Principally, Frühstück has made contributions to three distinct intellectual fields: The monograph, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2003)–based on her dissertation, Die Politik der Sexualwissenschaft, 1908–1941 (University of Vienna, 1997)–uses the tools of the history and social study of science to describe the formation and establishment of knowledge about sex at the intersection of public health, modernization policy, and the emergence of social science from late nineteenth-century Japan. A history of the present with regards to the interplay of sexuality, science, and social control, the book traces various uses of sexual knowledge, from barracks to classrooms and from brothels to eugenic consultation centers. In researching Colonizing Sex Frühstück came to realize that the modern nation state cared most about the sexual health of young men and their physical fitness for war, and that the modern army played a significant role far beyond wartime combat. Along with a handful of other practitioners of gender studies around the world, she began to recognize that the gender and sexuality studies field had neglected critical analyses of the most rigidly gendered institution in modern society–the armed forces. Frühstück found that to best understand (post)modern societies, including those of East Asia, one must understand the culturally and historically specific tension between a society’s gender/sexuality arrangements and its management of state violence–whether or not a given state exercises that violence. More recently, Frühstück completed Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan for the introductory series New Approaches to Asian History, published by Cambridge University Press (2022). It describes the ever-changing manifestations of sexes, genders, and sexualities in Japanese society from the 1860s to the present day. Analyzing a wide range of texts, images and data, Frühstück considers the experiences of females, males and the evolving spectrum of boundary-crossing individuals and identities in Japan. These include the intersexed conscript in the 1880s, the first “out” lesbian war reporter in the 1930s, and a group of pregnancy-vest-wearing male governors in the present day. Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan interweaves macro views of history with stories about individual actors, highlighting how sexual and gender expression has been negotiated in both the private and the public spheres and continues to wield the power to critique and change society. This dynamic and accessible survey introduces Japanese ideas about modern manhood, modern womanhood, reproduction, violence and sex during war, the sex trade, LGBTQAI+ identities and activism, women’s liberation, feminisms and visual culture.

At a time when virtually no one paid attention to the Japanese armed forces as an institution, Frühstück wrote the ethnography Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army (University of California Press, 2007). This book is based on interviews with service members, participant observation, archival work, and an extensive media analysis. Frühstück uses gender, memory, and popular culture as tools of engagement with a number of pertinent debates about the military. For instance, although the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) have never deployed to war, the recruitment and integration of women lags behind their counterparts in comparable countries. In addition, while the younger generation is generally uninterested in Japan’s imperialist past, the Army nonetheless feels burdened by the Imperial Japanese Army’s wartime legacy. And while Japanese service members receive conventional military training, thus far they have been deployed exclusively for disaster relief operations, community events security, and (limited) peacekeeping missions. In short, Uneasy Warriors describes how individual service members and the institution as a whole struggle with and negotiate these contradictions.

After World War I, twentieth-century authoritarian leaders Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, and Mao all understood that, in order to conduct total war, children needed to be “won over.” But what of children after the war, during peace? Having by then “joined” the armed forces as participant observer, Frühstück became aware of the peculiar presence of child culture in the adult public sphere in Asia, particularly Japan. That awareness, along with her appreciation of the power of Japanese visual culture, inspired her monograph, Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan (University of California Press, 2017). Playing War is a cultural history of the naturalized connections between childhood, militarism, and pacifism. The book analyzes the rules and regularities of war play, from the hills of nineteenth-century rural Japan to the killing fields of twenty-first century cyberspace. It shows that the modern notion of children as being vulnerable, innocent, and morally pure is an ideological construct that continues to have enormous political consequences regarding modern war and peace. In essence, by sanctifying children’s vulnerability, innocence, and moral authority, the military and the political and popular culture at large have both instrumentalized and silenced “the child.”

Frühstück has also co-edited volumes on the history of sexuality, masculinity, child’s play, and leisure in Japan (see CV). In addition to English, her research has appeared in Japanese, German, French, and Russian (please see CV for details).