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

Placing People

Controlling space involves controlling the practices of people who inhabit a particular place. In this case, the management of the store clerks was vitally important. Once a prospective merchant became a Hoshi franchise, the company did everything in its power to ensure that it would promote Hoshi's products and maintain the company's reputation. The success of its franchises depended on managing personnel in the network to ensure that they did everything possible to sell the company's products. This was particularly important for a newly established pharmaceutical company like Hoshi, which did not yet have the same brand recognition as other manufacturers. Medicines relied upon trust and reputation; because customers did not know the active ingredients in a particular medicine, or what kinds of medicines could treat which ailments, they relied on the advice of pharmacists and vendors to determine which medicines to buy.

Hoshi Pharmaceuticals claimed that its franchises were integral parts of the company's efforts to “democraticize” (minshūka) medicines. The company encouraged its franchise workers to be on-the-ground proselytizers of its promise to better human lives through better medicines. It wanted them to be active members of local communities who could easily provide medical advice in lieu of doctors. Hoshi claimed that its franchise workers were “pioneers” (kaitakusha) in spreading the benefits of its modern medicines across Japan, to far-flung rural and land-locked regions as well as across the oceans (“Baiyaku no minshūka” 1924). Echoing the very same discourse concerning the distribution of medicine in overseas colonies and beyond, a November 1, 1915 article in the company newspaper, for example, lamented how Hoshi franchises were not as numerous in places in Kansai, let alone Tōhoku where modern medical care was scarce (“Tōhoku chihō to Kansai chihō” 1915).

To create merchants loyal to the cause and train them in ways to better attract consumers, the company purported to make use of advances in psychology (shinrigaku). The goal was to make rational the seeming irrationality of the human mind and its desires. The company looked again to the United States for inspiration, where it appeared that “psychology had become practically inseparable from sales strategy (hanbai shōryaku).” The company wanted its franchises to learn from scientific expertise because it would help them become more efficient at attracting customers by better understanding and catering their tastes (shikō). For example, one article asked “what shapes and structures generally have the most impact, from all angles, in public view? What kinds of colors resonate (kyōmei) with female consciousness depending on age? The results to these types of problems are applied to merchandise as well as to other objects aimed at enticing customers” (“Shōnin to shinrigaku” 1918).

The company used a number of technologies and structures to manage its franchise workers. These included incentive and rewards programs and stock and bond offerings as well as efforts to educate franchise workers including franchise conventions and an affiliated business school. It also included the company newspaper.

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The Franchise Network
Previous paths have explored the importance of controlling the individual space of the franchise drugstore. This path, however, examines the value of managing the spatial arrangement between franchises within a broader network. Here, the interactions not only occurred between franchises within the network, but between different prospective franchise systems, whether it was Hoshi's or Shiseidō's or some other competitor's distribution network. It involved controlling the locations of individual franchises over a given region, in order to maximize sales.
As a newcomer trying to break into Japan's pharmaceutical industry in the early twentieth century, Hoshi relied on franchises because they addressed two fundamental problems. First, franchises helped the company gain a foothold into an already well-entrenched medicine distribution system in Japan. Second, they helped provide brand recognition. The selling of medicines, after all, is about selling promises, which is based on trust, reliability, and name recognition; franchise licenses ensured that merchants would sell Hoshi-brand products, rather than those of other brands.
Hoshi's franchise system attempted to overtake the prevailing wholesale system (ton'ya seido) for distributing medicines, which was similar to the distribution systems of other consumer goods. The wholesale system resembled, in both structure and function, the medicinal distribution system from Tokugawa times, which was composed of an intra-Asian network that funneled medicines from Nagasaki through monopolies in Ōsaka's Doshōmachi and Tokyo's Honmachi. The linchpin connecting manufacturers to retailers was, of course, the wholesaler (ton'ya), which substantially provided the same functions as their Edo period predecessors. The wholesaler took orders from the “ordering stores” (chūmon'ya) and the &dquo;stores selling to stores” (miseuriya). These stores then provided medicines to regional wholesalers (chihō-ton'ya), which were the final distributors to retail stores, doctors and pharmacies across the nation. This system roughly lasted from the beginning of Meiji up to the late 1930s (Yamashita 2010, 34-36).
Hoshi's franchise network also attempted to overcome another patent medicine network from Toyama, which was a sales system that explicitly catered to the rural backwaters of Japan's seacoast and which also had its origins from the early modern period. Toyama patent medicines were, perhaps, better known for how they were sold—through a door-to-door system of peddling throughout the countryside—than for the efficacy of the medicines themselves (gyōshō). The guiding ethos—and principal sales slogan—behind the sale of these medicines was the elevation of humanitarian needs over business interests: sen'yō kōri (“use first, pay later”). Medicine peddlers traveled to individual homes, and left a box of assorted medicines at the doorstep. Customers would have easy access to medicines the moment a sickness would occur, and they would only use what they needed. About half a year—or perhaps even a year—later, the merchant would return to settle accounts, restock supplies, and then customize later shipments. These deliveries and collections were often timed with the rhythms of rural life, often during or after seasonal holidays like New Year's or the summer festival of the dead, O-bon. Despite falling sales, partly due to state medical authorities criticizing the unscientific nature and poor quality of the medicines sold, this system of peddling medicine continued, adapting to the socio-economic changes of the twentieth century (Toyama-ken 1987, 39).
A rough sketch of Hoshi's franchise network is as follows. The company permitted only one franchise in each town or village. It did so to avoid, at all costs, competition among franchises as well as promote a cooperative group mentality among them. Each individual store, in a sense, had a sphere of influence in its designated area—the store directly purchased its merchandise from Hoshi Pharmaceuticals, and it had the sole right and responsibility to sell goods for its area (Jinbo 2008, 11). The company likened these privileges to the “same special privileges as government-granted monopoly rights” (senbai tokushu wo etaru to tōitsu no tokuken) (“Tokuyaku-ten dai-bōshū” 2013). In practice, of course, there were a number of franchises that continued to sell other competitor's products in addition to Hoshi's, and if found out, they were summarily expelled (“Tonya mondai kaiketsu” 1919).
The production of a space necessarily involved controlling the people who inhabited particular places. The next page, Placing People, further describes this logic, and the pages thereafter describe how this occurred through particular sites and vehicles.
Inside an Ideal Drugstore
For Hoshi, controlling space not only involved regulating the layout, location, and measurements of display cases and armchairs, but it also involved regulating the actions of each individual store. The goal was to promote a consumer's sense of free choice, which the company purposefully contrasted to older, traditional medicine shops where shopkeepers, seated on tatami mats, would bring medicines individually for the consumer after careful consultation (“za-uri hōshiki”) (Yoshioka 1994, 9-10). In a sense, the company endeavored to eliminate the social awkwardness of the uneven interaction between medicine man and consumer, which was especially important if the customer's ailment were, indeed, awkward.
To this end, the company wanted the space of the drugstore, above all else, to promote an open, clean, and refreshing feeling that was enticing and allowed such ease of access that the customer would “unconsciously walk into a drug store without realizing it.” Window displays, which delimited the store's boundaries, according to one source, should be designed to catch attention of a passing potential customer and be rotated every week in order to best attract customers' attention (“Beikoku no kusuriya” 1917).
Drugstores thus appeared as another new space of democratic consumerism: the department store. Indeed, the space of an ideal drugstore provided a variety of functions, many of which seemingly had nothing to do with selling medicines. Drugstores often “appear[ed] no different than a general store (zakkashō)” they sold a variety of goods such as candy, cosmetics, and tobacco, and they also provided a variety of services, including postal delivery, for public convenience (“Beikoku no kusuriya” 1917).
Drugstores served, in a sense, as temples of mass consumption, and medicines appeared as products consumed as often—and maybe as blithely—as candy. Yet, at the same time, drugstores continued to serve as places where customers went for medical consultation and even treatment. Compared to the traditional layout of a drugstore, the difference was that the customer did not have to seek that help. Clerks, even if they were not licensed pharmacists, required rudimentary medical training to make medicinal recommendations.

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