Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Insanity, institutions and society: the case of the Robben Island Lunatic Asylum, 1846–1910
- 2 The confinement of the insane in Switzerland, 1900–1970: Cery (Vaud) and Bel-Air (Geneva) asylums
- 3 Family strategies and medical power: ‘voluntary’ committal in a Parisian asylum, 1876–1914
- 4 The confinement of the insane in Victorian Canada: the Hamilton and Toronto asylums, c. 1861–1891
- 5 Passage to the asylum: the role of the police in committals of the insane in Victoria, Australia, 1848–1900
- 6 The Wittenauer Heilstätten in Berlin: a case record study of psychiatric patients in Germany, 1919–1960
- 7 Curative asylum, custodial hospital: the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum and State Hospital, 1828–1920
- 8 The state, family, and the insane in Japan, 1900–1945
- 9 The limits of psychiatric reform in Argentina, 1890–1946
- 10 Becoming mad in revolutionary Mexico: mentally ill patients at the General Insane Asylum, Mexico, 1910–1930
- 11 Psychiatry and confinement in India
- 12 Confinement and colonialism in Nigeria
- 13 ‘Ireland's crowded madhouses’: the institutional confinement of the insane in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland
- 14 The administration of insanity in England 1800 to 1870
- Index
8 - The state, family, and the insane in Japan, 1900–1945
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Insanity, institutions and society: the case of the Robben Island Lunatic Asylum, 1846–1910
- 2 The confinement of the insane in Switzerland, 1900–1970: Cery (Vaud) and Bel-Air (Geneva) asylums
- 3 Family strategies and medical power: ‘voluntary’ committal in a Parisian asylum, 1876–1914
- 4 The confinement of the insane in Victorian Canada: the Hamilton and Toronto asylums, c. 1861–1891
- 5 Passage to the asylum: the role of the police in committals of the insane in Victoria, Australia, 1848–1900
- 6 The Wittenauer Heilstätten in Berlin: a case record study of psychiatric patients in Germany, 1919–1960
- 7 Curative asylum, custodial hospital: the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum and State Hospital, 1828–1920
- 8 The state, family, and the insane in Japan, 1900–1945
- 9 The limits of psychiatric reform in Argentina, 1890–1946
- 10 Becoming mad in revolutionary Mexico: mentally ill patients at the General Insane Asylum, Mexico, 1910–1930
- 11 Psychiatry and confinement in India
- 12 Confinement and colonialism in Nigeria
- 13 ‘Ireland's crowded madhouses’: the institutional confinement of the insane in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland
- 14 The administration of insanity in England 1800 to 1870
- Index
Summary
A brief look at the history of psychiatric confinement in Japan from the Meiji Restoration (1868) to the Japanese experience of the Second World War (1941–5) must give a sense of déjà-vu to those familiar with its European counterparts in the nineteenth century. A cause célèbre of wrongful confinement led modern Japan to the Mental Patients' Custody Act (1900), its first national legislation for regulating the confinement of lunatics. In 1919, the effort of a few eminent psychiatrists, as well as the initiative of health officials at the central government, led to the Mental Hospitals Act (1919), which promoted hospital-based provision for the insane. Under these two acts, psychiatric provision in pre-war Japan expanded rapidly in the first four decades of the twentieth century, just like its empire in the Far East. Especially when compared with the situation in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, one is struck by the similarities. When the two countries started to confine the insane on a large scale, with an interval of about one century, they were both in the turmoil of industrialization, which perhaps acted as a kind of predisposing condition to the rise of asylum. Moreover, England and Japan shared three important factors in their creation of asylum-based psychiatric provision: the impetus given by exposé of the abuse of psychiatric confinement, the initiative taken by the central government, and the establishment of a psychiatric profession.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Confinement of the InsaneInternational Perspectives, 1800–1965, pp. 193 - 225Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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