The role of disease in Japanese history is a topic that has attracted the interest of Western historians only recently. The strongest stimulus for the study of disease and its effects on Japan’s premodern society was the publication of a new edition of Fujikawa Yū’s classic Nikon shippei shi in 1969 with a foreword by Matsuda Michio (A History of Disease in Japan, originally published in 1912). Along with his History of Japanese Medicine (Nihon igaku shi, 1904), A History of Disease in Japan provided historians with a detailed list of many of the epidemics that ravaged the Japanese population in the premodern era, including original sources of information and a diagnosis of many diseases in terms of Western medicine. Hattori Toshirō supplemented and updated Fujikawa’s work in the postwar era with a series of books on Japanese medicine from the eighth through the sixteenth century.

William McNeill also kindled interest with Plagues and Peoples (1976), a book that fit the disease history of East Asia into the context of world history. Both William Wayne Farris (1985) and Ann Bowman Jannetta (1987) have investigated pestilence in premodern Japan in detail, but the fithe field is still relatively undeveloped, as compared to work on Western history. The influence of the Annales school of France on Japanese scholars, which began in the late 1970s, may draw more scholars into work on disease, especially for the well-reported but unstudied period between 1300 and 1600.