Sabine Frühstück
Biographic Data
| ID | 138548 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sabine Frühstück |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sabine |
| FAMILY NAME | Frühstück |
| SIGNATURE | FRÜHSTÜCK S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Barbara |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4517-6547 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 27 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Crafting nostalgia: Emotional capital and the randoseru's victory
Since its initial adaptation from the army knapsack in the late nineteenth century, the randoseru, a specific style of elementary school bag in Japan, has come to signify an inherent contradiction of capitalist culture, namely the intimate interconnections of consumer acts and emotional life, and to facilitate the expression and experience of nostalgia. Describing its means of production-from its beginnings in the Imperial Japanese Army of the la…
Made in Taiwan’: Global Storytelling, Childhood Memories, and Undergraduate Research in the Twenty-First Century
‘Made in Taiwan’ is a platform and archive of life-course interviews of people who grew up in Taiwan, designed to teach about Taiwan, one childhood memory at a time. We hope that it will spark conversations about childhood memories around the world and inspire similar projects elsewhere that bring together university instructors, undergraduate students, and local communities in an effort to learn from one another, experience knowledge production …
Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan
Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan describes the ever-changing manifestations of sexes, genders, and sexualities in Japanese society from the 1860s to the present day. Analysing a wide range of texts, images and data, Sabine Frühstück considers the experiences of females, males and the evolving spectrum of boundary-crossing individuals and identities in Japan. These include the intersexed conscript in the 1880s, the first 'out' lesbian war repo…
Children, cement, and catastrophe go well together. Review of Earthquake children: Building resilience from the ruins of Tokyo
The historical record is relatively silent regarding children and their experiences but, fortunately, not all traces have been lost to time. Some scholars have probed the boundaries of what the his
Introduction: Queer lives in contemporary Japan
This introduction aims to situate four research articles on “Queer Lives in Contemporary Japan” in the larger field of gender and sexuality studies. It argues that, historically, the concepts “queer” or “transgender” are not particularly novel. Early twentieth-century progressives in Japan observed and sought social acceptance and suggested that individuals thought of as “sexually abnormal” would one day outnumber single-sex/gender men and women.…
The Currency of Innocence: Children’s ‘Emotional Capital’ in the Japanese Empire
In early twentieth-century Japan, a large body of pictures and narratives connected children with soldiers and war-making, producing a multi-sensory emotional register. An operationalised ‘emotional capital’ was employed primarily through the unapologetic insinuation of sentiments, such as Japanese children’s admiration for and affinity with soldiers, those children’s empathy for other children in Japanese-occupied territory, and ‘occupied’ child…
Protect someone, become yourself: How the Japanese military reinvents childhood for the 21st century
Military establishments the world over invest in multi-faceted and paradoxical relationships to children and childhood. This article aims to examine how the Japanese military today engages children and childhood in order to mold their public image, legitimize their missions, appease parents, and recruit the young
R obert K ramm . Sanitized Sex: Regulating Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and Intimacy in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952
Child’s Play: Multi-Sensory Histories of Children and Childhood in Japan
Few things make Japanese adults feel quite as anxious today as the phenomenon called the “child crisis.” Various media teem with intense debates about bullying in schools, child poverty, child suicides, violent crimes committed by children, the rise of socially withdrawn youngsters, and forceful moves by the government to introduce a more conservative educational curriculum. These issues have propelled Japan into the center of a set of global con…
Writing pregnancy in low-fertility Japan
Stories about pregnancy can be really boring. After all, writers, film makers and other members of the creative class have put all the drama into the birth, not the process that leads up to it. Yet
The War on Games
2017 and talk of war games is all around us. When The New York Times reported on 10 July of this year that India, the U.S. and Japan had begun "war games," surely very few readers thought of these war games as actual games. After all, they were designed to have submarines slide unannounced into the deep waters of the Indian Ocean in order to silently take positions near the Indian coastline. When, about a month later, according to The People's Li…
Sexuality and sexual violence
The Second World War was profoundly environmental as conflict transformed environments and human relationships with them. This chapter outlines various aspects of the war's environmental history through a focus on the relationship between militarized states, societies and environments during the period of totalizing warfare. Although research into war's environmental history has laid bare the complex environmental dimensions of warfare, few attem…
Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan by Sarah Kovner (review)
Reviewed by: Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan by Sarah Kovner Sabine Frühstück (bio) Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan. By Sarah Kovner. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2012. xi, 236 pages. $50.00, cloth; $22.95, paper; $22.95, E-book. In Japan, “sex work,” to use a broad and comparatively neutral term, has been regulated for several hundred years. Romanticized when performed by the high…
U.S. Military Bases and Environmental Problems
UI Jun (1932-2006) was well known as an environmental activist and scholar. He was working at the University of Tokyo when Minamata came to light and was frustrated by his colleagues’ disregard for his findings that methyl mercury caused the disease. He went on to research other forms of water pollution, and in 1986 moved to Okinawa where he became a vocal critic of the environmental degradation caused by the U.S. military bases there. This essay…
A "Dynamic Joint Defense Force"? An Introduction to Japanese Strategic Thinking
The Japan Ground Self-Defense Force public relations channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/JGSDFchannel; for the English version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tT63npch UM) recently announced in an illustrated video showing the GSDF in action that, according to the new National Defense Program Guidelines for FY 2014 and Beyond, Japan is building a "Dynamic Joint Defense Force." As such the SDF will emphasize "readiness, sustainability, resilie…
Recreating Japanese men
Recreating Japanese Men
Ampo in Crisis? US Military's Manga Offers Upbeat Take on US-Japan Relations
At noon on Wednesday, August 4, 2010, the Public Relations Office of the United States Forces Japan (USFJ) released the first of four volumes of a manga, Watashitachi no dōmei - Eizokuteki pātonāshippu/Our Alliance - A Lasting Partnership. The manga series was intended to mark and celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan (better known as AMPO) that had been signed between …
To Protect Japan's Peace We Need Guns and Rockets: The Military Uses of Popular Culture in Current-day Japan
The original tune quoted above, "Let's Join Jieitai," was mockingly performed and recorded by Takada Wataru in 1969 as an anti-war song. The National Broadcasting Corporation immediately banned the song as Japan mobilized in support of the US in the Vietnam War, an incident that became emblematic of the fraught relationship between the Self-Defense Forces and Japanese popular culture since the end of the Asia-Pacific War
Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics (review)
Reviewed by: Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics Sabine Frühstück (bio) Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics. By Laura Miller. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2006. xiv, 256 pages. $55.00, cloth; $21.95, paper. In the 1970s, disgusted by the willingness of women to undergo expensive, painful, and exhausting operations in order to ensure that their faces and bodies reflected a certain ideal of…
Uneasy WarriorsGender, Memory, and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army: Gender, memory, and popular culture in the Japanese Army
Following World War II, Japan's postwar constitution forbade the country to wage war or create an army. However, with the emergence of the Cold War in the 1950s, Japan was urged to establish the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) as a way to bolster Western defenses against the tide of Asian communism. Although the SDF's role is supposedly limited to self-defense, Japan's armed forces are equipped with advanced weapons technology and the world's third-lar…
Gendering Modern Japanese History (review)
Reviewed by: Gendering Modern Japanese History Sabine Frühstück (bio) Gendering Modern Japanese History. Edited by Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge, Mass., 2005. xi, 607 pages. $60.00. With Gendering Modern Japanese History, the Harvard University Asia Center has put out yet another handsome book. Collectively, the volume's essays poignantly make the case that gender matters in modern Japanese history. Ho…
Male Anxieties: Nerve Force, Nation, and the Power of Sexual Knowledge
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 a…
The Rules of Play: National Identity and the Shaping of Japanese Leisure (review)
Reviewed by: The Rules of Play: National Identity and the Shaping of Japanese Leisure Sabine Frühstück (bio) The Rules of Play: National Identity and the Shaping of Japanese Leisure. By David Leheny. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2003. xiv, 188 pages. $29.95. Slicing through the vast land of leisure and tourism while carefully parting policies from other concerns, David Leheny approaches "leisure" and "tourism" as political rather than episte…
The celebration of violence: A live-fire demonstration carried out by Japan's contemporary military
In this article we analyze an annual live-fire exercise held by Japan's Self-Defense Forces for the general public. On the basis of our analysis, we suggest that anthropologists seriously examine the military establishments of technologically advanced societies. If anthropologists want to understand violent acts, we need to study the perpetrators of such acts and not only their victims. In most of the scholarly literature, violence is seen as ano…
The celebration of violence: A live-fire demonstration carried out by Japan's contemporary military
In this article we analyze an annual live-fire exercise held by Japan's Self-Defense Forces for the general public. On the basis of our analysis, we suggest that anthropologists seriously examine the military establishments of technologically advanced societies. If anthropologists want to understand violent acts, we need to study the perpetrators of such acts and not only their victims. In most of the scholarly literature, violence is seen as ano…
"Now We Show It All!" Normalization and the Management of Violence in Japan's Armed Forces
Based on a diverse set of sources, the authors argue that since the end of the cold war the SDF has begun to use a complex set of strategies to actively address its problematic status in contemporary Japanese society and to manage its connection to organized violence in new ways. These strategies range from details of language and uniforms to aspects of body comportment; the control, regulation, and aestheticization of information about the SDF f…
The Culture of Japan as Seen through Its Leisure
Managing the Truth of Sex in Imperial Japan
My lecture is a lecture on biology. Therefore we will not be dealing with venereal diseases or perversions but with perfectly normal sexual phenomena. From my experience during the past two semesters I know that most of my students, or about sixty percent, still live chaste lives. We will become familiar with many technical terms and foreign (European) words. On the one hand, using technical scientific terminology is unavoidable, and on the other…
The Currency of Innocence: Children’s ‘Emotional Capital’ in the Japanese Empire
In early twentieth-century Japan, a large body of pictures and narratives connected children with soldiers and war-making, producing a multi-sensory emotional register. An operationalised ‘emotional capital’ was employed primarily through the unapologetic insinuation of sentiments, such as Japanese children’s admiration for and affinity with soldiers, those children’s empathy for other children in Japanese-occupied territory, and ‘occupied’ child…
Die Politik der Sexualwissenschaft: Zur Produktion und Popularisierung Sexologischen Wissens in Japan 1908-1941
Die Politik der Sexualwissenschaft: Zur Produktion und Popularisierung Sexologischen Wissens in Japan 1908-1941
Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan
The Culture of Japan as Seen through Its Leisure
The Culture of of Japan as Seen through Its Leisure
Managing the Truth of Sex in Imperial Japan
My lecture is a lecture on biology. Therefore we will not be dealing with venereal diseases or perversions but with perfectly normal sexual phenomena. From my experience during the past two semesters I know that most of my students, or about sixty percent, still live chaste lives. We will become familiar with many technical terms and foreign (European) words. On the one hand, using technical scientific terminology is unavoidable, and on the other…
Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society
"Now We Show It All!" Normalization and the Management of Violence in Japan's Armed Forces
Based on a diverse set of sources, the authors argue that since the end of the cold war the SDF has begun to use a complex set of strategies to actively address its problematic status in contemporary Japanese society and to manage its connection to organized violence in new ways. These strategies range from details of language and uniforms to aspects of body comportment; the control, regulation, and aestheticization of information about the SDF f…
The celebration of violence: A live-fire demonstration carried out by Japan's contemporary military
In this article we analyze an annual live-fire exercise held by Japan's Self-Defense Forces for the general public. On the basis of our analysis, we suggest that anthropologists seriously examine the military establishments of technologically advanced societies. If anthropologists want to understand violent acts, we need to study the perpetrators of such acts and not only their victims. In most of the scholarly literature, violence is seen as ano…
The Rules of Play: National Identity and the Shaping of Japanese Leisure (review)
Reviewed by: The Rules of Play: National Identity and the Shaping of Japanese Leisure Sabine Frühstück (bio) The Rules of Play: National Identity and the Shaping of Japanese Leisure. By David Leheny. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2003. xiv, 188 pages. $29.95. Slicing through the vast land of leisure and tourism while carefully parting policies from other concerns, David Leheny approaches "leisure" and "tourism" as political rather than episte…
Male Anxieties: Nerve Force, Nation, and the Power of Sexual Knowledge
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 a…
Uneasy WarriorsGender, Memory, and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army: Gender, memory, and popular culture in the Japanese Army
Following World War II, Japan's postwar constitution forbade the country to wage war or create an army. However, with the emergence of the Cold War in the 1950s, Japan was urged to establish the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) as a way to bolster Western defenses against the tide of Asian communism. Although the SDF's role is supposedly limited to self-defense, Japan's armed forces are equipped with advanced weapons technology and the world's third-lar…
Gendering Modern Japanese History (review)
Reviewed by: Gendering Modern Japanese History Sabine Frühstück (bio) Gendering Modern Japanese History. Edited by Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge, Mass., 2005. xi, 607 pages. $60.00. With Gendering Modern Japanese History, the Harvard University Asia Center has put out yet another handsome book. Collectively, the volume's essays poignantly make the case that gender matters in modern Japanese history. Ho…
Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics (review)
Reviewed by: Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics Sabine Frühstück (bio) Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics. By Laura Miller. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2006. xiv, 256 pages. $55.00, cloth; $21.95, paper. In the 1970s, disgusted by the willingness of women to undergo expensive, painful, and exhausting operations in order to ensure that their faces and bodies reflected a certain ideal of…
To Protect Japan's Peace We Need Guns and Rockets: The Military Uses of Popular Culture in Current-day Japan
The original tune quoted above, "Let's Join Jieitai," was mockingly performed and recorded by Takada Wataru in 1969 as an anti-war song. The National Broadcasting Corporation immediately banned the song as Japan mobilized in support of the US in the Vietnam War, an incident that became emblematic of the fraught relationship between the Self-Defense Forces and Japanese popular culture since the end of the Asia-Pacific War
Ampo in Crisis? US Military's Manga Offers Upbeat Take on US-Japan Relations
At noon on Wednesday, August 4, 2010, the Public Relations Office of the United States Forces Japan (USFJ) released the first of four volumes of a manga, Watashitachi no dōmei - Eizokuteki pātonāshippu/Our Alliance - A Lasting Partnership. The manga series was intended to mark and celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan (better known as AMPO) that had been signed between …
Recreating Japanese men
Recreating Japanese Men
U.S. Military Bases and Environmental Problems
UI Jun (1932-2006) was well known as an environmental activist and scholar. He was working at the University of Tokyo when Minamata came to light and was frustrated by his colleagues’ disregard for his findings that methyl mercury caused the disease. He went on to research other forms of water pollution, and in 1986 moved to Okinawa where he became a vocal critic of the environmental degradation caused by the U.S. military bases there. This essay…
A "Dynamic Joint Defense Force"? An Introduction to Japanese Strategic Thinking
The Japan Ground Self-Defense Force public relations channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/JGSDFchannel; for the English version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tT63npch UM) recently announced in an illustrated video showing the GSDF in action that, according to the new National Defense Program Guidelines for FY 2014 and Beyond, Japan is building a "Dynamic Joint Defense Force." As such the SDF will emphasize "readiness, sustainability, resilie…
Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan by Sarah Kovner (review)
Reviewed by: Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan by Sarah Kovner Sabine Frühstück (bio) Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan. By Sarah Kovner. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2012. xi, 236 pages. $50.00, cloth; $22.95, paper; $22.95, E-book. In Japan, “sex work,” to use a broad and comparatively neutral term, has been regulated for several hundred years. Romanticized when performed by the high…
Sexuality and sexual violence
The Second World War was profoundly environmental as conflict transformed environments and human relationships with them. This chapter outlines various aspects of the war's environmental history through a focus on the relationship between militarized states, societies and environments during the period of totalizing warfare. Although research into war's environmental history has laid bare the complex environmental dimensions of warfare, few attem…
Child’s Play: Multi-Sensory Histories of Children and Childhood in Japan
Few things make Japanese adults feel quite as anxious today as the phenomenon called the “child crisis.” Various media teem with intense debates about bullying in schools, child poverty, child suicides, violent crimes committed by children, the rise of socially withdrawn youngsters, and forceful moves by the government to introduce a more conservative educational curriculum. These issues have propelled Japan into the center of a set of global con…
Writing pregnancy in low-fertility Japan
Stories about pregnancy can be really boring. After all, writers, film makers and other members of the creative class have put all the drama into the birth, not the process that leads up to it. Yet
The War on Games
2017 and talk of war games is all around us. When The New York Times reported on 10 July of this year that India, the U.S. and Japan had begun "war games," surely very few readers thought of these war games as actual games. After all, they were designed to have submarines slide unannounced into the deep waters of the Indian Ocean in order to silently take positions near the Indian coastline. When, about a month later, according to The People's Li…
R obert K ramm . Sanitized Sex: Regulating Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and Intimacy in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952
Sociology (21 works) · Political science (19 works) · Japanese History and Culture (17 works) · History (13 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Asian Culture and Media Studies (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works)