2026 (Nos. 1070-1082)

Summary

History of Hot Springs in the Middle Ages: Focusing on Sakushu Shioyugo Hito Shinbyoki

ITO Katsumi

This paper analyzes Sakushu Shioyugo Hito Shinbyoki, the text detailing the origins of the Yunogo Onsen in Mimasaka City, Okayama Prefecture, and discusses its nature and characteristics. It was written in 1380 by the Rinzai Zen monk Unkei Shizan (1330–91), who recorded the history of the spring based on a local elder’s tale about its origins during his trip to the Yunogo Onsen for recuperation in 1380. According to legend, the Yunogo Onsen emerged from a different place in the past, but in 708, it jumped to its present location. Consequently, Yunogo Onsen came to be known as "Tobi-yu," or the Leaping Spring, and was regarded as a spring with miraculous healing properties. This text on the origins of the onsen attempts to theoretically explain why the Leaping Spring is a miraculous spring, based on the Confucian classic I Ching. Since this origins text, written in the 14th century, was unknown before this, Sakushu Shioyugo Hito Shinbyoki is considered an extremely valuable historical source on the medieval history of hot springs in Japan.

Bathing Bodies and “Clean” Subjects: Hygiene, National-Character Discourse, and Colonial Rule

KAWABATA Miki

This paper examines how bathing customs in Japan became bound up with the concept of “cleanliness” and, in the modern era, were institutionalized and normatively regulated, using the history of public bathhouses as its lens. After outlining conceptions of bathing found in Edo-period bathhouse culture and Yojo-sho (health care books), it traces how—against the backdrop of regulatory ordinances and hygienic science from the Meiji period onward—facilities such as layout and ventilation were progressively standardized. It also analyzes how the Western Public Bath Movement’s dual conception of cleanliness—as both physical hygiene and moral virtue—was introduced and reinterpreted by Japanese intellectuals, thereby contributing to the formation of a discourse on a Japanese “national character that values cleanliness.” In tandem with this process, water-quality inspections and public bath policies accompanied discourses and practices that positioned marginalized groups as “unclean.” The paper further shows that in Taiwan and Korea, bathhouses functioned as instruments of “civilizing” and assimilation policies, through which criteria of modern subjecthood were assessed against cleanliness norms.

Maternal Practices of Infant Bathing in Modern Japan: The Formation of Normative Discourse on Infant Care

HOGETSU Rie

This study examines professional discourses on infant bathing at home—including the “first bath” (ubu-yu)—to elucidate how hygiene governance operated through the family in modern Japan. Drawing on midwifery training textbooks from the Meiji period and childcare manuals published between the Meiji and early Shōwa eras, it argues that bathing was not merely a hygienic act but a key practice in the standardization and domestication of medical-hygienic knowledge. In midwifery textbooks, hygienic bathing was systematized as a medical-scientific technique, and qualified midwives were positioned not only as technical practitioners but also as pedagogical agents mediating the dissemination of hygienic childcare within households. In childcare manuals, bathing was reframed from a customary act into one grounded in medical-hygienic rationality, articulated as a “technical skill of motherhood” to be learned and correctly performed. These findings reveal how the modern reconfiguration of caregiving linked professionalization, gender norms, and domestic hygiene. Future work will address variations between normative ideals and lived practices across regions and social classes.

The Tokyo Bathhouse Association and the Bathing Fees Issue: Focusing on the 1900s-1920s

YOSHIDA Ritsuto

This paper aimed to examine public bathhouses, which provided ordinary citizens the opportunity to take baths; it focuses on the issue of bathing fees and the relationship between the Tokyo Bathhouse Association—an industry group—and the police and clarifies one aspect of the city's social structure where the bathhouse industry serves as a pivotal node. Though highly public in nature, individual bathhouses were private, profit-seeking businesses that sought to increase incomes and caused price competition. Although the Tokyo Bathhouse Association attempted to make bathing fees uniform under the coordinated pressure of district associations to maintain order within the industry, it faced stiff resistance that sometimes led to dysfunction. When the Bathhouse Business Management Regulations were amended in May 1917, shifting from a bathing fee system to a licensing system administered by the Metropolitan Police Department, the Tokyo Bathhouse Association sought to use this external pressure to limit price competition and strengthen internal control. Consequently, the Tokyo Bathhouse Association maintained internal industry control while shifting focus toward coordinating with the supervisory authority, the Metropolitan Police Department.