Introduction By now, the connection between Japanese imperialism and biopolitics has been well established. Recent work by scholars such as Takashi Fujitani, Mark Driscoll, and Thomas Lamarre has proven that the framework of biopolitics is a productive mode of critical inquiry into Japan’s colonial period. 1 If we were to follow the standard defnition of biopolitics as a modern regime of governance and regulatory techniques applied to the control and man- agement of the biological processes of the human population or “man-as- species,” as Michel Foucault puts it, then the Japanese Empire was steeped in it. 2 From institutional apparatuses of medicine, public hygiene, and the police to discourses on immunology, biology, anthropology, and economics, the modern regime of biopolitical governance in Japan and its colonies has received extensive atention in the past decade. Although Foucault’s deployment of the term “biopolitics” indirectly builds upon earlier discourses of geopolitics and biology, and while others such as Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri have ofered varying defnitions of the term, the Foucauldian framework remains 1. See Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Thomas Lamarre, “The Biopolitics of Companion Species: Wartime Animation and Multi-ethnic Nationalism,” in The Politics of Culture: Around the Work of Naoki Sakai, ed. Richard Calichman and John Namjun Kim (London: Routledge, 2010); Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon, eds., Traces 4: Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Diference (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006). 2. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003); Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 10 Tange Lab and Biopolitics From the Geopolitics of the Living Sphere to the Nervous System of the Nation Yuriko Furuhata