木村敏記念
臨床哲学文庫

The history of the "Department" of Psychiatry at Kyoto University dates back to 1902, and Professor Bin Kimura was its fifth-generation professor. I joined this "medical office" (ikyoku) during Professor Kimura's tenure, and I currently serve as the eighth-generation professor. The following reflections are written from this personal perspective.

The feudalistic image of a medical school’s ikyoku organization is widely known through Toyoko Yamasaki's novel The Great White Tower (Shiroi Kyotō), which, though naturally exaggerated, captures a certain truth. While the situation has changed significantly today, the period when Professor Bin Kimura served as professor of the Department of Psychiatry at Kyoto University—namely from 1986 to 1994—was still very much within that era. On the other hand, this period also saw active anti-establishment movements. At that time, the physicians in the Department of Psychiatry at Kyoto University, excluding the professor (equivalent to today's associate professors, lecturers, and assistant professors), formed an organization called the "Kyoto University Psychiatric Council" (Kyōdai Seishinka Hyōgikai). Their banners flew for anti-professorial councils and opposition to the ikyoku lecture-chair system. Today, as the head of the department, I daily hope that young members will gain research experience in graduate school and, if possible, obtain their doctoral degrees. At the time, however, the Council viewed systems like graduate schools and doctoral degrees as the very core of the professorial council's power, leaving the graduate school in a long-term state of suspension. Terms such as "department," "ikyoku," and "joining the office," which I have used here in quotation marks for lack of alternative words, were taboo at the time. The same applied to authoritarian expressions like the 120-year history mentioned at the beginning, or reference to the generation of a professor.

My own interview upon joining the office was conducted not by the professor, but by the physicians of the Council. I recall going to greet Professor Kimura at some stage around that time, though it was not a formal interview. For me, as a resident physician then, daily activities did not differ much from any ordinary ikyoku. Each doctor simply practiced medicine normally, received their prescribed salary, and made a living. However, it was different for the professor. A professor in such a situation would normally find themselves on a bed of thorns. Most professors at medical schools have built their careers as researchers in the natural sciences. If Professor Kimura had been an ordinary professor, having the graduate school—the very venue for research—boycotted would have been akin to having his hands and feet bound, resulting in a most unfortunate career.

Professor Kimura, however, was a thinker whose foundations lay in his clinical experience as a psychiatrist. He dedicated two days a week to outpatient care, and appeared to devote the remaining time to contemplation, including his writing. In my case, holding the same position today, half of my time at the workplace is consumed by organizational administrative management duties. The remaining time is packed with clinical practice, research, and lectures, leaving almost no time to sit and think slowly (even writing this piece in memory of Professor Kimura, who took such care of me, is being done under circumstances that afford insufficient time for refinement). In comparison, I believe Professor Kimura back then secured ample time to deepen his思索 on philosophical questions and to thoroughly read German and French classics. Looking at it this way, the situation at the time, where the anti-professorial faction held administrative management tasks, might have possessed a fortunate aspect for Professor Kimura.

Regarding how Professor Kimura himself viewed this situation, his own writings remain. After recalling that the Kyoto University Department of Psychiatry had not been swept away by the biological psychiatry that was overwhelmingly dominant at the time, but had instead become a uniquely Japanese center for the anthropological school through the efforts of the first professor, Shinkichi Imamura, and the third professor, Hitoshi Murakami, he stated the following: "The fact that the Kyoto University Department of Psychiatry became a central existence for 'anti-psychiatry' protests after 1969 must not be unrelated to this" (1).

When I joined the office in 1991, there were only two factions (?) in the department: the anti-psychiatry faction and Kimura's anthropological school. Though it did not occur to me then, the year 1991 corresponds to the period when biological and medical psychiatry—today's mainstream—began to establish its hegemony within psychiatry (2). In that sense, it could be said that two movements standing as important alternatives against mainstream psychiatry coexisted in a curious harmony within the department at that time (2).

References
Department of Psychiatry, Kyoto University, ed. 100 Years of the Kyoto School of Psychiatry (Seishinigaku Kyōto Gakuharu no 100-nen), Nakanishiya Shuppan, 2003.

Toshiya Murai. The Significance of 21st-Century Clinicians Learning the History of Psychiatry (Commentary in Brückner: Introduction to the History of Psychiatry [Nyūmon Seishinigaku no Rekishi], co-translated by Toshiya Murai and Takashi Kawashima, Nippon Hyoron Sha, Tokyo, 2023, pp. 157–171).

Reprinted from the commemorative volume marking the opening of the Bin Kimura Memorial Archive of Clinical Philosophy (the "Aida Library"): "Between Clinique and Philosophy: Bin Kimura and German Phenomenology/Anthropology"
https://www.koyoshobo.co.jp/book/b670977.html