“Forklift Disease”: The Making of an Occupational Illness in Postwar Japan

This paper uses the case of “forklift disease” (fōkurifuto-byō) to explore how occupational illness came to be conceived in postwar Japan.

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Speaker: Victor Seow, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of History of Science, Harvard University

Discussant: Eugenia Y. Lean, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs; Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, East Asian Langs & Cultures, Columbia University

Moderator:Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Co-Director, History Center, Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University Medical Center

This paper uses the case of “forklift disease” (fōkurifuto-byō) in postwar Japan to explore how occupational illness came to be conceived and contested in an era of logistical capitalism. Emerging in the port city of Kobe in the late 1960s, forklift disease referred to a cluster of concurrent ailments from lower back pain to gastrointestinal trouble reported by dockworkers who had shifted from hook-and-rope cargo handling to operating gasoline and later diesel forklifts on newly paved wharves. The paper reconstructs how labor activists, physicians, and engineers framed these complaints as a distinctive work-related disorder that stemmed from the bodily burdens of mechanized cargo handling. Forklift disease would soon travel beyond Kobe, spurring further medical investigations at other Japanese ports, experiments with seat and suspension design, and epidemiological studies on whole-body vibration. By the 1980s, the diagnostic label was increasingly eclipsed by international categories of vibration-related musculoskeletal disorder, even as the underlying injuries persisted and expanded to new groups of logistic workers. By situating this trajectory within concurrent developments in port labor relations, containerization, and state regulation of industrial health, this paper shows how postwar Japan’s pursuit of industrial rationalization reshaped both dockside workscapes and the diagnosis terrain of occupational disease.

Speaker's Bio: Victor Seow is a historian of science and technology, focusing on China and Japan in their global contexts. His research explores how technological artifacts, scientific knowledge, and forces of production intersect in shaping economic life and environmental outcomes. He is the author of Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (University of Chicago Press), a study of the relationship between energy and power in the industrial age. At present, he is completing his next book, The Human Factor: How Chinese Psychologists Reimagined the Science of Work in the Machine Age. His work has been recognized with several awards, most recently the Sarton Prize for the History of Science from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

This event is co-hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at the Mailman School.