Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Japan

Mark McLelland, Romit Dasgupta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134260577
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

Incorporating Japanese language materials and field-based research, this compelling collection of essays takes a comparative look at the changing notions of gender and sexual diversity in Japan, considering both heterosexual and non-heterosexual histories, lifestyles and identities.

Written by key Japanese authors and Western scholars the volume examines how non-conformist individuals have questioned received notions and challenged social norms relating to sex and gender. The chapters depict the plurality of gender positions; from housewives opposed to gender roles within marriage to heterosexual men wishing to be more involved in family life. Including material not previously published in English, this volume gives an overview of the important changes taking place in gender and sexuality studies within Japanese scholarship.

1 Introduction

Mark McLelland and Romit Dasgupta

More than a century and a half after Japonisme first swept the salons of Europe, Japan, far more so than other more populous countries of “the Orient,” still provides Western media with an endless supply of exotic and enticing images. Recent movies such as Kill Bill, The Last Samurai, Lost in Translation and Japanese Story have presented viewers with a repertoire of familiar characters – from samurai, yakuza, geisha and ninja, to the more quotidian salaryman. These movies, populated by all our favorite Japanese characters, seem so very satisfying (and credible) because they offer, as Edward Said points out, “a world elsewhere, apart from the ordinary attachments, sentiments, and values of our world in the West” (1995: 190).

This longstanding fascination with Things Japanese (the title of an 1891 collection by Basil Hall Chamberlain) is perhaps best illustrated by Arthur Golden’s (1998) best-seller Memoirs of a Geisha, the success of which saw the release of numerous other works about Japan’s traditional “floating world.” Indeed, travelers passing through airport bookshops in the early years of the present century will no doubt have noticed entire shelves dedicated to books on this topic. It would be unlikely that a book about a Chinese or an Indian courtesan, no matter how skillfully written, would have gained the same popularity. Memoirs of a Geisha was able to become so popular because it confirmed (admittedly in the context of a skillfully written and engaging narrative) everything that we think we already know about Japan.¹ It is the very “authentic” feel of the novel Anne Allison (2001) identifies as a major factor behind its success. As Allison observes, the novel resonates because it fits so well with widespread orientalist notions that are routinely entertained about Japan in societies of the West. She comments that the book is “Orientalist in the Saidean sense of treating the ‘Orient’ as innately different from the ‘West’ whose culture homogenizes as well as differentiates ‘them’ from ‘us’” (2001: 382).

While this repertoire of characters borrowed from Japanese history makes for engaging cinema, it does little to advance our understanding of Japan’s complex modern society which is subject to the same global trends and influences that are resulting in demographic and social shifts in other post-industrial nations such as the US, the UK and Australia. Notions of “homogeneity” and, more recently, “hegemony,” have come under attack from a variety of theorists who have analyzed how the shift from “traditional” to “modern” ways of living, thinking and working have been characterized by increasing differentiation and segmentation – within populations as much as markets. Giddens (1992), for instance, notes the development and proliferation of diverse “lifestyle sectors” within previously undifferentiated communities which are challenging received notions about how certain types of individuals should live their lives. Traditionally, gender has been a major divide structuring the kinds of lifestyle choices that individuals have been able to make but, in contemporary society, gender exerts less and less influence on an individual’s chosen life path. Issues of gender are increasingly complicated by the rise of a new category – sexuality, or better sexual orientation – which has emerged in Japan, as it has in the US and elsewhere, as a major node around which individuals are constructing their lifestyles.

This collection of essays focuses on changing notions of gender and sexuality in Japan in order to highlight the diversity which exists (and which, to an extent, has long existed) among Japanese people. Following the recent trend toward pluralizing concepts such as “gender” in order to highlight the diversity that these terms tend to mask when used in the singular, we present a series of essays focusing on a wide range of Japanese genders, transgenders and sexualities. We include the term transgenders here to stress that despite the proliferation of “masculinities” and “femininities” in contemporary societies, increasing numbers of people are choosing to live outside this binary structure; that is they prefer to live beyond or between conventional gender categories. Drawing extensively upon Japanese-language materials, as well as fieldwork with a range of Japanese individuals and communities, the authors in this collection present much new information about recent changes in Japanese constructions of gender and sexuality. We begin by considering the nature and the scope of research into Japanese gender and sexuality up until now.

Beyond homogeneity?

Vera Mackie has observed that Japanese “models of citizenship implicitly privilege the male, white-collar ‘citizen in a suit’” (2000: 246) and it is due to the marginalized position that women have occupied in a range of social situations that we have such a wealth of studies of Japanese women. These include studies ranging from the prewar “peasant” femininities enacted by village women described in Smith and Wiswell’s (1982) Women of Suye Mura to the urban women’s political activism outlined by Mackie (1997) in Creating Socialist Women in Japan and Sievers’s (1983) history of early feminist thought, Flowers in Salt: The Beginning of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan. Other important studies of contemporary women include Kelsky’s (2001) Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams, an investigation of Japanese women’s internationalism, and LeBlanc’s (1999) study of women’s participation in local politics, Bicycle Citizens: The Political World of the Japanese Housewife.

In contrast to these numerous investigations into a range of Japanese women’s lifestyles and philosophies, little attention has been paid to the variety that exists among Japanese men. Indeed, it is not much of an exaggeration to state that “we know virtually nothing about the practices Japanese men use to construct their masculinity” (Sturtz Streetharan 2004: 82). The lack of even a single monograph which takes the construction of masculinity in Japan as its focus testifies to this extreme imbalance. To an extent, as Taga points out in his chapter in this volume, male experience has historically been taken as paradigmatic of human experience and only women’s lives have been seen as different, problematic, deficient or in some other way “marked” and thereby in need of specific study.

While human experience is typically portrayed through the lives and achievements of men, to the extent that men as a category have been studied, there has also been a pronounced focus upon relatively elite men. The “salaryman” has for a long time been seen as the be-all and end-all of Japanese masculinity and it is his life and values that have attracted the most research (Vogel 1963; Plath 1964; Ballon 1969; Rohlen 1974; Clark 1979; van Helvoort 1979; Beck and Beck 1994). While this trend began with works such as Vogel (1963) and to a certain extent even Dore (1958), perhaps the most influential work on the salaryman has been that by Japanese anthropologist Nakane Chie. In 1967 Nakane devoted an entire chapter to the description of the “Characteristics and Value Orientation of Japanese Man” in her influential work Tate shakai no ningen kankei: tan’itsu shakai no riron (Inter-personal relationships in a vertically structured society: a theory of a homogenous society), translated into English in 1970 as Japanese Society. This book was warmly received in Japan and it was translated into English with government support so as to provide a textbook explaining Japan to the West. Still in print after over 30 years and frequently set as an introductory reader on Japanese anthropology courses, countless students have used this book as a resource in developing their understanding of Japan and Nakane’s theories, particularly her description of Japan as an “homogenous society,” have exerted a strong influence, not only on the discipline of Japanese studies, but via popular journalism, upon media representations of Japan in general. Three decades later, Nakane’s description of the Japanese man (as if all men in Japan shared the same characteristics and all possessed a single value orientation) is clearly seen as a nihonjinron (Japanese uniqueness)² argument, but it is only in the last few years that studies problematizing Nakane’s depiction of the elite, heterosexually married, white-collar salaryman as the paradigmatic embodiment of Japanese masculinity have become available in English. These include Fowler’s (1996) investigation of Tokyo’s day laborers, San’ya Blues: Laboring Life in Contemporary Tokyo, Roberson’s (1998) study of male factory workers, Japanese Working Class Lives: An Ethnographic Study of Factory Workers, and Roberson and Suzuki’s (2003) pioneering collection Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan, which is significantly subtitled Dislocating the Salaryman Doxa.

Likewise, it is only in the past few years that English scholarship has shown an interest in previously overlooked “marginal” or “liminal” sexual and gender identities (although in terms of the historical record, these patterns of behavior were hardly marginal at the time). Leupp’s (1995) Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan, Pflugfelder’s (1999) Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse 1600–1950 and McLelland’s (2000) Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan have traced developments in male homosexual identity and practice from the Tokugawa period through to the end of the last century, while Robertson’s (1998) Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan and Chalmers’s (2002) Emerging Lesbian Voices from Japan have looked at lesbian identities from the Taisho period until the 1990s.

Lunsing’s (2001) Beyond Common Sense: Sexuality and Gender in Contemporary Japan and McLelland’s (2005) Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age are so far the most comparative, looking at a wide variety of “non-standard” lifestyles and relationships. Lunsing finds that, contrary to received opinion, many people in contemporary Japan live outside hegemonic sex and gender roles and relationships and McLelland’s work shows that spaces have always existed for the expression of non-heterosexual desires and gender variant identities throughout the postwar period. In addition, important new work on gendered language use, such as Smith and Okamoto’s (2005) Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology: Cultural Models and Real People, has problematized much previous scholarship that assumed a binary relationship between “men” and “women.” There are, in fact, multiple masculinities and femininities in Japan as well as a range of transgender identities; Japanese sexualities, too, are similarly diverse.

Yet, while this growing interest in the English literature on the diversity of Japanese sex and gender expression is to be welcomed, it remains slight in comparison with the now extensive amount of research into multiple genders and sexualities published in Japanese. The ongoing boom in publications relating to masculinities/men’s studies, for instance, exemplifies the proliferation of voices and debates related to genders and sexualities taking place in Japan today. A whole body of work published over the past decade or so, by scholars and/or activists including Amano and Kimura (2003), Asai et al. (2001), Taga (2001), Shibuya (2001), Nishikawa and Ogino (1999), Sunaga (1999), Inoue et al. (1998), Nakamura and Nakamura (1997), Toyoda (1997), and Itō (1996, 1993), among others, attests to the richness and diversity of debates revolving around interrogations of “masculinity” as a gender construct. Yet, despite the significant influence of these works on discourse about genders and sexualities in contemporary Japan, very little of this material has been translated into English or is even referenced in English-language scholarship on gender in Japan.

This is unfortunate since this developing body of theory is not simply an academic preserve but, via popular media such as the internet,³ NHK’s education channel (Itō 2003), high-brow (but widely read) journals such as AERA, Gendai shisō and imago, and the mainstream press, is influencing the manner in which masculinity and gender are thought about in the Japanese context. Indeed, this discussion now takes place at all levels of society – for instance, in its July 1997 issue, the popular men’s magazine Bart ran a feature entitled “Kanzennaru ‘danseigaku’ de otoko ni nare!” (Become a man through mastering “men’s studies”!), the first of many such features to present men’s studies as a trendy activity.

Publications in Japanese about previously overlooked gender and sexual identities and practices, in particular, have undergone something of a boom in the last decade. Ueno Chizuko (1992, 1994) pioneered innovative critiques of Japanese sexuality from a feminist perspective and a new wave of trendy, young women writers including Haruka Yōko (2000a, 2000b) has further mainstreamed feminist critique in Japanese pop culture. Also, important landmarks in gay studies include Fushimi (1991, 2002), Yajima (1997) and Itō, S. (1992); in lesbian studies Yajima (1999), Kakefuda (1992) and Bessatsu Takarajima (1987), and in queer studies Kuia Sutadiizu Henshū Iinkai (1996, 1997). A number of attempts have also been made to explore connections between gay theory and feminism, including Itō and Ochiai (1998) and Saitō and Fushimi (1997). There are also a growing number of books about the lives and experiences of transgender individuals – including Harima and Souma (2004), Miyazaki (2000), Komatsu (2000) and Toyama (1999) and at least one university association dedicated to uncovering Japanese transgender history – Sengo Nihon Toransujendā Shakaishi Kenkyūkai (Postwar Japan Transgender Social History Study Group) – which has been responsible for a series of publications detailing otherwise unrecorded aspects of transgender history (Yajima 2000; Sugiura 2001; Mitsuhashi 2004). Sex workers, too, long written about by non-practitioners of the trade as a social problem, have recently found a voice in a series of publications (Hasurā 2000; Matsuzawa 2000a, 2000b, 2003) which stress that sex work, as often as not, results from personal choice not social privation. The plurality of debate, now aided and abetted by the internet, around issues concerning sexuality and gender is such that it is no longer possible to talk about Japanese “men” or “women” as homogenous categories and it is important that some of this discussion should be translated into English and become more widely known.

This volume, featuring chapters written by key Japanese authors as well as Western scholars who draw heavily on Japanese-language materials and debates, gives, for the first time in English, an overview of the important changes taking place in gender and sexuality studies within Japanese scholarship as well as the wide variety of gender and sexual identities negotiated by Japanese people themselves. The chapters in this collection depict the plurality of gender positions that are negotiated and expressed by people in Japan whose lives have fallen outside the purview of previous gender scholarship and whose experience has not been accorded a place in the curriculum. While also engaging with Western and Japanese gender theories, the main aim of the chapters in the book is to investigate the wide variety and complexity of Japanese people’s lived experience relating to gender and sexual expression through paying close attention to ethnographic detail as well as Japanese discourse and cultural products.

What is new about this collection is that it brings together essays on a range of topics that would normally be segregated into specific collections dealing with “women,” “men,” or “sexual minorities.” This kind of segregation is, however, highly misleading since, as the chapters that follow illustrate, much discussion is taking place in Japan between these categories – popular feminism in Japan, for instance, is now critiquing the previously central role that heterosexuality has played in feminist...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the text
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Hegemonic gender in Japanese as a foreign language education
• 3 The origins of “queer studies” in postwar Japan
• 4 Transgendering shōjo shōsetsu
• 5 From The Well of Loneliness to the akarui rezubian
• 6 The politics of okama and onabe
• 7 Salarymen doing queer
• 8 Being male in a female world
• 9 “Understanding through the body”
• 10 An introduction to men’s studies
• 11 Rethinking Japanese masculinities
• 12 Salarymen doing straight
• 13 Feminist futures in Japan
• 14 Commodified romance in a Tokyo host club