Excerpt from the article:

(...) In this article I want to recapture the subtle relationship between opium and science in a specific colonial setting. That is, I would like to describe how the political rationality of Japanese colonialism became manifest in a technoscientific discourse on bodily taste, hands-on practice and the management of related materials and personnel. In particular, I suggest that in researching and developing new opium pastes, colonial officers endeavored to reassemble a flexible, and sometimes unstable and fragile, framework for constituting superior authorities and colonial bodies. Experiencing the new taste of opium thus could be a means of experiencing colonial modernity.