two hundred was most active in the field of publicity. In 1955 alone, the task force spent sixteen million yen circulating 225,000 anti-hiropon pamphlets, 470,000 leaflets, and 385,000 posters (Morimoto Reference Morimoto1957, 11). One poster distributed in Osaka showed a crouching drug user covered in injection punctures and shivering in long underwear. A man in a business suit and tie extended his hand in the direction of the addict, below the caption, “Let's wipe out the evil of stimulant drugs!” (Deverall Reference Deverall1954b, 176). Nationwide broadcasts on the government radio station, NHK, addressed topics such as “Can hiropon addiction be cured?” and “The hard work of stimulants researchers.” In cooperation with newspapers and the film industry, the agency also produced an educational video entitled Kakuseizai no kyōfu (The stimulants crisis). At the local level, thirty-six branches organized lectures, roundtable discussions, and presentations in schools, corrective institutions, professional organizations, welfare centers, factories, and even nightclubs throughout Japan (Keishi-chō kakuseizai torishimari taisaku honbu 1955, 16–49; Morimoto Reference Morimoto1957, 10–11).

The media cooperated in calling attention to hiropon as a social menace. The Asahi shinbun, Yomiuri shinbun, and Tokyo shinbun, the three newspapers with the largest circulation in early postwar Japan, made drug crimes headline news fifty-one times in 1954 (including forty-three times between the months of July and December) (Tatetsu, Gotō, and Fujiwara Reference Tatetsu, Akio and Takeshi1956, 10). One doctor recalled of the spring of 1954, “For three straight days there were no newspapers without articles about the central stimulants” (Hemmi Reference Hemmi, Sjöqvist and Tottie1969, 151). Publicity peaked that November, designated “Anti-Hiropon Month.” In addition to lurid exposés and images of drug crime, newspapers printed interviews, editorials, and cautionary tales by ex-users, doctors, psychologists, and public figures such as Sugahara Tsumi, a popular movie actor, author, and arts patron active in campaigns against drugs, prostitution, and venereal disease (Brill and Hirose Reference Brill and Hirose1969, 193).

The publicity blitz achieved its intended result of public awareness. In 1955, the government questioned three thousand individuals, drawn from thirty cities and thirteen villages, on their knowledge of methamphetamine. Only 3 percent (1 percent of urban residents) claimed total ignorance of hiropon. The remainder reported learning about stimulants from newspapers, radio broadcasts, social acquaintances, movies, billboards, lectures, and other methods (Naikaku sōri daijin kanbō shingi shitsu 1955).

Public receptivity towards anti-hiropon messages rested in part on the perception that drugs posed a particular threat to youth. As early as 1950, police estimated that Tokyo alone contained more than twenty-five thousand underage methamphetamine users (Arakawa Reference Arakawa1950). A psychiatrist at an addiction treatment clinic claimed that 80 percent of hiropon consumers were under the age of twenty-five, and 60 percent were younger than twenty (Takeyama Reference Takeyama1955a). According to one survey, nearly 30 percent of respondents aged twenty to twenty-two had experimented with or were using stimulants (Morimoto Reference Morimoto1957, 11). Of one hundred methamphetamine psychosis patients in a mental ward, more than 50 percent had first sampled hiropon between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four (Hirose Reference Hirose1955).

In framing and responding to drug use as a special problem of youth, postwar Japan drew on a tradition of concern for juvenile behavior that dated back to the end of the nineteenth century. As historian David Ambaras has written, in the late Meiji period, the ebbing specter of colonization by the West allowed for the introduction of social issues, including juvenile delinquency, into national political discourses. Influenced by Euro-American penology, bureaucrats, professionals, reformers, religious groups, and others came to view the proper cultivation of youth as essential to the future of an economically and militarily strong nation. By the time of Japan's defeat in 1945, society had institutionalized the belief that every aspect of adolescence should be rendered visible and subject to intensive state regulation (Ambaras Reference Ambaras2006). In the hiropon age, as the state confronted the challenge of postwar reconstruction, society naturally turned its attention to the next generation, which would shoulder the responsibility of restoring Japan to the ranks of first-rate global powers. Narcotics Section Chief Nagahama Masamutsu wrote, “As most of the victims are youths in their twenties and the ones to lead the world of tomorrow, it must be realized that this [hiropon] effects the decline of morals and the tragedy it will bring upon society” (Reference Nagahama and Deverall1954, iii). Particularly worrying was the growing trend among young men and women to use drugs not only for temporary relief from a prevailing sense of “impotence” (impotentsu), but also as a means of suicide—the ultimate withdrawal from the national community (Funayama Reference Funayama1955).

In the years after World War II, the United States also experienced rising public anxiety regarding juvenile delinquency, symbolized by an alluring youth “scene” of pegged pants, disc jockeys, and back seats (Wolcott Reference Wolcott2005). The Occupation transmitted postwar popular culture and its critics to Japan. Japanese and American observers of the 1950s concluded that youth were unsophisticated and likely to be led astray by temptation if not firmly guided (Hara and Minagawa Reference Hara, Minagawa, Schwalb and Schwalb1996). In Japan, the legacy of war and defeat compounded this belief. Society viewed adolescents and young adults as “doubly innocent”—not only naïve in the ways of the world, but also free from culpability for the crimes of imperialism committed by older generations. As one psychiatrist pointed out, youth were the purest victims of the hiropon age, suffering from “frustration, collapse, loss of confidence, and doubt concerning humanity due to defeat in the war” (Hemmi Reference Hemmi, Sjöqvist and Tottie1969, 148). Typical was the case of a juvenile delinquent given the pseudonym “Yoshio.” When Yoshio's father lost his job working at an iron mine, the youth dropped out of school and helped to support his family by selling newspapers outside a Tokyo train station and known hiropon market. He subsequently joined a street gang, escaped from his parents, and became a vagrant and petty thief. When interviewed by a researcher at a child welfare organization, he had been selling methamphetamine for several years, and using the drug for nearly as long (Inekura Reference Inekura1950).

Yoshio was undeniably a victim of circumstances beyond his control, but he was also a threat to society. A unique feature of Japanese law, which enabled the judicial system to monitor “problem children” who exhibited disturbing behavior but had not committed any crimes, prompted a retroactive inquiry into the background of juvenile hiropon users like Yoshio. A study of 160 underage consumers found that only 5 percent had a positive attitude towards school, and nearly 90 percent had achieved grades of C or lower or had dropped out (Aoki Reference Aoki1954, 12). One survey deemed 80 percent of those arrested for methamphetamine consumption “of the type easily led astray” (aku ni mo somari yasui), and claimed that about seven out of ten had demonstrated abnormal behavior prior to drug use. Like Yoshio, a quarter had run away from home (Maruyama Reference Maruyama1955). Between the early 1940s and the mid-1950s, the number of juvenile delinquents quadrupled, and approximately half of all youth in detention admitted to regular use of stimulants (Arakawa Reference Arakawa1950; Kokusai mondai kenkyū kyōkai 1954, 27). Doctors theorized that methamphetamine exacerbated a natural tendency towards criminality, resulting, in the most extreme cases, in crimes such as the killing of Hosoda Kyōko. The stimulant addict was not simply a victim; he was also a menace to the public.

The protection of youth from hiropon, and the population at large from juvenile delinquents, were uncontroversial goals towards which many social and occupational groups could cooperate, rebuilding a sense of national unity and purpose in the process. In June 1954, a prefectural youth council in southern Japan staged ten days of anti-hiropon events, including speeches by police, pharmaceutical representatives, educational association leaders, and fishermen (the dominant occupational group in the region) (“Soshiki ni yoru kakuseizai tsuihō undō” 1955). The fourth meeting of the All-Japan Youth Problems Forum (Seishōnen mondai zenkoku kaigi), held in February 1955, attracted 195 participants, including police officials, cabinet members, and representatives of the Ministries of Welfare, Justice, Finance, Commerce, Labor, and Self-Defense (“Hiropon ka issō e” 1955). In May 1955, the journal Seishōnen mondai (Youth matters) devoted a special issue entirely to hiropon. Films such as Hiropon wa akuma da (Hiropon is the devil) and Ushinawareta seishun (Lost youth) doubled as publicity and entertainment, reinforcing the message against drugs in a media likely to appeal to a juvenile audience (“Kakuseizai ni tsuite no eiga wo go-shōkai shimasu” 1955).

In the wake of the murder of Hosoda Kyōko, mothers also organized against hiropon. Maternal associations dated back to the prewar period, when they served as a vehicle of national strengthening, training women how to raise morally and physically fit children (Jones Reference Jones2010, 139). On September 30, 1954, the Tokyo Haha no rengōkai (Tokyo alliance of mothers) assembled three thousand women to call for stricter punishment for hiropon traffickers, the expansion of addiction treatment facilities, and the complete eradication of the drug (Asahi shinbun October 15, 1954). Meanwhile, teachers brought the anti-methamphetamine message into the classroom. One article in an education journal encouraged homeroom instructors, “who have a special love for their students,” to work with closely with parents to reinforce the idea that “even one injection is dangerous.” The author recommended suspending or expelling students who showed signs of hiropon use (Taiiku hoken ka 1954). In February 1955, the Ministry of Education outlined a plan for anti-drug activities in schools. It tasked teachers with four responsibilities: (1) disseminating information and providing guidance, (2) offering extra help to weak-willed or strange (ijō seikaku) students, (3) detecting symptoms of drug use, and (4) working with families and neighborhoods to keep children safe (Monbushō shōtō chūtō kyōiku-kyoku hoken ka 1955).

Organizations known as chōkai or chōnaikai (block associations) facilitated cooperation between schools and communities. These voluntary bodies were often said to originate in Japan's early modern age, when they served as instruments of self-policing and tax collection. In the late nineteenth century, modern law enforcement gradually took over many chōkai functions. In 1940, however, the wartime government began to collaborate with block associations to facilitate the spiritual unification and collective monitoring of the population (Hastings Reference Hastings1995, 69–85). Following Japan's defeat, SCAP denounced chōkai as a means by which “the government reached into the lives of every citizen through a means more effective than the very effective police system” (Braibanti Reference Braibanti1948, 140). By 1951, however, the Occupation had come to view neighborhood associations as potential vehicles of democratization and “a broad base upon which Japan can create a civilization of fundamental newness” (164). Chōkai membership was optional, but social pressure to join was so strong that participation was virtually universal. Some chōkai, such as those in Tokyo's Honda neighborhood, founded committees specifically to counter stimulants. Others charged youth protection task forces with this responsibility. In a classic study of a Tokyo ward in the 1960s, sociologists Hiroshi Wagatsuma and George A. De Vos attributed Japan's low rate of juvenile delinquency partly to these local organizations (Wagatsuma and De Vos Reference Wagatsuma and De Vos1984, 442–43).

Like members of block associations, doctors and scientists participated in anti-methamphetamine activities to restore a sense of agency and professional solidarity. The study of addiction provided researchers with a means of reentering the global scientific community, from which they had become estranged during the war years. Prior to 1945, most Japanese doctors framed addiction in physiological terms. Researchers sought to understand the physical bases of dependence and impact of chronic drug use. Treatment generally involved the administration of an analgesic (itself often habit-forming) to counteract the effects of narcotics and mitigate the symptoms of withdrawal. The psychological state of the drug user and his or her reasons for consuming mind-altering substances received little attention. Psychiatry in general made scant headway as a medical specialty in prewar Japan. Psychoanalysis, the Freudian approach that captured the imagination of early twentieth-century Western practitioners, did not easily spread beyond its cultural milieu (Shorter Reference Shorter1997, 160). By the 1930s, scientists in Europe and the United States had come to understand addiction as a problem of the psyche, and Japanese doctors were isolated in their steadfast allegiance to a physiological construction of drug dependence (Kingsberg Reference Kingsberg2012, 343).

During the Occupation period, heavy American influence in all fields, including medicine, bolstered the credibility of psychiatry. By claiming the high-profile issue of methamphetamine addiction, Japanese psychiatrists built professional credibility and demonstrated the value of their discipline to society. As psychiatrist Hemmi Takemitsu declared, “We psychiatrists of Japan learned many things from this nation-wide movement toward the abuse of central stimulants, particularly how we experts might participate in the activities of ordinary citizens. It can be said that this seemed to be the dawn of community psychiatry in Japan” (1969, 153).

In 1950, the National Diet passed the Mental Hygiene Law (Seishin eisei hō). Drafted by Kaneko Junji, a former professor of criminal psychiatry and a longtime crusader against illegal drugs, this legislation expanded the social and political role of psychiatrists by mandating the institutionalization of individuals suffering from various psychological disorders in new, state-subsidized mental facilities (Matsumura Reference Matsumura2004, 921).Footnote ⁵ The following year, the government amended the law to include hiropon addicts on the roster of patients subject to involuntary confinement. By 1954, concerned citizens had identified over 4,000 candidates for hospitalization, but only 263 of the 37,849 beds in the nation's 224 mental asylums were available for drug users. The Diet accordingly allocated funding for 3,750 new places for hiropon patients in psychiatric clinics. As beds remained insufficient, doctors also treated many stimulant users on an outpatient basis (Nagahama Reference Nagahama1968, 21).

Within asylums, physicians sought to provide a secure environment for withdrawal, a process often accompanied by sweating, insomnia, irregular appetite, anxiety, and signs of psychosis, including hallucinations, depression, and paranoia. Defining “addicts” as “persons who, of their own free will, are unable to give up the use of drugs,” doctors plied convalescents with personality and intelligence tests and interviews, seeking to understand their motivation in consuming hiropon. They also attempted radical interventions such as electric and insulin shock treatment, lobotomy, and psychotherapy. To prevent relapse, asylums attempted to improve the social adjustment of recovering drug users through job training and family counseling (Ishii and Motohashi Reference Ishii and Motohashi1977, 112–13).

Doctors also responded to encouragement by the Japan Medical Association to undertake laboratory research on methamphetamine addiction (Kasamatsu and Ritsuno Reference Kasamatsu and Ryū1950). Eager to efface past estrangement and methodological differences with European and American physicians, Japanese scientists courted global publicity for postwar research on addiction. Like their predecessors in the 1920s, they submitted studies to various Western-language periodicals (e.g., Sano Reference Sano1956; Utena et al. Reference Utena, Ezoe, Katō and Hada1959). They also collaborated with colleagues in the West. During the 1950s, Dr. Maurice Seevers of the University of Michigan visited Japan eight times as the American coordinator of a Japan-U.S. cooperative research program on drug abuse, a venture cosponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Seevers also hosted thirty-five Japanese postdoctoral researchers in Ann Arbor (Brill and Hirose Reference Brill and Hirose1969, 192).

In 1956, Tatetsu Seijun, Gotō Akio, and Fujiwara Takeshi, doctors at the Matsuzawa Mental Hospital, Japan's flagship psychiatric asylum and hiropon addiction treatment facility, published a book-length summary of their clinical findings over the preceding eight years. The authors argued that because methamphetamine consumption was first noticed as a social issue in Japan, Japanese psychiatrists had a responsibility to the world develop the field (Tatetsu, Gotō, and Fujiwara 1956, 5). Dr. Hirose Tetsuya received a year-long residential fellowship from the Narcotic Addiction Control Commission of New York to translate their text into English. In the preface of his work, Hirose wrote, “Since the experience of the West is still far smaller than that in Japan with respect to methamphetamines, and far briefer, it would seem that there is much to be gained from an intensive study of that epidemic, its outcome, and any [lessons] which may be identified” (Brill and Hirose Reference Brill and Hirose1969, 190). Some psychiatrists in Europe and the United States did in fact look to Japan for a model response to stimulants. In the context of rising methamphetamine consumption in Scandinavia, Swedish psychiatrist Nils Bejerot suggested, “The Japanese have shown how to combat a mass epidemic of advanced drug addiction” (Reference Bejerot1970, 71).

Reinserting Japan into the international scientific community after the rift of the 1930s and 1940s was the real accomplishment of Japanese addiction psychiatrists, who were unable to cure most or even many methamphetamine users. After eight years of clinical research, Tatetsu, Gotō, and Fujiwara could only conclude that the success of treatment “depended on the individual.” Most of the case studies they presented—an orphaned harmonica player, an unemployed school dropout, a middle-aged bar hostess—failed to progress enough to leave the hospital environment, or relapsed and were returned by relatives or police (Tatetsu, Gotō, and Fujiwara Reference Tatetsu, Akio and Takeshi1956, 137–73). Another asylum found that only eighteen out of sixty-eight patients remained drug-free six months after discharge (Watsuji Reference Watsuji1954, 267).Footnote ⁶ Disillusioned, Dr. Hemmi Takemitsu began to advocate incarcerating incorrigible addicts in jails and correctional facilities instead of mental hospitals (1969, 153). In 1955, one psychiatrist published a cartoon depicting an addict crouching on the ground, a syringe poised above his big toe. Next to him, a burly policeman, mouth open in speech, thrust forward a pair of handcuffs. A doctor, identifiable through his signature white coat, stood in the distance behind the two figures (Takeyama Reference Takeyama1955b, 233). Even in their own view, psychiatrists played only a background role in addressing the hiropon crisis.

The Aftermath of the “Hiropon Age”

By 1956, the hiropon age had passed its peak. Under headlines such as “Japan Gradually Winning Battle Against Philopon,” the media encouraged a cautious optimism regarding the disappearance of methamphetamine from society (Japan Times June 23, 1956). Violations of the Ban on Stimulant Drugs declined to about 6,700—less than 13 percent of the 1954 total. In 1958, the number of arrests fell below one thousand; barely two hundred suspects were indicted. Less than a quarter of all drug offenses involved stimulants, compared to over 90 percent from 1952 to 1955 (Hōmushō 1953–59).

The near eradication of methamphetamine from early postwar Japanese society constitutes a virtually unparalleled triumph in the global war on drugs that has raged intermittently in various parts of the world since the decades leading up to the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century. Prior to the establishment of communist rule in 1949, China struggled to break the financial and cultural hold of opium (Baumler Reference Baumler2007; Brook and Wakabayashi Reference Brook and Wakabayashi2000; Dikötter Reference Dikötter2004; Madancy Reference Madancy2003; Slack Reference Slack2001). The United States has waged largely failed campaigns against marijuana, heroin, and cocaine at home and abroad; current policymakers cite methamphetamine, dubbed “the most American drug” for its popular appeal, as the latest and largest threat (Reding Reference Reding2009, 54). Trafficking and consumption of drugs has long undermined political stability and social welfare in parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America (Gootenberg Reference Gootenberg2008; McCoy Reference McCoy1972). Most challenging of all for international regulatory regimes, narco-states such as Manchukuo (the so-called “puppet state” run by the Japanese army in northeast China from 1932 to 1945), North Korea, and Afghanistan have structured their political economies around drugs, tying their very existence to the global appetite for illicit substances (Gibson Reference Gibson, Jalalzai and Jefferess2011; Jennings Reference Jennings1997; Kan, Bechtol, and Collins Reference Kan, Bechtol and Collins2010). Why did the campaign against hiropon in Japan in the 1950s succeed so completely and immediately, when other efforts against drugs have mostly failed?

Hiropon was exceptional. In contrast to, for example, opium in nineteenth-century China or methamphetamine in contemporary Thailand and the rural United States (Chouvy and Meissonnier Reference Chouvy and Meissonnier2004; Garriott Reference Garriott2011; Lintner and Black Reference Lintner and Black2009; Zheng Reference Zheng2005), the drug was not inscribed in the mainstream culture or political economy of postwar Japan. The use of the phrase “hiropon age” in its own time suggests the public's awareness that the drug was characteristic of a specific and passing temporal frame: the aftermath of war, defeat, and occupation (Okakura Reference Okakura1951; Shimoyama Reference Shimoyama1955, 45). Although hiropon was a “Japanese” drug, first created in the laboratories of domestic chemists, it never generated local communities of interest to anchor it to the changing social landscape, transforming it from an artifact of exhaustion into a financial or psychological tool of recovery. On the contrary, the long-standing connotation of dependence attached to addiction generated comprehensive efforts to remodel sick and helpless hiropon users as empowered and self-reliant citizens. A decade after the crisis, one psychiatrist reflected:

By the end of the 1950s, public mobilization against methamphetamine had pushed consumption past the pale of respectability for average citizens. In the wake of the hiropon age, drug addicts, once the very incarnation of the nation, became stigmatized as abnormal or even deviant. The figure of the emaciated, rag-clad youth injecting stimulants to quell hunger disappeared from the public view and popular imagination. Juvenile delinquents, still understood as the dominant demographic among addicts, were no longer seen as pity cases whose lives had been destroyed by war; rather, they were depicted as spoiled children in whom the experience of luxury had awakened a pernicious hedonism and indifference to the collective welfare (Erbe Reference Erbe and Foljanty-Jost2003).

The return of economic prosperity changed the dynamics of supply as well as demand in the methamphetamine market. As high-speed growth created new jobs and put an end to ubiquitous participation in the underground economy, drug trafficking shifted from the mainstream to the margins of society. By the end of the hiropon age, Japan's organized crime families, the yakuza, had laid claim to the stimulant trade. They found allies among third-country nationals, similarly excluded from domestic society. Over time, the yakuza also developed links to crime syndicates in Korea, Taiwan, China, and Southeast Asia, as well as narco-states such as North Korea and Myanmar (Kaplan and Dubro Reference Kaplan and Dubro2003; Tamura Reference Tamura, Traver and Gaylord1992).

In the mid-1970s, following two decades of relatively minimal drug crime, Japan once again experienced surging supply and demand in the market for illegal substances. During what became known as the “second stimulant epidemic,” police took tens of thousands of suspects into custody annually for trafficking and consumption of shabu, a new variant of methamphetamine (Hōmushō 1978–95). Although the numbers of drug-related arrests and indictments remained small in comparison to other developed societies such as the United States, the outbreak aroused concern among policymakers who had come to view stimulants as a foreign issue, rather than a problem of “ordinary people” (ippanjin) (Yakubutsu ran'yō taisaku shinpō honbu 1977, 1).

In contrast to the hiropon age, which was brought to a swift conclusion, the second stimulant epidemic subsided but did not disappear. Today, Japanese authorities estimate the number of shabu addicts at four hundred thousand, in addition to millions of casual users. In 2003, one study claimed that 1.7 percent of the nation's population aged 15–64 had abused methamphetamine (Roman, Ahn-Redding, and Simon Reference Roman, Ahn-Redding and Simon2005, 174). The domestic drug market generates several billion dollars of illicit revenue annually, including between one-third and one-half of yakuza income (Friman Reference Friman1996a, 967). By pushing the traffic into the hands of illegal syndicates, the resolution of the hiropon crisis gave rise to a political economy and subculture based on narcotics. The Japanese government, like the international community, has found organized, established, and armed interests in the contemporary drug market far more difficult to combat than the “mom and pop” operations of the post-Occupation years. Moreover, the public determination to eradicate drugs that characterized the hiropon age has not returned. In the 1950s, methamphetamine addiction symbolized the national state of despair, defeat, and dependence. The campaign against stimulants yielded measurable achievement in the collective quest for national rejuvenation. By the 1970s, high-speed growth and development had transformed Japan into an advanced industrial capitalist state, with the second-largest GDP in the world. Illegal drugs were scarcely more than a consumer choice in a consumer society—not the problem, but the price of solution.