Abstract
In the fall of 1929, a Kyōto-based journal for popular medicine reported that the dean of sexology, Habuto Eiji, had committed suicide after having long suffered from neurasthenia (shinkei suijaku).1 A practicing gynecologist, Habuto had been the editor of the sexological journal Seiyoku to Jinsei (Sexual Desire and Humankind), the author of numerous books on sexual issues, and the coauthor, together with Sawada Junjirō, of an abridged Japanese version of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, entitled Hentai Seiyokuron (1915). He was also involved in the translation of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1901–1928), the twenty Japanese-language volumes of which were advertised under the title Sei no Shinri (see figure 2.1) as early as 1927.
I am grateful to the MedHeads at the University of California at Berkeley and Warwick Anderson in particular for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter. Michael Bourdaghs’ critique has been invaluable for broadening my perspective. I also would like to thank Hiromi Mizuno and the participants in the workshop on “Sex and the Politics of Desire: Japan” at the University of Minnesota in April 2002. Research and writing were facilitated greatly by the University of California President’s Fellowship in the Humanities and a Committee of Research Grant from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Yokoyama Tetsuo, “Seigaku no taika Habuto hakushi shinkei suijaku ni taoru,” Tsūzoku igaku 1929, 7 (10): 1–4.
See, e.g., Enjū satsuyō (1631) and Yōjōkun (1714); both cited in Shimizu Masaru, Nihon no seigaku jishi (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō, 1989), pp. 199–206 and 246.
Scholars of Japan have begun to write a history of masculinity only recently; most notable among them are Hikosaka Tai, Dansei shinwa (Komichi Shobō, 1991);
Itō Kimio, “Otokorashisa” no yukue: Dansei bunka no bunka shakaigaku (Shinyōsha, 1993);
Inoue Teruko, Ueno Chizuko, and Ehara Yumiko, eds., Danseigaku (Iwanami Shoten, 1995);
and Taga Futoshi, Dansei to jendā keisei (Tōyōkan Shuppansha, 2001).
Recent approaches to the topic in the United States include George L. Mosse’s examination of The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford University Press, 1996);
David D. Gilmore’s Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (Yale University Press, 1990);
and R.W. Connell’s Masculinities (University of California Press, 1995).
Cited in Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde auf Grund dreißigjähriger Forschung und Erfahrung 1 (Stuttgart: Julius Püttmann Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1926), p. 287.
Andreas Hill, “‘May the doctor advise extramarital intercourse?’: Medical Debates on Sexual Abstinence in Germany, c. 1900,” in Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality, ed. Roy Porter and Miculás Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 286–287.
Arthur Kleinman, Social Origin of Distress and Disease: Depression, Neurasthenia, and Pain in Modern China (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 16–17.
See George M. Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: Putnam, 1881).
Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 90. In Japan, the prominent pedagogue Shimoda Jirō, for example, discussed Beard’s study in his book Joshi kyōiku (Tōkyō: Zenkōdō, 1904), p. 407.
See Paul Smith, “Vas. Sexualität und Männlichkeit,” in Wann ist der Mann ein Mann? Zur Geschichte der Männlichkeit, ed. Walter Erhart and Britta Herrmann (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1997), p. 82.
The adoption of Western food elements began in the Imperial Japanese Navy (Teikoku kaigun) in the 1880s. The Imperial Japanese Army (Teikoku rikugun) followed suit after the turn of the century; see Katarzyna Cwiertka, The Making of a Modern Culinary Tradition in Japan (Leiden University, 1999), pp. 122–123.
Conscripts were classified in one of five categories according to fitness for service. Classes A, B, and C were considered different degrees of fitness for service. In class D were the “physically or mentally deficient,” or those regarded as unsuitable for becoming soldiers, including criminals and dwarfs. Class E men were ill at the time of the annual physical examination and had to report for reexamination and reclassification the following year; see Edward J. Drea, In the Service of the Emperor: Essays on the Imperial Japanese Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), pp. 78–79.
Rikugunshō, Rikugunshō daiichi nenpō (Tokyo: Rikugunshō, 1876), pp. 83–88.
Another example of the military’s take on neurasthenia is to be found in the May 1927 issue of Senyū (Comrade) 203: 28–34, where a military surgeon describes “Shinkei suijaku to sono ryōhō” (“neurasthenia and its cure”). For more details on sexual control in the military, see the first chapter of Sabine Frühstück, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
Hirota Motokichi, Shinkei suijaku ni tsuite (Kyoto: Kakubundō Shobō, 1919), p. 138.
The surgeon pointed out, however, that at the beginning of his study, war-related psychoneurosis and neurosis had not yet been added to the nomenclature when the record was started, and so large numbers of these conditions were included as “neurasthenias.” Thus, undetected malingerers, arrested or not fully developed psychoses, and many of the so-called shell-shocked marines were in the neurasthenic class of his records. See E.C. Taylor, “Types of Neurological and Psychiatric Cases Common in the Navy,” United States Naval Medical Bulletin 1920, 14 (2): 194.
See also Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000).
Geoffrey C. Mahaffy, “Sexual Neurasthenia,” The Journal of the Kansas Medical Society 1916, 16: 323–326.
For the development of eugenic thought in Japan, see Sumiko Otsubo’s chapter in this book; Matsubara Yōko, “Meiji-matsu kara Taishōki ni okeru shakai mondai to ‘iden,’” Nihon Bunka Kenkyūsho kiyō 1996, 3: 155–169;
Matsubara Yōko, “Senjiki Nihon no danshū seisaku,” Nenpō kagaku gijutsu shakai 1998, 7: 87–109;
Saitō Hikaru, “Chiiku taiiku iden kyōikuron o kangaeru: Nihon yūseigaku no ichi koma?” Kyōto Seika Daigaku kiyō 1993, 5: 168–178;
and most recently, Jennifer Robertson, “Japan’s First Cyborg? Miss Nippon, Eugenics and Wartime Technologies of Beauty, Body and Blood,” Body & Society 2002, 7 (1): 1–34. For an overview on the literature on the history of eugenics see Frank Dikötter, “Race culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics,” American Historical Review April 1998, pp. 467–478. For the concerns with neurasthenia among Americans in the Philippine Islands, see Warwick Anderson, “The Trespass Speaks: White Masculinity and Colonial Breakdown,” American Historical Review, December 1997, pp. 1343–1370. Judith Farquhar and Hugh Shapiro have examined the history of neurasthenia in China; see Farquhar’s “Technologies of Everyday Life: The Economy of Impotence in Reform China,” Cultural Anthropology, 14 (2): 155–179
and Shapiro’s “The Puzzle of Spermatorrhea (yijing) in Republican Period China,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 1999, 6 (3): 551–596.
Matsubara Yōko, “Meiji matsuki ni okeru seikyōiku ronsō: Fujikawa Yū o chūshin ni,” Ningen bunka kenkyū nenpō 1993, 17: 231–239, on p. 232.
Fujikawa Yū, “Gakureki jidō no shikijō ni tsuite,” Jidō kenkyū 1900, 2: 454–460.
For a detailed analysis of Fujikawa Yū’s career as a medical historian, see Matsumura Noriaki, Hirono Yoshiyuki, and Matsubara Yōko, “Fujikawa Yū: Pioneer of the History of Medicine in Japan,” Historia Scientiarum 1998, 8 (2): 157–171;
Fujikawa Hideo, ed., Fujikawa Yū chosakushū (Kyōto: Shibunkyaku shuppan, 1982);
and Fujikawa Yū sensei kankōkai, ed., Fujikawa Yū sensei (Tokyo: Daikūsha, 1988).
For literary authors around 1900, neurasthenia was a largely personal affair. In their writings, neurasthenia primarily appeared as a foil for contemplations on an intellectually and emotionally demanding modern lifestyle. In Natsume Sōseki’s novels, neurasthenia is commonly used to describe and explain the flaws of the leading characters. Neighbors ascribe neurasthenia to the leading character in Wagahai wa neko de aru (I Am a Cat) as well as in Kusamakura (The Three-Cornered World). Natsume Sōseki suffered from the disease himself and obviously attempted to increase sympathy and understanding for other victims of the ailment through his sympathetic description of “neurasthenics” (shinkei suijaku-sha) in the novels he wrote in Tokyo after he had returned from England in 1903. He also might have been influenced by the aforementioned renowned psychiatrist Morita Shoma, with whom he was acquainted. See Takahashi Masao, “Sōseki bungaku ni okeru naoshi. ‘Shinkei suijaku’-sha no rikai to kyūsai,” Nihon byōsekigaku zasshi 1996, 52: 30–36.
R.P. Neuman, “The Sexual Question and Social Democracy in Imperial Germany,” Journal of Social History 1974, 7 (3): 271–286, on pp. 272–273.
The censorship of Wita sekusuarisu was reported in Taiyō January 1, 1908, cited in Jay Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1984), pp. 21–22.
For the rehabilitation of the text by sexologists, see Takasugi Saburō, “Ryōsho no suisen,” Seikagaku kenkyū 1936, 1 (5): 78.
There is a huge volume of literature on neurasthenia and its place in the history of sexual knowledge. For the European history see the following authors: Karl Braun, Die Krankheit Onania. Körperangst und die Anfänge moderner Sexualität im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1995);
Arnold Davidson, “Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality,” Critical Inquiry 1987, 14 (1): 16–48;
and Neuman A., “The Sexual Question,” For Europe, see Roy Porter and Leslie Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995);
Robert A. Nye, “The History of Sexuality in Context: National Sexological Traditions,” Science in Context 1991, 4 (2): 387–406;
and Peter Weingart, Jürgen Kroll and Kurt Bayertz, Rasse, Blut und Gene: Geschichte der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992), pp. 108–113.
For the discussion of sexological ideas in Russia see Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-siècle Russia (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992);
and for China, see Kleinman, Social Origin; and Frank Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual Identities in the Early Republican Period (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1995).
Fujo shinbun, June 19, 1921, cited in Furukawa Makoto, “Ren’ai to seiyoku no daisan teikoku,” Gendai shisō 1993, 21 (7): 114.
The first survey of sexual behavior in boys and girls was published in 1949; Asayama Shin’ichi, Sei no kiroku. Sengo Nihonjin no seikōdō o kagakuteki ni chōsa shita shiryō ni motozuku (Ōsaka: Rokugatsusha, 1949).
Yamamoto Senji, Yamamoto Senji zenshū: Daiikkan jinsei seibutsugaku, ed., Sasaki Toshiji (Tōkyō: Sekibunsha, 1979), pp. 104–105.
Okamoto Kazuhiko, “Taishū no gaku toshite no seikagaku no tenkai,” Gendai Seikyōiku Kenkyō 1983, 14: 108–118.
See, e.g., Sugita Naogeki, “Seibyō to seishinbyō no kankei,” Kakusei 1924, 14 (8): 17–19;
Yoshii Kaneoka, “Eiseijō kara mitaru kōshō mondai,” Kakusei 1940, 30 (1): 38–39;
and Alfred Blaschko, “Eiseijō yori kōshō seido o ronzu,” Kakusei 1914, 4 (3): 5–11.
Abe Isoo, “Shinkei suijaku nanshōsha ni,” Tsūzoku igaku 1930, 10 (8): 152.
Matsumoto Shizuo, “Seishin suijaku to shuin (onanii),” Tsūzoku igaku 1937, 15 (3):98.
The significance of Viagra as a marker of the transformation of the social, economic, and gender order since the 1990s is discussed in the epilogue of Sabine Frühstück, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2005 Sabine Frühstück
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Frühstück, S. (2005). Male Anxieties: Nerve Force, Nation, and the Power of Sexual Knowledge. In: Low, M. (eds) Building a Modern Japan. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981110_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981110_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-53057-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-8111-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)