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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative
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October, 2004
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Book Review

Asia



Sabine Frühstück. Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan. (Colonialisms, number 4.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2003. Pp. x, 267. Cloth $50.00, paper $19.95.

This comprehensive survey of discourses on sexuality in modern Japan focuses on the role of the capitalist-imperialist state, from 1868, in the construction of attitudes and behavior among the masses. Its five well-argued chapters are organized thematically rather than along strict chronological lines. In the first, Sabine Frühstück describes how, from the inception of the modern state, authorities sought to ensure the (sexual) health and hygiene of the soldiery, the prostitutes thought necessary to service them, and children (as future citizens and soldiers)—three categories vital to the nation conceptualized as a Spencerian "social organism." Of particular interest here is how the state associated sexual virility with warfare, issuing condoms to troops in the 1930s with such names as "Attack Champion." 1
      The second chapter examines the debate about sexual education in the early twentieth century, when the budding (German) field of sexology reached Japan, producing a variety of scholars who either urged the provision of "scientific" information about sex to schoolchildren or challenged its desirability, and debates about the proper role of schoolteachers and parents in this education. The key concern for most was the curbing of childhood sexual interest and masturbation. . . .

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