Organizer and Chair: Hans Martin Krämer, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany

Discussant: Susan L. Burns, University of Chicago

It is well known in history that the exclusion of minorities or other societal groups has been an integral part of the constitution of supposedly homogeneous modern nation states. One of the instances in which this demarcation has taken place is the body: Mechanisms of exclusion have been central to the history of the constitution of the body. Indeed, it is not possible to define the 'normal' body without at the same time marginalizing or othering 'deviant' bodies. In premodern East Asia, bodies of criminals, animals, mentally ill, women, or 'barbarians,' among others, were employed as a negative foil in establishing conceptions of one's own bodily constitution, thereby defining who does and who does not belong to society.

The papers in this panel reveal connections between marginalizing representations of bodies and understandings of the societal self in Japan up to the nineteenth century. Niehaus traces both the branding of criminals into signs by certain forms of physical punishment and the stereotypical depiction of criminals' bodies as deviant in Tokugawa period Japan. Heé explores how notions of civilization and barbarism had a deep impact on the classification of the body from the 1850s until the 1870s in Japan. Krämer examines the relationship between morality and physical constitution by looking at Confucian and proto-scientific discourses on the difference between animals and humans in early modern Japan and China.

Andreas Niehaus, Ghent University, Belgium

What do we learn about a person's character by looking at his or her appearance? How is a person's history, character, and action expressed: Can these aspects be read on the body? In early modern Japan, authorities mapped the body of criminals by applying visible and readable signs (by e.g. tattooing, flogging, or mutilation), thus making the criminal identity visible by conventionalized, i.e. clearly defined signs. This stigmatization, which also meant a dissemination of Tokugawa power and control, made the body into a legible text that marginalized it and gave it an identity. This body-text also offered society orientation for its behavior towards a person marginalized by such signs. Besides this institutionalized marginalization we also find a stereotypical repertoire of signs in pictures and texts of the Edo period that easily identify a person as criminal.

This paper examines 1. the relationship between institutionalized and mediatized stereotypization of "criminal bodies" by analyzing popular stories and woodblock prints, and 2. outlines the cultural tradition in which these stereotypes have to be situated.

Hans Martin Krämer, Ruhr University Bochum

Early Chinese Confucianist thinkers were very much concerned about the human and hardly interested in animals. Until the Han period, this had changed somewhat in that animals were now frequently referred to in attempts to define the human. The Huainanzi and the Chunqiu fanlu, e.g., argued that it was only morality which made humans different from animals. Interestingly, however, they arrived at this conclusion not by mere speculative reasoning, but by pointing to differences in the physicality of humans and animals: It is the deficient bodies of animals which prevent them from developing the same high degree of morality which human beings are capable of.

When Neo-Confucianists later took the call to "investigate the things" more seriously and began to record natural phenomena, they had to reconcile traditional views on the connection between morality and physicality with their actual observations. The Japanese Neo-Confucianist and physicist Kaibara Ekken is a particularly interesting case in point. Ekken not only explicitly discussed the traditional views in his natural history work Yamato honzô (1708), but also stressed the moral necessity to take care of one's (human) body in his health guidebook Yôjôkun (1713).

This paper explores what kind of physical shortcomings Chinese Confucianists have found in animals to prove their lack of moral faculty, and how Ekken’s views of the human body were shaped deeply by ethical concerns partly stemming from this tradition.

Nadin Heé, University of Tokyo

After the coerced opening of Japan in the 1850s, the relationship and the perception of the "Japanese body" changed cardinally: Direct physical encounters and contentions of the Japanese with the strange "Western body" are reflected in a wide range of classification systems of the body. This paper examines mechanisms of in- and exclusion, boundaries between the normal and the deviant in the depiction and description of the body in the upcoming new media—like nishikieshinbun (newspaper with woodblock prints) or kawaraban (a sort of news leaflet)—after the 1850s. In analyzing these pictures and texts two patterns of categorizing the body are considered as examples. First, the definition of human and animal bodies, and second, the definition of one's own and the alien body are traced. The task is not to look at each of them isolated, but to explore the cross connections between them. Doing so, the following questions will be highlighted:

• Do the two models of in- and exclusion exist independently of each other or are they interlinked?
• What categories (for example class, race, culture, nation) play a hegemonic role in making a difference between one's own and the other body? How crucial are notions of civilization and barbarism in this context?
• Are there shifting boundaries in the definition of boundaries between social groups or Japanese and foreigners?