Reconsidering Japan’s Plant Patent Movement: National Histories, Colonial Legacies, and Transpacific Dynamics

Event Details

Date:

Tuesday, 04 April 2023 - Tuesday, 04 April 2023

Time:

2:30 pm - 3:30 pm

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Full Description:: A movement calling for plants to be treated as patentable inventions emerged in 1970s Japan. Among the loudest proponents of reform were people who had long engaged in the breeding and propagation of fruits and flowers, in certain cases far beyond Japan's post-1945 borders. My presentation contextualizes the activities of the plant patent movement these breeders and propagators joined.

Although United States plant patent precedents loomed large in Japanese debates, the issue was not simply one of borrowing existing legal frameworks. Rather, ideas of plant patenting were enmeshed in complex histories of migration, settler colonialism, and agricultural improvement. The implementation of a non-patent based Japanese plant variety protection system split opinion within the plant patent movement and contributed to its breakup by the early 1980s. Even so, several of the movement's former members later became involved in a widely publicized dispute over the patentability of a fruit tree: a peach variety with roots in colonial-era Korea. In tracing Japan's plant patent movement alongside plants and people in motion, this presentation reconsiders issues of ownership and state power beyond nationally framed histories of plant variety protection alone.