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This paper explores domestic dynamics in the complex making of institutional psychiatry in Japan in c. 1920–45. It mainly examines gender issues between the relatively long-lasting system of the family care of mentally ill members and the use of freshly introduced systems of psychiatric hospitals. I shall look at the record of Ohji Brain Hospital (1901–45) in Tokyo, which has several thousands of case histories mainly in Tokyo c. 1920–45. From the analysis of the cases of male and female patients, as well as the complex situations of their households and kin groups, I shall look at the gender issues in the making of the psychiatric hospital regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychotherapy had developed into a dynamic and diverse field in pre-war Japan. Apart from thousands of spiritually oriented lay psychotherapists, there were a few quasi-professional practitioners who insisted on a rational approach and experimented with a variety of psychotherapeutic methods. Among them was Kokyō Nakamura, whose quest for a viable psychotherapeutic method is intriguing and illuminating. This paper examines the evolution of Nakamura's theories and practices by dividing it into three stages: hypnotic suggestion, psychoanalysis, and Morita therapy. His pragmatic and adaptive approach to psychotherapy provides not only an interesting example for studying the spread of psychotherapy across nations and cultures, but also valuable clues to understanding its nature as a body of knowledge and therapeutic method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study offers a historical introduction to psychiatry and music therapy in Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, followed by English translations of related excerpts from Shūzō Kure's Psychotherapy (1916). Music was used as preventive healthcare during the Edo period (1603–1867). This continued into the Meiji period (1868–1912), when European music was also employed by psychiatrists alongside traditional Japanese songs. Kure (1865–1932) is known as the father of Japanese psychiatry and his work best illustrates the links between music and psychiatry in Japan at the turn of the century, showing the integration of European and Japanese theories and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores an example of the transmission of Dutch psychiatric knowledge to Japan in the Edo period (1600–1868), through the translation of a case study first published by Schroeder van der Kolk in 1826. The translation appeared in an innovative new journal of Western medicine edited by the Japanese rangaku (Dutch-learning) scholar, Mitsukuri Genpo. The case study describes the symptoms and treatment of a woman who experienced delusions following an ear infection, in terms largely familiar to the Japanese doctors of the time. This translation provides opportunities to consider the globalization and localization of psychiatric knowledge, the medicalization of mental health care in Japan, and the growing interest in Western psychiatry before its official introduction to Japan after 1868. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the making of a relationship between Japanese psychoanalysis and Buddhism, in the life and work of Kosawa Heisaku. Kosawa did not work out the compatibility of psychoanalysis with Buddhism in abstract, theoretical terms; rather, he understood them as two different articulations of the same practical approach to living well. He saw this approach in action in the lives of Freud and Shinran, the latter a thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist reformer. For Kosawa, both individuals exemplified the ‘true religious state of mind’, at the achievement of which Kosawa understood psychoanalytic psychotherapy as ideally aiming. This article uses newly available documentary and interview material to examine the historical dynamics both of Kosawa’s work in this area and of the broader ‘religion-psy dialogue’ of which it is an early example. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]