ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Histories of Menstrual Products Technologies in Modern Japan: Uncovering the Hidden Prehistory of Femtech

• In Event: Fertility and the Sexed Body: Midwifery and Childbirth

English Abstract

This paper investigates the technological and commercial history of menstrual products in modern Japan and situates it within global histories of science, technology, and gender. By tracing the introduction, domestication, and industrialization of menstrual technologies from the late nineteenth century to the twentieth century, the study reveals a previously overlooked trajectory: the transition from imported menstrual belts to domestic production, technological innovation, and eventually Japan’s role as an exporter shaping global markets. This history complicates dominant narratives of Western-centered innovation by demonstrating how menstrual technologies emerged through transnational industrial networks and gendered labor systems.

Drawing on archives such as trade journals, company histories, women’s magazines, oral testimonies, and autobiographies, the project focuses on two landmark products: the Victoria menstrual belt (1910s–) and the Anne sanitary napkin (1960s–). Through these cases, the paper analyzes how knowledge about menstruation shifted from ritual “impurity” to biomedical “uncleanliness,” and how menstrual management evolved from handcrafted domestic labor to standardized industrial consumption. It argues that the development and promotion of menstrual products—initially led by male industrialists and later by women entrepreneurs—was embedded in broader transformations in public hygiene, imperial industrial policy, and gendered citizenship.

Theoretically, the study integrates ignorance studies, science and technology studies, and gendered innovation to illuminate how “gendered knowledge gaps” were historically constituted and socially reproduced. By reconstructing the social-technical history of menstruation, this paper proposes a historiographical foundation for critically understanding contemporary Femtech and menstrual equity policies, revealing continuities in epistemic inequality and contested bodily knowledge.

Author

• shiyu sun, International Research Center for Japanese Studies