1857: Network and Territory in Conflict
In 1857 the Nishikata exclave finally received a vaccination clinic, with Koyama Yōju in charge. Until then, local parents who wanted to have their children vaccinated most likely turned to physicians of other nearby territories, such as Naitō Dōitsu in Itō village. The events leading up to the establishment of the Nishikata clinic provide some insight into the relationship between domain rule and the vaccinators’ regional network.
For a translation of the relevant passage from the "Vaccine Travel Record," click here.
In 1857, Hayashi Unkei visited Hakuō in Fukui and informed him of the following incident. Some time ago, he and his Ōno colleagues had learned that Koyama Yōju was once again performing vaccinations in Ota village. This time, however, Yōju was acting with official backing. The domain representative (rusuban, probably the rural intendant) had ordered him to vaccinate the local population, “not knowing that we [the vaccinators] had earlier sworn an oath at the domain office [of Fukui].” Unkei apologized to Hakuō for this oversight, but reassured him that he and his colleagues had put a stop to Yōju’s activities by contacting the domain representative in question. He also pointed out that the domain representative had since been removed from his post, though it is unclear whether this removal had anything to do with the vaccinations.
This incident shows that Ōno’s domain government, despite its collaboration with the vaccinators, was not fully aware of their professional network and agreements. The domain representative in Nishikata simply seems to have done what made sense from the government’s point of view: ask a physician of reasonable ability to vaccinate domain subjects within his region to achieve population growth and economic prosperity. The vaccinators, who shared the goal of full coverage of domain subjects, had additional priorities in mind: building public trust in the treatment and preventing greedier competitors from hijacking the technique. Ultimately, however, the two sides were able to resolve their disagreement because they relied on each other: the physicians on the coercive power of the government and the officials on the physicians’ expertise.
Officials from the brand-new intendant’s office in Ota might have been forgiven for assuming that Nishikata would fall outside the control of the castle-town-based occupational associations with privileges in the rest of the domain. For example, Nishikata was not part of the territory of Ōno’s beggar boss association, and its village watchmen acted independently from the beggar bosses in the castle town, even as the bosses began to exercise some loose control over the watchman of Ota village in the 1830s. Nishikata’s sake brewers, too, did not belong to the sake brewers’ guild in the castle town [Ehlers, Give and Take; Ota chōshi].
The vaccinators’ society, however, had separate chapters for each domain, and that included exclaves such as Nishikata. With Yōju’s operation now terminated, the problem remained of how to achieve coverage in Nishikata. The vaccinators eventually solved this problem by integrating Yōju, this time on their own terms.
