A Meiji obstetrics volume. The unusual aspect of this item is the print of Adam and Eve at the front. This is in reference to Christianity coming into mainstream Japan at the time.

According to scholar Angelika Koch, “Zokakiron was a very popular sex handbook explaining reproductive processes in Meiji Japan, a kind of early popular sexological work that incorporated Western anatomical knowledge. It was reprinted numerous times. I believe the print of Adam and Eve has to do with presenting sex as the natural beginning of all things, the creative process that brings forth all things – a trope that was already very common in Edo period erotic works, for example, as a legimizing tool for talking about sex. In fact, before the print of Adam and Eve you will find a Japanese ‘counterpart’ representing, I believe, Izanami and Izanagi standing on the floating bridge of heaven and dipping the spear. It is certainly not a Christian work nor does the author include any doctrinal elements. This just came as part and parcel of Western culture. I would even think that Adam and Eve were mainly used as a Western equivalent to Izanami and Izanagi. It is also interesting that the book cover itself also seem to show Izanami and Izanagi, so this indigenous trope takes precedence here in making the link to creation and procreation.

Izanami and Izanagi famously created some of the Japanese isles through intercourse and I presume Adam and Eve in juxtaposition are presented as the ‘Western’ progenitors of humanity.

I should add that this is probably about presenting specifically marital sex as natural by this point and the focus of the work is on procreation — Zokakiron specifically means ‘Discussion of the Mechanisms of Creation/Generation (if one is to use an early modern medical term)’. I believe this is not the original work, which was published by Chiba Shigeru in 1875, as the author here is different. But due to the popularity of Chiba’s work there was a whole boom of such works on ‘generation’. As far as I know, these were mainly translations or adaptations of English and German popular medical texts of the sort that were in circulation in 19th-century Europe. So in this sense of indirect absorption so to speak and in the fact that there was a Christian influence on the ideas of ‘spiritual love’ in marriage in the Meiji period, you could say there some Christian influence.”