Several historians have analyzed the various uses of medical films and have examined how cinematography changed the epistemology of medical doctors, or how governments and private companies utilized moving pictures for promoting ideas of hygiene among the general public. But historians have paid little attention to those medical films that were circulated in Japan. Some Japanese surgeons recorded their operations and screened surgical films in academic meetings to convey their techniques effectively. Others used moving pictures to educate medical students, who had limited opportunities to observe professors’ skills in schools. In 1929, this type of medical film began to circulate in Japan: a pharmaceutical company imported German medical films while one film company collaborated with a medical professor to record the first surgical film in the country. The 1930s witnessed the wide dissemination of medical films that followed the introduction of small-gauge film to Japan, and a flourishing medical film production continued until the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941. This article examines why and how these medical films were domestically circulated in Japan and internationally screened outside Japan by looking at not only how medical practitioners used films but also how they successfully cooperated with a pharmaceutical company, filmmakers, technicians, and government.

Since the 1980s, the rise of local history scholarship has increasingly pushed historians of medicine of Japan’s Tokugawa period to examine how people dealt with sickness and disease in local communities. Scholars have shown that while local people benefitted from the rising number of village doctors, the shogunate and domains provided scant medical services. In part for this reason, the history of medical policy in the Tokugawa has been understudied, despite important initiatives by some domains to employ physicians and distribute drugs to save lives. Specifically, this article examines how the Akita domain was more actively engaged in medical policy than the shogunate or other domains, both in terms of ideology and administration. The Tenmei famine (1782-1788) sparked political reformation in Akita, leading newly educated officials to play a significant role in providing medical aid to the population, especially miners, as an act of benevolent government.

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