How the Media Suppress Japan’s Gay Past
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AS a university professor in Japan and a dabbler in its gay history, I must admit a certain fascination with the institution known as “nanshoku.” Literally “male colors,” nanshoku describes a wide range of Japanese same-sex relationships from ancient times up until the end of the 1860’s.

While in some ways similar to pederasty in ancient Greece, nanshoku consisted of many more dimensions, social codifications, and historical roots. It is also much better documented: in addition to woodblock prints depicting domestic and erotic same-sex scenes, entire books of nanshoku connoisseurship were written and distributed in popular culture with various classifications for tastes and potential clients in mind. Assuming one could pursue the pleasure within one’s social class or could pay the fees for services from professionals, being a shojin-zuki (a married man who dabbled) or an onna girai (literally a “women hater”) was not a point of contention. In fact, books such as the Nanshoku Okagami (or “Great Mirror of Male Love”) are fascinating not for their depiction of gay sex but for their acknowledgment of the critical role of same-sex relationships in defining contemporary ideas of virtue, pleasure, and social
mobility.

Of course, things have changed a lot in Japan since the 1860’s, caused in part by the widespread influence that Western countries exerted (at least superficially) upon Japanese legal, educational, and social attitudes. Negative opinions of nanshoku and proscriptions against it were instituted, creating a contradictory situation in which such relationships continued to be pursued (and were in any case well documented historically), on the one hand, but were kept beneath the surface and “not talked about,” on the other.

You can understand, then, my interest during the summer of 2009 when Japanese national television began broadcasting every Sunday night a mini-series about 16th-century northwest Japan centered on the famous heroes Uesugi Kenshin and Naoe Kanetsugu, military men on the level of George Washington or Ulysses Grant in the U.S. Most fascinating was how the drama dealt with Kenshin’s nanshoku. While not every samurai engaged in these relationships, these well-documented affections permeated Kenshin’s public and private life. Even the author Tanizaki, famous for his lascivious heterosexual love stories, mentioned Kenshin’s love of his fellow samurai and younger pages in a historical work of the 1930’s, comparing it to an ancient Chinese emperor so enamored with his young lover that he cut off his coat sleeve rather than risk awakening the lad nestled in his arms.

In the drama, Kenshin is played by Abe Hiroshi, the rugged star of TV and film, sporting a bit of facial hair to add to the effect. Kanetsugu is played by Tsumabuki Satoshi, the almost supernaturally beautiful actor and musician, with his perfect skin, high cheekbones, large eyes, and warm smile. As the mini-series unfolds, we see that together they fight, kill, smile, wear elaborate period dress, and pursue great exploits that have been carried down through history. And they’re not only heroes on the battlefield, they are all-around great guys: they also love their wives and children, with whom they share happy domestic moments.

Any expectation I had for a passionate tryst between Kenshin and one of his warriors was not to be fulfilled. But even the heterosexual relations as depicted in 16th-century Japan were bizarrely anachronistic. In fact, 20th-century-style marriages of happy domesticity were almost nonexistent in medieval Japan. The idea of “true love” or romance related to marriage, or indeed the idea of “private spaces” in which such relationships could take place, did not exist in Japan until quite recently. Indeed, most husbands met their wives for the first time on the day they were married and had little or no choice in the matter. For high-ranking samurai, the match would have been made solely for family benefit or for sealing
allegiances.

For me, this TV drama became an apt metaphor for an entire series of world events going on in the summer of 2009 that illuminated the unique and sometimes paradoxical position of Japan on GLBT issues. The same-sex marriage debate raged in the U.S., with a few states legalizing it for the first time. I watched these events from my office south of Tokyo, assigned from June to August to teach an intensive seminar to Japanese students aged twenty to 65. Outside of class and on breaks, the students discussed the latest episodes of the TV drama, while in class we talked about current news and events. They expressed confusion over the American same-sex marriage debate. One male student even said, “We couldn’t do that, because Japan has no gay people.” Fellow students nodded in agreement. An older female shook her head, conceding that there were “such people” but that they were hardly normal, not deserving of legal equality.

A frontal assault being impossible, I used the drama as a way to get the students talking. I asked them about Kenshin, and what they knew about his history. The younger students knew only what had been on TV or in their history textbooks. I asked them what they knew about nanshoku; only one had even heard of the term. Thanks to the Internet I was able to access links to various sources on nanshoku and Kenshin himself (and discovered that there’s more scholarship in English than in Japanese). Line by line, I could observe the proverbial jaws drop. The next day, I brought my Japanese-language copy of the Nanshoku Okagami to class, passing it around for the students to read.

My hope was to make the link between their own history and that of the struggle for gay and lesbian equality around the world. Further, I hoped to show them that gays and lesbians in Japan, too, needed such recognition, where hitherto they had received little more than a vaguely tolerant neglect. On the other hand, Japan is also the home of the popular “yaoi,” which are gay-themed comic books (though the target audience is actually married women in search of a fantasy). There is also a growing prominence of GLBT musicians and entertainers featured on TV talk shows. But there seems an odd disconnect between these contemporary phenomena and the thousands of years of Japanese history in which same-sex relations flourished under the rule of the nanshoku, which remains hidden to all but a subset of (mostly non-Japanese) historians.

With nearly two decades of economic stagnation and a recent earthquake that has devastated large swaths of the country, Japan is at a crossroads. With thousands of years of fascinating history behind it, there is a cultural and social wealth to be tapped, if only a greater sense of reality and openness can be reached. For younger Japanese men and women, one important place to start is in the opening up of Japan’s history, which would reveal that a wide range of approaches to life and love are what made their culture unique, not the erasure of these elements from popular culture for commercial or other reasons.

John L. Clayton is on the faculty of communication at Nagoya University of Commerce & Business in Japan.