Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (review)

Sabine Frühstück's book is the first detailed history of sexual knowledge and the ways in which various individuals, groups, and organizations have contributed to the establishment of sexual norms in Japan since the beginning of modernization in the Meiji period (1868–1912). At the beginning of the twentieth century in Japan, as elsewhere in the world, sex was a taboo topic in public discourse. By the late 1920s, however, sexual issues had attracted noticeable attention in popular media as well as discussions among academics, government officials, and social reformers. And by the end of the Second World War, Frühstück argues, normative ideas of sex were established that comprise the framework for debates on sexual issues even up to the present.

The history begins with an examination of the Meiji government's effort to erect a "modern health regime," one aspect of its wide-ranging modernization reform program. This regime, Frühstück points out, focused primarily on improving the physical and mental condition of male subjects, especially soldiers and children. Women prostitutes came to the attention of health officials and under their greater control but in order to prevent the spread of venereal diseases to men and their innocent families rather than to protect the health of the women themselves. Most government officials and physicians supported the licensed prostitution system so that regular medical examinations of prostitutes could be conducted. They shared a common assumption with Westerners that prostitution was a "necessary evil" to assuage men's "natural" sexual needs and that prostitutes were the main source of venereal disease.

The health of children was also the government's concern, leading to the establishment of school hygiene programs. These were mainly aimed at controlling the spread of infectious diseases, but, as with the health examinations of conscripts and soldiers, data from regular examinations of schoolchildren were systematically recorded. Frühstück emphasizes the importance placed by the government on quantification and classification of the population's physical condition for establishing a modern nation. These are ways, Frühstück argues, that the quest for knowledge, surveillance, and control incorporated soldiers, prostitutes, and children into a complex set of power relations. "Administrative control was exercised and extended in order to 'protect' and 'defend' the soldiers from prostitutes, the children from themselves, and the empire from its pathological subjects" (54).

Chapter 2 traces the expanded role of nongovernment experts as well as government officials in sexual matters as a massive debate about sexual desire in children and the need for "scientific" sex education emerged during the first decade of the twentieth century. Debate on sex education was not confined to doctors and educators, however, but reached the wider reading public and was made part of a broader "sexual problem" when the national daily newspaper, the Yomiuri shinbun, ran a series of articles on the subject in 1908.

In chapter 3 we see how the print media's taking up debates about sexual desire and the "sexual problem" began the movement for extending scientific knowledge about sex to the masses. Two pioneers in sex research during the early 1920s were Yamamoto Senji and Yasuda Tokutarô. They carried out the first surveys of sexual behavior among Yamamoto's university students and published summaries of the results in major newspapers and magazines. They hoped that developing a "science of sex" would liberate young people from "falsehood and menace" (89). They and other sexologists tried to disseminate the new knowledge through public lectures and by founding sexological journals as well as publishing books and articles in popular women's and popular science magazines. Police surveillance and censorship often interrupted Yamamoto's activities among workers and farmers, and his criticisms of government policies provoked a right-wing extremist to assassinate him in 1929.

Censorship was a problem faced by sexological journals and birth control advocates, the subject of chapter 4. Here and in chapter 5, which traces...