ABSTRACT
Over the last two or three decades, sexuality studies has come to be seen as a distinctive field of academic inquiry. What is sometimes referred to as the ‘new sexuality studies’ is distinguished from earlier paradigms which looked at human sexuality through the prisms of biology, medical science, psychoanalysis, psychology and what was known as ‘sexology’. Discussing the range of sexual concepts and practices that occur in the countries of East Asia is in many ways not a new enterprise. Where sexuality in the region is concerned, there has been a long tradition of objectifying supposedly ‘traditional’ practices that have seemed exotic to Euro-American observers. Japan’s role as an imperial power and then an economic and cultural hub in the region cannot be overestimated. For over half a century from the end of the nineteenth century until its defeat in the Second World War, Japan was a colonising power in the region.
