Colonizing Sex Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan [Paperback]

A sweeping study of sex, power, and knowledge in modern Japan, this ambitious work provides the first full-scale, detailed history of the formation and application of a science of sex from Meiji through mid-twentieth century Japan. Tracing the different uses made of sexual knowledge, the book brings to light the complex and subtle interplay between sexuality, scientific expertise, social control, and empire building.

Drawing on a wide variety of sources, Fr?hst?ck analyzes the conflicts and negotiations that aimed at producing a normative sexuality. She shows how the colonization of sex was enacted through debates over several issues: the necessity of sex education; the prevention of venereal diseases; the problem of masturbation and its alleged consequences; the legalization of birth control; the fight against prostitution; the emergence of eugenics; and, eventually, the implementation of racial hygiene policies. InColonizing Sexwe see how these struggles were driven by rhetoric consisting of cries for defense, liberation, and truthemphasizing in every historical moment how the sexual body has been, and is, part of much broader currents in political, cultural, and social life.

Sabine Fr?hst?ckis Professor of Modern Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is coeditor ofThe Culture of Japan as Seen through Its Leisure(1998) andNeue Geschichten der Sexualit?t: Beispiele aus Ostasien und Zentraleuropa 1700-2000(1999). She is currently completing a book on military-societal relations in modern Japan, entitledAvant-garde: The Army of the Future.

Anyone interested in the history of western sexuality will want to read this book because of how it refracts the huge project of sexology through the eyes of another people, the Japanese, who appropriated it as part of their own project of modernization. And anyone interested in Japan will find Fr?hst?ck 's story faslC’