Transnational Transfer of Euro-American Autism-Related Knowledge in Japan’s Medical, Educational, and Welfare Domains, 1952–1999

Abstract

This thesis examines how autism-related knowledge was transnationally transferred—introduced, accepted, rejected, and localised—from Euro-American countries to Japan by Japanese doctors, researchers, teachers, government officials, and parents. This thesis positions Japan as an early non-Euro-American participant in the transnational exchange of autism-related knowledge. In doing so, the study examines how autism-related knowledge became transnational through Japan’s early engagement with Euro-American knowledge. Japan’s trajectory illuminates an early phase of the globalisation of autism-related knowledge, demonstrating that autism had already been transnational well before its later expansion to low- and middle-income countries in the 2000s. This study sees the globalisation of autism through the framework of global assemblages (Ong and Collier 2005), through which heterogeneous forms of knowledge and practice became contingently connected under the name of autism. From this perspective, autism-related knowledge did not circulate as a coherent package that was uniformly implemented across contexts. Instead, a wide range of pre-existing and newly formed practices across the medical, educational, and welfare domains were mobilised, reinterpreted, and selectively reconfigured in relation to autism. By foregrounding the simultaneity of regional diversity and the expansion of a shared global vocabulary, this study examines how autism-related knowledge came to be assembled in Japan. This study analyses written materials and interview data across the medical, educational, and welfare domains, both at the discursive and practice levels. The findings reveal that the concept of autism was received differently in each domain; that debates in the medical field shaped knowledge transfer in other sectors; that overseas therapies did not fit Japan’s administrative systems, leading to their adaptation in schools in different ways from original protocols; and that Japanese ministries and experts coined local terms to mediate between foreign concepts of autism and Japanese contexts. These findings highlight the entanglement of multiple domains and demonstrate that policy and administrative systems, rather than cultural factors, played a key role in shaping localised forms of autism knowledge. The findings also suggest a nuanced account of the interactions between Japan and Euro-American countries that co-produced recognition of Euro-American knowledge as internationally authoritative.</p