Chapter 8: Strengthening the National Body
in Japan and China
In previous chapters we have examined certain aspects of national identity in Japan and China. This chapter continues in the same vein, focusing on the early twentieth century and examining the efforts of the state and of influential people in society to strengthen the nation by strengthening the people who comprise it. The process was part of a world-wide trend. In the United States, Canada, and throughout Europe, for example, social activists clamored for state intervention to strengthen the population. Public health measures to guard against disease were one aspect of this intervention, but it often when much further. Throughout much of the western world during the 1920s, governments enacted laws designed to breed better, stronger, and more intelligent populations. These laws often took the form of forced sterilization of people deemed to be “feeble minded.” Every state in the United States and every province of Canada enacted sterilization laws, many of which remained on the books until the 1970s. At precisely the same time, social activities in Japan and China also sought state intervention to improve the current population or to breed a better population in the future. Therefore, social activists and governments became concerned with regulating the sexual activities of its citizens and regulating other aspects of their lives deemed relevant to the health of individuals and thus the health of society as a whole. Often discussions of these matters invoked the vague but potent notion of “race” and of a Darwinian struggle for dominance between races. When writers and lecturers in Japan and China spoke of “improving our race,” they were not pursuing an agenda unique to East Asia. Instead, they were squarely in the mainstream of world trends.
We start with a brief examination of some of these world trends. Then we turn to Japan and China and see how they played out in those societies. As with many other topics, the Chinese case is complicated by the intrusion of imperialism.
The early twentieth century was a time when the notion of “race” as a biological attained its strongest influence. The idea the human species can be divided into meaningful and clearly-defined sub-species (races) first emerged in the 1790s in the writings of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840). Blumenbach (building on the work of his teacher Carlous Linnaeus) helped create the five-color classification of humans, and he coined the term “Caucasian.” He claimed that the people living in and near the Caucasus Mountains (roughly modern-day Armenia) were the most beautiful people in the world. This personal aesthetic value judgment became Blumenbach’s starting premise. Therefore, he reasoned, Noah’s Ark must have come to rest in the Caucuses when the Biblical flood waters receded. The people of that region are the closest to the original descendants of Noah, and people farther removed geographically from the Caucuses had “degenerated” from this original stock to varying degrees. As you can see, Blumenbach’s theory of human divisions starts with a highly subjective value judgment and is full of other problematic points. While it is a significant historical milestone, it would hardly pass muster today as science.
The whole project of classifying humans into different races, whether five or 500, has been fraught with a lack of scientific rigor. Paradoxically, however, the concept of race typically masqueraded as a biological fact. Even today, most people apparently to assume that human races are clearly-definable biological categories, and much of our legal and political discourse proceeds from this assumption. In general, human races were social constructs that masqueraded as natural categories of biology. The believability of this masquerade was the result of mainstream science giving its stamp of approval to the idea that human beings divide naturally into various races (nobody could ever agree on how many). Moreover, the racial science of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries assumed, but never proved, that cultural characteristics derived from racial biology. What today is often called “scientific racism,” therefore is the belief that human beings can be objectively divided into sub-species, and cultural differences are the result in whole or in part of those sub-species (races). Although biological science has thoroughly discredited this notion, it remains influential in casual though in many parts of the world.
When did the notion of “race” move out of the realm of specialized scientific fields and become social common sense? There is no precise date, but many historians regard the 1850s as an important turning point. Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau (1816-1882), a French aristocrat, novelist, and general man of letters, published Essay on the Inequality of Human Races between 1853 and 1855. It became widely influential in the western world and later in East Asia. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the notion that human races, exist, are clearly definable, and are culturally significant gradually became common sense among educated people in many parts of the globe.
Although people tended to believe that human races were clearly definable, no writer on the subject was able to delineate them with precision. Genetics did not really get started as a branch of science until the early twentieth century (Gregor Mendel’s pioneering work in the 1850s and 1860s languished unappreciated until decades later). By that time “race” had already become a firmly-established scientific category. Owing in part to the influence of genetics, some writers on the subject of human races assumed that they are immutable, unchangeable entities. Others used the term more loosely and assumed that races could change or be changed, ether quickly or over several generations. In any case, the whole realm of racial discourse, whether scientific or popular, was best by confusion and contradictions. Nobody could adequately define the term “race” or determine how many human races existed, but most people seemed convinced that human races were terribly important.
The concept of race developed before the emergence of genetics as a branch of science, and so early geneticists tended to assume the biological reality of races without question. As educated people came to be aware of the principles of hereditary transmission during the first decade of the twentieth century, a new category into which humans might be assigned arose: feeble mindedness. The idea of feeble mindedness was not only the product of genetics, it was also the product of early, crude educational testing. The first version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test came out in France in 1896 as a tool to help classify school children in terms of ability. It did not work well in its initial form and underwent modifications during the first decade do the twentieth century. Its creators never claimed that the test was a comprehensive measure of intelligence, but that is how it came to be regarded. The influential American psychologist Henry H. Goddard (1866-1957) popularized the term “feeble minded” as a general description for those scoring on the low end of IQ tests. More specifically, an “idiot” was someone scoring between 0-25, an “imbecile” was someone scoring 26-50, and a “moron” was someone with a score of 51-70. Today, these terms are casual derogatory terms with no precise meaning. In the 1910s-40s they were scientific technical jargon.
The unproved assumption on the part of Goddard and others was that feeble mindedness was a hereditary condition. Moreover, Goddard claimed that feeble-minded people breed at a much higher rate than normal or intelligent people. (Notice the tendency to assume that higher levels of intelligence correlate inversely with sexual desire—a notion still strong today.) These two points—the alleged hereditary nature of feeble mindedness plus the alleged higher rates of reproduction—were cause for alarm. The problem was that without intervention, society would soon become overrun with feeble-minded people. As the average mental capacity of individuals declined, the entire society would decline with disastrous consequences. Therefore Goddard and others urged lawmakers to force feeble-minded people to live in state institutions. He also thought that forced sterilization of the feeble minded was a good idea, but he doubted that society had the political will to carry out such radical measures. Goddard also advocated severe restrictions in immigration. In the latter case he argued that immigrants tend to be overly represented by feeble-minded individuals (the poor, the unwashed, etc.). In practice, impoverished individuals often came to be classified as “feeble-minded,” for reasons that should be easy to imagine. Later in life, Goddard came to regret many of his early conclusions, but they had already influenced U.S. immigration law, state sterilization statues, and, in German translation, even had an influence on Nazi policies.
Notice that the issue of feeble mindedness and ideas of “race” were different and yet potentially connected. Although all races or any other groupings of humans would contain some feeble-minded people, it was easy for people in the early twentieth century to imagine that some races were more prone to feeble mindedness than others. Moreover, advocates of “racial improvement” (eugenics) could make a strong case that sterilizing or otherwise preventing feeble-minded people from reproducing would strengthen “the race” or “the nation” in future generations. In other words, many social activists in the early decades of the twentieth century envisioned state intervention to cause the breeding a stronger and more intelligent population.
The alleged problem of feeble mindedness became even more of a menacing issue in the context of social Darwinism. Social Darwinism refers to the application (often loosely) of biological Darwinism to human societies. The general idea was that social conditions reflect a struggle among the population, with the fittest members of society tending to emerge at the top. At its worst, social Darwinism served as an argument against attempts to assist society’s poorer members on the grounds that their poverty is a form of “natural” selection. Such thinking ignores several key components of biological Darwinism. Today, Darwin’s theories have been proven correct and form the foundation of modern biology. Social Darwinism (which Darwin himself never advocated), on the other hand, has been thoroughly discredited.
Social Darwinism emerged in the late nineteenth century, and it soon became part of the discourse on nations as political scientists and others began to apply the idea of competition for survival not so much to the different members within a society but to entire societies competing on a world stage. In other words, by the start of the twentieth century, there was tendency to see the world in terms of different nations locked in fierce competition with each other. As a result of this competition, some nations prospered and others declined. One result of regarding this situation as a “natural” condition of humankind was that imperialism became easier to justify. After all, the logic went, it is only natural that the strong should conquer and control the weak. Seeing the world in these terms also added to the urgency among those let the (early) Goddard who advocated state intervention to breed a stronger society. In other words, in a fiercely competitive world, the harm done by the presence of ever higher percentages of feeble-minded citizens could result in the destruction of the nation or “race.” Doomsday scenarios were easy to imagine. In the case of a country like China, already in the grip of imperialists, creating a stronger society—whether by breeding or other means—became attractive to intellectuals and politicians as a way to escape from imperialist control.
Notice how easy it was for notions of “race,” nations, heredity, and mental and physical fitness in a competitive environment all to blend into each other within the scientific and political environment of the early twentieth century. These various ideas were fuzzy and flexible and could be bent to serve the interests of a variety of social and political agendas. They also tended to re-enforce each other. For example, as people came to imagine that they shared a common ancestry with other members of their nations, it became easy to equate “race” with nation—at least in many cases. The merging of nation and race reinforced the idea of inherent “national characteristics” that distinguish one such group from another. To mention a negative example, during the first decade of the twentieth century many Californians vigorously argued against permitting Japanese immigrants to become naturalized citizens, or even to enter the United States, on the ground that their inherent national (= racial) characteristics were at odds with the fundamental culture of the United States. One specific item frequently as an “inherent” characteristic was an alleged desire to worship the Japanese emperor. Notice here that crude racial science was deployed in a way that alleged certain quasi-religious traits that most Americans would find objectionable. The goal was to reduce or eliminate Japanese immigration to the U.S. west coast, and the ultimate motivation was fear of economic competition from these new immigrants.
The process of taking a group of people, typically imagined as a nation or a race, and actively intervening to “improve” it is generally called eugenics. Francis Galton (1822–1911), is generally regarded as the founder of the “science” of eugenics, though the general idea of actively intervening to make a better society obviously predates Galton. In an 1883 book, Inquiries in Human Faculty and its Development, Galton coined the term eugenics and proposed that the state provide incentives for desirable people to marry early and produce more children to counter the (alleged) tendency of eminent people to produce few if any children. Galton did not advocate full-scale social engineering or forced sterilizations of undesirable people, but other advocates of eugenics would push his ideas in that direction. By the twentieth century, eugenics was a general term for programs advocating varying degrees of state intervention for the purpose of breeding a better society.
What about the possibility of transforming society as it currently exists? This idea, too, was prominent in the minds of many social reformers, and it usually complemented plans to encourage better breeding. Indeed, because even experts had only a crude grasp of genetic principles, the incorrect belief that acquired characteristics could be passed on to subsequent generations was widespread during the early decades of the twentieth century (and even today, albeit to a lesser extent). Therefore, whether for reasons of immediate practical benefits or with an eye toward future generations, programs to transform society’s current members were prominent in the minds of politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and others with an interest in social progress.
In the case of China, especially, the idea of “race” as a hard-wired physiological state from which culture derives was generally ad odds with prevailing ways of thinking about people. Because of its vast size, the Chinese empire always included a wide variety of peoples and ethnic groups within its boundaries. Elite Chinese ethnocentrism was often second to none in arrogance, but it was based on cultural characteristics, not physical characteristics. Moreover the traditional tendency among Chinese elites was to assume that all human beings could acquire desirable cultural characteristics (e.g., a familiarity with classical literature, the ability to compose poetry, play certain types of music, certain habits of dress, etc.) should they chose to make the effort to civilize themselves.
I do not mean to suggest that Chinese elites never viewed foreign people as physiologically different than themselves. On the contrary, peoples of far off lands were often depicted with strange physical features, and the European imperialists were often described as having different organs than Chinese (four testicles, for example, instead of two for men). In this regard, Chinese elites often thought that differing conditions of climate and geography would change people’s physiology, sometimes even within a person’s lifetime. What was missing from this Chinese-style racial thinking, however, was the idea that human races were fixed biological categories from which culture derives. Instead, Chinese thinkers tended to see human races as malleable categories, and the tended not to associate culture so strongly with physical characteristics. For this reason, Chinese thinkers often wrote of changing one’s race, both in the sense of “improving” the existing one and even of changing one for another. European ideas of race certainly had an impact on Chinese thinking, but the older ways of thinking about human divisions and classifications tended to alter these European ideas in subtle but significant ways.
In many parts of the world, the early twentieth century was a time of hope and fear. The prominence of western-style science was one of the major background factors contributing to these two emotions. The germ theory of disease, for example had become almost entirely accepted by the start of the twentieth century. The notion that bacteria and viruses cause most diseases held out hope that scientific investigations could find cures for nearly all human afflictions. On the other hand, the same knowledge also stimulated a fear of unseen microbes. Potential pathogens lived in the water, on household surfaces, and on our skin. Contact with foreign peoples became even more of a cause for anxiety when one imagined all the exotic germs that those living in strange distant lands might carry and possibly transmit. The need for vigilant, coercive public health systems became more apparent to ordinary people in light of the new understanding of germs and disease.
Within this complex social, political, international, and intellectual milieu, a new term became prominent: hygiene. “Hygiene” is a loaded word today, and was even more so a loaded term during the early twentieth century. Today we tend mainly to take the term hygiene to mean sanitation, usually at the level of individuals, sometimes applied more broadly. Hygiene is morally coded as “good,” and its practice is a sign of taking personal responsibility for one’s health Schools and other socializing agencies teach certain hygienic practices to children primarily in the name of good health, but with moral overtones of “personal responsibility” ringing in the background. During the early twentieth century, the term “hygiene” (Japanese: eisei 衛生; Chinese: weisheng 衛生) was much more complex.
In addition to invoking a sense of health and personal responsibility, the term hygiene carried overtones of “civilization,” “modernity,” and “(superior) culture.” Hygiene was not only a matter of health-related practices in the narrow sense of the word, but also of lifestyle and attitude. Washing one’s hands before eating was certainly part of hygiene, but so, too, was sitting up straight (especially in school) and maintaining good posture. Soon after the Boxer Uprising, foreign imperialists occupying Tianjin tore down the city’s walls in the name of “hygiene.” In Japan, organizations dedicated to promoting lifestyle improvement undertook a campaign to encourage women to wear underwear during the 1920s and early 1930s—in the name of “public health,” “modernity,” and “hygiene,” all terms with much overlap in meaning. In China, too, wearing Western-style underwear became an emblem of good hygiene, especially for men. A common term for underwear in China at this time was weisheng yi 衛生衣, literally, “hygiene clothing,” but in the broader social context one might also translate the term as “modern clothing.” During the Pacific War (1937-45), Japanese soldiers carried (or were supposed to carry) “hygiene matchboxes” (eisei matchi), which were small boxes containing two condoms. Condoms themselves were often called “hygiene sacks” (eisei sakku) in prewar Japan. Clearly the term “hygiene” covered a wide terrain.
Imperialists routinely criticized native peoples for their alleged lack of hygiene, and this lack itself became a justification for certain imperialist policies. Clearly the term hygiene was very complex and highly potent during the early twentieth century. It resonated with medical, social, political, religious, moral, and cultural overtones. Hygiene became an emblem of modernity. It often became part of a set of real or imagined characteristics that supposedly set one nation or “race” apart from another. “Cleanliness is next to godliness” was a common expression at the time in the English-speaking world, and it hints at the strong moral overtones associated with hygienic practices. In the words of Sabine Frühstück, writing about the case in Japan, “For bureaucrats, military officials, physicians, and pedagogues alike, hygiene became a concept that not only linked but intrinsically intertwined rules of cleanliness with those of morality, the health of the body with that of the mind, the individual with society, and Japan with other modern nations.” (Sabine Frühstück, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003], p. 25.) “Hygiene,” in short, was a vague, powerful concept with a connecting and integrating function in social discourse.
Hygiene also became linked with eugenics. How did one say “eugenics” in Japanese or Chinese early in the twentieth century? There were actually several terms, each with different nuances. One was 優生学 (Jp. yūseigaku; Ch. youshengxue). Another common term was 民族衛生 (Jp. minzoku-eisei; Ch. minzu-weisheng), which literally means "race/nation/ethnic group hygiene." This hygiene-related word was closely associated with several similar compound terms consisting of a word for “race,” nation, and/or ethnic group (Japanese and Chinese terminology in this realm is just as vague and confusing as English terminology) plus a word meaning improvement. In short, notice that “hygiene” was an integral part of efforts to engineer a better society through making better (stronger, healthier, smarter, etc.) people. Let us now turn to Japan and China to examine select aspects of these attempts to strengthen the social body by strengthening (or otherwise improving) individual bodies played out in Japan and China.
You are probably tired of more terminology, but there is one more key term that we must examine: kokutai 国体, which literally means “national body.” This term first appeared in academic discourse during the last years of the bakufu. By the start of the twentieth century, kokutai had become fairly common in public discourse. It was not an ordinary household word, but most Japanese would have been able to explain that kokutai referred to some sort of special quality that their nation possessed. Indeed, the best overall translation of the term is “national essence.” Exactly what this essence was required several volumes of books to attempt to explain in detail. Most commonly, however, writers attempting to explain Japan’s kokutai would focus on the (allegedly) unbroken line of emperors dating back to the misty dawn of prehistory. In some mysterious way, this unbroken line of emperors imparted to Japan and its people certain qualities that made Japan both distinctive and superior to other countries. In addition to its meaning of national essence, some Japanese writers used the term kokutai in its more literal sense. They imagined the Japanese nation to be like a living organism, whose overall health was a function of the individual health of all the individual Japanese citizens. In this line of thinking, personal health was no longer strictly a personal matter—it was also the business of the nation, and therefore the state. The title of this chapter derives from the literal meaning of kokutai as national body.
Early in the Meiji period, Japanese physicians who went abroad to examine health practices in other countries urged their government to create an official public health bureaucracy with strong police powers. In 1875, the new state created a health bureau. In 1877, a cholera epidemic swept through Tokyo, and the bureau began its first major intervention. It quarantined victims in isolation hospitals from which few returned alive, quarantined victims’ families, disinfected houses of victims with strange chemicals, and burned the corpses of those who died. In 1879 another cholera epidemic broke out in Tokyo and the government reacted similarly. The general population resisted these unprecedented measures, even to the point of violent rioting that could only be suppressed by military intervention. The struggle for control over individuals’ bodies had begun. Over time, the state gained the upper hand. By the start of the twentieth century, Japanese public health practices resembled those of most western countries, and citizens generally complied with them.
During the late nineteenth century, several prominent physicians wrote books on hygiene. Some of these books were technical in nature, intended for specialized audiences and others were aimed at the general population. Mori Ōgai 森鴎外 (1862-1922), an army physician and novelist, was one of these writers. According to Ruth Rogaski:
. . . Mori penned thousands of pages on eisei [hygiene]—essays on venereal disease, hospitals, women’s hygiene, surgical techniques, nutrition, tuberculosis, malaria, public works, sanitary police, breast-feeding, and the hygienic value of geta (Japanese wooden clog-sandals). Mori made eisei into a science that encompassed everything: food, clothing, architecture, cities, police, armies, nation, and ultimately the Japanese “race.” For Mori, a consciousness of hygiene was what made Japan modern, and more than any other writer in Japan it was Mori Ōgai who created hygienic modernity. (Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004], p. 154.)
In addition to a state-sponsored public health system that operated under the general rubric of hygiene, various activists explored ways to strengthen society by improving Japanese bodies. A radical example was Takahashi Yoshio, who in 1884 published Nihon jinshu kairyōron 日本人種改良論 (The improvement of the Japanese race):
Takahashi . . . argued that blood and learning determine and influence one another. He also emphasized the importance of both character building and physical exercise and pointed out the advantages of mixed marriages between Japanese men and white women. While debates about the improvement of the race were common throughout the Meiji period, mixed marriages were not. Hence, Takahashi’s suggestion provoked intense criticism by contemporaries who doubted that mixing races would result in an improvement of the Japanese race, arguing that even if it did, it would take a long time. (Frühstück, Colonizing Sex, p. 20.)
Notice that although Takahashi was literally concerned with breeding a better “race,” his program also included practices that would benefit the current generation of Japanese such as physical exercise and character building. Some hard-core, biologically-oriented eugenics advocates in Japan and China argued that efforts to improve currently-existing bodies were a waste of resources and that only better breeding would make a significant improvement, albeit in future generations. Such voices were a minority view, however, and most eugenicists advocated efforts to improve the bodies of those now alive (instead of or in addition to breeding programs).
A good example of a mixed approach to eugenics (improvement of the current human stock plus better breeding for the future) can be found in the Japanese state’s attempts to regulate sexual activity. This topic is very complex, and here we can only address a few highlights. The first area of direct attention was the military. One reason was that the health of soldiers obviously had a direct effect on the strength of the state (more so than, for example, the health of scholars). Another reason is that young conscript soldiers tended to have strong sexual appetites, which they often satisfied by hiring prostitutes. Therefore, the first major effort in the realm of sexual regulation on the part of Japan’s modern government was aimed primarily at prostitutes (with some attention also paid to improving the “hygiene” of soldiers).
As early as 1876, the state began mandating health examinations for prostitutes. During the twentieth century, three different codes formed the framework for state regulation of prostitution: Regulations for the Control of Prostitutes, Regulations for the Enforcement of the Law for the Prevention of Infectious Diseases, and the Law for the Prevention of Venereal Diseases. The two sets of regulations were flexible, and subject to revision. They gradually became tighter as medical knowledge of sexually transmitted diseases advanced.
The Law for the Prevention of Venereal Diseases also required the government’s Bureau of Hygiene (Naimushō eiseikyoku 内務省衛生局) to compile detailed statistics on brothels, prostitutes, and their health throughout the country. Moreover, the bureau oversaw a system of hospitals for prostitutes suffering from disease. According to government statistics, these measures resulted in a reduction of prostitution as a vector for sexually transmitted diseases. Reality, however was different. There were numerous ways prostitutes could avoid regulations, and many worked unregistered and thus out of the gaze of the Hygiene Bureau. Sexually transmitted disease was a significant health problem among Japan’s general population during the 1920s and 1930s. The state also regularly examined soldiers’ bodies, not only for sexually transmitted disease, but also for a wide variety of other data. This data helped shape public health policies.
At the same time that the Japanese state concerned itself with the hygiene of soldiers and prostitutes, it also turned its attention to hygiene in connection with children, especially schoolchildren. For example, by approximately 1900, education researchers had become especially concerned with the posture of schoolchildren, a topic that they discussed under the broader rubric of “school hygiene studies” (gakkō eiseigaku 学校衛生学). Scholars made detailed studies of spine positions, ways of sitting, student desks, and so forth. (Interestingly, posture was becoming a prominent issue in the United States at about this time, and not only for small children. The practice of taking nude photographs of incoming students at elite universities and colleges was conducted in the name of posture improvement, and was common during the first half of the century.)
This concern with the bodies of schoolchildren gradually led to the topic of sex education. In the context of young people, “sex education” in Japan ca. 1900 or 1910 had one overwhelmingly important goal: the prevention of masturbation. Yes, that’s correct. Strange as it may sound to us today, in 1900, it was medical common sense throughout the industrial world (not only in Japan) that masturbation caused serious even fatal illnesses. (#Click here# to read the strange story of how masturbation became a medical problem in Europe.) That many people also regarded the practice as a moral shortcoming enhanced the sense of danger. Because masturbation often causes permanent harm to individual bodies, the logic went, it weakens the national body as a whole.
The debate over the proper extent and forms of sex education for children took place in the pages of both popular media and academic journals. In 1908, the daily newspaper Yomiuri shinbun 読売新聞 ran a six-week series of articles by leading medical doctors and pedagogues on "the sexual question." A theme running through most of the articles was that the dissemination of correct knowledge about sex would improve Japan's population. Frühstück summarizes the article series ("the controversy" in her terminology) as follows:
The controversy in the Yomiuri shinbun represents an entire repertoire of new ideas characterized by three main features: the ideas always appeared together; they were tightly intertwined and mutually supportive of each other; and at their core they carried the necessity of the creation and popularization of correct knowledge in order to improve the Japanese populace. "Scientific method" required that confessions of children, diagnoses of school doctors, and empirical data on the sexual behavior of students fulfill certain criteria. Scientific knowledge had to be clearly cut off from religious customs and social traditions. Moreover, the conclusions had to be prophylactic in nature, aimed at preventing dubious sexual practices (e.g., masturbation or prostitution) and their "consequences" (e.g., neurasthenia, venereal diseases, or unwanted pregnancies). Debate over "sexual questions" included discussions of the problem of sex education . . . . Some authors asked further questions: What exactly does sex education mean? Why should it be carried out? Who is to be enlightened on sexual matters? What is the goal? What can be said? Who has the authority to speak? The controversy indicated the broad ramifications of the new scientific and pedagogical interest in sex. Intrinsic to the debate were concepts of individual and social responsibility, self-restraint and happiness, and disease and concern for the nation's health. . . . (Sabine Frühstück, "Managing the Truth of Sex in Imperial Japan" [The Journal of Asian Studies, 59.2 (May, 2000)], pp. 339-340.)
One tension inherent in these discussions was disagreement about where primary responsibility for sex education lies: with parents or with "experts" (school officials, for example). Some argued that parents were in the best position to influence their children, but others questioned the qualifications of most parents, arguing, for example, that parents rarely had the requisite knowledge. Despite such disagreements about implementation, they all tended to agree on the desired goals of sex education. According to Frühstück:
Most pedagogues who contributed to the debate in the Yomiuri shinbun agreed that sex education was necessary primarily "to avoid the horrible consequences of masturbation." . . . Yubara Motoichi, the head of Tōkyō Ongaku Gakkō [Tokyo school of music], suggested discussing sexual instinct in a way that would not embarrass young boys and girls. He also thought it essential to separate boys and girls during sex education. Masturbation, he argued, was to be mentioned rarely and only if absolutely necessary, and before doing so a doctor was to be consulted. . . . For Washiyama Yayoi . . . founder and director of Japan's first medical school for women . . . masturbation was "the most terrible ailment related to the sexual instinct." Regarding sex education, she asserted: "The only purpose of the sexual instinct is reproduction, and any abuse has fatal consequences." Washiyama believed that ignorance led students between the age of fifteen and seventeen to masturbation. Since masturbation did not lead to satisfaction, they masturbated frequently and had to bear unimaginable consequences. (Frühstück, "Managing the Truth of Sex,” p. 342.)
An area of disagreement concerned whether boys, girls, or both should receive sex education and whether there should be different approaches for each. Several experts argued that both masturbation and lesbianism was rampant in schools for girls and factory dormitories (factories often preferred to employ young women, who typically worked for a few years before leaving to marry). Others, however, argued that school authorities were too nervous about sexual issues and often mistook platonic friendships between girls for sexual relationships. Some of the literature on this topic went into lurid detail about alleged practices and abuses (sorry—no example!).
This early twentieth-century discourse on sex, sexual deviancy, and sex education was ultimately concerned with the health of the nation. It tended to be alarmist about the current situation and to call for various combinations of education and coercion. Frühstück explains the connections between sex education, the national body, and the state as follows:
The concept of "the nation's health" legitimated a fine network of investigation, control, and observation by schools, parents, teachers, and physicians, as well as prohibitions. Contributors to the Yomiuri series, and other authors later, feared that certain newspapers and magazines of an already depraved society would cause children's impressions of their parent's morals to deteriorate further. They argued that even children "who came from a good home and received a good education" were in danger. What could possibly be done? Although the ethical basis was to be found at home and at school, an equal portion of responsibility for the education of "a morally strong people" was ascribed to the state. Discipline once instilled by the "ethics of the warriors" (bushi no dōtoku) was, in Mukō's view, now to be carried out by an apparatus of "social punishment" (shakaiteki seisai) formed by three major authorities: the home, the school, and other governmental institutions. (Frühstück, "Managing the Truth of Sex,” p. 343.)
It seems that in every age, social commentators tend to decry the present as a time characterized by weakness and decline. Likewise, they tend to idealize the past. In the case of Japan, particularly after its military victory over Russia in 1905, it was common to hear references to "warrior" traditions and influences of the past. In this case, it appears, the noble warriors of the past never masturbated or fornicated—yea right.
The obsessive concern with masturbation strikes contemporary readers as strange in large part because today few if any people regard masturbation as a health hazard. Because it is a harmless, private activity, that the state would concern itself with masturbation seems especially bizarre. But given the status of prevailing medical dogma do the time, this official concern made sense. The campaign to promote the wearing of underwear among women, however, seems strange by almost any standard. It can, however, be explained.
Before we examine this matter, let us get a couple of things straight. The campaign for women’s underwear in the 1920s ad 1930s was not waged by the state, at least not directly. Instead, it was waged by private organizations attempting to reform society. The general term of these groups in the context of modern Japan is lifestyle improvement organizations. Temperance associations in the United States that attempted to reduce or eliminate the consumption of alcohol (and sometimes other vices) would be roughly similar types of organizations. In general, Japan’s government probably tended to agree with the goals of the lifestyle improvement organizations, but general agreement is not the same as state sponsorship.
The campaign to promote the wearing of underwear was conducted under the closely-related banners of “public health,” “modernity” and “hygiene.” Today, virtually all Japanese wear underwear (bras, panties, briefs, boxer shorts, etc.). The practice would strike most contemporary Japanese as so “natural” and obvious that few would imagine that, for women, wearing underwear became the norm throughout the country only after the Second World War. Some Japanese women wore underwear as early as the Meiji period, but only when wearing European-style clothes. Even then, not all wearers of European-style clothes wore underwear beneath them (many men, of course, wore only underwear, at least in the summertime). Japanese-style clothing consisted of one or more robes wrapped around the body and secured with a belt, with no underwear beneath.
In 1923, in the late Taishō period, the issue of women and underwear received extensive public attention as a public safety hazard (note that in most modern societies “public safety” often replaces “morality” as the common justification for official or quasi-official attempts to regulate citizens’ private lives). In that year, a terrible earthquake devastated vast areas of Tokyo. The destruction of property and loss of life has never since been equaled in any natural disaster in Japan. (#See photographs of the earthquake's aftermath#.)The earthquake touched off rumors, the most destructive of which being that Korean immigrants had used the quake as an opportunity to loot. This rumor resulted in the slaughter of thousands of Korean immigrants at the hands of angry mobs. Another rumor was that many women died in the quake because modesty prevented their escaping fast enough. The main problem was that since most women did not wear underwear, they would not run at full speed because their robes would come open, thus exposing the private parts of the body for all to see. There is no evidence to support this rumor, and there is #extensive photographic# and #eye witness evidence# to question it. For example, in the days after the quake, it was common to see men and women of all ages bathing amidst the rubble in plain view.
It would not have been practical for the government to mandate that women wear underwear (who would police such a regulation?), but public service organizations such as the Lifestyle Improvement Alliance *expended substantial resources to encourage the practice*. In 1932, the public took a renewed interest in matters of women’s underwear when a large fire broke out at Shirokiya Department Store in Tokyo. The likely cause was celluloid toys, which are highly flammable. Shirokiya employed many young women as sales clerks. According to rumor (spread by newspaper reports), because most of these women were not wearing underwear, they refused to climb down the fire ladders that had been extended to the upper story windows. In other words, they chose to die in the fire rather than possibly expose themselves to public view. Remarkably, this tale continues to be repeated to this day as truth despite no reliable evidence to support it. Wikipedia, for example, says (ca. early 2006):
The 1932 fire at the Nihombashi store is believed to have been the catalyst for the decline in kimonos as everyday wear. During the fire, 14 customers and employees, all women, refused to jump out of windows onto life nets, for fear that their kimonos would fly open and expose them to the crowds below. Shortly after the fire, the sale of trousers and underwear skyrocketed throughout Japan. (Main Entry: "Shirokiya;" Sub-heading "Trivia.")
Colorful urban legends never seem to fade away. Strictly speaking, of course, this entry is correct because of the weasel words "is believed." The final sentence is also accurate and indicates one result of the urban legend.
Is the explanation given in the urban legend version of the fire credible? Eye witness accounts by fire fighters and others at the scene give no indication that embarrassment or modesty had anything to do with the large number of deaths. As one fire fighter recalled in a 1956 interview:
The young women made escape ropes from cloth and slipped while exiting second and third story windows or let go without being aware as the flesh ripped from the palms of their hands, falling to the electric streetcar tracks below. In some cases, the escape ropes broke. These are the reasons they died. All the stories about the lack of underwear . . . would certainly have helped boost sales for a fabric company [the Shirokiya Department Store?] (from Civilization and the Nude Body, by Inoue Shōichi, serialized throughout 1992 in Gekkan Asahi 月間朝日. November issue, p. 185).
Furthermore, in other fires at banks and department stores from about the same time, modesty was no barrier to female employees using ladders and other means of escape—as several male eye witnesses took care to observe from below. One could think of several organizations (the fire department, the department store, local government.) that would have preferred the public think a lack of underwear—not structural problems with the building, lack of preparation, or poor performance by the fire crews—was the main cause of the deaths in the Shirokiya fire.
No doubt the discourse in Japan concerning hygiene, which had been prominent for decades, conditioned reactions to the Shirokiya fire. Although the notion that employees died because of a lack of underwear strikes us today as absurd, in the 1920s it was likely a more plausible story. And, as we can see from the information above, this version of events would have diverted blame for the tragedy away from certain vested interests in society.
There were more formal elements to the growing campaign to promote underwear for public health reasons. Dr. Habuto Eiji, an obstetrician and editor of the journal Seiyoku to Jinsei 性欲と人性 (Sexual desire and humankind), decided to do some rigorous, quantitative research to see how many women were wearing underwear. He went to the Ginza district of Tokyo where he had discovered a place where the position of buildings created what amounted to a wind tunnel through which many people a day passed. The wind blew so strong that few women were able to keep their skirts, robes, etc. from blowing open or upward. Little did they know that Dr. Habuto, dedicated public servant, was watching to see if they were wearing underwear. According to the results of his study, the majority of women wearing European-style clothing wore underwear and the majority wearing Japanese-style clothing did not. Because those wearing Japanese-style clothing outnumbered those wearing European-style clothing two to one, the majority of women were not wearing underwear. We should note that the Ginza was the most upscale and sophisticated part of Tokyo and was therefore likely to have the highest percentage of women attired in European-style clothes. If Dr. Habuto’s findings were accurate, therefore, we may conclude that ca. 1930, very few women in Japan wore underwear despite all the attention devoted to the topic in popular discourse of the time.
It seems that the main motivation for many of those working to encourage Japanese women to wear underwear was a desire to “modernize” lifestyles to better fit their own conceptions of Japan’s new modern society. Of course, there is no reason that underwear is necessarily or inherently “modern,” but that was the perception among activists at the time in the various lifestyle improvement movements. Indeed, the invoking of “public health” as the main reason that women should wear underwear, necessarily invoked the closely-related ideas of hygiene and modernity. Koga Harue was an artist who often painted #images of modernity#. Among his most famous works is the 1930 painting, *Makeup Outside the Window*. It celebrates modernity in the form of a young woman, painted disproportionately large, whose main attribute is that she is clearly wearing underwear.
To take what is seemingly an entirely different kind of example, let us go to the island of Okinawa, which Japan annexed in 1879. Although technically Okinawa became a full-fledged prefecture of Japan, its actual circumstances were often more akin to those of a colony. Governors of Okinawa were always mainlanders and always appointed by the central government in Tokyo. Their policies typically stressed rudimentary cultural and linguistic training for Okinawans to make them into proper modern Japanese citizens. With this context in mind, consider the following excerpt from a public speech made in 1913 by Okinawa's Governor Takahashi on the occasion of the opening of a school:
Because from now on, things must change in accordance with the world's progress, we must reform what should be reformed and stop adhering stubbornly to outmoded ways. In this place [Okinawa], women do not fasten belts around their robes . . . No matter where one might go around here, there are women without fastened belts and women who do not wear underwear. . . . Even in Korea [then a colony of Japan], women wear underwear. . . . Try going to the mainland in your present state of dress. Not only will people laugh at you, they will hold you in contempt. However impressive and learned you might be, others will regard you as idiots. (Quoted in Naha-shiyakusho, comp., ed., Naha-shi shi, Shiryō-hen, Vol. 2.3 [Kumamoto, Japan: Shirono Insatsu, 1970], p. 348.)
Of course, as we have seen above, most mainland Japanese women did not seem to have been wearing underwear at this time either. And the bigger question might be, in any case, what does underwear have to do with anything important in the realm of politics or social conditions? Incidentally, it was also the case that in China at about this same time, we find much discussion about #female hygiene and its relationship to modernity#, as we will see in the final section of this chapter.
Despite such official, male concern with women's underwear, we should keep things in perspective: most ordinary Japanese of the 1920s and 30s were not much interested in making major changes to the way they dressed. The notion that women of the 1920s and 30s were so modest as to prefer death to exposing themselves is part of a presentist and modernist bias, argues Inoue Shōichi. He further states that since the Second World War, there has been a sharp increase in prudery and self-consciousness about breasts, in the case of women, and the external sexual organs, in the case of both men and women. This development, he says, is the direct result of underwear becoming a standard item of clothing in postwar Japan. Postwar Japanese, in other words, have learned to become ashamed of the parts of the body they cover up with underwear. (Civilization and the Nude Body, by Inoue Shōichi, serialized throughout 1992 in Gekkan Asahi. November issue, pp. 188-89.)
Returning to the broader picture in Japan, the 1930s were a time of increasing international tension and threat of war. By the summer of 1937, Japan was engaged in full-scale war with China. This war, which seemed like it would be an easy victory, dragged on for years, eventually involving Japan in wars with other countries. By the late 1930s, society had become more militarized and more prudish. Discussion of sexual matters, even in academic journals, became taboo, and government censors banned nearly all books and articles dealing with sex. A group of medical and pedagogical experts on sexual matters--sexologists--emerged during the first decade of the twentieth century. By the late 1930s, most of the sexologists were out of business. At the same time the sexologists were fading from the public stage, a new group of experts was coming to the fore: the eugenicists.
The eugenicists claimed that their agenda would promote the breeding of a stronger population and, at the same time, address the key issues that the sexologists had raised. In 1930, Nagai Hisomu founded the Japanese Association of Racial Hygiene [i.e., eugenics] (Nihon minzoku eisei kyōkai 日本民族衛生協会), which became the most influential of several eugenics organizations whose goal was to influence state policies. Nagai and his group advocated the sterilization of inferior people and those with heredity diseases. He also advocated that marriages be arranged according to eugenic principles to insure the optimal breeding of the Japanese race. By promoting these two points, Nagai and his group were in the general mainstream of eugenic thought of that day. By this time, for example, every state in the United States and every Canadian province had enacted sterilization laws.
Nagai's agenda bore immediate fruit in the form of prohibitions against many forms of birth control starting in the early 1930s. The state used these prohibitions as a convenient way to round up socialists and communists, because many left-wing political activists also promoted birth control as a way for women to control their own reproductive destiny. Nagai and his comrades were less successful in getting a sterilization law passed, despite repeatedly circulating drafts of such laws to relevant government officials. The main reason was that the medical community and others objected on the grounds that genetic science was still too crude to determine who might be a fitting candidate for sterilization and on other practical grounds. Despite these objections, the movement toward a national eugenics law gradually gained steam, inspired in part by the National Socialists (Nazis) in Germany. In 1940 the government passed the national Eugenic Law (Kokumin yūseihō 国民優性法), which went into effect in 1941. The law permitted the government to sterilize those with hereditary illnesses, which encompassed a wide range of physical and mental conditions. To help get the law passed, the health and welfare ministry agreed not actually to coerce people into getting sterilized even though the law allowed it. How many Japanese were sterilized for eugenic reasons? 217 men and 321 women between 1941 and 1947. Compared with Germany or the United States, the Japanese figure was very small. One reason for this low figure was that sterilization ran contrary to broader government policy during the war, namely to encourage reproduction at the highest rate possible to replace the increasing numbers of war dead. In short, the practical demands of wartime undermined any serious attempt at social engineering to strengthen the national body.
As we have seen, popular nationalism emerged in China around 1900 and became widespread by approximately 1920 in the wake of the May Fourth Movement. One of the main characteristics of modern nations is that their members imagine themselves to share a common ancestor. In early twentieth-century China, the overwhelmingly common choice for this alleged common ancestor was the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi 黃帝). Students and intellectuals, especially, promoted the idea of a "Han race" and Chinese nation descended from the Yellow Emperor. As Frank Dikötter explains:
The myth of blood was sealed by elevating the figure of the Yellow Emperor to a national symbol. The Yellow Emperor (Huangdi) was a mythical figure thought to have reigned from 2697 to 2597 BC. He was hailed as the first ancestor (shizu) of the Han race, and his portrait served as the frontispiece in many nationalist publications. From the mid 1930s, the radical magazines started using dates based on the supposed date of birth of the Yellow Emperor. Liu Shipei's (1884-1919) first published article advocated the introduction of a calendar in which the foundation year corresponded to the birth of the Yellow Emperor. . . . The Yellow Emperor remained a powerful figure for many decades. Despite the historian Gu Jiegang's severe criticism of the myth in the 1920s, he [=the Yellow Emperor] was still officially revered in 1941 as the founder of the nation and initiator of the race. (Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992], p. 116.)
Indeed, the myth of the Yellow Emperor continued through the years of the People's Republic and remains alive today. Also during the early decades of the twentieth century, it became common for Chinese university students, intellectuals, and politicians to see the world in terms of fierce conflicts between groups of people for dominance or even outright survival. To some extent, Darwinian ideas (social and biological) played into this view of the world, although the influence of Darwin was weaker in China than in Europe or Japan. In other words, the idea of a world consisting of groups of humans locked in bitter conflict had several sources, both native and foreign, in the case of China. Of course, the actual experience of imperialist domination was also major reason for the tendency to see the world in these terms. Here is a typical sample of Chinese revolutionary discourse at the start of the twentieth century from Chen Tianhua (1875-1905):
As the saying goes, a man is not close to people of another family [xing, 'surname']. When two families fight each other, one surely assists one's own family, one definitely does not help the foreign [wai, 'exterior'] family. Common families all descend from one original family: the Han race is one big family. The Yellow Emperor is the great ancestor, all those who are not of the Han race are not the descendants of the Yellow Emperor, they are exterior families. One should definitely not assist them; if one assists them, one lacks a sense of ancestry. (Quoted in Dikötter, The Discourse of Race, p. 117.)
Revolutionaries like Chen Tianhua or Zhou Rong often complained that China's people lacked a strong racial or national consciousness. They imagined that the creation of such a consciousness would bring about national unity, which would lead to the power to throw off the yoke of the Qing dynasty and the foreign imperialists. Chen, Zhou, and others of like mind seemed to have overlooked the evidence from around the world that even groups of people possessing a strong consciousness of race and/or nation still seem to find ample reasons to kill each other. In China, even though national consciousness did increase as the twentieth century went on, internal strife did not lessen as a result. In any case, even as some Chinese worked to increase national consciousness as a way of rescuing their country, others focused on the approach of strengthening Chinese bodies and minds. In other words, they sought to change or improve the collective national body.
The general idea of improving the national body was similar in body China and Japan (and many other parts of the world): state intervention or the intervention of public service groups to induce habits which strengthen individual bodies and thus the nation as a whole. The vast differences in political and social circumstances between the two countries, especially the lack of a strong centralized state in China until after 1949, resulted in some differences in emphasis and approach. Nevertheless, reformers in both countries understood the important role of educational institutions in transforming the habits of young people. For example, just as in Japan, Europe, and the United States, posture became a major concern among Chinese educators in the early twentieth century. One reason for this concern in all these places was the increasing tendency to liken the human body to a machine. Dikötter explains how the concern with posture played out in early twentieth-century China:
Gestures and postures were to be reformed, since physical uprightness was thought to be equivalent to moral rectitude. A good posture and balance, it was argued, would improve the national spirit: the body and the country both had to be steeled in the face of the enemy. At home and at school, the reluctant child was increasingly forced to stand up, sit up and straighten up. Numerous 'health guides for youth' carefully introduced young readers to the new gestures: the head thrown up, the chest thrown out, the stomach drawn in. A strict upright posture was prescribed to youngsters under the Guomindang's New Life Movement in the 1930s, and today it is still characteristic of the way in which young party members are portrayed in communist propaganda. On the other hand, a bearing which denoted indolence was attacked and every effort was made to correct slovenly gestures: these became the marks of physical degeneration and spiritual decay. Lack of discipline in a person's posture was condemned, and laziness was a social evil. The reformer Jian Zhiyou (1866-1929), also author of an influential Inquiry into the Chinese race, propagated the new discoveries on the 'disease of laziness' in Liang Qichao's New People's Journal at the turn of the century; Gan Yonglong expatiated on the same 'disease'. After 1900 there was an emphasis on physical training and martial vigor, and this ranged from Luo Zhenyu's recommendation to turn Confucian temples into physical training centers to Mao Zedong's writings on physical exercise. (Frank Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity in China [Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995], pp. 174-175.)
Notice the web of interconnections. A certain posture became indicative of a vigorous attitude, which, if inculcated widely, would allegedly improve the national spirit. Laziness, once a moral failing, now also became a disease with the potential to undermine nation and race through causing physical and spiritual decay. Although I have made these points before, it bears repeating that all of these concepts are vague and indefinable (at least not with consistency and precision). "Nation" and "race" are imaginary constructs that can be defined in dozens if not hundreds of ways. No legitimate scientist or medical researcher has ever found a causal link between posture and physical health, much less vaguer concepts like "spiritual" health. I make these points not to criticize Chinese intellectuals of the time, who were in any case adopting and adapting ideas that were common throughout the industrial world. Instead the broader message here is that we should always thing twice and think critically about the common sense notions of our time, particularly when political agendas are at play. In what ways to moral and medical categories overlap and interconnect in contemporary social discourse?
Another commonality between Chinese and Japanese discourse on strengthening the national body was a similar medical discourse on masturbation, "the evil habit." Although there were a few dissenters who claimed that medical concern over the alleged ill effects of masturbation were overblown, mainstream medical opinion held that masturbation was a practice that directly and severely harmed the body. Regardless of what one may think about the legitimacy of sexual pleasure, masturbation therefore became "evil" because it weakened the nation. In the case of modern China, traditional Daoist ideas of health bolstered the insights of western medicine to strengthen the anti-masturbation movement. Daoist medical ideas regarded the loss of semen as a grave threat to male health. #Click here# for more details. Consider the following excerpt from a 1934 book on sexual hygiene written for a popular audience in question and answer format. The dialogue combines modern medical terminology with classical Daoist and Buddhist terminology and concepts:
Question: What is considered sexual abuse?
Answer: The excessive indulgence in sexual desire, the squandering of semen [jingxue, a classical medical term], be it through nocturnal emissions or through immoral emissions [feifa chujing, a Buddhist term], are all considered to constitute abuse.
Question: What are the consequences of the excessive use of sexual desire?
Answer: The consequences are sexual neurasthenia [xing shenjing shuairuo, a biomedical term], impotence, spermatorrhoea, venereal diseases and the like.
Question: How many kinds of venereal diseases are there? What is harmful about them?
Answer: There are four kinds of venereal diseases: syphilis, gonorrhea and soft chancres, the last being divided into a minor type which leads to disability and a major type which leads to death, sterility or the infection of offspring.
Question: What is the harm of diseases like sexual neurasthenia, impotence, and spermatorrhoea?
Answer: Dejection, the inability to have sexual relations and death.
Question: How should youth cherish sex?
Answer: They should preserve their body like jade, avoid any excitement and restrain their behaviour, and to preserve their health, the married couple should know how to restrain sexual desire.
(Quoted in Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity, p. 166.)
Notice that overindulgence in sex in general is considered a medical problem, and that within this context masturbation would be a major concern. Notice also that this dialogue assumes a male perspective. Although Chinese physicians and reformers regarded female sexuality in general and masturbation in particular as problematic no market ever developed in China for the special underwear, restraints, or cauterizations (yes, that's correct) that became part of the campaign to prevent female masturbation in parts of Europe. The main reason was a tendency to assume that girls and women were passive objects of male desire, not sexual agents in their own right. Traditional Daoist-influenced medical ideas, with their obsessive emphasis on semen, reinforced this focus on male sexuality as the key to national health:
Semen was a form of capital which had to be carefully managed in the interests of the nation and future generations. It was said that masturbation caused impotence and premature ejaculation, and in the latter the seed was sterile. An alarmist rhetoric described how the genital organs could decompose from within. Although a superficial examination would not show them to be any different from those of a normal person, the testicles of the masturbator could shrink or become clogged with stale sperm, while the urethra could suffer from inflammation. Semen itself degenerated: 'The secretion inherent to the testes gradually decrease, the spermatozoa also diminish in quantity, the semen becomes thinner in consistency and often contains underdeveloped and weak spermatozoa. This type of spermatozoon is abnormally transparent and has an impaired power of movement, it has no feeling, lacks vitality and dies quickly, its membrane shortened, the head is small, the whole body is bent as if it has been snapped, and it has a curled tail.' A sterile sexual practice, masturbation caused permanent infertility and deprived the nation from man's most precious contribution. (Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity, p. 171.)
Although the anti-masturbation discourse in Japan and elsewhere in the world was not quite as obsessed with semen as was the case in China, the view described above was part of world-wide medical common sense during the early decades of the twentieth century. Also as in the case of Japan and elsewhere, much of the popular discourse on the harm of masturbation took the form of confessional literature in which the writer held himself up as a negative example for others to avoid. Medical professor Yu Fengbin (1881-1930), for example, wrote that:
The error of a moment may become the regret of a lifetime. As a child, I used to be careless and masturbate often. As an adult, I now regret this bitterly. . . . I had constant nocturnal emissions. For some obscure reason, my condition has recently got worse. When I go to the toilet, semen actually seeps out with the urine. Since I have contracted this disease, my memory has gradually faded, my comprehension has degenerated and my vision is impaired. (Quoted in Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity, p. 169.)
One point of rhetoric like this is to bemoan the waste of human potential. If only Dr. Yu had known of the horrible consequences of masturbation in his childhood, perhaps he would have exercised sufficient restraint. Had that been the case, his individual health and the collective health of the nation would have been better. Of course, we now know that masturbation is not harmful in any of the ways that so many medical experts used to imagine. Dr. Yu's perceived health problems and their alleged link with masturbation in his youth were, to various degrees, figments of his imagination. They were not random figments, however. Instead Dr. Yu discovered in himself exactly what he expected to discover based on the "logic" of the medical discourse of which he was a vigorous part. Obviously, the rhetorical function of such intimate confessional literature also helped shape its content.
Dr. Yu offered detailed advice on prevention strategies. Soaking a cloth in cold water and placing it on the overheated organ was one technique for immediate relief of improper urges. If that was not enough, one should place the unruly penis in a glass of ice water. In addition to these techniques, other writers proposed such measures a tying the hands to the side of the bed before sleeping, certain sleeping postures, a special leather sheath worn before sleeping that would deflate any random erections, and even certain medications (see this #array of tools# for comparison). The general atmosphere of anti-masturbation vigilance even influenced rules on table manners, which started to specify that both the eating hand and the suspicious other hand be kept on top of the table.
As we have already seen in several contexts, the notion of hygiene was part of any discussion of educational and health policy. Let us now connect hygiene, politics, and imperialism. The Boxer Uprising was a humiliating event for all the major actors in China: the rebels themselves, the Qing court, and Chinese elites. We have seen that the uprising prompted the Qing court to work hard at upgrading its image in the eyes of the imperialist powers. Similarly, the uprising also prompted Chinese elites living in areas under foreign control or in nearby areas to distance themselves from a host of negative qualities the Boxers represented (to both the Chinese elites and western imperialists): violence, superstition, backwardness, lack of cultural sophistication. Remember, "the Chinese" did not really exist even though westerners often used this expression along with some Chinese nationalists. A vast cultural distance separated social elites from the masses of rural peasants or urban laborers. One prominent way that Chinese elites were able to distinguish themselves from the unwashed masses in general and the Boxers in particular was to embrace foreign models of modernity and hygiene. Moreover, such Chinese elites usually saw their less sophisticated countrymen as deficient in hygienic modernity, causing them to support state-sponsored public health programs based on European models.
And not only European models. The tremendous influence of Japan on elite Chinese cultural practices and thought at this time is often overlooked by historians (especially historians in China). As we have seen above Japanese elites readily embraced state intervention in public health matters, especially in the name of improving hygiene (in its wide range of meanings). Japan's strong modern state made popular resistance to such measures largely futile. Chinese elites frequently went to Japan for higher education, and, whether Japanese educated or not, many Chinese elites looked to Japan as an example of an "Asian" country that had escaped the yoke of imperialism and was becoming ever more powerful and prosperous. The enthusiastic Japanese embrace of hygienic modernity, ironically in part to distance Japan from the rest of Asia, made a strong, positive impression on many Chinese elites. In the Chinese case, the state was weaker and thus unable to implement strong-armed public health measures throughout the empire. But in areas with a prominent foreign presence, Chinese elites often supported activist public health measures. In a previous chapter we have seen the example of the pneumonic plague outbreak in Manchuria in 1911-12. Writing about Tianjin soon after the suppression of the Boxer Uprising, Rogaski points out that:
Chinese elites comfortably entertained Japanese elites in their homes in the immediate aftermath of the Boxer suppression. In addition to a possible mutual appreciation of Chinese tradition, both were engaged in a similar project: distancing themselves from a perceived chaotic Other and obtaining for themselves, as fellow Asians, a position in the new order of "modern civilization." For both Chinese and Japanese elites alike, this chaotic Other was primarily defined as a "superstitions," "backward," deficient China . . . (Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity, p. 185.)
As Japanese influence in China increased throughout the first half of the twentieth century (a topic we will examine in later chapters), so too did Japanese notions of state-sponsored hygienic modernity make their way into government practice at the local level, especially in coastal areas.
Governments might pursue policies to promote hygienic modernity, but this elusive quality was not merely something that states might try to impose on unwilling populations. In the 1920s and 30s, it was also something that could be bought. Advertising urged members of the emerging middle class to make their homes bastions of hygiene by purchasing porcelain sinks, flush toilets, bathtubs and other appliances. Various patent medicines, deodorants, toothpaste, and even underwear--almost always of foreign manufacture--claimed to aid in the struggle for hygienic modernity by making Chinese bodies strong, healthy and fragrant. Dr. William's Pink Pills for Pale People, for example, offered nothing less than the "Path to Hygiene" (weisheng zhi dao 衛生之道) for those modern Chinese who consumed them. Rogaski points out that in the 1920s and 30s, the word weisheng (hygiene, hygienic modernity):
resonated through advertisements, lecture halls, movie theatres, wall posters, newspapers, magazine articles, and government propaganda as a wide variety of actors used the word to help them imagine the condition of modernity. The meaning of weisheng was not fixed . . . Ultimately, however, weisheng was intertwined with desire, a desire for a modernity--often marked as foreign--that existed just out of reach. How far away this desired hygienic modernity resided depended on the situation. For the sophisticated middle-class individual, it might easily be obtained through the purchase of a commodity. For elites contemplating the masses of Chinese people, hygienic modernity lay far away, obtainable only through a medical revolution or a moral revolution that could bring the absolute standards of the West to China. Weisheng was even used to decry biological deficiencies hidden within the very genetic material of the Chinese people. By the 1930s, some believed that "health had fled to a remote place," a hidden, microscopic realm, and could only be obtained by altering the genetic material of the "race" or by conquering the germs that lurked on the skin and in the blood. The standard for this imagined hygienic modernity was always a distant and idealized West/Japan, where all was robust and free of germs. (Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity, p. 226.)
Interestingly, in Japan at about this same time, although the word "hygiene" (eisei) remained common in public discourse, because it had been around since the early Meiji period, in advertising it began to sound old-fashioned. Therefore, in the 1920s and 30s, words like "culture" (bunka 文化) and "civilization" (bunmei 文明) often *replaced "hygiene" in ad copy.* Otherwise, these newer terms carried the same wide range of meanings as the older "hygiene," and, much like the case in China, suggested a glorious modernity that was just one more purchase away.
Purchasing hygienic modernity was one way of improving Chinese bodies. Another, more radical approach, was eugenics. We have seen that in Japan, advocates of eugenics eventually succeeded in obtaining passage of a national eugenics law, but its impact was inconsequential for a number of reasons. In China, eugenics remained at the level of academic and public discourse but did not become law. Pan Guangdan 潘光旦 was regarded as the founder of eugenics in China. He argued that programs designed to improve public health were actually a waste of resources because they allow unfit citizens to survive and possibly reproduce. Instead the government should devote all resources to breeding a better, more fit population for the future. The way to do so was to identify genetically desirable Chinese and encourage them to marry early and produce many offspring. On the other side of the equation, the state should do nothing to ameliorate the harsh conditions of poverty an disease, which would serve as natural means to weed out undesirable people. Although Pan's agenda never received widespread support and never became state policy, it contributed to the general sense of crisis among thoughtful Chinese seeking a "way out" of their country's predicament. For many Chinese, including Guomindang leader Jiang Jieshi, part of the "way out" involved strengthening Chinese bodies to make a stronger nation.
