This brief history derives mainly from the unpublished A Record of Critical Events at the Losheng (2009) by Hu Ching-ya, as well as Fann Yen-chiou, Epidemic, Medicine and Colonial Modernity: The Medical History of Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule (Daw Shiang Publishing, 2005).
Because Mycobacterium leprae cannot be cultivated outside the human body, academics still debate whether the experiments on Losheng residents using medications such as DDS can be deemed “human medical experiments.” However, during the USAID period in Taiwan, a “cellular immunity mechanism” project conducted on the leprosy patients likely faced unwillingness and disobedience on the part of the patients. For related research, see Fann Yen-chiou, “USAID Medicine, Hansen’s Disease Control Policy, and Patients’ Rights in Taiwan (1945–1960s),” Taiwan Historical Research, vol. 16, no. 4 (2010): 115–60.
On Japan’s national structure (Kokutai) since the Meiji Restoration, see Tsurumi Shunsuke, An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan, 1931–1945 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten Publishers, 1982). The Chinese translation of this book was published by Flâneur Culture Lab. Regarding the “standard of civilization” and related subjects, see Origins of Global Order: From the Meridian Lines to the Standard of Civilization, ed. Lydia Liu (Beijing: Joint Publishing, 2016).
See Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 2000).
The US PRISM project discussed in the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, along with other programs mentioned in documents uncovered by the recent hack of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, demonstrate how the US and multinational capitalists interfere with “civic” movements around the world.
Japan passed its Worker Dispatch Law in 1985, implemented it in 1986, and amended it five times.
All images are courtesy of the artist.