Timothy M. Yang's Medicated Empire: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Modern Japan offers a history of opium in the Japanese Empire in the first half of the twentieth century. Opium in this book is regarded more as a business opportunity, and the book explores the politics of the modern pharmaceutical industry in Japan. Medicine and pharmacy were strongly connected with politics and the market in a quickly modernising country.

An introduction, epilogue and eight chapters make this book historically solid, and references to cultural theories provide inspiration. It is also visually interesting, with more than 20 figures from the advertisements of newspapers, journals and posters in Japan, Taiwan, Korea and Manchukuo. The most important material comes from the archives of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals, which was created by Hoshi Hajime (1873–1951) in 1906. Drugs were not merely medicine; they were commodities which were important in the modernisation of Japan and international trade based in East Asia, Peru, the Dutch East Indies, the USA and other areas. The commodities created images in the market that shaped modern bodies; the point here is that they worked without consulting any doctors. The state and pharmaceutical companies attempted to cultivate a culture of self-medication, and Japanese individuals were becoming rational consumers, productive workers and obedient state subjects.

This civilising and humanistic plan of therapeutic commodities was deeply affected by opium, however. Yang has found a lot of clear evidence that suggests the dependence of the Japanese Empire on opium. Using the raw materials of opium, cinchona and coca, Japan prohibited the use of opium-based products by the Japanese people, but its colonies of Taiwan and Korea and the puppet state of Manchukuo were places of manufacturing and trading of opium. The distinction between Japan and its colonies was very rigid. In 1925, however, the police revealed Hoshi Pharmaceuticals’ illicit activities used to trade opium through links between Japan, Taiwan, China and Russia, at Vladivostok. Hoshi Pharmaceuticals thereafter quickly declined. After the defeat of Japan in the Second World War, during the Allied Occupation of Japan, Hoshi's continuation of business relating to cinchona and morphine was discovered. This ended the company.

Missions of civilisation and humanity and the production of drugs have coexisted with the abuses of the global market of addictive opium. Yang's book illustrates the widespread addiction to opium in East Asia. The comparison of Japan with the present-day situation in the USA, the UK and many other countries is fascinating.