LIFE AND EXCREMENT

— the reimagination of flow in Edo Japan (1603–1868) —

Shigehisa Kuriyama

The year is 1850. The place is Edo, Japan. A diner pauses after a sip of saké, and stares into space. One eye peers high into the sky, while the other scans a remote horizon.

You know the look. It is the gaze of someone lost in thought. The unfocused stare of a person pondering the revelations of his mind's eye.

Excrement and Toil

What did they think, the townspeople of mid-nineteenth-century Japan, when they surveyed this diner’s belly?

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that the Mirror of Food and Drink and the Nurturing of Life (Inshoku yōjō kagami 飲食養生鑑c. 1850) enjoyed success in its time.{{¹}}{{{The publication of the lushly illustrated multi-volume collection of materials from Japanese history, Zuroku nihon iji bunka shiryō shūsei 図録日本医事文化史料集, which contains a full-colour reproduction of the Mirror of Food, was pivotal in the modern revival of interest in the print. See Nihon Ishi Gakkai ed. Zuroku nihon iji bunka shiryōshū 図録日本医事文化史料集. (Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1978). The survival of many original prints, however, testifies to its contemporary popularity. These prints can be found in numerous collections, both private (including that of the author) and institutional. The copy featured in the Zuroku is now housed at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, along with a companion print, the Mirror of Sexual Regimen (Bōji yōjō kagami 房事養生鑑), which awaits future study. For those interested in scrutinising the Mirror of Food in detail, I recommend the high-resolution digital version that the University of California San Francisco has made available online. Other institutions that own copies include the Naitō Museum of Pharmaceutical Science and Industry, the National Museum Nature and Science (Tokyo), the University of Kansas and the National Library of Medicine.}}}

Its playful portrait of the body’s inner workings is entertaining to contemplate even for us today, and its topic too is one in which we remain keenly interested. After all, we all must eat and drink, and we all want a long and healthy life.

But what is surprising—and indeed, rather puzzling—is the particular way in which this Japanese print relates food and life. Its take on the subject is quite unlike our own.

Closeup of workers inside the diner's belly

For us, food is most immediately sustenance. It is what feeds the body. We know that we cannot live for long without eating, and we believe that our choice of foods can make us stronger or make us sick. Food also feeds the soul. Eating and drinking can be intensely pleasurable, and can often feel just as much a spiritual need as a biological imperative.

But the Mirror has nothing to say about any of these matters. Not a word.

Astonishingly, it is completely silent on what foods are healthy and nutritious, and which are sickening and meretricious.

Nor does it make any mention of tastes and desires.

This is the puzzle. Here is a print that touts the paramount importance of eating and drinking to life, and yet it blithely ignores those concerns that make food seem vital to us. Why? If not as a source of sustenance and comfort, how else do food and drink matter?

The Mirror of Food’s answer is startling. Food and drink matter, its preface explains, as excrement-to-be. The saké and fish that the diner consumes will soon become faeces and urine. This was the print’s vital lesson; the one truth critical for the nurturing of life. Accumulating in the body, meals become toxic residues that putrefy and foment the most horrible diseases. Everyone, regardless of talent or social rank, is at risk. No-one can escape pollution.

The implications of this lesson are what is displayed in the diner’s belly: to prevent the harmful accumulation of poisons in the body, smelly, sludge-like excrement must be processed and transported through and out of the body from morning to night, every day, continuously, without a break. Caring for life is above all a matter of ceaseless hard work.

Is it any wonder that our diner looks so pensive? In mid-nineteenth-century Japan, meditations on health focused on two grim obsessions: a fear of excrement and a compulsion to toil.

The Sources of Obsession

The fear came after the compulsion, and was imported from Europe.

Anxieties about food’s polluting residues had long haunted the Western imagination of the body. For over 2,000 years, the origins of sickness were closely associated with the inner accumulation of excrement. Which is why, from Greek antiquity into the mid-nineteenth century, therapy and prophylaxis in Europe relied heavily on cathartic cleansing—on purging measures such as bloodletting, enemas and emetics.{{²}}{{{On the centrality of the excremental imagination in European humouralism, see Shigehisa Kuriyama, ‘The Forgotten Fear of Excrement’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38 (2008): 413–42.}}}

By contrast, classical East Asian medicine was far more concerned about the loss of vital essences than about the accumulation of toxic wastes—at least traditionally. Yet, remarkably, after it was introduced to Japan in the late eighteenth century, the European fear of excrement quickly became part of the everyday self-understanding of ordinary Japanese.{{³}}{{{Sugita Gempaku, whose New Book of Dissection (1774) introduced Western anatomy to Japan, was also a key conduit for the transmission of Western anxieties about excrement. His Seven Don'ts for Nurturing Life (1801) was among the first Japanese works to stress how food’s residues corrupted the blood. See Sugita Gempaku, Yōjō shichifuka 養生七不可, 2a-b (edition housed at Waseda University). On Gempaku and the transmission of anatomy, see Shigehisa Kuriyama, ‘Between Eye and Mind: Japanese Anatomy in the Eighteenth Century’, in Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge, ed. Charles Leslie and Allan Young (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 21–43. What the Mirror of Food suggests, however, is that the impact of this new style of seeing remained relatively limited before the modernising reforms of the Meiji period, and that the aspect of Western medicine that was truly influential in the Edo period was one that has hitherto been largely overlooked, namely, the fear of excrement.}}}

For example, Santorio Santorio’s notion of ‘insensible perspiration’—the idea that health turned on the daily expulsion of massive volumes of food’s residues through the skin’s pores—found its way into popular manuals of domestic medicine.{{⁴}}{{{Hirano Jūsei taught that a full third of the wastes from ingested food had to be excreted as invisible vapours—insensible perspiration—through the pores. See What Patients Families Must Know (Hirano Jūsei, Byōka suchi 病家須知, vol. 2, 5b, edition housed at Waseda University). The perils of unevacuated faeces were well known, he noted, but the problem of obstructed pores, if less obvious, was no less dangerous, and accounted for countless maladies. Around the same time as the Inshoku yôjô kagami, Kawamoto Kōmin would publish his Kikai kanran kōgi (1851–56; 機海観瀾広義), the first Japanese textbook of Western science, which would assign an even greater role to the skin, calculating that the skin counted some 20 million pores, through which no less than five-eighths of ingested food and drink had to be purged every day. For more on insensible perspiration, see Kuriyama, ‘The Forgotten Fear of Excrement’; E. T. Renbourn, ‘The Natural History of Insensible Perspiration: A Forgotten Doctrine of Health and Disease’, Medical History 4 (1960): 135–52.}}} Japanese craftsmen, for their part, designed devices that let people purge their own bowels.{{⁵}}{{{Intestinal purging figures at the forefront of concerns in Devices as Effective as Drugs (Seikei Sugita, Naifuku dōkō 内服同効), which was composed shortly after the Mirror of Food.}}}

For contemporary viewers, then, the Mirror reflected the accepted wisdom of the day. Its vision of workers busily transporting wastes was more a reminder of common beliefs than a revelation of new discoveries.

We cannot but wonder: How did foreign fears come to be internalised as a local obsession? Why were European anxieties about excrement so quickly assimilated into Japanese bodies? As is often the case in history, the change was not, in fact, quite as abrupt as it appears. For more than a century, long before they began to fret about labouring to move along wastes, doctors in Japan were already insisting on the need to work hard to sustain the flow of qi 氣.

Patient receiving enema, and another throwing up

Transfer of purging patients in Europe to processing excrement in Japan

Qi in ancient China was a dynamic, ethereal fluid, something that flowed naturally and spontaneously, like shifting winds, like floating clouds.

Chinese doctors constantly underlined the continuity between the qi coursing inside the human body and the shifting breaths of the surrounding world, the flow of fluids within people and the streaming of seasonal time.{{⁶}}{{{See Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 1999), Chapter 6.}}}

The late seventeenth century, however, saw the emergence of starkly different intuitions in Japan.

Life had changed. The world that Japanese doctors now saw around them was no longer one of open skies and streaming cosmic breaths. Now they lived in densely crowded cities, amidst the clamor of commerce, and under the reign of money. And in this new life qi lost its classical fluidity. It no longer flowed, naturally, on its own.

Instead, it came to be imagined as something that had to be made to flow, something whose circulation depended on human effort, on work. Without continuous human exertion, doctors warned, qi would stagnate and harden into sickening accumulations.

This was the change that eased the later incorporation of European fears. If alien anxieties about accumulating excrement took root in Japan with surprising speed in the nineteenth century, it was because Japanese had already been obsessing for over a century about work, stagnation, and the harmfulness of accumulating qi.

Life and Money

The unification of Japan in 1603 ushered in an age of prolonged peace and unprecedented prosperity. By the end of the seventeenth century, Edo had become home to a million people and was possibly the largest city in the world. Luxuries abounded, and what were once considered delicacies and extravagances felt increasingly like ordinary necessities.

Contemporary doctors and moralists explicitly framed their altered vision of qi within this altered social order. Qi now stagnated as it had never done before, they explained, because people had become lazy and overfed, addicted to pleasures and chronically indolent. This was why the majority of the population now suffered from qi accumulations (shakki 積気)—stagnant, sickening lumps that grew larger and harder with each passing day.{{⁷}}{{{Shūan Kagawa, Kinsei kampō igakusho shūsei 近世漢方医学書集成 vol. 65 (Tokyo: Meicho shuppan, 1982), 128–29.}}}

The required remedy was clear. Stagnation had to be countered with steady toil. Only hard work could restore flow. This was the key teaching of the Yōjōkun (養生訓, 1713), the most widely read medical text in Japanese history. It extolled: ‘Keep the body constantly working, and food and qi will circulate, and ingested food will not stagnate. This is how to care for life.’{{⁸}}{{{ Ekken Kaibara, Yōjōkun. Wazokukun 養生訓・和俗訓 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1981), 44.}}}

For the first time in Japanese history, industriousness thus came to be touted as a universal virtue.{{⁹}}{{{On the rise of a new conception of qi in the Edo period and its entwinement with the so-called ‘industrious revolution’, see Shigehisa Kuriyama, ‘The Historical Origins of katakori’, Japan Review 9 (1999): 127–49. For a more philologically detailed Japanese version of this study, see Shigehisa Kuriyama, ‘Katakori kō’ , in Rekishi no naka no yamai to igaku, ed. Keiji Yamada and Shigehisa Kuriyama (Kyoto: Shibunkaku, 1997). On the notion of an ‘industrious revolution’, see Akira Hayami, Keizai shakai no seiritsu: 17–18 seiki 経済社会の成立・17–18世紀 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1994).}}} Work became a quasi-metaphysical ideal. Even gold and silver, contemporary theorists of commerce insisted, had to be made ‘to move and put to work’.

Just as the life of individuals depended on making qi circulate inside their bodies, so the vitality of the new economic society required the vigorous flow of money. As early as 1692, Nishikawa Joken warned that money hoarded and allowed to idle in private coffers would soon die.{{¹⁰}}{{{Nishikawa Joken 西川如見, Chōnin bukuro 町人嚢 in Kinsei chōnin shisō 近世町人思想 vol. 59 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1975), 101.}}}

Life and money were henceforth entwined. And, just as the qi accumulations of the early eighteenth century evolved by the mid-nineteenth century into accumulations of putrid wastes, so the gold and silver accumulated by the rich, too, came to be imagined as excrement.{{¹¹}}{{{On the connection between money and excrement, see Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), Chapter XV, ‘Filthy Lucre’. For a discussion of the connection in the specific case of Edo period Japan, see Kuriyama Shigehisa, ‘Money as a Humour’, in The Body in Balance, ed. Elizabeth Hsu and Peregrine Horden (Oxford: Berghahn, 2013), 69–85.}}} In 1855 a major earthquake destroyed large sections of Edo, and the capital’s wealthier denizens were forced to contribute to rebuilding the city. But, in the ‘catfish prints’ that circulated right after the disaster, the money coughed up by the wealthy—which doctors, carpenters and other profiteers scurried to gather—was revealed to be merely vomit and faeces.{{¹²}}{{{Japanese folk belief associated earthquakes with the stirring of catfish. For more on these pictures, see Noboru Miyashita et al., Namazue—shinsai to Nihon bunka [Catfish Pictures—Earthquakes and Japanese Culture], (Tokyo: Ribun shuppan, 1995).}}}

And why not? Like the residues of extravagant feasts, hoarded wealth represented superfluous excess. Is it right for people to accumulate more than they need? The Mirror of Food and the earthquake prints testified to the profound unease that excess could stir, even as that excess was avidly coveted and madly pursued.

Fluids flow. Once upon a time, this was almost a tautology. But no longer. In the economic society of early modern Japan intuitions of streaming breezes were replaced by fears of sickening sludge, and trust in spontaneous flow gave way to a merciless compulsion. A punishing need to toil.

IMAGE AND FILM CREDITS

Listed in the order in which they first appear in the essay.

Man vomiting gold. Anonymous print, 1855. Ishimoto Collection, General Library of the University of Tokyo (item ID: I-02-090). Made available by the library under an equivalent of Creative Commons BY license.

Man drinking saké and all subsequent images. Inshoku yōjō kagami (anonymous, c. 1850). Reproduced from personal copy owned by author.

Food pyramid. Loma Linda University, Vegetarian Food Pyramid, 2011. Taken from Wikimedia Commons. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike Unported (CC BY 3.0).

Gourmand. Henri Brispot (1846–1928), Un Gourmand, n.d. Taken from Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Woman vomiting. Isaac Cruickshank, A Woman Holding Her Stomach and Vomiting into a Bucket after Self-Administering an Emetic, 1800. Wellcome Collection. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Woman receiving clyster. Anonymous French oil painting c. 1700?, Wellcome Collection. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Floating clouds. Reproduced under license.

Busy scene of commerce. Saitō Chōshū (1737–99), et al., Edo meisho zue (1834–36). Edition published by Suhara Ihachi 須原屋伊八. Japanese National Diet Library edition 000007277957, maki 1, frame 48. Copyright expired work, released by the library for free use without permission.

Fish market. Saitō Chōshū (1737–99) et al., Edo meisho zue (1834–36). Edition published by 須原屋伊八. Japanese National Diet Library edition 000007277957, maki 1, frame 39. Copyright expired work, released by the library for free use without permission.

Edo street scene. Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), Junkei machi Yomise no Zu, 1828. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Universal Public Domain Dedication (CC0 1.0).

Lobster. Katushika Hokusai (1760–1849), Large Lobster, 1800–15. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Universal Public Domain Dedication (CC0 1.0).

Catfish and rich men. See Man vomiting gold.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Hirano, Jūsei. Byōka suchi 病家須知 [What Patients' Families Must Know]. Edo: Suharaya Mohei, 1832.

Kaibara, Ekken. Yōjōkun. Wazokukun 養生訓 [Precepts on Nurturing Life]・和俗訓 [Precepts on Education]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1981.

Kagawa, Shūan. Kinsei kampō igakusho shūsei 近世漢方医学書集成 [Collected Works of Early Modern Kampō Medicine] vol. 65. Tokyo: Meicho shuppan, 1982.

Nishikawa, Joken. Chōnin bukuro 町人嚢 [Guide for Merchants] in Kinsei chōnin shisō 近世町人思想 vol. 59. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1975.

Sugita, Gempaku. Yōjō shichifuka [The Seven Don'ts of Nurtuing Life]. 1801 [no publisher].

Sugita, Seikei. Naifuku dōkō 内服同功 [Devices as Effective as Drugs]. 1st ed. 1857. Reprinted in Edo kagaku koten sōsho 江戸科学古典叢書. Vol 29. Edited by Yamada Teijun. Tokyo: Kōwa shuppan, 1980.

Secondary Sources

Brown, Norman O. Life Against Death. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959.

Hayami, Akira. Keizai shakai no seiritsu: 17–18 seiki 経済社会の成立・17–18 世紀 [The Establishment of an Economic Society: 17th and 18th Centuries]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1994.

Kuriyama, Shigehisa. ‘Between Eye and Mind: Japanese Anatomy in the Eighteenth Century’. In Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge, edited by Charles Leslie and Allan Young, 21–43. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Kuriyama, Shigehisa. ‘Katakori kō’. In Rekishi no naka no yamai to igaku, edited by Keiji Yamada and Shigehisa Kuriyama, 37–62. Kyoto: Shibunkaku, 1997.

Kuriyama, Shigehisa. ‘Money as a Humor’. In The Body in Balance, edited by Elizabeth Hsu and Peregrine Horden, 69–85. Oxford: Berghahn, 2013.

Kuriyama, Shigehisa. The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. New York: Zone Books, 1999.

Kuriyama, Shigehisa. ‘The Forgotten Fear of Excrement’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38 (2008): 413–442. doi.org/10.1215/10829636-2008-002

Kuriyama, Shigehisa. ‘The Historical Origins of katakori’, Japan Review 9 (1999): 127–49.

Miyashita, Noboru et al. Namazue—shinsai to Nihon bunka 鯰絵—震災と日本文化 [Catfish Pictures—Earthquakes and Japanese Culture].Tokyo: Ribun shuppan, 1995.

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