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I would like to thank four anonymous reviewers whose penetrating and stimulating insights made this article ultimately a better one. Equally helpful were the comments and encouragements by Dale Baum, Donnalee Dox, Ichinokawa Yasutaka, Fukushi Yuki, Iijima Wataru, Kim Youngsoo, Lee Kyung-lock, Nagashima Takeshi, James Rosenheim, Robert Shandley, and Timothy Yang. Librarians and archivists - ItÅ KyÅko, Haruko Nakamura, Kuniko Yamada McVey, and Matthew Schaefer - helped in the acquisition of essential materials, while Yuki Waugh lent a hand with the Japanese romanisation. This research was financially supported by the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research and the Program to Enhance Scholarly Research and Activities of Texas A&M University.
Introduction: Seirogan and the Myth of Imperial Benevolence
If there is any litmus test for measuring the familiarity with Japanese popular culture, Seirogan might be a good one. Looking and tasting 'like charcoal', as a renowned Japanologist recalled,1this soft, pellet-shaped, anti-diarrhoeal herbal medicine is a symbol of katei jÅbiyaku (), a generic over-the-counter pill that any Japanese household stocks and uses to treat minor digestive disturbances in everyday life.2Intimately and unmistakably linked to the idea of travel, Seirogan is currently manufactured by more than thirty different pharmaceutical companies in Japan. TaikÅ Pharmaceutical's Trumpet Brand - the most famous version - alone sold roughly 41 million bottles of Seirogan (or 2.8 billion yen in sales revenue) from 1995 to 2004, and the pill is now exported to Canada and the United States (US) as well as Korea, Taiwan, and China.3Given the embeddedness of Seirogan in the everyday lives of the Japanese, which can be roughly approximated to the ubiquity of aspirin in western countries,4it is hardly surprising that nationwide consternation erupted between 1998 and 2000 in the wake of the allegation that wood creosotes - the pill's main ingredient - increase the likelihood of liver cancer.5
A dependable travel companion for Japanese people, from a middle school student participating in a shugaku-ryÅkÅ (school trip) to a professional flight attendant travelling globally, Seirogan tells us much more than a simple meteoric success story of a well-advertised, over-the-counter drug. What is especially intriguing to historians is the less than subtle way that