Abstract
The introduction discusses Michel Foucault’s theory used in this book. It argues there was a major shift, which Foucault would call an epistemic shift, in mid-eighteenth-century Japan in the field of medicine, where perceptions of the body and medical methods drastically changed. After the creation of a modern nation state in Japan in the latter half of the nineteenth century, modern bio-power proliferated in conjunction with the accumulation of medical and scientific knowledge about both individuals and the wider population, categorized by gender, race, nationality, age, and so on. Collaboration between the modern state and the medical profession led to the expansion of bio-power, which has often worked against the interests of many women.
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- 1.
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
- 2.
Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
- 3.
Terajima Ryōan, Wa-kan sansai zue, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1986): 108–109.
- 4.
Ibid.
- 5.
Organized medicine connotes a collectivity of physicians and other medical experts who act together to advocate for the medical profession. Historically, medical associations pursued higher status and control in the medical field by defining other types of health care as deviant or “quackery.” While organized medicine has sought professional autonomy for medical practitioners, it has worked closely with the state because laws, licensing, and other government regulations are central to its domination of the field. For the purpose of this book, modern organized medicine emerged in Japan after the 1868 Meiji Restoration.
- 6.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1973); and The Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Harper Colophon, 1972).
- 7.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I (New York: Pantheon, 1979); and Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1979).
- 8.
Sabine Frühstück presents illuminating discussions on this issue in the Introduction and Chap. 1 of Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
- 9.
Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harre, “Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior (20:1): 46.
- 10.
Ian Hacking discusses how both individuals and categories into which individuals are classified are constructed within discursive structures. See Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
- 11.
See Timothy Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). See also Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Rules of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995) and Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
- 12.
See, for example, Brett L. Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); David L. Howell, Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
- 13.
The Japanese experience is similar to that found in Thailand, which also never became a colony of European or US powers, but became instead what Tamara Loos calls a “semi-colonial” state subject to pressures exerted by imperialist powers. See Tamara Loos, Subject Siam: Family, Law, and Colonial Modernity in Thailand (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
- 14.
Sawayama Mikako, Shussan to shintai no rekishi (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1998); Ōta Motoko, Kodakara to kogaeshi: kinsei nōson no kazoku seikatsu to kosodate (Kyoto: Fujiwara Shoten, 2007); and Kinsei no “ie” to kazoku: kosodate wo meguru shakaishi (Tokyo: Kadokawa Gakugei Shuppan, 2011).
- 15.
Sakurai Yuki, “Mabiki to datai,” in Hayashi Reiko, ed., Josei no kinsei (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1993): 97–128; and “Kinsei no ninshin shussan gensetsu,” Rekishi hyōron, No. 600 (April, 2000): 27–38.
- 16.
Fabian Drixler, Mabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan, 1660–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
- 17.
Ogata Masakiyo, Nihon fujinka gaku shi (Tokyo: Maruzan, 1918, reprinted by Kagaku Shoin, 1980); and Nihon sanka gaku shi (Tokyo: Maruzan, 1918, reprinted by Kagaku Shoin, 1980); Sakai Shizu, Nihon no iryōshi (Tokyo: Tokyo Shoseki, 1982).
- 18.
Ochiai Emiko, “Edo jidai no shussan kakumei,” in Kindai kazoku to feminizumu (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1989): 56–78; “Kinsei matsu ni okeru mabiki to shussan,” in Wakita Haruko and Susan Hanley, eds., Jendā no nihonshi (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1994): 425–459; “The Reproductive Revolution at the End of the Tokugawa period,” in Hitomi Tonomura, Anne Walthall, and Wakita Haruko, eds., Women and Class in Japanese History (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1999): 187–215.
- 19.
Susan Burns, “The Body as Text: Confucianism, Reproduction, and Gender in Tokugawa Japan,” in Benjamin Elman, John Duncan, Herman Ooms, eds., Rethinking Confucianism: Past and Present in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam (Los Angeles: University of California, UCLA Asian Pacific monograph series, 2002): 178–219.
- 20.
Fujime Yuki, Sei no rekishi gaku (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1997); Hayakawa Noriyo, Kindai ten’nōsei kokka to jendā: Seiritsu ki no hitotsu no rojikku (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1998).
- 21.
Fujime, Sei no rekishi gaku.
- 22.
Ishizaki Shōko, “Meiji-ki no seishoku wo meguru kokka seisaku,” Rekishi hyōron, No. 600 (April 2000); Drixler, Mabiki.
- 23.
In her sociological study, Hiroko Takeda also uses Foucault’s theory of “governmentality” to discuss the politics of biological reproduction in modern Japan. Her major focus is the post-World War II period. Hiroko Takeda, The Political Economy of Reproduction in Japan: Between Nation-State and Everyday Life (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005).
- 24.
Nishikawa Mugiko, Aru kindai sanba no monogatari: Noto, Takejima Mii no katariyori (Toyama: Katsura Shobō, 1997), and for its abridged English version, see Mugiko Nishikawa, “The Modern Midwife (sanba) and the Transformation of Childbirth at the Local Level in Japan,” U.S. Japan Women’s Journal, No. 24 (2003): 82–101. Other major works include Ochiai Emiko, “Aru sanba no nihon kindai” in Ogino Miho et al., eds., Seido to shite no “on’na”: Sei, san, kazoku no hikaku shakai shi (Tokyo: Heibon sha, 1990): 257–322; and “Modern Japan through the Eyes of an Old Midwife: From an Oral Life History to Social History,” in Wakita Haruko, Anne Bouchy, and Ueno Chizuko, eds., Gender and Japanese History, Vol. 1 (Osaka: Osaka University Press, 1999): 235–296; Yoshimura Noriko, Osan to deau (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1985); and Kodomo wo umu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1992); Fujime Yuki, “Aru sanba no kiseki: Shibahara Urako to sanji chōsetsu,” Nihonshi kenkyū 366 (February 1993): 90–112, and its English translation, Yuki Fujime, “One Midwife’s Life: Shibahara Urako, Birth Control, and Early Shōwa Reproductive Activism,” Wakita et al., eds., Gender and Japanese History, Vol. 1: 297–325; Shirai Chiaki, ed., Umi sodate to josan no rekishi (Tokyo: Igaku Shoin, 2016).
- 25.
See, for example, Onshi Zaidan Boshi Aiikukai, ed., Nihon san’iku shūzoku shiryō shūsei (Tokyo: Daīchi Hōki Shuppan, 1975); Akamatsu Keisuke, Hijōmin no minzoku bunka (Kyoto: Akashi Shoten, 1986); and Hijōmin no sei minzoku (Kyoto: Akashi Shoten, 1991); and Chiba Tokuji and Ōtsu Tadao, Mabiki to mizuko: kosodate no fōkuroa (Tokyo: Nōsangyoson Bunka Kyōkai, 1983). For an important recent study on the birth house custom in twentieth century Japan, see Fushimi Yūko, Kindai nihon ni okeru shussan to ubuya (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 2016).
- 26.
Frühstück, Colonizing Sex; Matsubara Yoko, “Minzoku yūsei hogo hōan to nihon no yūseihō no keifu,” Kagakushi kenkyū, dai ni-ki, No. 36 (April 1997): 42–50; and “Dai go-shō: Sengo no yūsei hogo hō to iu na no danshu hō” in Yonemoto Shōhei, Nudeshima Jirō, Matsubara Yoko, and Ichinokawa Yasutaka, eds., Yūsei gaku to ningen shakai (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2000); Ogino Miho, “Kazoku keikaku” e no michi: kindai nihon no seishoku wo meguru seiji (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2008); Sumiko Otsubo and James R. Bartholomew, “Eugenics in Japan: Some Ironies of Modernity, 1883–1945,” Science in Context 11.3 and 4 (1998): 545–565; “Between Two Worlds: Yamanouchi Shigeo and Eugenics in Early Twentieth Century Japan,” Annals of Science, 62.2 (April 2005): 205–231; Sumiko Otsubo, “The Female Body and Eugenic Thought in Meiji Japan,” in Morris Low, ed., Building a Modern Nation: Science, Technology and Medicine in the Meiji Era and Beyond, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005): 61–81; and “Engendering Eugenics: Feminists and Marriage Restriction Legislation in the 1920s,” in Barbara Molony and Kathleen S. Uno, eds., Gendering Modern Japanese History, (Cambridge, MA: Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2005): 225–256.
- 27.
Susan Burns, “When Abortion Became a Crime: Abortion, Infanticide, and the Law in Early Meiji Japan,” in David Howell and James C. Baxter, eds., History and Folklore Studies in Japan (Kyoto: International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 2006): 37–55; Drixler, Mabiki; Ishizaki Shōko, “Nihon kindai no kazoku to seishoku: 1910-nen dai-1950-nen dai,” Sōgō joseishi kenkyū, No. 24 (March, 2007): 1–18; and “Principles of Procreation and the Family in Modern Japan: Factors behind Decisions on Family Size,” in Hiroko Tomida and Gordon Daniels, eds., Japanese Women: Emerging from Subservience, 1868–1945 (Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental, 2005): 278–306; Ogino, “Kazoku keikaku” e no michi.
- 28.
Working on the local history of Shizuoka prefecture, historian Owada Michiko published an invaluable article that provides a window into the practices of birth control and abortion during the pre-World War II period. Owada Michiko, “Sanji seigen kara tasan shōrei e: bosei ni miru shizuoka-ken kindai josei-shi no tenkai,” Shizuoka-ken kindai-shi kenkyū 14 (October 1988): 61–63.
- 29.
Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Sarah Frederick, Turning Pages: Reading and Writing Women’s Magazines in Interwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006). For a useful summary on women and modernity in early twentieth-century Japan, see Vera Mackie, “Modern Selves and Modern Spaces: An Overview,” in Elise K. Tipton and John Clark, eds., Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000).
- 30.
Fujikawa Yū, Kure Shūzō, and Masuda Tomomasa, eds., Nihon sanka sōsho (Kyoto: Shibunkaku, first published in 1895, reprinted in 1971): 53–63.
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Terazawa, Y. (2018). Introduction. In: Knowledge, Power, and Women's Reproductive Health in Japan, 1690–1945. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73084-4_1
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