Figures 3 and 4: Beautiful boys make out in a popular women's YAOI manga.
From the comic book B-boy, courtesy of Biburosu Publications, Tokyo.
Various commentators have, then, argued that the bishoonen are not really 'men' but fantastic, androgynous creatures created by Japanese women as an expression of dissatisfaction with current gender stereotypes and the 'narrow life paths' which restrict women in the real world.[21]
Gay men tend not to identify with the beautiful youths in women's manga and feel that these figures are figments of women's imaginations. One gay man interviewed in Yajima Masami's collection of gay life stories says that these images had a negative effect upon him when he encountered them in high-school. He got the impression from women's comics that 'being gay meant being a smart and beautiful member of the elite' and that homosexuals 'must be cute and pretty.' As he was neither cute nor beautiful, he worried 'what will become of me?'[22] Another of Yajima's informants says that he was familiar with homosexuality from childhood and that although he considered it 'taken-for-granted' [atarimae] because of its widespread representation in women's comics, the plot lines suggested to him that it was 'an unforgivable but beautiful relationship.'[23] The highly idealised 'homosexual' characters and fanciful plots in women's comics therefore do little to foster a sense of recognition or identity in gay male readers.
Yet, despite the rather 'fantastic' representation of homosexually-inclined beautiful youths which commonly occur in women's manga, these representations do seem to have affected the way some Japanese women regard actual gay men. Starting with a series of articles in the women's magazine CREA in February 1991, entitled 'Gay Renaissance,' Japanese women's media began to interest themselves in Japan's gay subculture which resulted in what has since been termed Japan's 'gay boom.'[24] One article in CREA under the headline of 'Women who plan on spending a pleasurable life with gays' explains that women's interest in developing not just friendships with gay men, but cohabiting relationships, results from the negative image they have of traditional masculinity and masculine roles. In this article, and others like it, it is assumed that gay men are radically different from their straight counterparts and can even be 'best partners' [besuto paatonaa] for women. Mainstream magazines such as the tabloid-style SPA (18 March 1998) have also picked up on this trend and begun to run articles on the 'boom' in 'friendship marriages' [yuujoo kekkon) which are supposed to be increasing between straight women and 'gays' [gei]. The women interviewed in the SPA article, entitled 'Women who choose gays and gays who choose women,' mention a number of attractive features supposedly possessed by gay men which their straight counterparts lack. These include their willingness to negotiate roles within the marriage and to help with housework. The writer mentions that it is a cause for concern that straight men are assumed not to have these qualities, but the assumption that these qualities are characteristic of gay men goes unchallenged.
The fantasy of the gay man as a woman's 'best partner' is most clearly developed in two 'gay boom' movies directed at a female audience which focus on the relationships between straight women and gay men. In Okoge[25] the heroine Sayoko, who is an independent-minded career woman, finds herself attracted to gay men as she associates straight men with the sexual abuse she received at the hands of her step-father. When she attempts to match-make on behalf of a gay friend she ends up being raped by a 'gay' man (who turns out to be straight). She becomes pregnant as a consequence and although she tries to make a life with the baby's father, he continues to abuse her. Eventually she leaves him to set up home with her gay friend with whom she has been in love all along. Twinkle[26] is another movie featuring a relationship between a gay man and a straight woman. In this movie, the couple agree to a 'camouflage marriage' [kamofuraaji kekkon] to escape the intense pressure from family and colleagues to get married. After a series of emotional traumas arising when the husband is 'outed' to his in-laws, it becomes clear that they have actually fallen in love and they decide to continue as a married couple, albeit making space in their relationship to accommodate the husband's boyfriend. In both the above relationships gay men are shown to be offering women the kind of love, appreciation and respect denied to them by straight men. However, there is no suggestion that the gay men have been converted to heterosexuality, for in these narratives it is heterosexual men and the sexist 'system' which produces them that is irretrievably 'other' to the female heroines.
In popular culture aimed at women in Japan, it seems difficult to represent heterosexual sex positively as women are always disadvantaged by Japan's patriarchal value system. Feminist Ueno Chizuko makes this explicit when she argues that 'neither men nor women are sleeping with the opposite sex, they are sleeping with a system'[27] and despite the personal dynamics which operate in individual relationships, 'the system' always works to disadvantage women. Hence, when women themselves create fantasies about sex, it is frequently homosexual sex which is depicted. As one Japanese woman confided to lesbian author and activist Sarah Schulman, 'Images of male homosexuality are the only picture we have of men loving someone else as an equal. It is the kind of love we want to have.'[28]
Above, I have outlined how representations of male homosexual love are common in women's manga and have been so since the 1970s. The very idealised representations of 'beautiful youths' common in these stories seems to have generated the idea in many women's minds that contemporary 'gay' men resemble these figures. In fact, in a recent book written by Nomura Sachiyo, one of Japan's top female TV personalities entitled Can You Judge Men? Here are 17 Checkpoints, she draws a picture of the homosexual man which seems to come straight out of women's manga. For instance, she says that homosexuals are always neat, their clothes are fashionable and clean and they smell nice. Their apartments, like their personal appearances, are meticulous and contain tell-tale signs of homosexuality such as lace curtains, rose-patterned wallpaper, rococo-style furniture and chandeliers. She concludes that 'homosexuals are, as you would expect, somehow lady-like.'[29] Women's media in Japan constantly reiterate the idea that gay men are substantially different from straight men and that they more closely resemble women both in their appearance and in their sensibilities. The CREA (February 1991) article mentioned above stresses that friendships with gay men involve an intimacy that is impossible with straight men, with one woman stating, 'When we snuggle up together, it's not in the least unpleasant, it feels like petting a cat.' This latter comment betrays two important assumptions - the first being that straight men have a difficulty dissociating intimacy from sexuality (snuggling up to a straight man would become 'unpleasant') and that gay men, like pets, enjoy this kind of intimacy. The article further suggests that having to constantly compete with men on unequal terms causes many women in Japan to feel exhausted [tsukareru] but that a gay partner can 'relieve this exhaustion.' Hence, unlike the patriarchal 'other' against which women have to battle in order to win social space for female subjectivity, gay men are women's allies, described as nurturing women in much the same way that women are expected to nurture men.
However, a look at specifically gay Japanese media suggests that with regard to their attitudes towards sex and their relationships with women, Japanese gay men have much more in common with straight men than they do with women.[30] Representations of gay men in women's media, then, tell us little about those men in Japan who primarily experience sexual desire directed towards other men and rather more about Japanese women's problematic relationship with traditional images of masculinity.
Women's idealised representations of gay men also tend to be rejected by gay men themselves. After all, gay men are characterised by their love of other men, not women. One man in Yajima's collection of life stories articulates the feelings of many of the gay men to whom I have spoken when he says that 'the "gay boom" is really about Japanese women ... constructing a fantasy which refuses the distortions and bad influences thrust upon them by a patriarchal society.'[31] Many of the married gay men interviewed in the SPA article mentioned above also seem to be more interested in the institution of 'the family' than they do in their female partners. One man comments that 'the meaning of marriage is to establish a stable family; sex is just an added extra. I want to have a family more than sex.' Another man comments, 'My image of marriage is walking about town with my kids.' In this construction, the wife has been entirely elided.
Homosexuality in mainstream media
If male homosexuality is sympathetically, albeit unrealistically, treated in Japanese women's media, what about more mainstream media directed at society as a whole? Generally when a 'mainstream' audience is anticipated, the homosexual man is still represented in 'feminine' terms although he is received not so much with sympathy as irony or humour. However, such representations are still commonplace. In 1994, the gay-rights group OCCUR, in one week of evening-time television monitoring, recorded fourteen references to homosexuality and/or transgenderism treated as 'something to be laughed at.'[32] On television, in particular, the homosexual man is represented as an okama. James Valentine says of the okama stereotype: 'In media portrayals okama look like fakes, trying to be women but noticeably failing.'[33] Okama are represented as the opposite of 'normal' men (noomaru, a loan word from English and futsuu, the Japanese equivalent, are the main terms used to describe 'straight' men in Japanese). Japanese television loves to present documentaries and 'wide shows' (live variety programmes) detailing 'surprising' things or events and okama are often featured on these shows either as subjects of investigation or as studio guests. However, when they appear they do so only to be laughed at. One recent TV show[34] illustrates how discussion of homosexuality is introduced for comic effect. The programme, entitled 'Japanese people, here is something strange I tell you: the statement "homosexuals should be killed" leads to a riot in the studio,' featured a 'debate' between a group of Japanese-speaking foreigners and some Japanese homosexual men and women who were invited to discuss the topic of homosexuality in front of a Japanese audience. Most of the foreigners were selected from countries in which homosexuality is still illegal, including India, Pakistan, Iran and Ghana, and whose nationals are not normally featured on Japanese TV as Japanese-speaking 'talents.' The audience found the vehemence and animation with which some of the foreign guests derided homosexuals as evil and sick people to be particularly hilarious. This is partly to do with the difficulty Japanese people have in understanding why some foreigners get so upset about homosexuality, but also to do with the spectacle of the Japanese-speaking foreigner. That the 'foreigners' were as much on display as were the 'homosexuals' is evident from the fact that although the Japanese guests had name plates, the foreign guests were identified only by their country of origin. The spectacle of these non-white foreigners (a very small minority group in Japan) using the Japanese language in an extremely animated diatribe against homosexuals generated, among the Japanese audience, not concern but comedy.
Print media too often associate the homosexual man with the 'feminine' even when there is little actual evidence for doing so. For instance, an article in the popular tabloid magazine FOCUS (1 April 1998) entitled 'The Finance Ministry again! The homo connection of an employee arrested for drugs: his secret after 5 "hobby",' exposed a civil servant for his drug abuse and what it termed his 'homo play.' The writer described the man's obsession with extremely cute things and was at great pains to stress that since the man involved was not married, the cute things on his desk and in his car could not be put down to a wife or daughter. They must therefore be the result of his shumi, which is the usual word for 'hobby' but here signifies something more like 'proclivity' or 'taste,' specifically his taste in sexual partners. Given the widespread assumption that same-sex desire signifies transgenderism (or even a desire to be the opposite sex) the writer makes a 'natural' association between homosexual 'play' and an affinity for 'cute things' (here gendered as a female interest). It is significant in this article and many others like it that the homosexual activities of the man involved are described using the terms asobi, meaning 'play' as well as the English loan-word purei, and the Japanese term shumi meaning 'hobby' or 'taste.' In Japan, it is commonly assumed that Japanese men have a variety of sexual peccadilloes and that so long as they indulge in them out of sight and do not let them interfere with family obligations, they are largely tolerated. Indeed, the article mentioned above relates this scandal to another recent affair involving senior members of the Finance Ministry who were caught using their expense accounts in a nopan shabushabu (a Japanese steak restaurant in which the waitresses wear 'no panties'). The writer was not so much upset that senior Government officials had been found in such a restaurant but that they were there at the tax-payers' expense.
As American anthropologist Jennifer Robertson notes[35] 'as long as an individual's sexual practices do not interfere with or challenge the legitimacy of the twinned institutions of marriage and household, Japanese society accommodates - and in the case of males, even indulges - a diversity of sexual behaviors.' This tolerance is extended even to homosexual sex, which, although it is not to be spoken about, is easily available in Japan, where there is no legislation relating to sex between men or sex between women.[36] Hence, many Japanese gay men resist the western notion of 'gay rights.' For instance, one gay man writes into a Japanese gay Internet BBS 'You can do whatever you want with regard to love and sex so why is it necessary to support "gay lib"?' Another man writes that 'being gay is basically a personal problem so I can't agree with gay-lib thinking.' As Dutch anthropologist Wim Lunsing has argued 'sexuality is not thought of so much in terms of what is right or wrong as it is in Anglo-American contexts, but rather as play, something people may engage in if they wish to do so.' The lack of religious and legal sanctions against non-marital, non-vaginal sexual expression on the part of men, then, means that 'sexuality may not be easy to politicize.'[37]
Conclusion
Above, I have suggested that representations of and discussions about male homosexuality are frequent in Japanese popular culture but that their reception differs according to the anticipated audience. Women tend to produce and consume homoerotic stories about bishoonen [beautiful youths] whom they fantasize as ideal men. This has led in some women's books, magazines and movies directed at a female audience to a discourse which posits the homosexual man as a sympathetic best friend for women and even a woman's 'best partner.' However, where a male gaze is anticipated, men who transgress to the feminine are treated humorously. 'Homosexuality' is a topic which will always get laughs and therefore asides and references to it are a staple of many Japanese TV documentaries and 'wide shows.'
Despite the frequent and widespread references to homosexuality in a variety of Japanese popular media, none of these representations really show actual men or women who experience same-sex desire going about their daily lives much as 'normal' people do. There is hardly any discussion in Japanese media about homosexuality as a specific 'identity' or 'lifestyle choice.' Yet, compared with the US, there is little overt hostility in the media directed towards homosexuals either. One reason why the debate program discussed above was so interesting and amusing to a Japanese audience was the extreme vehemence with which some of the foreign panellists derided homosexuals. Such strength of emotion was seen as 'surprising' from a Japanese cultural position which views 'homosexuality' either as a fantasy romance for women or a staple of TV comedy. As The World Press Review states, 'Homosexuality is not the hot social and moral issue in Japan it is in the US or Western Europe.'[38] One wonders what Evangelist Jerry Falwell, who derided the Teletubbies' character Tinky Winky as a gay role model,[39] would think about Japanese girls lining up to buy homosexual soft porn because it depicts romantic relationships that are 'more pure' than those between men and women!
Japan is certainly no paradise for men or women who experience exclusive same-sex sexual attraction, and it is true that there is little space at present in Japanese society for developing a lesbian or gay 'identity' or living a lifestyle centered around one's same-sex desires as is possible for certain individuals in most major cities of the western world (but hardly so outside them). However, to claim, as Barbara Summerhawk does in her introduction to her collection of Japanese lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual people's lives that 'a majority of Japanese gay men live in contradiction, a constant struggle with their inner self, even to the point of cutting off emotions and a denial of their own oppression'[40] is clearly mistaken. Not only has Summerhawk not spoken to 'a majority' of Japanese gay men but her diagnosis of their mental states rests upon an unexamined confidence that the experience of same-sex desire means the desire to be 'a lesbian' or 'a gay' in the late-twentieth-century Anglo-American sense of these terms. Such an assumption is undermined even by some of her own interviewees. Indeed, one gay man commented that 'Japan has a very different history when it comes to discrimination ... I have never had to face termination of employment because I was gay ... I have never come across someone thrown in prison because he was gay ... there is no religious concept of homosexuality as a vice, drawing out a sense of self-contempt ... for me in Tokyo, subscribing to [the concept of 'gay rights'] is like carrying around someone else's baggage.'[41]
The fact that in Japan 'homosexuality' is not constructed as the anti-social, anti-Christian, anti-family, absolute signifier of the 'other' that it has become to conservative groups in the US, suggests that the gradual acceptance of lesbian and gay lives in Japan may be achieved without the animosity, the fighting and the panic that such (limited) acceptance has so far occasioned there. As Wim Lunsing, who has worked extensively with gay and lesbian groups in Japan, points out, 'In Japan, when push comes to shove, not many people can say what is wrong with homosexuality,' and he consequently thinks that the future holds 'much promise.'[42]
Just what the future does hold for gay men and lesbians in Japan is difficult to predict. We need more research on what Peter Jackson has called the 'micro-histories'[43] of sexual identity formation with regard to Japan's recent past as well as more extensive interview data from men and women in contemporary Japan who experience and express same-sex desire. It is to be hoped that more resources will be directed at this study soon, for the recent history of homosexuality in Japan is of great interest for lesbian and gay studies. The rapid transformations which have taken place in Japanese society over the last century have shown that it is possible to 'modernise' without having to 'westernise' and that it is therefore problematic when we try to understand Japanese culture through terms which have a very specific history within our own.
Endnotes