Parasites and the Postcolonial: Renewed Japan-Korea Medical Collaboration and South Korean Developmentalism, 1964-Early 1970s

This paper (undertaken with Aya Homei of Manchester University) depicts how anti-parasite and family planning campaigns developed in Japan and Korea independently after the Second World War, as specifically domestic public health initiatives that directly contributed to the post-war reconstruction (Japan) and nation-building (South Korea) exercises, and examines how they were later incorporated into development aid projects from the 1960s. In the South Korean case, leading parasitologists, including Dr. Seo Byung Seol (1921-1991) of Seoul National University, re-engaged with their Japanese colleagues, while also reaching out to Southeast Asia as a mentor, and potential model. By juxtaposing domestic histories of Japan as a former coloniser, and South Korea as its former colony, the paper explores colonial legacies in post-war medical cooperation in East Asia. Furthermore, by clarifying how Japanese and South Korean development aid projects both grew from the links that existed in their respective domestic histories, the paper aims to highlight complexities engrained in the history and to shed new light into a historiography that often locates the origins of development aid in colonial history. If South Korean developmentalism dates its origins to this intense period of networking (late 1960s, early 1970s), the outreach remains distinct from the colonial period, even while containing uncomfortable resonances with it.