From the Brothel, to the Body: the Relocation of Male Sexuality in Japan's Prostitution Debate, 1870-1920
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From the Brothel, to the Body: The Relocation of Male Sexuality in Japan's Prostitution Debate, 1870-1920 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Colbeck, Craig. 2012. From the Brothel, to the Body: The Relocation of Male Sexuality in Japan's Prostitution Debate, 1870-1920. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:9795674 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA © 2012 –Craig Boone Colbeck All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Andrew Gordon Craig Boone Colbeck From the Brothel, to the Body: the Relocation of Male Sexuality in Japan’s Prostitution Debate, 1870-1920 Abstract This dissertation argues that the Japanese debate over prostitution regulation between the 1870s and the 1910s saw a fundamental shift in the construction of male sexuality as a political tool. Before the turn of the century the Protestant Christian “abolitionists” and the brothel- keeping “regulationists” who debated Japan’s system of licensed prostitution did not describe erotic desire as an inherent property of male bodies; rather, both camps asserted that men did not experience erotic desire unless they visited brothels. On that shared understanding, the two sides debated whether desire itself was desirable: while abolitionists argued that desire harmed society by training men to use women as tools for pleasure, their opponents argued that the experience of desire stabilized male psyches. After the turn of the century both camps reformulated their arguments based on the assumption that all male bodies harbored an instinctual desire for sex. Regulationists adopted the notion with gusto. And abolitionists proved no less willing, as they came to describe male sexual desire as the impetus for the romantic love that created stable families, and argued that commercial sex disrupted the natural courtship process. In the 1910s, secular feminists deployed the male sex drive to advocate for legislation to empower women within marriages. The political use of the sexual instinct put male sexuality at the heart of several forms of social policy and critique. Therefore the debate over prostitution regulation is emblematic of the larger discourse on male sexuality as a subject of government intervention and social-policy activism. iii Acknowledgements Among the functions of an Acknowledgments page is to recognize the people an author took for granted in order to complete the project at hand. On that note, I would like to thank my family—especially my parents—for their indispensable support through the years I have spent researching and writing this dissertation and throughout my graduate career, not to mention everything that came before. Likewise, as the culmination of a graduate career, a dissertation represents the contributions of a large number of scholars who have been generous with their time. Most important among these are my three dissertation advisers—Andrew Gordon, Ian Miller, Gregory Pflugfelder. This dissertation was only possible with the generous support of Harvard University, the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and Waseda University. The patience and input of several scholars was also very important and will always be deeply appreciated. In Japan, my dear friend and sempai Fujino Yūko; the always supportive Onozawa Akane of Rikkyō University, the especially-patient Obinata Sumio and the members of the Waseda Modern History Workshop, Michael Burtscher and the Tokyo University Japanese History Workshop, and most of all the members of the Waseda Modern Japanese History Workshop and the Harvard Modern Japanese History Dissertation Workshop. I would also like to thank my sometimes-editor and constant friend David MacMaster, my trustworthy study- buddy Qiaomei Tang. Especially important for their input on the earliest drafts of this dissertation were Nick Kapur, Konrad Lawson, Jennie Miller, Kristin Williams, and Josh Hill. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: THE MEANING OF REGULATION 39 CHAPTER TWO: THE BROTHEL AS THE LOCUS OF MALE SEXUALITY, 1874-1900 87 CHAPTER THREE: THE INSTINCT FOR SEX; THE INSTINCT FOR LOVE, 1900-1920 130 CHAPTER FOUR: EVOLUTION AND GENDER DIFFERENCE IN SECULAR FEMINISM 171 CONCLUSION 217 WORKS CITED 230 v Craig Colbeck Harvard University Introduction This dissertation is about politics, not sex. True, it investigates discourses on sexuality as politics; but this does not entail an investigation into the sexual practices of the brothel or of the home. Moreover, this dissertation does not examine the lives of those I term “pleasure workers” or the circumstances in which they labored in brothel districts. Other scholars have done this to great effect. Indeed, without such scholarship to draw on, this project would not be possible. Furthermore, although this dissertation gives sustained attention to the roots of the demand-side of prostitution, it does not seek out or ask questions of individual brothel clients about their subjective experiences. Rather than the above, this dissertation gives sustained attention to a discursive reconstruction of male sexuality as a political tool in Japan in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. In other words, between 1870 and 1920, a new conception of the fundamental nature of male sexuality replaced a previous one in the arguments of the prostitution-regulation debate; this dissertation tracks and interprets this change. In brief, the change was from debating policy based on the shared understanding that male erotic desire was contingent on a man’s visiting a brothel, to debating policy based on the shared understanding that all men carried sexual desire within themselves at all times, requiring no external stimulus. The specific example in question is the debate over whether the Japanese government should continue to regulate prostitution through a two-layer system of officially-recognized brothels that indentured prostitute women through advance payments to their heads of households (usually their fathers), and of specialized hospitals that vaginally examined and sometimes incarcerated them, all administered by a strict and also specialized police apparatus. This system was in effect in Japan between the 1870s to 1 Craig Colbeck Harvard University the end of the Second World War; however, because the discursive change in question ossified in the 1910s, it should suffice to extend the analysis only to 1920. The Beginnings of “From the Brothel to the Body” This project began from my reading of feminist theory from the 1970s and 1980s; my first engagement was reading Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking essay—“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”—while serving as a teaching assistant for a course on Japanese manga. (However, this dissertation is not a male-gaze analysis.) The essay, written in 1973 and published in Screen in 1975, details a psychoanalytic theory of “where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual [male] subject and the social formations that have molded him.”1 Mulvey’s argument that visual imagery of women interacts with the male subconscious precludes the intervention by the man’s conscious mind. That is: “The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking . .”2 Mulvey’s particular contribution was to phrase male sexuality in terms of both psychoanalysis in its source and specifically linked to viewing in behavior, and many feminists have continued to do this under the broader rubric of “objectification.” But as the following pages demonstrate, feminists around the world had long used this framework in a more expansive way. I appreciate the utility of the “male gaze” framework. Across the twentieth century, feminists made highly-effective use of the idea that male sexual instincts inevitably guided male behavior in ways that damaged women’s interests in particular as well as society’s interests in general. Arguments constructed on this basis have been crucial to anti-sexual-discrimination and -harassment legislation, reform of rape investigation and prosecution, and more. This sea-change 1 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975), p. 6. 2 Ibid., p. 11. Current author’s emphasis. 2 Craig Colbeck Harvard University in attitudes and policies with respect to gender in society would not have come about without a large-scale problematization of male sexuality as a social-policy issue based on the assumption that men are always already prone to viewing women as sexual objects, and to do so in ways that incorporate denigration and violence. As opposed to viewing women as the source of sexual feelings within the man—“blaming the victim”—this framework rightly placed responsibility on individual men to control their supposedly-innate tendencies and charged society with enforcing this self-control. Therefore, the governmentality of male sexual desire has had a profound, positive impact on structural and physical violence against women in the United States and across much of the globe. But it occurred to me that the underlying framework of Mulvey’s analyses—which discursively roots male sexuality within the male body and the “primordial”