Sexology versus Folklore: The Argument over a Native Conception of Gender in Early 1920s Japan

In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan, when parents feared their child(ren) may die before reaching adulthood, parents could raise their child(ren) as the opposite gender to bestow upon them the gods’ protection and thus wish them a long life. Scholars have investigated this phenomenon by focusing on its social, cultural, and religious significance. However, experts have not studied the lively debate that the practice sparked in the early 1920s. On one side of the controversy was sexologist Sawada Junjirō (1863-1944), a vocal and prolific expounder of the science recently imported from the West, who deemed the custom an “errant belief” (meishin) that had to be eradicated from society lest it damage the public health of the “benighted people” (gumin). On the other side of the dispute was mycologist and folklorist Minakata Kumagusu (1867-1941), an eclectic thinker whose nuanced and sophisticated worldview bore the influence of Buddhism, who defended the practice as part of popular wisdom, or, in his parlance, as the “way of the people” (gushadō). By closely examining and commenting on the essays in which these intellectuals discussed the phenomenon of rearing children as the opposite gender, this paper aims at illustrating the main concepts and articulations of the Sawada-Minakata disagreement. In this manner, the paper will uncover an aspect, not yet researched, of the intensive process whereby Japanese sexologists rejected indigenous notions of gender and how instead Japanese of divergent opinions valorised their cultural heritage.