Closely related to social phobia in Western psychiatric classifications, taijinkyofusho 対人恐怖症 (« phobia of interpersonal relations ») was for a long time understood by Japanese psychiatrists as a Japanese culture-specific neurosis. Since it has been studied in the limited framework of post-War discourses on Japanese cultural identity, the history of its genesis has to a great extent been ignored. Yet, the creation of taijinkyofusho is the result of the circulation of ideas between Europe, the United States and Japan between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. This is what we aim to show in this paper by tracing its genealogy. This enables us to reach a different understanding of taijinkyofu 対人恐怖, the reinvention by the Japanese psychiatrist Morita Shoma 森田正馬 in the 1930s of the European erythrophobia of the 1890s.