[Health and garden connections between Japan and New Zealand: the impact of Bella and Frederic Truby King's visit to Japan in 1904].

Abstract

Through the case-study of the visit of a prominent New Zealand medical reformer and his wife to Japan in 1904, this article examines new aspects of the health and environmental connections between Japan and New Zealand in the early twentieth century. At one level, the article analyses the broader context of interest in Japanese plants in New Zealand and the model of Japanese health reforms constituted by these connections. At another, it argues that subjects previously considered separate--such as modem health reform, scientific agriculture and gardening, and Japanese and New Zealand intellectual influences--need to be considered together as contemporaries understood them. Doing so, it suggests, enables the more accurate consideration of the intellectual and scientific worlds of the early twentieth century and hints at the global dimensions of aspects of thought and state and societal reform associated with modernity.