Emerging Lesbian Voices from Japan

Sharon Chalmers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135787868
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

Lesbian Sexuality has remained largely ignored in Japan despite increasing exposure of disadvantaged minority groups, including gay men. This book is the first comprehensive academic exploration of contemporary lesbian sexuality in Japanese society. The author employs an interdisciplinary approach and this book will be of great value to those working or interested in the areas of Japanese, lesbian and gender studies as well as Japanese history, anthropology and cultural studies.

1 A moment in time

Introduction

Traditionally, the way of thinking in Japanese society concerning minorities, and unusual people, strange people, was not to exclude them. They were allowed into society, but society would act as if they weren’t there, by ignoring them, and if that didn’t work, telling them to keep quiet. So to that extent, Japanese society is not very aggressive toward minorities. Most lesbians at the moment haven’t come out so they can’t be seen. And because they can’t be seen, society doesn’t attack them, and is prepared to let them be. So for the lesbian too, that’s okay. There are some unpleasant aspects, but if some one is prepared to put up with them a bit, there’s not really a problem.

(Kakefuda)

Kakefuda Hiroko made the decision to come out publicly, through the publication of her book, Rezubian de aru to iu koto (Being a Lesbian) in 1992. Over the following five years both television and the print media generally called on her for comments and appearances whenever a ‘lesbian point of view’ was required. Kakefuda consistently asserted that one of the most difficult areas for lesbians in Japan to deal with is the overall social approval of knowing when to keep silent as an instrument of both containment and oppression. She argues that containment of marginal groups has been historically constructed in terms of ‘tolerance’, which has also been long described in the language of consensus and harmony. However this appearance of tolerance can only be maintained as long as minority or marginal groups are prepared to accept that the dominant form(s) or hierarchical relationships will allow only for their partial inclusion.

Over the last twenty years, however, there has been an increasing number of visible interest groups – a multiplicity of publics – who, with varied success in reforming social policies, have worked to voice their concerns from alternative subject positions. These groups, including pacifist, anti-war, environmental, feminist, Burakumin, Ainu and Korean groups, have attempted to challenge in various ways the representation of Japan as a homogeneous and mono-racial society.

These shifts notwithstanding, within this new inclusiveness there is one overarching assumption that still remains firmly in place and overwhelmingly unchallenged in academic and popular discourse.¹ That is, that all Japanese are heterosexual, or, at the very least require a heterosexual guise in which to operate as full members (ichininmae) of Japanese society. Hence, few cracks have hitherto appeared in the hegemony of these heterocentric discourses in Japan. Thus, despite the increasing political exposure and academic documentation of the issues of disadvantaged minority groups in Japan, lesbian sexuality has remained inconsequential. The result has been portrayals of lesbian sexuality which perpetuate and sustain the myth of lesbian invisibility in Japan.

This invisibility, Kakefuda contends, is not generally manifested in the form of direct discrimination but rather as systematic cultural dis-ease which results in either objectification or omission of their daily experiences as embodied social subjects. This is the issue that to a large extent precipitated her decision to come out. Kakefuda maintains that in Japan the fear of one’s parents’ and family’s reactions to finding out that one is lesbian is what prevents many women from taking this step.

[But] the idea of telling their parents is enough to make most people panic … . It comes down to who is going to suffer! And of course within Japanese society, it is not the individual who is the most important. Putting yourself above others is simply not the acceptable way to think in Japanese society

(Kakefuda; also see Hara, M. 1995: 72)

Kakefuda’s view is premised on the assumption that Japanese social relations encompass a worldview in which the form or type of association of any given relationship becomes the privileged site (Rosenberger 1994: 102). In other words, ‘I’ only becomes meaningful by contextualising one’s position relative to others and so ‘I’ is interwoven into and implicated in a multiplicity of constantly shifting hierarchical relationships. Arguably, this notion of a fragmented ‘self’ has the potential to open up spaces in which ‘whole’ identities do not need to exist in order to be inside various social contexts. However, to know which part to reveal in what situation, usually learned from early childhood in Japan, is a little more complicated for lesbians. This was expressed clearly by one of the women whose perspectives are presented in this book. As Fumie explains, when initially ‘coming out’ to her mother, her mother’s (lack of) reaction clearly fits in with Kakefuda’s analysis of the general response to minority groups in Japan.

[S]he didn’t say anything outright because we just have this custom of not saying things … and not saying positive things when you feel it. It’s better not to express things. And that’s what really oppresses me here [in Japan].

The issue, therefore, is that these different selves are contained in strictly bounded hierarchical groupings. In Japan these are primarily founded on sex, age, status and ethnicity. The moment at which one attempts to recognise and/or separate one’s self from one’s accepted position within a relationship, the relationship based on ‘form’ and ‘tolerance’ is disrupted and affirmed as anti-social.

One of the major aims of this book is to challenge this myth of ‘tolerance’ by critiquing the apparent overwhelming desire to create the impression of harmony and consensus through ‘sameness’ within Japanese society. This ‘harmony’ and ‘sameness’ are represented in terms of cultural (Japaneseness) and (hetero)sexual homogeneity in which notions of outsider and outsiderness are set in opposition to norms grounded in the maintenance of appropriate hierarchical forms of being. These hierarchies subsequently become internalised and eventually normalised. In contrast, those who do not appear to fit in are either explained away within narrow and limited explanations as some form of deviancy, at best anomalies, or, more commonly, they are simply ignored. Part of the problem however is that these two pseudo-explanations themselves are constructed within a contained binary opposition of inside/out, or sameness/difference (Fuss 1991).

A further aim of the book is to reinforce what has now become apparent within recent scholarship on identity formation. That is, that socio-cultural factors such as sexuality, class, age, ethnicity and gender are not separate entities but work simultaneously. In Grosz’s words all these factors are ‘mutually constituted’ to produce multiple meanings (1994a: 19–20),² the effects of which in this instance enable or disable Japanese lesbians to appear and disappear as social, economic and political subjects in Japanese society. In order to make sense of these dis/appearances I attempt to work in a somewhat unconventional form, in the telling of ‘this story’ (Kondo 1990: 8). For the women I worked with and for myself, this final text is the result of various discussions, negotiations, friendships as well as misunderstandings and altercations which we grappled with over a six year period (1993–94 and for a short period in 1998).

And this brings me to a critical issue: that being the way I have decided to produce this text and represent the voices of the women with whom I talked. This account examines narrative themes rather than individual life stories. Indeed, there is very limited information offered about the appearance, residences, work lives or routine daily comings and goings of the women involved. Furthermore, this book explores a range of social and geographical sites rather than locating ‘lesbian activity’ in a particular geographic space or in any one specific community (Robertson 1998a; Wolf 1979; Krieger 1980). In addition, I have adopted an interdisciplinary approach in that the work draws on history, social and cultural anthropology as well as Japanese, lesbian, gay, queer, women’s and cultural studies.

Similarly, all the participants, myself included, were located in multiple shifting subject positions some of which included those of researcher, friend, academic, paid and unpaid worker, confessor, confidante, political activist, parent, lover and of course same-sex attracted women. Within these various guises I want overtly to acknowledge what has hitherto, particularly among Western academic researchers – whether working in the area of anthropology, sociology, history or behavioural psychology – been generally met with some amazement, that is, that narrators have knowledge and expertise about both their own lives, and the socio-cultural contexts in which they and their ‘others’ live.³

At the same time, the recent and often well-founded empowerment strategies of acknowledging women’s expertise in interpreting their own lives and their own socio-cultural positionings, previously the domain of the outsider or ‘objective researcher’, continue to call for constant critique. That is, there is now a tendency to construct the subjectivity of ‘the insider’ merely as a mechanism in ‘the projection of an all-knowing subject’. Trinh Minh-ha refers to this twist as ‘a paradoxical shift of the colonial mind’ (1988: 75). In doing so, she asks whether this move is simply a post-colonial reinvention of the self/other relationship through the privileging of female voices without serious reflection of the hierarchical process inherent in the gesture of calling on other women’s voices. This can result in the construction of false representations of homogeneous and romanticised subjects where ‘the other would always remain the shadow of the self. Hence not really, not quite all knowing’ (Trinh Minh-ha 1988: 75).

The above issues are integral to the form the text has taken in that the women involved determined the context in which their voices could safely speak and be heard. In contrast, other women who were initially involved felt that the research process, sometimes due to our personal relationships and at other times because of the sensitivity of the research itself, placed them in an untenable position and subsequently withdrew. Due to the ethical, emotional and intellectual complexities (and potential minefields) of these issues, it is no accident that this is the first published English language analysis of both institutionalised heterosexuality and female same-sex attracted Japanese women and it is one that almost did not happen.

The process of the production of this text has been changing since its inception. There are no surprises in that! Indeed, I did begin with the idea of collecting life stories but over time I was made aware that the narratives could not be presented in this form because of the homophobic and sexist climate in Japanese society. For example, as alluded to above the fear of being ‘outed’ through this research, despite the use of pseudonyms or only first names, caused so much distress that a number of women withdrew. This fear – whether real or perceived – was not just about being ‘outed’ as a rezubian (lesbian) but rather rested on being ‘outed’ as a lesbian and an unmarried woman, the latter a precarious position to be in in Japanese society in terms of housing, family, work, gender or sexual relations.

On a personal level, the withdrawal of these women caused me great distress, anger and sadness as I had already been working and collecting stories for one year. More significant however was that it also resulted in the end of a number of close friendships. Acknowledgement of this situation in the introduction by way of their virtual disappearance in the rest of the text is in itself evidence of the sensitivity and vulnerability of their socio-political positions, emotional vulnerability as well as the inherent ethical dilemmas faced in the process of doing research and intervening in other people’s lives (Edwards 1993: 185).

What has eventually materialised is broadly speaking a three-way conversation which gives a partial picture of how the women I talked with see, contextualise, explain, analyse, and make sense of certain issues in their lives as self-identified Japanese lesbians. The result is an exchange in which the women’s views are juxtaposed alongside academic and popular discourses and encapsulated within my theoretical/methodological approach. The fact that they would only appear/participate under particular conditions attests to the coercive and dominant position heterosexual discourse plays in all areas of Japanese women’s lives. Thus, while some may be critical of what may appear to be simply ‘talking heads’, at least they are talking.

I believe that what makes this work different is the fact that, as I have mentioned above, there is almost no contemporary academic discourse in English⁴ about lesbian sexuality in Japan. And furthermore neither are there any works in English or Japanese that challenge or open up a space that allows a paradigm shift in who and what is being analysed.⁵ In other words what has emerged is a space in which these women are able to express their critique of Japanese heterosexuality from a position both within and outside of heteronormative behaviours.

I don’t really know anything about the academic world in Australia, but in Japan there are women who are supposedly intellectual who still react negatively to women’s studies. There was one woman at the last place I worked who was really outstanding … . But even she rejected women’s studies as a discipline. She said that putting together a lot of opinions and impressions as a discipline would only give people yet another opportunity to poke fun at women … . She considered herself a feminist …. [but] so far as she was concerned, an academic discipline wasn’t a discipline unless it had the right sort of data and objectivity. Of course I don’t know whether it’s that important to be acknowledged by academic circles – that’s your decision. But on the other hand, acknowledgement of your methods would be an indirect but important influence toward change in the academic world.

(Mitsu)

The Japanese education system thrives on the notion of collective learning, and ‘difference’ is seen as a negative attribute in student and teacher interactions (Hendry 1986; Lewis 1989; Peak 1989; Rohlen 1989: 19–26). This concern was reflected in the above observations by Mitsu, one of the women I talked with over fifteen months. Central to Mitsu’s analysis was a concern with how I would legitimate the direct words and lived experiences that constitute the substantive knowledges of different lesbians’ lives. ‘Will academics criticise you or ignore you?’ This worry is not unique to my work but is a fairly common reaction by women to participating as active voices in feminist research. That is: is what I am telling you and how I am telling it worth anything (Contratto in Buss 1985: 1; Kennedy and Davis 1993: 16)? This vulnerability, as Buss argues, often translates into invisibility (Buss 1985: 14; Vance 1984: 13). Thus, the silences and practices of marginalisation which surround lesbians’ lives in Japan are also indicative of the personal experiences within academic institutions and mainstream popular discourses both in and outside Japan. Consequently the changing developmental process of the research – at times volatile – was at risk not only from outside criticism, but we also had to overcome the negative attitudes attached to speaking about women, the language women use to express themselves (Gluck and Patai (eds) 1991; Personal Narratives Group (eds) 1989), speaking and writing about (homo)sexuality (Walsh-Bowers and Parlour 1992: 109; Williams 1993: 118; Bolton 1995: 158; Duberman et al. 1991: 1; Humphreys 1975: 228; Lewin and Leap 1996: 19), and speaking about lesbians by lesbians. The latter to some degree can be explained by internalised homophobia in regard to our collective fears of ‘coming out’ in the text as well as the anxieties and pressures in relation to the acceptance and legitimacy of feminist research. In addition, as alluded to by Mitsu, there is an on-going academic struggle between Women’s Studies and the position of oral narratives as a legitimate research method in Japan (Tomida 1996: 22). The low status of feminist methodologies, in combination with the trivialisation of sexuality studies as a serious and relevant area of research (McLelland 2000: 61; Allison 1996: 9–15), work towards the marginalisation and de-legitimisation of both projects as academically worthwhile.

Despite these fears, lesbian invisibility and the active production of these silences in Japan can only begin to be understood with the cooperation, involvement and analyses of Japanese ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 A moment in time
• 2 Lesbian in/visibility in Japan: Passing into the present
• 3 Identifying the lesbian in contemporary Japan
• 4 Negotiating boundaries
• 5 What's in a family?
• 6 Consolidating heteronormative practices
• 7 Re-creating families
• 8 Female friendships and the nature of reciprocity
• 9 Cultures and communities: the necessity for new possibilities
• 10 Bodies of knowledge
• Notes
• Reference
• Index