Although it is often assumed that European-trained Japanese psychiatrists assumed control of managing those considered mentally ill at the turn of the twentieth century, most afflicted individuals remained in the care and custody of their families. This talk explores both the history of how family-based care intensified in Japan despite the introduction of psychiatry, as well as the challenges of writing such a history through a psychiatric archive.It offers possible reasons that histories of madness tend to render invisible a crucial condition that enabled family-based care: ad omestic and moral economy of caregiving that relied on women’s physical and mental labor. It also traces the intellectual, social, and affective processes through which one historian ended up writing a book that she had once thought was unwritable.

H. Yumi Kim is assistant professor of Japanese and Korean history in the Department of History, Johns Hopkins University. Her book, Madness in the Family: Women, Care, and Illness in Japan, was published in 2022 with Oxford University Press and won the AHA Fairbanks prize.