Sensory Worlds of Experiment in Japanese Thoughtography, 1910–1911

What is it about?

This article examines experiments by Japanese psychologists and physicists ca. 1910-11 concerning the supernormal power of "thoughtography"--the ability to project images in the mind onto photosensitized surfaces. I argue that conflicts over the status of thoughtographs were fundamentally conflicts over the senses, and that these in turn reveal the operation of gendered personae and norms of behavior within spaces of experiment. Specifically, I analyze thoughtography as a story of how conflicts between the personae of “gentleman” and “detective” played out in the space of the private, nuclear-familial home governed by the new figure of the “housewife.” In the early twentieth century, the psychological laboratory had yet to establish its authority in Japan. Successful experiment thus required visiting subjects and navigating the intersensorial spaces of their homes. The strategies through which researchers adapted to homes, and the strategies by which housewives manipulated homes to their advantage, reveal contestations over how to look, touch, and feel in the presence of others. They furthermore reveal that the drive to emulate “Western science” met with contradictions in “Westernization” itself, particularly its demands concerning new protocols of masculine sociability and the prerogatives of the bourgeois wife and mother.

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