When Kuo Wen-Hua handed me the packet of 12 postcards of EASTS covers, he said that the “gift” came with, he said half-jokingly, an obligation; namely, to write a brief 500-word response to any one of the covers. Immediately I responded that I knew what cover I would write about. Immediately coming to mind, was an image of the EASTS cover of an East Asian female scientist, clocked in a long white coat over a striped gray-blue skirt, who was seated in a lab with a microscope prominently featured in front on her desk. I was very familiar with this particular EASTS (vol. 8, no. 3, 2014) cover because the promotional poster made from it had been taped to my office door in the Department of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University for many years after I had received it.

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After returning from the 15th ICHSEA in Jeonju, Republic of Korea, I was jet-lagged and up well before dawn so finally had time to go through the packet of postcards Wen-Hua had given me the previous week. At first I was disappointed that they only went back to 2016 because the cover I wanted to write about was not among them. Nonetheless I went through each one reading the cover image explanation until the map on the cover for EASTS (vol. 11, no. 4, 2017) struck me as particularly interesting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun published this map in a 1944 colonial report “南方の據點臺灣：寫真報道 (Taiwan-Stronghold of the South: A Photo Report). Formosa is placed as the bullseye of a five-band target that encompasses in the South, all of the Indonesian archipelago, including New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, with north Australia just within reach; to the West, the eastern edges of India, Tibet, and Xinjiang come into view; to the North, all of Mongolia and Manchuria are engulfed with the southern border regions of the Soviet Union at the upper edges; and to the East, Japan (including Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands up to the USSR’s Kamchatka Peninsula) and a cartographic insert of the islands of Micronesia islands.

 

The map’s caption identified Formosa as “the center of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” powerfully instantiating Japan’s imperialist vision as radar signals reverberating out from the island and well beyond what Japan had claimed for this sphere. Jennifer A. Liu used this map in “Postcolonial Biotech: Taiwanese Conundrums and Subimperial Desires” (p. 571) to emphasize an analytical point made by a previous author using the same map that changing the geographic alignment of Taiwan allows for correspondingly different narratives about Taiwan. In her case, how genetic studies delink Taiwanese scientifically from northern Han Chinese in favor of Southeast Asian origins. Rather that same map made me recall those dying from starvation from failed rice rationing in 1944 Japanese-occupied Hong Kong, just down the coastline within the target’s second ring. Who was the author of this 1944 report and the creator of the map? What other maps did Japanese produce that year in their “Co-Prosperity Sphere”? Did they produce any maps of the disease and epidemics that spread that year? What work did this map and any other type of map printed in 1944 do to further legitimate, or possibly challenge, the Japanese imperialist vision of this map?

 

Perhaps, however, I was going down a rather dark and complex historical path I could not possibly describe within the word limit. Instead, I though, I should consider writing about the more upbeat cover of the woman scientist I was so fond of over the years it has been on my office door. Retrieving the issue and reading the caption for the cover, I was shocked to discover that, in fact, I knew nothing about this image. What I had always assumed was a Chinese female scientist was in fact painted by the Korean artist Yi Yu-tae (1916-1999). Furthermore, Yi had used ink and color on paper to create a portrait of a female scientist in 1944 Japanese-occupied Korea. How is it that I had never realized this? Clearly, I had never read the cover design caption at the back of the issue. Furthermore, none of the articles in that issue either referred to this painting or discussed science or gender within colonial Korea. Who was this woman?

 

The artist titled the painting only Tanjiu探究 “Research” and there are no other clues provided in the cover’s caption. Was she Japanese or Korean? What was her relationship with the artist? What science did she do, did she publish, and what was she working on when this portrait was made? What happened to her after 1945? Certainly those credited with providing the image, Professor Kim Yung Sik and Director Chung Hyung-Min of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, would have some answers to these questions.  

 

Looking now together at the two EASTS covers from 8.3 (2014) and 11.4 (2017), I’m struck by the different perspectives they depict from the expansionist imperialist vision of someone, likely male, placed at the center of the Japanese empire to the more contemplative scientific life of a Japanese or Korean woman situated within colonial Korea. There is surely another probing EASTS article lying behind the history and context of how each of these images were produced (a photo report versus a painting), within what context (Japan or Taiwan versus Korea), for what end, and their contemporaneous relationship to each other in 1944, the year before the Japanese Empire collapsed. This brief writing exercise – my little obligation in accepting Wen-Hua’s gift - raises a broader phenomenon I’d also like to call attention to by way of conclusion.  One of the most delightful dimensions of historical writing is the serendipity of discovering how one thing leads to another by chance and out of that questions formulate that deserve further exploration.

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