New Books on Japan: "Madness in the Family: Women, Care, and Illness in Japan"

March 8, 2023 | 7:00PM-8:30 PM EST | REGISTER FOR ZOOM

Madness in the Family: Women, Care, and Illness in Japan (Oxford University Press, 2022)

Author: H. Yumi Kim, Assistant Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University

Discussant: Daniel Botsman, Professor of History, Yale University

The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with H. Yumi Kim (Assistant Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University). Professor Kim will be speaking about her new book, Madness in the Family: Women, Care, and Illness in Japan (Oxford University Press, 2022) . Madness in the Family explores how, following the introduction to Japan of Western ideas about psychiatry and mental illness in the 1880s, the family came to be seen as the natural provider of care for those suffering from mental illnesses. As Professor Kim demonstrates, women and families navigated a shifting therapeutic landscape by producing their own gendered approaches to madness that would take precedence over the claims of psychiatry, the law, and the state. By decoupling the history of mental illness from the discipline and institutions of psychiatry, Madness in the Family reveals the power and fragilities of gender, kinship, and care in the creation of different modes of caring for and understanding mental illness that persist in Japan to this day. Daniel Botsman (Professor of History, Yale University) will serve as discussant.