The History of Drugs in Japan

The tenor of japanese drug policy seems fixed for at least the foreseeable future. Japanese fears around opium were defined by a desire to avoid the fate of post opium war china. colonial policies on opium were intended to reflect a new sense of japans superiority in cleaning up the adicts of tian and korea, or ruthlessly exploiting those adicts. What a society decides about the sort of things we're allowed to do to our bodies says a lot about how people view their relationship to each other within that society and to other societies in the world at large. The history of drugs in Japan is not really about drugs; it's about what it meant and what it means