Sabine Frühstück – East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies

Sabine Frühstück

PhD, University of Vienna

Area:

Modern and contemporary Japan, history, ethnography

Office:

HSSB 2232

Email:

fruhstuc@ucsb.edu

Personal Website:

http://sabinefruhstuck.com

Curriculum Vitae:

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About:

Sabine Frühstück studies modern and contemporary Japanese culture and its relationship to the world. Her research has engaged several intellectual fields. Her most recent book, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan (2022) describes the ever-changing manifestations of sexes, genders, and sexualities from the 1860s to the present day. Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan (2017) is a cultural history of the naturalized connections between childhood and militarism. It analyzes the rules and regularities of war play, from the hills and along the rivers of 19th century rural Japan to the killing fields of 21st century cyberspace. The ethnography, Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army (2007) employs gender, memory and popular culture as technologies of engagement with a number of debates that centrally involve the ambivalent status and condition of Japan’s contemporary military. Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (2003) is a socio-historical study of the creation, formation, and application of a “science of sex” from the late 19th through the mid-20th century.

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Committed to the pursuit of knowledge as an interdisciplinary and transnational enterprise, Frühstück has guest edited special journal issues of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (2023) and Asian Anthropology (2020), and co-edited volumes on Child’s Play: Multi-sensory Histories of Children and Childhood in Japan (2017), Recreating Japanese Men (2011), Neue Geschichten der Sexualität (1999), and The Culture of Japan as Seen Through Its Leisure (1998). Her books, articles, and essays have appeared in Japanese, German, French, Russian, and English.

Frühstück is the general editor of the book series “New Interventions in Japanese Studies” of the University of California Press and co-editor of the Journal of Japanese Studies. She has been the PI on Korea Foundation Establishing a Professorship Grant (2022–27), a Taiwan Academy grant (2023), and a Japan Foundation IPS Grant, 2019–22 (Ref. No. 10121178), and has served on the Scientific Advisory Boards of the University of Vienna, the German Institute of Japanese Studies, Tokyo; the American Advisory Committee for Japanese Studies, Japan Foundation; an ACLS Fellowship Committee; the North East Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies; the Executive Board of the Vereinigung für sozialwissenschaftliche Japanforschung; the Board of Trustees of the Society for Japanese Studies; the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources; the advisory/editorial boards of book series on “Transnational Asian Masculinities” (Hong Kong University Press) and “Children, Youth and War” (University of Georgia Press); the advisory or editorial boards of The Journal of Japanese Studies, Japan Forum, Critical Military Studies, Vienna Journal of East Asian Studies, and U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, and the editorial committee of the University of California Press. She has been a member of the Eisenhower Research Project at the Watson Institute of International Studies of Brown University, the chair of the Executive Board of the Pacific Rim Research Program, University of California, and the director of the East Asia Center as well as the Center for Taiwan Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Frühstück was a Japan Foundation postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Tokyo (1998-99, 2001), a University of California President’s fellow at UC Berkeley (2001-2002), an external faculty fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center (2005-2006), a visiting research professor at Kyoto University (2003), a senior fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies, Vienna (2010), a visiting professor at the Deutsches Institut für Japanforschung, Tokyo, a visiting scholar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Stanford University (2015-2016), and the 2019 Shinhan Distinguished Faculty in the Underwood International College of Yonsei University, Seoul, among other honors.

Shared Media

View videos and listen to podcasts about Frühstück’s research and teaching.

Interview with Will Brehm about why Playing War: Children and the Modern Paradoxes of Militarism in Japan (2017) matters now on FreshEd, a “weekly podcast that makes complex ideas in educational research easily understood.”

Roundtable on “Meiji at 150 – Gendering War & Peace in Modern Japan” (Episode 21). Tristan Grunow (UBC) in conversation with Frühstück, Barbara Molony (Santa Clara University), and Hillary Maxson (University of Oregon).

The “Short(est) History of Sex in Japan” (in Japanese and German) on the Goethe Institute’s website.

Publications:

Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Child’s Play: Multi-Sensory Histories of Children and Childhood in Japan, ed. Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.
Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.
日本人の「男らしさ」 -サムライからオタクまで「男性性」の変遷を追う。東京：明石書店、2013.
Recreating Japanese Men, ed. Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
不安な兵士たち ~ニッポン自衛隊研究 サビーネ・フリューシュトゥック。東京：原書房, 2008.
Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Neue Geschichte der Sexualität: Beispiele aus Ostasien und Zentraleuropa 1700-2000, ed. Franz X. Eder and Sabine Frühstück. Vienna: Turia & Kant, 1999.
The Culture of Japan as Seen through Its Leisure, ed. Sepp Linhart and Sabine Frühstück. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998.
Die Politik der Sexualwissenschaft. Zur Produktion und Popularisierung sexologischen Wissens in Japan 1908–1941. Vienna: Institute for Japanese Studies, 1997.

Selected Articles:

“Japan’s Military Battles Its Own Male-dominated Culture,” East Asia Forum Quarterly vol. 8, no. 2 (April–June 2016), pp. 28–29. http://www.eastasiaforum.org/author/sabine-fruhstuck/rss
“Sexuality and Sexual Violence.” In The Cambridge History of the Second World War – Vol. III. Total War: Economy, Society, Culture, ed. Michael Geyer and Adam Tooze. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
「モダンギャル（モガ）としての女性兵士たちー自衛隊の内と外」。軍隊の文化人類学。田中雅一編。東京：不許社、2015.
“A ‘Dynamic Joint Defense Force’? An Introduction to Japanese Strategic Thinking.” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus.http://www.japanfocus.org/events/view/213, posted on March 18, 2014.
“Sexuality and Nation States.” In Global History of Sexuality, ed. Robert Marshall Buffington, Eithne Luibheid, and Donna Guy. London: Wiley-Blackwell (2014).
“The Modern Girl as Militarist: Female Soldiers In and Beyond Japan’ Self-Defense Forces.” In Modern Girls On the Go: Gender, Mobility, and Labor in Japan, ed. Alisa Freedman, Christine Yano and Laura Miller (2013).
“The Uses of Popular Culture for Sex and Violence.” Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies 13/3 (December 2013). http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/ejcjs/about/index.html
“‘The Spirit to Take Up a Gun:’ Militarizing Gender in the Imperial Army,” In Gender, Nation and State in Modern Japan (ASAA Women in Asia Series), ed. Andrea Germer, Vera Mackie and Ulrike Wöhr. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2014.
“AMPO in Crisis? US Military’s Manga Offers Upbeat Take on US-Japan Relations” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 45-3-10, November 8, 2010.
“J-Militarisierung: ‘Go, Go, Peace,” In J-Nationalismus, ed. Jaqueline Berndt and Steffi Richter. Berlin: Konkursbuchverlag Claudia Gehrke, 2008.
“New Conversations, New Truths: Commentary on ‘Politics and Pitfalls of Japan Ethnography: Reflexivity, Responsibility and Anthropological Ethics.” Critical Asian Studies 39/4, 2007.
“De la militarisation de la culture impériale du Japon,” In La société japonaise devant la montée du militarisme, ed. Jean-Jacques Tschudin and Claude Hammon. Arles: Editions Picquier, 2007.
“アヴァンギャルドとしての自衛隊一一将来の軍隊における軍事化された男らしさ一一」『人文学報』第90号, 2004年4月, 京都大学人文科学研究所.”
“Male Anxieties: Nerve Force, Nation and the Power of Sexual Knowledge in Modern Japan.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 15/1, 2005.
“Gender and Sexualities,” In Companion to the Anthropology of Japan, ed. Jennifer Robertson. London: Blackwell, 2005.
“‘Now We Show It All!’ Normalization and the Management of Violence in Japan’s Armed Forces.” Journal of Japanese Studies 28/1, 2002 (with Eyal Ben-Ari).
“Managing the Truth of Sex in Imperial Japan.” Journal of Asian Studies 59/2, 2000.

Courses Taught:

Violence and the State in Modern Japan (Japan 25, lower division)
Sociology of Japan (Japan 63, lower division)
Asian Values (EACS 7, lower division, co-taught)
Modern East Asian Cultures (EACS 4B, lower division, co-taught)
Childen at War (EACS 136, upper division)
Representations of Sexuality in Modern Japan (Japan 162, upper division); cross-listed with History and Anthropology
Modernity and the Masses in Taishō Japan (Japan 164, upper division); cross-listed with History
Popular Culture in Japan (Japan 165, upper division)
The Modern Girl Around the World (EACS 166, upper division)
Japan Modern (Japan 226, graduate seminar on various topics)
Modern East Asian Cultural Studies (EACS 215, graduate seminar on various topics)
Freshmen and honors seminars on: Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan, Men and Masculinities in Modern Japan, Growing Up in Japan, and History and Memory in the 20th Century.