Joseph R Hawkins. The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide. Volume 7, Issue 1, Winter 2000.
As an anthropologist who studies contemporary gay culture in Japan, I have often been amazed by the gulf that separates the Japanese gay cultures of today and those that flourished prior to the turn of the 20th century. Before the Meiji period (1868-1912), Japanese society sustained such male homosocial enclaves as the military, monastic Buddhism, the Kabuki theater, and urban centers of male prostitution. However after that era, the cultural environment for Japanese males increasingly became a product of western cultural imperialism, globalization, and the encroachment of Western-styled homophobia, which was a part of this complex.
To understand the changes that comprise these shifts, it is necessary to look to some of the details of the pre-World War I Japanese cultural atmosphere for same-sex eroticism. Within the highly articulated homosocial aesthetic prior to 1868 and extending back to before the 1600’s, the love object of Buddhist priests was typically a young androgynous boy, while the samurai favored a strong, resolute youth, and the Kabuki theater’s aficionado focused on a transgendered person that signified the “female” in a filtered and interpretive form. Each archetype of homosexual interaction (though the combinations available to men in private were presumably not limited to these three) represented a model of behavior that homosexual and bisexual males—for indeed many of them were not exclusively or even predominantly homosexual—would follow under given social circumstances. In short, pre-Meiji males developed a connoisseurship of love that fitted their socio-economic situations, their age grades, and their desires.
These forms of male love were well integrated into the larger sociological framework of Japanese society. So common was homosexual behavior in pre-Meiji Japan that it prompted one Jesuit missionary in the 16th century to comment, “The young men and their partners, not thinking it serious, do not hide it. They even honor each other for it and speak openly of it.” To be sure, the vast majority of men who engaged in homosexual behavior were married to women and considered their same-sex activity ancillary to their familial duty of procreation. Although female same-sex eroticism existed in this traditional world, it was segregated from public life, as were women themselves.
Today, in contrast, most of the homosexual men I interviewed during my field research self-identified as “gei” (transliterated from the English word), but confessed that they told almost no one aside from their get friends. Few had ever attended a gei rally, march, or meeting. Most said they were not interested in marrying someone of the opposite sex, but felt that living with someone of the same sex in contemporary Japan would be difficult at best. For most Japanese gei-identifled men, their lives were divided into distinct public and private spheres. Most of the men I interviewed professed to know little of the history of homosexuality in Japan, and held little interest in knowing more. Most said they seldom feared persecution, violence, or legal action, as many Americans still do, but almost all were terrified that family or coworkers would discover their secret, and that they would be ostracized because of it. (This is not to say that there are no openly gei men in Japan, for indeed there are, but they a re a small minority.)
And yet, for three centuries prior to the Meiji period, males who had sex with other males would not have feared public or social retribution for their acts. Nor would they have claimed a homosexual “identity” in today’s sense (except perhaps as a woman-hater, onnagirai, or as a connoisseur of a particular form of male-male love, such as wakashudo, or jyado). How are we to account for this rather sudden reversal of fortune for men who engaged in same-sex sexual activity?
Three major socio-political developments in Japan can be educed. First, it’s important to emphasize that in traditional Japanese society homosexual behavior was viewed as a diversion or hobby that was separate from one’s serious procreative duties and public identities, which were built around group affiliation. This meant that homosexuality posed no threat to the family or to society. Second, after the Meiji period, Japan launched into a national effort to assimilate Western methods of production and, as it were, reproduction. Part of this project was a wartime pronatal stance that emphasized the desirability of reproductive activities and the elimination of nonprocreative sex, however traditionally sanctioned. The transgendered male, in particular, became a comical figure and the brunt of derision rather than an aesthetic icon. Third, in more recent years the development of gay and lesbian life in Japan has been heavily influenced by global economic systems, tourism, and the media. This has resulted in a g radual reformation of gendered identities to ones that, in large part, ignore Japanese traditional roles and concentrate instead on Western models of homosexuality.
Japan first began its national project of assimilation to Western materialist pursuits in the Meiji period, when the country was forced to open trade with Europe and the U.S. At that time, many Japanese scholars also journeyed abroad and began to study foreign sciences, military strategies, philosophies, and literature. As it happens, Europe was in the process of developing a new ideology around sex based on the emerging science of psychology, which led to the classification of some sexual patterns as “aberrant”—everything from masturbation to homosexuality—and subject to diagnosis and treatment. These shifts in Europe influenced the Meiji government, which was eager to be seen as modern, and it set out to revamp its own legal system. For example, the Shinritsu Koryo (“Outline of the New Law”) of 1873 included the first statute against sodomy in the history of Japan. The law required that all sodomites spend ninety days in jail. However, male same-sex indiscretions were so much a part of the culture that t hey were largely ignored. From 1876 to 1881 only twenty occurrences of sodomy were punished as criminal under the new law, though it is clear from the record that the practice was much more widespread.
Even so, the passage of this anti-sodomy law reveals an increasing awareness of and self-consciousness about Western moral judgments regarding same-sex erotic behavior, however reluctant the Japanese authorities of the time were to make the policing of homosexuality a part of everyday life. As further evidence of this ambivalence, the anti-sodomy law was repealed ten years after its passage (1883) with the assistance of a French legal advisor.
The government’s negative response to homosexuality continued to exhibit change and adaptation. In 1909, for instance, Mod Ogai published his semi-autobiographical volume, Vita Sexualis, whose title echoed Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). Ogai’s book told of his own homosocial and homoerotic experiences, and of his sexual molestation and discomfort while living in a Japanese boy’s school. Japanese authorities, fearing the appearance of immorality to Western eyes, quickly banned the book. At the same time, a rise in militarism and a revitalization of “manly” samurai codes spurred a resurgence of homoerotic aesthetics (nanshoku) during the Chinese and Russian Wars with Japan (1894-1905). Evidence of this can be found in the emergence and policing of youth gangs, such as the White Hakama Group, which fought over the control of bishonen, or beautiful young boys, on city streets.
IT wasn’t until the Taisho period (1912-1926) that Western-style sexual categories took hold in Japan. Foreign books and magazines, including a wealth of pseudoscientific sexology publications, became widely available to a newly emerging mass audience. This was the age of industrialization in Japan, as people moved en masse to urban centers, taking them away from the traditional control of communities and families. Urbanization led to a breakdown of the traditional segregation of the sexes, as men and women mingled freely in the new environment. Gender roles, too, began to lose some of their traditional rigidity. Free to experiment, some urban youths of the Taisho period pursued an ideal of sexual ambivalence, even as they defended the emergence of individuality and the self—a direct affront to traditional group identifications. Writers of the Taisho promulgated Western sexology in their writings, often treating sexual terms and theories as a collector would classify fashion reviews, each a chic new trend. In one volume of the period, A Collection of Perverse Habits or Desires (Hentai Shu Heikishi, 1912), a writer and amateur researcher catalogued the obsessive collections of his subjects. Among the “perversions” he analyzed, one male subject collected the pubic hairs of his female partners, and another studied the knots used in sadomasochistic sex play. The book listed sexological terms from the West such as Fellare, Gynandrie, and Homosexualitat, and displayed both a fascination with and a studied concern over these practices.
Inukai Ken, another writer of the Taisho, wrote a series of essays that dealt with homosexuality. “The Weak Student” appeared in Shirakaba (“White Birch”), a highbrow literary magazine, in the early 1920’s. This story followed the lives of some students at the Gakushuin (Peers School). A novella written by Inukai, Hitoshi no Jidai (“One Time”), documented Gakushuin dormitory life. A later story, “Ume” (“Dreams”), appeared in Josei (“Women”) magazine and was about a young man from a high-class family who was laughed at by women for falling in love with a boy. The story spoke mostly about the problems of masturbation (called onani), but did not discuss homosexuality as such. However different these stories from each other, they all represent a dramatic departure from the traditional subject matter of Japanese literature. The old tropes of the Buddhist monk’s boy love, the samurai’s youth, and the Kabuki’s female impersonator are slowly being replaced by a disparaged and secretive homosexual type (homosekusharu ).
In the early 1900’s there was a resurgence of the kagema, the female-impersonating male prostitute, as a model of homosexual beauty. There was also a rise in the popularity of the nimaime, or sexually ambivalent male actor, and the birth of the “Takarazuka” theater and its all-female male impersonators. These apparitions were part of a general socio-sexual upheaval in the Taisho period, and incurred the wrath of the right-wing imperialist radicals. During World War II, as the burgeoning imperialist government called for a return to pronatalist values, selected aspects of the samurai code were resurrected. Not included as part of the samurai ideal were homosexual relations of any kind. Even after the War was over, homosexuality continued to be devalued, while its practice grew increasingly clandestine.
As the occupying American forces were settling in after World War II, writings about homosexuality began to reemerge, the work of clandestine groups that dodged censors and the police to reach their audiences. As a practical matter, any publication that displeased the occupying forces was banned. Kabuki theater and American literature alike fell under the purview of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers; much was censored. The American military was stepping up its epochal war on homosexuals, and there were frequent court-martials and trials of lesbians who served in occupied Japan.
American homosexuals, who were overseas as part of the occupation, taught Japanese people a range of lessons about what homosexuality was like in the U.S. One Japanese man I interviewed recalled his delight at being able to have sex with many African-American servicemen who were denied access to Japanese female prostitutes in a small town. Another informant told of how he was beaten by GIs for holding hands with a Japanese man on a bus. Hibiya Park, across from the Imperial Palace and General MacArthur’s headquarters building, was a famous site of homosexual cruising just after the War, and one American informant told me that he cruised the western side of Osaka to pick up boys for hire.
Homosexual enclaves developed alongside entertainment and prostitution districts, much as they had before the War. But the lives of the denizens of these nighttime districts were highly secretive and scarcely reminiscent of the traditional homosocial environments of Buddhism, Kabuki, and the military. Many Japanese men continued to participate in homosexual activities while married to women but did not self-identify as gay. Homosexual arenas of interaction had less to do with self-definition and identity than they did with sex and entertainment, and were usually visited after dark. For many elderly Japanese homosexuals who were married and had children, sex with other men was considered to be a “hobby.”
One of the first postwar homophile publications, Adonis (1952-1960), initially produced in only 200 or 300 copies, was sold underground or only in used bookstores in deference to the occupation forces’ censorship laws. From around 1954 on, there were other homophile magazines as well. Fuuzoku kikan, Fuuzoku zoshi, and Kikan Club were among the most popular. Their names implied a relationship to the entertainment industry or played on words like fuuzoku, whose first syllable, fuu, referred to both manners and morals, and whose suffix, zoku, denoted a tribe. In Adonis, readers eagerly talked about their lives in postwar Japan, and how they yearned for things to be more Western:
Greetings… I’m very excited that the situation in foreign countries was in the magazine along with the pictures that I had been waiting to see. It’s too bad that we cannot have physical beauty like what we see in the Greek statues. However, I am looking forward to seeing the pageant of beauty on the beach this summer… (Adonis #16, 1954:7)
The covers of Adonis were most often photographs or drawings of idealized Greco-Roman males. This became a part of the postwar gay code, which alluded to homosexuality indirectly to elude the censors. Adonis, of course, was a thoroughly Western mythological figure known for his beauty. Adonis #7 (1952) reviewed R.F. Burton’s analyses of Greek homosexual philosophy and male beauty—a piece on classical cultural history to which the censors could scarcely object. The magazine also served the practical purpose of informing its readers how the West dealt with homosexuality, an important thing to know about under the post-occupation ethos.
Inside, the magazine displayed nude photos of young Japanese men and boys—at least at first. But as time passed a larger proportion of the photographs came from American physique pictorials. Articles and essays in Adonis become less concerned with exploring Japan’s history and more preoccupied with homosexuality in the West. Magnus Hirschfeld, Freud, and Edward Carpenter, among others, were translated completely or in parts. Issue #16 (1954) included a translation of an essay by Albert Moore on the subjects of paederasty, oral fixation, onanism, and mutual masturbation. Issue #51 (1959) contained an essay on One, America’s first gay magazine.
Early Japanese homophile magazines featured letters to the editor, conversations or colloquia from the readership, and, later, a personals section. Most revealing are the letters from readers. One laments the passing of the transgendered male as the standard of beauty and her replacement by the new, more egalitarian homosexual:
I who am middle-aged am looking for a bluebird among you. My bluebird is a person who can dress like a Japanese woman very well. … I am happy when the man I love dresses up more beautifully than women. To put on Japanese coiffure, thick make-up, waist adornments and undergarments—these things require an aesthetic. Isn’t this ability to create something beautiful a God-given talent? Traditional Japanese hairstyles, white powder and red belts are not only for women.
While some men lamented the loss of traditional spaces for homosexuality, others were busy claiming new physical territories, as the following quote reveals:
In Abeno there is a gay house where the men touch their feet under the table. There are also homosexual coffeehouses in the Kansai area. The other day I went to this park and I went into the bathroom and there was one man sitting on top of another. In the toilet near Y-station some guy was pulling down his pants and having sex with many partners.
Adonis ceased publishing in 1960, four years before the staging of the Tokyo Olympics and the emergence of television as a powerful medium in Japan. It was in 1974, four years after the dramatic death of Yukio Mishima, that Barazoku (“The Rose Tribe”) began publication. Barazoku, which would go on to become Japan’s longest-running gay publication, reflected the influence of an emerging gay movement in the West, and contained the word gei on almost every page. Still, older notions regarding same-sex sexual practice were still apparent when I started my research in 1987. Older men were usually married, had children, and said that homosexuality was a mere “hobby.” Many younger men identified as gei—a concept whose Western origins they acknowledged.
For all the influence of Western models of homosexuality, Japan has not developed the kinds of gay urban neighborhoods for which America in particular is famous. But perhaps there is less need for a fully articulated, Western-style gay movement in an environment where discrimination is subtle, persecution indirect, and legal wrangling rare. Most informants told me that they were seldom confronted directly by homophobia. Instead, loans for housing or opportunities for jobs are quietly denied. Many felt that legal battles and parades were a public embarrassment, and that they served to attract more negativity to gay people by rocking the social boat. Most were out to no one except their closest friends.
The case of Japan raises serious questions about the values and goals of gay movements in the postmodern, transnational world. The power of Western models of gay identity, which emulate other social movements in the West, is undeniable. But there are nevertheless limits to its historical relevance in a country that has no comparable tradition of social movements. To be sure, Japan’s traditional past was no homotopia. But an understanding of that history just might prove valuable as gei people continue to encounter the limits of identity politics in the Japanese cultural matrix.