Seishin shikkan gensetsu no rekishi shakaigaku: “Kokoro no yamai” wa naze ryūkōsuru no ka精 神疾患言説の歴史社会学-『心の病』はなぜ流行するのか by Masahiro Sato 佐藤雅浩 (review)

During the Meiji Restoration (1868-1912), Japan’s leaders encouraged the population to acquire modern knowledge from the West, and many insights were adopted from the field of mental health. New diagnostic terms for mental disorders were introduced, and medical knowledge was distributed through the Japanese population, chiefly via media representations. A Historical and Sociological Analysis of the Discursive Practice of Mental Illness clarifies these processes through a series of close readings. In this review, I first examine the book’s content and methodology and then discuss the strengths and drawbacks of the author’s conclusions.

The distinctive characteristic of this book is its elaborate analytical procedure, which ensures a clear, concrete, and coherent presentation. The data used come chiefly from Asahi and Yomiuri, the two most popular Japanese national newspapers, both of which have been issued continuously since the 1870s. Hence, Masahiro Sato’s exploration depends on sources that have been a constant presence in modern Japanese society. Furthermore, thanks to electronic records systems, the data are efficiently extracted via specific keywords, for instance, depression (鬱病 utsubyo). Whereas previous research explored nonjournalism texts on mental illness, such as academic papers and official reports (see, e.g., Kanekawa 2012; Watarai 2003; Okada 2002), this is the first study to employ such coherent data handling. Sato’s methodology sheds light upon the ways in which the “popularized knowledge” about mental illness—a novel concept in academic research on the modern history of mental illness in Japan, owing much to Sato’s methodological approach—has been constructed since the Meiji Restoration.

The author’s examination of the popular representation of mental illness is divided into four historical periods that saw different tendencies rise to dominance. The first division is the earlier part of the Meiji period, from the 1870s to the 1890s. A careful investigation of media coverage demonstrates that medicalized knowledge had not yet been widely disseminated, and the traditional perception of madness persisted. For instance, in most journalists’ accounts, socially deviant behavior—including homicide and suicide—was interpreted as the result of madness, a category long since excluded from therapeutic literature. These narratives about insanity were not produced by medical doctors. Sato shows that the general public would read of such cases on average once a week, generally confirming what it already knew.

The second period covered in the book is the latter half of the Meiji period, the 1890s and 1900s. This period saw a transformation of the status of mental health. New actors, psychiatrists, emerged in popular perceptions of insanity, especially with reference to a novel diagnostic term, neurasthenia (神経衰弱 shinkei-suijaku). The author shows how neurasthenia was introduced to the general public around the early 1890s by both psychiatrists and journalists and subsequently circulated during the 1900s through newspaper reports. Sato demonstrates that, by the end of the 1910s, as knowledge of this illness grew alongside the national modernization program, neurasthenia had become a common illness, thought to afflict those who were “civilized” and “well educated,” code for middle-class men.

The author also shows that doctors did not diagnose women’s mental disorders as neurasthenia, regardless of the patient’s social position. In those days, women were regarded as left behind by civilization and therefore ineligible to experience neurasthenia. In order to describe female mental illness, the new Western concept of hysteria (ヒステリー histerī) was utilized by both academics and members of the media. The advent of fujin-ran (a newspaper section dedicated to women’s issues) enhanced the diffusion of this novel concept to the Japanese population. The book thus shows the processes through which modern knowledge of mental illness was shaped with gendered overtones and then circulated in the population.

The main phenomenon of the third period (1910s-1930s) is traumatic...