Sexology

Abstract

In early twentieth-century Japan, a new, Western ‘science of sexuality’ began slowly to take hold, displacing understandings of sexuality derived from native intellectual traditions. Minakatu Kumagusu, an ethnographer and biologist born in 1867, was an early student of the burgeoning Western literature on sexuality and his writings bore witness to a profound shift in thinking about sexuality taking place in his society. As much as he advanced the new science, he believed that it threatened alternative ways of conceptualizing sexuality that had flourished in Japan. He argued that the Japanese were losing sight of their traditions and in one of his works he noted the existence of a Sino-Buddhist tract that identified four karmic causes that accounted for why some men desired to be sexually penetrated by other men — such as their having been guilty of committing slander or incest in a previous life. The logic of this argument may seem baffling to us today and, as Gregory Pflugfelder reminds us, it would certainly not have satisfied Western sexologists, scientists who sought the origins of human sexual behaviour in the body, not in the karma.¹ But who were those scientists who influenced Kumagusu and what was the enterprise to which they were committed? More generally, what are the origins of Western sexology? What was the ‘truth’ of sexuality the new science discovered?