This paper seeks to balance the regional and thematic focus of cholera historiography by examining maritime quarantine in Busan, as it was devised and implemented by Japanese officials and doctors during the pre-colonial period. It also places the relationship between Korea and Japan in the context of relations with China, Russia and Britain. This paper shows that quarantine measures in Busan and other Korean ports reflected the rise of Japanese imperial power and the increasing desire on the part of the Japanese to establish an effective borderline for their regional empire.

From 1879 Japan began to impose maritime quarantine in Busan, where Japanese influence was very strong even before the colonial period, though at that time Japan was unable to perform quarantine in its own ports independently due to the objections of Western powers, particularly Britain. Victories in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars established Japan as a regional power on equal terms with the West, and as the dominant power in Korea and Eastern Asia. With the acquisition of the right to impose quarantine in its homeland, Japan strengthened and extended the range of quarantine from Japan to Korea, China and Russia. Now quarantine screened Japan from potentially harmful agents – pathogenic and political – and its functions diversified further as modernisation and imperial expansion gathered pace. The reliance which Japan placed upon quarantine in maintaining its empire explains why it was increasingly out of step with other powers regarding international sanitary precautions. The Japanese maritime quarantine in Busan during this period therefore shows many aspects of Japan’s ‘national empire’.

A number of experimental methods of reconstructing prehistoric hand images like those in the cave of Gargas, France, are described and assessed. The results of experiments using these methods are evaluated from the point of view of the bearing they have on our knowledge about the creation of the original pictures in the cave.

Drawing on recent visual and spatial turns in history writing, this paper considers AIDS posters from the perspective of their museum ‘afterlife’ as collected material objects. Museum spaces serve changing political and epistemological projects, and the visual objects they house are not immune from them. A recent globally themed exhibition of AIDS posters at an arts and crafts museum in Hamburg is cited in illustration. The exhibition also serves to draw attention to institutional continuities in collecting agendas. Revealed, contrary to postmodernist expectations, is how today’s application of aesthetic display for the purpose of making ‘global connections’ does not radically break with the virtues and morals attached to the visual at the end of the nineteenth century. The historicisation of such objects needs to take into account this complicated mix of change and continuity in aesthetic concepts and political inscriptions. Otherwise, historians fall prey to seductive aesthetics without being aware of the politics of them. This article submits that aesthetics is politics.