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Male Anxieties: Nerve Force, Nation, and the Power of Sexual Knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2005

Abstract

In the autumn of 1929, a Kyôto-based journal for popular medicine reported that the dean of sexology, Habuto Eiji, had committed suicide after having suffered from neurasthenia (shinkei suijaku) for a long time. A practicing gynaecologist, Habuto had been the editor of the sexological journal Seiyoku to Jinsei (Sexual Desire and Humankind), the author of numerous books on sexual issues, and the co-author, together with Sawada Junjirô, of an abridged Japanese version of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, entitled Hentai Seiyokuron (1915). He also was involved in the translation of Havelock Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1901–1928), the twenty Japanese-language volumes which were advertised under the title Sei no Shinri as early as in 1927. Among other sexologists, Habuto had been a chief theorist on the causes of neurasthenia. Physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, pedagogues, and sexologists agreed with him that neurasthenia primarily afflicted men and was caused by overpowering exhaustion that was in turn the result of certain sexual practices. Modern commentators like Habuto speculated that neurasthenia was the result of masturbation or – even worse – homosexuality.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2005

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Footnotes

1

I am grateful to the MedHeads at the University of California at Berkeley and Warwick Anderson in particular for their comments on an earlier version of this article. Michael Bourdaghs's critique has been invaluable for broadening my perspective. I also would like to thank Hiromi Mizuno and the participants in the workshop on Sex and the Politics of Desire: Japan at the University of Minnesota in April 2002. Research and writing were facilitated greatly by the University of California President's Fellowship in the Humanities and a Committee of Research Grant from the University of California at Santa Barbara.