As the author of this detailed, closely reasoned and beautifully written study reminds us, "Rather than sexual practice, this book is a study primarily of sexual discourse. I am concerned here, in other words, less with the sorts of sexual acts that people engaged in, than with how they wrote and spoke about these acts and the meaning that they attached to them."
His premise is that desire, sexual or not, is by no means a constant or a given. Rather, it is shaped in crucial ways by the manner in which it is thought and spoken about.
To indicate what these are in reference to Japan, he maps the unfolding of three paradigms of male-male sexuality (which he calls disciplinary, "civilized" and sexological), across three realms of knowledge (popular, legal and medical) over three chronological eras (Edo, Meiji, Taisho-Showa). Though he is quite aware that historical discourse is never this neat, he also believes that "even if all maps are approximations, we could not set forth on our journeys without them."
By "disciplinary," Pflugfelder means the Edo ethos that framed male-male sexuality as a "michi" or "do," as in judo or kendo, a "way" to be pursued and perfected. Its rhetoric made use of an expression, "shudo" (the "way of youths") that indicated a number of assumptions, among them that the erotic object was not yet adult and that the desiring subject was fully so.
The "civilized" paradigm refers to the Meiji legal codes that insisted upon the power of the state and found shudo to be uncivilized -- as indeed was found anything other than state-sanctioned marriage between males and females. The "sexological" construct of late Meiji, lingering into contemporary Heisei, frames male-male sexuality not as an erotic discipline to be perfected, or as a breach of propriety to be condemned, but as a sexual pathology that demanded the attentions of medical professionals.
Opinion is usually the result of terminology. This is the reason that the author is careful to insist upon the term "male-male" sexuality. Such terms as "perverted" are blunt tools indeed; the still-accepted "homosexual" is cumbersome and carries an unwanted medical weight, and the more recent "gay" has become so disco-happy as to exclude it from any serious discussion of the matter.
There is also the matter of designation. "Loving youths" or "loving women" was something that one did rather than what one was. "Suru" (to do) was the verb used in the copious Edo literature on the subject and loving youths did not preclude loving women or the other way around.
The literature itself is vast. Thanks to the sustained efforts of the publishing industry from the 17th century on, there is a continuous and extensive record of popular construction of male-male sexuality in Japan that remains one of the richest to survive in any part of the world before the present century.
Some of Pflugfelder's findings within this body of information correct current popular misconceptions: the notion, for example, that the Edo period was some sort of "golden age" for the pursuit of male-male sexual pleasures. On the contrary, there was an unprecedented proliferation of legislative efforts to regulate such behavior. The emphasis, however, was not on the act itself, but upon its commercialization. Mercantile male-female pleasures received much the same treatment.
(On the other hand, female-female desire was barely mentioned, let alone regulated. Perhaps it was regarded, like so much else, as being of less importance because it did not involve men, or perhaps it was merely disregarded, on the alleged example of Queen Victoria. Striking out an identifying clause in a new law, she is supposed to have said, "There is no such thing.")
That male-male desire had political underpinnings is also exposed here. A 17th-century lord of Mito, for example, wishing to describe the evils of a harsh Edo governance, chose intercourse with page boys as the most apt metaphor, since in both cases the party on top (the inserter or ruling class) derived satisfaction, while the other (page boy or populace) suffered.
Working closely with masses of historical materials (mostly here translated for the first time) the author slowly and patiently builds a most convincing case for a study of a definition of desire (of any kind) within shifting constellations of cultural meaning.
At the same time he writes, "Let us hope that future generations will not judge what we do in bed, or who we are as people, simply on the basis of the portrayals in our fiction, the proscriptions in our law codes, or the diagnoses of our physicians and psychiatrists."
Pflugfelder's study offers both a humanist synthesis of what history has left us and an astute analysis of what contextualization can reveal of its subject. It is the first book of its kind and a very important one.
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