A Medicated Empire: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Modern Japan

In his first monograph A Medicated Empire, Timothy M. Yang examines the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and the nation-state by spotlighting one entrepreneur, Hoshi Hajime (1873–1951). Today, his name is best known as the father of Hoshi Shin’ichi (1926–1997), the most successful science fiction writer in Japan, but Hajime found great commercial success by founding Hoshi Pharmaceuticals, which formally started in 1911 and whose ownership was eventually transferred from the Hoshi family in 1952. By tracing the work of Hoshi Hajime and his company, Yang illustrates how an energetic industrialist started a business and tried to expand it during the rise of the Japanese Empire from the late Meiji era to the early Shōwa era. This book consists of four parts and eight chapters. In Part I, the author sketches the prehistory and the beginning of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals. Born in a rural area in Fukushima Prefecture, Hoshi Hajime went to Tokyo to study business. Like contemporary ambitious men, he also traveled abroad and entered Columbia University for further study. He completed his Master’s course in 1901 and gained expertise in management and business. During his stay in the United States, Hoshi launched a newspaper and grasped an applied sense of enterprise. This international experience shaped his career, but, at the same time, his business dealings were largely indebted to his extensive network of leading figures in Japan, such as Itō Hirobumi and Nitobe Inazō. Among them, Gotō Shinpei was the most decisive for Hoshi’s career, since Gotō strongly supported Hoshi’s newspaper business in the United States as well as his future work in Taiwan. After returning to Japan, in 1906 Hoshi chose medicine as his new business and rapidly achieved commercial success, resulting in the establishment of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals in 1911. In Part II, Yang analyzes the early success of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals in terms of marketing, advertising, and logistics. Since the company entered the pharmaceutical market much later than major drug firms such as Takeda and Shionogi, it targeted not prescription drugs but instead patent and household drugs. To make his medicines