Torii Ryūzō’s anthropometric measurements and photography in colonial Korea

Several historians have analyzed anthropologist Torii Ryuzō's ethnographic research across East Asia and the Pacific, including his use of photography in conducting fieldwork. However, scholars have largely overlooked his interest in physical anthropology in the early part of his career. This article investigates Torii's anthropometric research in Korea during the 1910s to show that, despite a large amount of data collected through years of fieldwork, institutional and technical reasons prevented his research from being part of the scholarly dialogue in the following years. Torii was seeking to combine anthropometric measurements with photography to innovate a research method that would critically engage contemporary European anthropological scholarship, through the combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. However, from the 1920s, physical anthropology in Japan underwent a major shift with the widespread adoption of Rudolf Martin's anthropometric methods. With Keijō Imperial University in colonial Korea serving as one of the important research hubs, anatomists emphasizing precise measurements and statistical analysis dominated Japanese physical anthropology. Consequently, despite its scale and the attempt to arrive at an innovative methodology, Torii never managed to publish his anthropometry data or anthropometric photographs from Korea. This article thus shows, through tracing the disappearance of Torii's physical anthropology from academic discourse, Japan's anthropological research of the early twentieth century was shaped by global research trends, institutional power dynamics, and the unavailability of techniques to study qualitative data in conjunction with numerical ones.