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53 Quantification of the social problem of drug use fed demands for action to contain it, but the ideological entanglement 20 · moral crusade in meiji japan of opium and nationhood in Meiji Japan constrained policy choices. Although metropolitan leaders wished to encourage Japanese migration to Taiwan, the better to subjugate and extract resources from the island, they feared that local opium smokers might lead settlers astray. Immediately upon taking power, the colonial regime, known as the Office of the Governor-General (Taiwan So- tokufu), declared that any Taiwanese caught supplying drugs to Japanese army troops would be punished with death.

9 Oka abhorred the sight of public smoking in Shanghai and other treaty ports. He gazed in wonder at drug users who lay prone “as though sleeping . . as though drunk . . 10 With the exception of a few elites—like Oka, who could afford continental travel—the impressions of most Meiji-era Japanese regarding China were shaped at home by encounters with Qing migrants, either directly or through the media. Following the abrogation of Japan’s seclusion policy, Chinese accompanied Westerners as compradors, domestic servants, and translators to treaty ports throughout the archipelago.

Nonetheless, throughout the 1910s and 1920s, addiction mortality was significantly higher for Japanese than Chinese. 23 Moral entrepreneurs also distorted the occupational profile of the Dairen drug user community to fit preconceived notions of the “addict” as a Chinese coolie. Three studies provide information on jobs held by registered opium smokers at different moments of Japanese rule over the KLT. In 1927, licensed drug users numbered 31,176. The Kwantung Bureau classified them into fourteen occupational categories.