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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

"Regarding Steel-constructed Hoshi-style Prefabricated Stores"

Translation:
The pictorial diagram on this page are blueprints of the new, steel-constructed Hoshi-style prefabricated store brought back from President Hoshi's recent trip from Europe and America. We hope you reference President Hoshi's opinions concerning this store on page 2 of this issue in his interview about his visit to Europe and America.

First, the steel-constructed Hoshi-style, prefabricated stores are the most scientifically designed and ideal for this new era of drugstores.

Second, the Hoshi-style prefabricated store has three separate sizes: Large, Medium, and Small.

Large-size stores: width 5 ma [ma =1.97 meters], length 7 ma

Medium-size stores: width 4 ma, length 6 ma

Small-size stores: with 3 ma, length 4 ma

Third, the figures mentioned are blueprints of a large-size store. I will provide a summary of the three figures. The first figure is a diagram of the outside of the front of the store, and to the right and left of the entrance are displays. On the right side is what looks like a panel made up of a one large sheet of glass, but that is not the case. On the left is the same. The left is a made out of small sheets of glass using a partitioned frame. You cannot say that it looks as good as a single sheet of glass. But because a single glass panel is expensive, and will definitely be hard to get in certain places, depending on location, if you use a frame, and add in small glass panels, it will not look inferior to single glass panel, with a bit of effort.

The display windows on the right and left for large-size stores is 9 shaku in width, for medium-sized stores, its 7 shaku, and for small-size stores its 6 shaku. The central entrance is 5 shaku in width and has a revolving door. The revolving door, for example, if a customer pushes the revolving door on the right, the door revolves to the left, and as it turns, customers enter the interior. The revolving door keeps the interior warm, and it is delightful and very convenient.

The second figure is a rendering of the interior. In the center there is a merchandise display case, comprised of a rectangular case enclosed in glass, which can be opened and closed, when desired, with sliding doors. In it, goods are affixed with prices, customers freely, quickly, individually can decide to buy the goods they want, without bothering individual store clerks. On the left and on the right of the front of the store are display cases with glass windows that can exhibit an abundance of goods. The display cases and the display shelves, whether long or short, are prefabricated, and can be moved to whatever place one desires. In the interior, one two ladders allow one to climb to the second floor. The display shelves on the second floor can freely accessed through a corridor, which is 2 shaku and 1 sun in width. One can think of the 2nd floor corridor, from end-to-end, as 6 or 7 shaku in length. If that is the case, then on the first floor underneath can be used as a small office or even be turned into a pharmacy. The third is a two-dimensional diagram of the interior.

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The Drugstore as Contact Zone
This module explores how drugstores in early-twentieth-century Japan were more than simply places to buy medicines. They were also contact zones for a variety of globally-circulating goods and ideas. At a time when the hegemony of Western medicine (Seiyō iyaku) over indigenous forms of healing was not yet “matter-of-fact,” drugstores were crucial interfaces for spreading the values and practices of modern medicine across society and into peoples' hearts and minds.
Drugstores are places where the values and practices of medicine intersect with those of the market. The medicines they sell are more than simply compounds for health and healing; they are also ideological tools. As concrete symbols of objectified healing, medicines represent medical treatment seemingly disengaged from unequal social entanglements such as the uneven power relationship between doctor and patient.
This module explores how a major Japanese drug firm in the early twentieth century, Hoshi Pharmaceuticals, attempted to structure the space of its franchise drugstores to promote an ethos of what I'll call “democratic self-medication.” Hoshi's network of franchise drugstores spanned across Japan and its colonies, selling patent medicines (what we might call “over-the-counters” today) along with cosmetics and household goods. Its goal was to facilitate ever faster, more efficient sales, and in doing so, it helped influence the dissemination of modern medicine's on-the-ground, at the point of contact between merchant and consumer. The company endeavored to create an environment that cultivated an ethos of self-medication, liberated from the unequal power relationship between doctor and patient -- a space that promoted the freedom for consumers to choose their own medicines and to purchase them quickly and efficiently. (Spending money, after all, is perhaps the only true “freedom” in a capitalist system.) To this end, the company promoted a model of an “open and liberating” drugstore that would entice prospective customers and provide such ease of access that he or she would “unconsciously walk into a drugstore without realizing it.” Hoshi claimed that conversion to these new glass-and-steel constructions would lead to skyrocketing sales. Yet, in the years that followed, existing franchises proved reluctant to adapt, despite company pressures and incentives.
I have based this module on two sources from the company's newspaper that provide insight into a time when drugstores in Japan were becoming more than simply places to buy medicines, but places purposefully incorporated into the rhythms of everyday life. They are: “Beikoku no kusuriya” in Hoshi seiyaku kabushiki kaisha shahō, October 1, 1917 and “Hoshi shachō ga Ō-Bei yori motaraseru Kōtetsu-sei Hoshi-shiki kumitate tenpo ni tsuite” in Hoshi seiyaku kabushiki kaisha shahō, February 1, 1923. Together they illustrate the company's attempts to convince existing franchises to modernize the space of their drug stores based on a standardized ideal floor plan, which, itself, was an abstraction of various Midwestern drugstores in the United States. This module demonstrates, according to David Ambaras and Kate McDonald's lucid overview of the Bodies and Structures project, “how different experiences and articulations of place produce or invoke different concepts of space and vice-versa.” It shows how the place of a single drugstore (here, an imaginary, abstract one) serves as a spatial topography that reveals the frictions and flows of commodities, people, and ideas.
This module begins with a brief introduction to the company and to its consumer medicines. The page that follows introduces users to a Hoshi Franchise Store, and provides three overlapping, heuristic pathways that describe how the company attempted to structure the space of its drugstores to facilitate transactions in its favor. There are (at least) two different spatial networks in play here. One is the border-crossing global network of commodity flows and knowledge exchanges that appears egalitarian. The other is the hierarchical network of Hoshi's franchise drugstores, which parallels the hierarchical control structures of the nation-state and empire.
There is no one way to approach this module. If a user follows each pathway in linear fashion, then he/she will get a straightforward, company-sided perspective. Poking around non-linearly, however—through the use of tags and hyperlinks—will reveal the ways in which the company's ability to control the space of a drugstore was never total, and allow the user to make connections to other modules in the Bodies and Structures project.

Click here for a list of references for this module, which is also available from the module's Conclusion page.
The Company Newspaper
Newspapers create imagined spaces of community and belonging. One of the most important technologies of the Hoshi franchise system was the company newspaper. It is this newspaper that provides two major sources for this module: “Beikoku no kusuriya” and “Hoshi shachō ga Ō-Bei yori motaraseru Kōtetsu-sei Hoshi-shiki kumitate tenpo ni tsuite.”
Established in November 1913, the newspaper was first published once every two months. Subsequently, the newspaper moved to a monthly publication schedule, and finally a bi-weekly schedule. It was distributed to every domestic and overseas franchise. Its contents included news about the day-to-day happenings at the company's headquarters, testimonials of high-performing franchise owners, and information about new products and new techniques to improve sales (“Hoshi seiyaku kabushiki kaisha shahō hakkō” 1913). One of its primary goals concerned how to attract and interact with customers. To this end, there were two long-running columns in the newspaper, which reflected the nature of selling medicines as a for-profit yet humanitarian enterprise. The first was “Business transactions” (Shōbai ōrai), which provided articles that treated medicines as any other commodity, by providing practical tips on marketing, advertising, and sales. The second was “Hygiene Toolbox” (Eisei chikō), which helped promote sales by arguing that clerks needed to impart medical knowledge to help them gain the trust of consumers, providing medical advice concerning proper hygienic practices and how to treat common illnesses using, of course, Hoshi medicines (“Shōbai to eisei bōshū” 1919).
Like all educational tools, the newspaper had a disciplinary function. Articles often addressed how to manage store clerks, paying careful attention to their potentially harmful attitudes and dispositions (“Shōbai ōrai: tenin no shikaku” 1918). The very best franchise managers and clerks shared the company's ambition for growth and success, and were regularly featured as ideal clerks (“Kōjyō shin aru tenin wa shussei suru yūbō na tenin” 2020). One example was the story of the twenty-five year old franchisee Kai Machiko, an exceptional “young female better than men” whose diligence in following company directions as well as her personalized treatment of customers was the reason why her Saga Drugstore was the top pharmacy in her district of Otaru (“Tokubetsu jyōtō no tokuyakuten” 1924). Nearly every issue of the newspaper contained a section that ranked franchise managers for achieving sales goals or issued punishments for franchises found to have violated company regulations such as selling products that competed with Hoshi products. The company also solicited feedback through the newspaper, requesting articles for publication about techniques for sales, successes, failures, and personal stories (“Genkō bōshū” 1918).

This page references:

"Hoshi shachō ga Ō-Bei yori motaraseru Kōtetsu-sei Hoshi-shiki kumitate tenpo ni tsuite"