Ethnosexual frontiers in queer Tokyo: the production of racialised desire in Japan

Abstract

Recent years have seen a worrying rise in anti-Korean and anti-Chinese xenophobia in Japan. This xenophobia has pervaded many aspects of Japanese society, and the gay male community in Tokyo's Shinjuku Ni-chōme is no exception. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of Ni-chōme and interviews conducted with Japanese, Chinese and South Korean men, this article utilises Nagel's theory of the ethnosexual frontier to examine how certain racial identities are rendered illegitimate in Ni-chōme. I argue that the stratification of Ni-chōme into spaces where only certain ‘racialised desires’ (minzokuteki na seiyoku) are legitimated reflects broader ideologies of racial identity that circulate throughout Japanese society. I discuss how Chinese and South Korean men understand themselves as ‘ethnosexual sojourners’ who visit Japan to form long-lasting romantic relationships with Japanese men, striving to adopt Japanese ethnosexual mores. I juxtapose the Chinese and South Korean men's narratives with the voices of Japanese gay men who ambivalently position Chinese and South Korean tourists as a threat to the status quo of the Japanese gay sub-culture. I suggest that these men draw upon neo-colonial discourses of China and South Korea as ‘backward’, which circulate throughout wider Japanese society to position Chinese and South Korean men as ‘ethnosexual invaders’.

Keywords:

• queer space
• queer Japan
• ethnosexuality
• race
• xenophobia
• sexual politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The majority of interviews with Chinese informants were conducted in English, supplemented by Japanese (in which I have a native-like fluency) and Chinese (in which I have conversational competency). Interviews with Korean informants were conducted mostly in English and Japanese as I do not have Korean language competence.

2. Rather than ascribing pseudonyms to these Japanese informants, I have de-identified them throughout the text because their data are supplementary to that of the Chinese and Korean informants.

3. Naturally, I do not claim to be able to ‘see’ race or nationality. To determine the ‘race’ of the men I was observing, I would ask them where they were from and with which ‘race’ they identified, to build up a random sample of the population.

4. If Hobin had greater Japanese competence, he may have potentially been allowed to stay. Sometimes nai-sen bars are welcoming of non-Japanese who are fluent in Japanese. During fieldwork, I often negotiated my own entry into these spaces through my native-like use of Japanese (which was perceived as an amusing novelty).

5. Chinese Tourists to Japan up 80% in 2014, Asahi Shimbun Asia and Japan Watch, 31 December 2014. Available at http://ajw.asahi.com/article/asia/china/AJ201412310023, accessed 21 October 2015.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas Baudinette

Thomas Baudinette is a PhD Candidate in the Social and Political Sciences Program, Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Australia. His research investigates how the consumption of media informs young Japanese gay men's understandings of their desires and identities. Thomas is also interested in the production of queer spaces in Japan and has written on queer Japanese art. He may be contacted at [email protected]