Introduction: queer lives in contemporary Japan

Abstract

This introduction aims to situate four research articles on “Queer Lives in Contemporary Japan” in the larger field of gender and sexuality studies. It argues that, historically, the concepts “queer” or “transgender” are not particularly novel. Early twentieth-century progressives in Japan observed and sought social acceptance and suggested that individuals thought of as “sexually abnormal” would one day outnumber single-sex/gender men and women. Yet, the Japan story is more complicated and contradictory than the notion of a neat progression from the 1920s to our own moment would suggest. It also has more local and cultural flavor than the increasingly global sexual rights struggle might indicate. Ultimately, the introduction highlights the significant self-conscious individualism and self-determination a broad range of individuals bring to bear in order to pursue the increasing normalization of queer lives.

Keywords:

• Modern
• Japan
• queer
• transgender
• X gender

Words matter—sometimes more than we think; sometimes less. For the title of this special feature, the authors settled on “queer (kuia) lives” in order to signify sexual and gender formations that are neither heterosexual nor “cisgender” (persons whose identity and gender correspond with their birth sex)—as well as to be inclusive, particularly of “transgender” and that term’s various inflections in different Japanese communities. In a recent contribution that complicates the notion of “global knowledge” to the journal Theory, Culture & Society, Constantina Papoulias noted that

The shifting fortunes of the term transgender since the early 1990s testify to the faultlines and methodological impasses in the theorization of gender across numerous disciplines. At the same time, transgender marks the forging and transformation of alliances and collectivities in political activism. Transgender is one of the latest in a series of terms which, in the social sciences, have sought to name counter-normative materializations of gender on individual bodies, through practices of gender-crossing either in matters of dress and presentation, and/or in terms of body modification. (Papoulias 2006, 231–33)

Historically, of course, the concepts “queer” or “transgender” do not seem particularly novel; indeed, early twentieth-century progressives in Japan and elsewhere observed as much—some even sought social acceptance and normalization therein. In Japan in 1922, for instance, Miyatake Gaikotsu, the editor of a collection of stories titled Thoughts on Hermaphroditism (Hannannyokō), remarked: “Won’t the hermaphrodites that are today called abnormalities someday come to call single-sex men and women abnormalities?” Note that, though my translation is clumsy, the reductionist term “hermaphrodites” is nonetheless historically sound. And yet, the editor had in mind a much looser category encompassing ambiguously sexed individuals that he described as “half male, half female” (hannannyo)—and physically, mentally or emotionally so (Miyatake 1922 [1986], 325–29).¹ Such radical pondering was to be expected from someone like Miyatake—humorist, activist, author, and publisher of an astonishingly wide range of works. Much like the editors of Le Charivari in Paris, Punch in London, and Die Fackel in Vienna, with his Humor Newspaper (Kokkei Shinbun) Miyatake frequently provoked censorship—only to then mock the censors, whether those aimed to suppress social and political disorder or to uphold “national moral health.”² In other writings, Miyatake had calibrated routine attempts at placating both the hypocrisy of the Japanese ruling class and the authoritarianism of the regime. Thoughts on Hermaphroditism was no different.

Covering a wide range of legends, hearsay, and rumors about sexually and genderwise non-normative individuals, this story collection—printed and distributed “under the table” with the note “not for sale” next to the copyright information so as to evade censorship—was intended as much to entertain and scandalize as to lay out “a utopian vision of a future in which the human race would evolve to complete cultural and physiological hermaphroditism.”³ The more factual parts of Thoughts on Hermaphroditism echoed the German physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s influential and (mostly) contemporaneous writings, including the educational brochure “What Must the Population Need to Know About the Third Sex?” (Was muss das Volk vom dritten Geschlecht wissen! Eine Aufklärungsschrift), the book Berlin’s Third Sex (Berlins drittes Geschlecht) and the numerous publications of his thoughts and findings on “psychological [or emotional] transsexuality” in his periodical Yearbook of Sexual Intermediate Types (Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, 1899–1923), a quarterly publication devoted to scientific, literary, and political topics related to sexual and gender minorities (Hirschfeld 1904, 1899). From Miyatake’s Tokyo to Hirschfeld’s Berlin, at the beginning of the twentieth century, an ever-broader range of medical doctors, intellectuals, scientists, and social reformers considered questions about and the socially revolutionary potential of recognizing “intermediate types” beyond the binary gender order and sexual heteronormativity.

Roughly a hundred years since Miyatake first released his Thoughts on Hermaphroditism, I sometimes ask the students in my history of sexuality course if his musings had come to fruition, that today (or very soon) the hermaphrodites once seen as abnormalities would instead be considered normalities. Given that my question is asked in California, most undergraduates whole-heartedly respond in the affirmative, very likely reading “cultural and physiological hermaphroditism” as Miyatake would have wanted: as some version of the advancing dissolution of a binary gender and sexual order; the diversification and decoupling of sexualities and genders; the increased understanding of sex and gender as fluid and flexible within a spectrum or along a continuum of modes of being and experiences; and a budding acceptance of sexual and gender identities being not fixed but fluid and malleable.

These students have a point. Even just during the last couple of decades, the ways different generations in different parts of the world think about and practice sexuality has remained in flux, including both forward leaps and reactionary backlashes.⁴ As for forward leaps, within just the last few years we have observed remarkable changes regarding sexual rights in some parts of the world. For instance, homosexuality has become legal in India; Germany and Canada have introduced a third sex for legal documents; and more countries than ever have legalized same-sex marriage (Frankfurter Allgemeine 2018; Busby 2017). These developments suggest that an ever-larger percentage of the world population—beyond the assumed hold of Euro-American liberalism—has become more optimistic about the possibilities of overcoming established boundaries of sexual practices and identities. But these progressions have been countered by some significant conservative strongholds and backlashes. Even though the law is only rarely enforced, same-sex activities remain illegal and no anti-discrimination protection exists in Singapore. Though South Africa’s 1996 Bill of Rights was the first in the world to ban discrimination on the grounds of “sexual orientation,” that country struggles to align those noble intentions with social, legal, and political practices.⁵ As I write this, the United States’ Republican-controlled Senate is still pondering the controversial Equality Act—passed by the House of Representatives in May 2019—that is designed to amend the Civil Rights Act to “prohibit discrimination on the basis of the sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition of an individual, as well as because of sex-based stereotypes” (Wikipedia 2020). At the same time, a number of US states have aggressively turned back the clock on reproductive rights. And though historically Japan has not criminalized same-sex sexuality (except for a very brief period in the late nineteenth century), the Japanese government’s current focus on increasing its dwindling birth rate leaves neglected relevant pursuits such as the expansion of sexual rights to non-normative individuals.

In short, the (Japan) story is more complicated and contradictory than the notion of a neat progression from Miyatake’s time to our own moment would suggest. It also has more local and cultural flavor than the increasingly global sexual rights struggle might indicate.⁶ Gender-bending and cross-dressing have been centuries-old practices on and off the various stages of Japanese theater—from Kabuki to Takarazuka, current-day incarnations of which were most recently and quite beautifully captured in Graham Kolbeins’s documentary film Queer Japan (2019). Further off the stage, the gay boom of the 1990s—in part triggered by Fushimi Noriaki’s biographical book Private Gay Life (Puraibēto gei raifu posuto renai-ron, 1991) and his magazine Queer Japan (Kuia Japan, 1999–2005)—led to specific segments of current-day popular culture seeing both a proliferation of representations of same-sex sexuality and a substantial increase in the elasticity of gender and sexual identity representations—many of which remain uncommon elsewhere in much of the postindustrial world (Fushimi 1991).

In many ways facilitated by the gay boom, the first two decades of the twenty-first century seem marked by a somewhat smaller but visibly increasing presence of other LGTBQI + subcommunities. In 2003 and 2017 respectively, Japanese municipalities elected the first openly transgender people to public offices: Kamikawa Aya as a Setagaya ward assembly member and Hosoda Tomoya as a councillor for Iruma City. Additionally, over the last decade, the foundation of self-help groups, establishment of hotlines, and introductory publications about Gender Identity Disorder and X gender intended for a wide audience have proliferated. For instance, Yoshinaga Michiko—journalist, prolific author of non-fiction, and recipient of the Ōya Sōichi Nonfiction Award for an earlier book, wrote Gender Identity Disorder: The Future of Sex Change (Sei dōitsusei shōgai: Sei tenkan no ashita, 2000). Three friends under the leadership of Mizuno Eita founded the self-help group Label X with the support of crowd funding and published a collection of essays that address the question, What Is X Gender? The Status Quo of Diverse Genders/Sexes/Sexualities in Japan (X jendā tte nani? Nihon ni okeru tayō na sei no arikata, 2016). The book is designed to explain the various meanings and experiences of “intersex” to a lay public that remains somewhat confused about the phenomenon.⁷ These were essential cultural contributions particularly given that mainstream television frequently features transgender and transsexual individuals mostly to sensationalize them in entertaining an audience that ostensibly overwhelmingly identifies as heterosexual and cisgender. Even more problematic, popular television tends to pathologize or even criminalize non-normative sexualities and genders, particularly gay men who don’t appear feminine.⁸

A similarly contradictory complexity governs the laws and rights for diversely gendered and sexed individuals in Japan. The postwar constitution promulgated on 3 November 1946 guarantees “the essential equality of the sexes” (Article 24). Today, though sex change is legal, it is governed by the Gender Identity Disorder Act of 2003, which pathologizes the freedom it grants and requires several difficult-to-meet conditions. As the act’s name indicates, individuals desiring a sex change must first be diagnosed as having Gender Identity Disorder, and must have “the will to make himself or herself physically and socially conform with the opposite sex,” thus reinforcing binary gender norms (Taniguchi 2013). Furthermore, in February 2019 Japan’s Supreme Court upheld a law that forces transgender people to undergo full sex-change surgery—specifically to no longer have functioning reproductive glands—before having their gender legally registered in the all-important family registry. The court justified the decision as a way “to avoid sudden disruptions in a society that still values gender on the basis of biology,” prompting condemnation from activists in Japan that were chorused by the World Health Organization, the European Human Rights Court, and Human Rights Watch. The latter called the decision “incompatible with international human rights standards, against the times, and deviating from best global practices” (Siripala 2019).

In short, not all is well for members of the highly stratified LGTBQI + community. Some groups have created specifically designated semi-public spaces that provide for a certain level of “being out” while also protecting from the ignorance and scorn of mainstream society, a majority of which has yet to accommodate a multitude of sexes, genders, and sexualities. And yet, a number of representative nationwide public opinion surveys show that this mainstream society is somewhat sympathetic to the trans population. When asked which of a total of 18 human rights issues (plus the categories “other” and “none in particular”) respondents felt needed attention in Japan, 15 percent of respondents felt that more should be done in Japan to protect the human rights of “people suffering from Gender Identity Disorder” and “people of certain sexual orientations” (Naikakufu 2017). These replies compared to concern for the human rights of other groups, including “people with disabilities” (51%), “violations of human rights on the Internet” (43.2%), “the elderly” (36.7%), “children” (33.7%), “women” (30.6%), and the “survivors of [the triple disaster in Northeastern Japan, referred to as] 3/11” (28.8%). When asked about whether individuals are discriminated against based on their sexual orientation, almost 40 percent of respondents said that, indeed, discriminatory language was used for non-heteronormative individuals; more than 20 percent of respondents listed how such was used, including “staring and marginalizing,” “bullying at school or work,” and “ignorant behavior at school or work.” And yet, 26 percent said they were not sure any such discrimination existed at all (Naikakufu 2017).

The rich body of critical studies about genders and sexualities that we know today has been substantially morphed and reshaped since Miyatake laid out his sexual and gender utopia in Thoughts on Hermaphroditism. Furthering the scholarship, the essays that follow these introductory remarks enrich our insights about sexualities and genders in contemporary Japan, a field of study that has evolved in major ways since the early folklorists and ethnologists first recorded sexual legends and beliefs around the turn of the nineteenth century, and since a handful of sexologists first studied sexual behavior at the beginning of the twentieth. The field has branched into several interdisciplinary subfields: a sexual ethnology, which emerged in the late nineteenth century and continued to dominate the first few decades of the twentieth; women’s studies, which rose to prominence after World War II and continues to thrive, and which traces its roots to the early twentieth-century works of women’s history à la Yamakawa Kikue’s pioneering Women of the Mito Domain (Buke no josei, 1943); gender studies, which acknowledge the importance of interrogating in gender and sexual terms women and femininities as well as men and masculinities; the politically more determined feminist studies; and the most recently institutionalized LGBTQI + studies and queer studies, which occupy much of our current attention despite massive conservative strongholds or even backlashes in many areas of gender and sexuality policy-making in Japan and elsewhere.⁹

Echoing Miyatake’s prediction, this collection of essays variously provides us with the personal testimonies of a range of non-heteronormative individuals (Summerhawk, McMahill, and McDonald 1998; Ito and Yanase 2001; Label X 2016), studies that interrogate the boundaries of onstage and offstage gender performances,¹⁰ and offer insights into the politico-legal struggle for an expansion of (particularly same-)sex rights and its recent successes, including, in 2015, the recognition of same-sex partnerships in some towns and cities in Japan; and, in 2017, the public sector institutionalization of anti-discrimination at the workplace legislation based on one’s sexual orientation and gender identity (Yoshinaga 2000; Capell and Elgebeily 2019). To one degree or another, these studies have confirmed what Jennifer Robertson articulated two decades ago: that the “composite character of gender” makes it fundamentally ambivalent and ambiguous, capable of fluctuating between or being assigned to more than one referent or category—and thus capable of being read or understood in more than one way (Robertson 1998, 140).

The pieces assembled here home in on the finely grained experiences of a range of individuals directly affected by the historical backdrop, contemporary mainstream attitudes, and legal frames briefly discussed thus far. Three of the articles describe how particular trans individuals live their everyday lives while enjoying moderate success as members of their respective sexual minority community. The authors take seriously the agentive role of, for the most part, fairly ordinary individuals who might choose, like anyone else, to hang out at café-bars, attend drinking parties, or aim to be included in the family registry even if its rules formally transform the relationships they are part of. Yet, these individuals are also, in a range of ways, associated or identified with the LGBTQI + community—they make sense of themselves as gendered and sexual beings, and they negotiate their place within society at large. In highlighting the diversity of the sexual minority community, these accounts describe how LGBTQI + individuals variably embrace self-determination, play with or reject their identities’ politicization and performative potential, and insist on an ordinariness that is in some cases sharply distinguished from an intellectual feminism as well as from commonly glamorizing and spectacularizing media representations.

Three essays contribute to our understanding of how LGTBQI + individuals engage the potential of non-heteronormativity and render its productivity. The fourth constitutes a critical analysis of the family registry through the lens of “institutional performativity.” The very everydayness of the scenes described in two of the pieces—Shu Min Yuen’s “Unqueer Queers: Drinking Parties and Negotiations of Cultural Citizenship by Female-to-Male Trans People in Japan” and Michelle H. S. Ho’s “Refusing Queer: Contemporary Dansō (Female to Male Crossdressing) Culture in Tokyo”—contrasts with Adrienne Renee Johnson’s “Josō or ‘Gender Free’? Playfully Queer ‘Lives’ in Visual Kei,” whose players aim to “tak[e] down a binary sex-gender system without becoming one themselves.” Despite these differences and distinctions, suggests SPF Dale in her contribution on “Same-sex Marriage and the Question of Queerness: Institutional Performativity and Marriage in Japan,” at the bottom of it all lies the enduring power of the family registry system, which governs how the LGTBQI + community live and make sense of their lives.

In “Unqueer Queers: Drinking Parties and Negotiations of Cultural Citizenship by Female-to-Male Trans People in Japan,” Shu Min Yuen considers individuals who reject politicized categories and identities, or who are at least disinclined to widen their push for acceptance into a larger sociopolitical project. Indeed, many of them insist on a kind of radical ordinariness and embrace lives which conform to the expectations of gender-normative men driven by their will to “fit into society as gender normative men.” They live their days across a public space where they live heteronormative lives aligned with their biological sex, and a hybridized private/public space, where they enjoy—in rather heteronormative ways—their being trans, together with both fellow trans individuals and other variously gendered and sexed ones. Rather than seeing this bifurcation of their experiential space as confining, they instead embrace it.

In “Refusing Queer,” Michelle H. S. Ho discusses the results of her research in a Tokyo female-to-male crossdressing café, where individuals embody variants of composite genders. In so doing, they not only reject political activism and LGTBQI + identities as represented in the public sphere—particularly television and popular culture at large—they also insist on a radical ordinariness that one of them articulated, somewhat antisocially and apolitically, as “I am me.” Identity, of course, is most vigorously expressed “in the face of oppression,” making it impertinent “to address the criticism of identity to those whose existence is threatened” (Wieseltier 1996, 14). Ho’s cross-dressers have no such experience of discrimination; as such, they do not actively aim to achieve wider recognition or identity—or at least they do not appear to.

Adrienne Renee Johnson offers readers a different scene. In “Josō or ‘Gender Free’? Playfully Queer ‘Lives’ in Visual Kei,” Visual Kei gender benders (mostly joyfully) “[mix] conflicting gender and sexual signs” in an overall effort to intervene in and glamorize “incoherences in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender, and sexual desire.” As such their queerness is playful and experimental; they live lives that Johnson describes as being “open to others” while also being both comparatively safe from mainstream criticism and separate from strict identity politics.

On and off the musical stage or, indeed, any other platform, the family registry remains closely intertwined with individuals’ most intimate decisions and self-perceptions. This is what SPF Dale proclaims in her essay on “Same-sex Marriage and the Question of Queerness: Institutional Performativity and Marriage in Japan.” In most of Japan it is not possible for a same-sex couple to marry. And yet, one partner in a queer relationship can legally adopt the other as a son or daughter (regardless of their age difference), thus forming a family unit that can be definitively recorded in the family registry. This legal option, ironically, enables a queering of people’s lives and identities despite the family registry’s reactionary conservatism.

Collectively, these four essays are yet another testament to the advancing normalization of queer existence achieved in the century following Miyatake’s prediction—as well as to the significant self-conscious individualism and self-determination a broad range of individuals can bring to bear in order to pursue it.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sabine Frühstück

Sabine Frühstück is the Koichi Takashima Chair and Professor of modern Japanese cultural studies in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Broadly interested in the study of modern and contemporary Japanese culture and its place in the world, she is the author of Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2003), Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army (University of California Press, 2007), and Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan (University of California Press, 2017). Frühstück is currently completing a volume on gender and sexuality in modern Japan which is under contract for the New Approaches to Asian History series of Cambridge University Press.

Notes

1 Here I follow Teresa A. Algoso’s critical analysis of the text; see Algoso (2006).

2 “National moral health” was high up on the agenda of the modernizing colonial regime and had numerous dimensions, including political and sexual ones. See, for instance, Frühstück (2003).

3 For a close reading of Gaikotsu’s Thoughts on Hermaphroditism, see Algoso (2006, 558).

4 Germany is one of the first countries worldwide that introduced the designation “diverse” as a third option for the birth registry (Allgemeine 2018) while Canada was the first country in the Americas to allow its citizens to use an “X” category, joining those in Australia, Denmark, Germany, Malta, New Zealand, and Pakistan. India, Ireland, and Nepal are among the countries that provide various third-options (Busby 2017).

5 For situating Japan’s modern sexual history within a longue durée and within a global frame respectively, see Frühstück (2005) and (2014).

6 There is a growing body of scholarship that examines the global dimensions of political activism around LGBTQI + matters. See, for instance, Capell and Elgebeily (2019), Martin et al. (2010).

7 It should be noted that this is based on a small sample of 239 students at Miyazaki International College, Miyazaki City, with an n of 153; see Lusk (2017).

8 In the Anglo-American sphere, Mark McLelland has most consistently traced the history of queer activism in numerous important monographs and anthologies, including McLelland (2005), McLelland and Dasgupta (2005), McLelland, Suganuma, and Welker (2007), and McLelland and Mackie (2014).

9 For a detailed history of the field of sexuality and gender studies with regards to Japan, see Frühstück (2005).

10 Most central to these debates is Robertson 1998; see also the numerous other publications by the same author.