The samurai warrior is a defining image of Japan that has inspired some of the most enduring icons of its popular and literary culture since medieval times. Yet Funakoshi Kinkai’s Ehon baisō gundan is a warrior tale of an entirely different kind; while blades are crossed and valiant deeds extolled in the narrative, its battleground is the human body, its warriors are under attack from the miasma of disease, and the insidious assailant is a scourge that was terribly familiar in early modern Japan: syphilis. Such mock battles were in fact a prolific trope in Edo-period (1600-1868) literature and arts, which humorously pitted all kinds of inanimate objects against each other; these could range from rice wine and mochi rice cakes to different genres of popular literature and types of Kyoto textiles.
Armed feuds between various medicines and diseases, such as measles and smallpox, were a particularly successful motif across a variety of media, from narrative fiction to visual arts and commercial advertising. This type of military metaphor for the ‘battle’ against disease was not unique to early modern Japan, and even at the dawn of the twenty-first century we still regularly ‘declare war’ on cancer and ‘combat’ new epidemics. If cultural theorist Susan Sontag is correct that deadly, widespread, and incurable diseases attract popular mythologization, then syphilis certainly fulfilled all these preconditions in early modern Japan. Modern science has proven the viral extent of its transmission – with Edo-period bone samples suggesting infection rates of between forty and seventy percent of the adult population – and contemporary accounts bear witness to a growing awareness of the rampant spread of the disease among all walks of life.
Sugita Genpaku 杉田玄白 (1733-1817), one of the pioneers of Western-style medicine at the turn of the eighteenth century, claimed that no less than seven or eight hundred in a thousand patients he treated every year suffered from syphilis. Treatment was often ineffectual and unpleasant; apart from Chinese herbal medication and hot spring bathing, doctors swore by mercury-based medicines that caused serious side effects due to their toxicity. Despite its prevalence, syphilis was in fact a comparably new disease in most of the early modern world. After appearing in Europe at the end of the fifteenth century, it subsequently swept across the continent at a breathtaking speed and reached the shores of Japan a mere two decades later at the beginning of the sixteenth century, presumably via the Asian mainland. The Japanese first referred to the skin eruptions of syphilis as ‘Chinese boils’ (tōgasa 唐瘡) due to their perceived geographic origin, applying a naming strategy similar to that in Europe, where the new malady was variously known as the ‘French disease’, ‘Spanish disease’, and ‘Neapolitan disease’. Medical opinions concerning this devastating illness changed throughout the Edo period – as did social attitudes towards it. Late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Japanese physicians mainly interpreted its ulcers as the visible manifestation of stagnating sexual desires that had manifested physically under the skin’s surface.
Viewed as arising from the sufferer’s body itself, initially no connection was drawn with another contaminated body or with the specific social context of prostitution. Indeed, manifold explanations existed in the Edo-period medical mind to make sense of syphilis: Some sources blamed environmental and climactic factors, others hereditary factors or the emerging urban modus vivendi of luxury and conspicuous consumption. It was not long, however, before the notion appeared in both medical writings and popular conceptions of the disease that one possible source of syphilis was transmission through intercourse, particularly with prostitutes. One late eighteenthcentury doctor, for example, complained:
The prostitute should be called a storehouse for syphilis. A long time ago I was asked for help by a bordello and treated many cases of this disease. In every brothel seven or eight out of every ten prostitutes were secretly infected, but they made up their faces with rouge and white powder, covering up the signs of disease. They should truly be called monsters.
Needless to say, such rhetoric demonized professional sex workers as the source of syphilis infection and the flourishing early modern culture of the pleasure quarters as a cesspool of disease. Nevertheless, this vilification failed to produce any sustained public discourse questioning the institution of prostitution per se in early modern Japan, much less any detectable governmental attempts to prevent the spread of the disease. Only once Japan opened its ports to Western ships in the second half of the nineteenth century did such measures become a matter of debate, as a result of foreign intervention. Until that point, dealing with the disease was largely left to the unfortunate sufferers, their families, and at times doctors with varying degrees of knowledge. In the course of the eighteenth century, the number of syphilis treatises published both for experts and lay people increased, and medical practitioners specializing in its treatment appeared, along with a booming market for commercial patent medicines.
It is within this context that we have to place the appearance of a work such as Ehon baisō gundan. Its author, Funakoshi Kinkai, was in fact one of the doctors who began to specialize in syphilis treatment. More precisely, he straddled the categories of both patient and practitioner. If we are to believe his own account of events, both of his parents were infected with the disease, while he himself “suffered from it for several years in his youth and sought relief with all kinds of remedies” – yet to no avail. The quest for a cure ultimately motivated him to become a doctor and to spend many years developing his own treatments. He later set up his practice in Osaka and dedicated himself to enlightening common people about the disease, penning several compendia on the topic in accessible vernacular before writing Ehon baisō gundan.
His first-hand experience in battling the affliction is perhaps nowhere more palpable than in the medical case studies he published, which paint a devastating picture of the horrors of the disease. His patients included men and women of all ages, prostitutes as well as the sons and daughters of merchant families, and those who had contracted the disease congenitally as young children as well as those infected later in life.
Their symptoms are described in gruesomely graphic detail:
Patient: the son of Hinoya Chōshichi, aged 26, from Osaka Shinsaibashi. His left leg had been eaten away by syphilis from the knee joint to two-thirds down his calf. The sores gaped like caverns in a rocky landscape – some deep, some shallow – up to about one sun (ca. three centimetres) in depth.
In Ehon baisō gundan, however, Funakoshi strikes a very different tone in order to disseminate his teachings. His self-confessed strategy in this work is “to compare the interactions between medications and disease to a military conflict, in order to convey information in an easily accessible manner.” Adopting the “standard format of playful writings”, he mimics the style and contents of contemporary popular literature, including the “fervour of the battlefield” and supernatural elements such as spirits and deities – “without whom one can hardly hope to please readers these days”.
The narrative revolves around an attack by the evil ‘King Syphilis’ (baidoku daiō 梅 毒大王), portrayed as a malevolent fox spirit , who invades the “lands of the human body”. His first port of call is the “country of the female body” in Nagasaki’s Maruyama 丸山 district – the pleasure quarters in Japan’s only harbour open to foreigners until the 1850s, where Chinese and Dutch ships regularly arrived to trade. From there, the villain rapidly advances into the “provinces of the male body”, though soon meets resistance from the army of medications led by the deadly efficient General Long-Life Concoction (Enjugan 延寿丸) – none other than a personification of the patent medication that Funakoshi himself was selling. After a drawn-out war over five volumes which witnesses gains and losses on both sides, the medications predictably emerge victorious. The changing fortunes of the prolonged struggle in the tale were a fitting representation of the vicissitudes of syphilis and must have been all too painfully familiar to Funakoshi.
Just as King Syphilis’s soldiers, even when seemingly defeated, regroup once again and lay waste to one province after another, syphilis would recur repeatedly after periods of latency that lulled sufferers into the mistaken security of thinking themselves healed. It attacked new regions of the body over the years and in its terminal stages would not only disfigure the infected but might also render them blind, deaf, and mad. The varied symptoms of the disease appear in Ehon baisō gundan as the fiendish minions of King Syphilis’s invading army, sporting humorous names such as Aching-bones Can’t-move (Honeitami Ugokazu 骨痛動須), Ulcers Quick-sprout (Gekan Hayanari 下疳早成), and Poisons Hard-to-Kill (Idoku Nukekane 遺毒抜兼). Visually represented as grotesque demonic figures, the evildoers also display sores, ulcers, and boils on their bodies reminiscent of those affecting syphilis sufferers.
The choice of Nagasaki, Edo-era Japan’s window on the world and, particularly, the Maruyama pleasure quarters as the site of King Syphilis’s invasion clearly reflects common perceptions of how the disease was propagated. As mentioned above, it was a widespread belief that the ‘Chinese boils’ had been introduced to Japan from abroad and hence inevitably via Nagasaki. Yet while Funakoshi mirrors this popular conception in his narrative, his postscript provides a more global view of the disease that is remarkable for its awareness of contemporary Western knowledge: “In the year 1494 according to the Dutch calendar, the French discovered America. […] They attacked the Antilles Islands, looting treasure and women. When they brought these women onboard their ship and had sex with them, the crew developed syphilis. Following this, the disease spread in the lands of the Red-haired Barbarians [i.e., the Netherlands and by extension Europe].”
Despite obvious mistakes in his account, Funakoshi was clearly aware of the European notion that syphilis was brought to Europe from the New World by Columbus’s ships. As mentioned previously, Funakoshi’s reason for adopting a novel and dramatic style in his text was not merely to provide entertainment but also “to convey information in an easily accessible manner”.
This intention is most clearly seen in the final volume of the work, which consists entirely of a short treatise detailing the origins, symptoms, and treatments of the disease. Some editions of the book even include a note on the last page stating that the publication was not for sale and that it would be printed and distributed for free, as long as the person wishing to obtain the book brought their own paper (this generally being the most expensive part of the printing process) “since it was written with the aim of saving the sick people in our realm”.
The UCLouvain copy, however, like others currently in Japanese collections, lacks this magnanimous note and was clearly distributed on a commercial basis by the Osaka publisher Harimaya Gorōbei 播磨屋 五郎兵衛, who appended advertisements for his own goods and services at the back of the book. This variation suggests that the work was initially distributed free of charge but was probably sold to a commercial publisher at a later stage. Yet Funakoshi’s self-proclaimed lofty goal of ‘saving the people’ merely masks the deeply commercial and promotional character of the work, which also acted as an extended advertisement in narrative guise for Funakoshi’s own medications, such as Long-Life Concoction (Enjugan), which were promoted in the book’s back matter (see Ill. 4). Although this medication was produced at Funakoshi’s shop in Osaka, the advertisement claims, possibly with a touch of hyperbole, that it could also be obtained from distributors in all the towns and provinces throughout Japan. The Louvain copy has a rare handwritten entry that identifies its distributor as “the Nabeya shop in Toyooka City, Tajima Province” (present-day Hyōgo Prefecture), suggesting that the book was circulated there, potentially together with the various medications. Funakoshi’s business-oriented thinking is also evident in his treatise on syphilis in the final volume, in which he instructs his readers how they can make a range of remedies for the disease – the formulas for his own prescriptions, however, are omitted with the curt statement that these are “commercially available medications”. Ultimately, Ehon baisō gundan is a multi-faceted work that was designed not only to entertain but also to circulate medical knowledge about the disease and act as an advertisement for commercial medications. Perhaps most importantly, though, it promised sick readers what the narrative acted out for them on the page: a victory over King Syphilis and a happy ending to their own story.