IN 1868, THE SAME YEAR that the word “homosexual” entered the European lexicon, Japan underwent a revolution that swept away the centuries-long rule of shōgun warlords and saw the emergence of a modern government led by a newly empowered emperor. This shift was sparked by external pressures from Western nations encroaching on East Asia as well as internal dissatisfaction with the ruling government and Tokugawa clan. Organizing around the figure of the emperor, who had until then maintained only symbolic authority, the restorationists overthrew the shōgun government and declared a new era of enlightened imperial rule. They named the new era the Meiji Period (1868–1912), choosing Sino-Japanese characters meaning “enlightened rule,” and declared that modernization and Westernization in the name of “civilizational enlightenment” (bunmei kaika) would be the overriding goal of the new regime. This drive toward Western ideals of modernity and progress would result in the erasure of almost a millennium of queer art and literature and the imposition of a heteronormative model of sexuality.
Before delving further into the consequences of 1868, let’s take a look at the history of sexuality in Japan before that fateful year. After a period of prolonged civil war, Japan was politically reunited in the first few decades of the 1600s under the leadership of the samurai leader Tokugawa Ieyasu. The subsequent two-and-a-half centuries of rule by the Tokugawa clan saw Japan cut off from virtually all foreign contact and the development of an elaborate, hierarchical society with one of the highest rates of urbanization in the world by the 1700s. Named after the newly designated capital of Edo (modern-day Tokyo), the Edo Period (1600–1868) in Japan was characterized by a strict social hierarchy with samurai at the top and in charge of political affairs. For centuries, samurai had carried on a tradition of age-structured relationships between younger and older samurai known as shūdō (the way of youths). While the word homosexual didn’t exist, a wide variety of terms described same-sex relationships between men, the most prominent being nanshoku, a word formed from a pair of Sino-Japanese characters meaning “male eroticism.” Nanshoku, according to one writer of the period, was nothing less than the “flower” of the samurai class. Not to be outdone, Buddhist temples also had a long tradition of relationships between monks and acolytes, dating all the way back to the Heian Period (774–1185).
Edo Japan was a patriarchal society that placed relatively few restrictions on male sexual pleasure. In the rapidly growing urban centers of the 1600s and 1700s, sexuality was enormously profitable. Rising literacy rates and improvements in printing technology fueled the growth of commercial markets for erotic woodblock prints and books among urban commoners. Glamorized depictions of the so-called “floating world” (ukiyo-e) of urban red-light districts and amorous trysts between merchants and prostitutes were mainstays of popular theater, art, and literature. The writer Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) was one of the best-known writers of amorous ukiyo-zōshi, tales of the floating world depicting a range of erotic scenes both gay and straight. Representative works include such titles as Tales of an Amorous Woman (1686), Five Women Who Loved Love (1685), and the highly popular The Great Mirror of Male Love (1687).
Such works were frequently accompanied by lavish illustrations by leading artists. In contrast to their European counterparts, woodblock print masters like Utamaro and Hokusai had no qualms about depicting eroticism in myriad forms. Erotic woodblock printmakers, writers, and the proprietors of brothels and teahouses specializing in male sex workers formed overlapping symbiotic relationships with each other. Even as the authorities tried on occasion to clamp down on red-light districts and the circulation of erotic prints in the name of public morals, they were largely unable to stem the tide until larger social and economic changes in the 19th century. We should also note that the woodblock prints depicted an idealized world and not the social reality. Notwithstanding its relative toleration of male homosexuality, Edo society was highly misogynistic. Women were seen essentially as sex objects, so sex between women was invisible. Indeed Edo Japanese lacked a specific word for lesbian sexuality.
The Tokugawa government and its stratified political system remained stable for a remarkably long period. By the middle of the 19th century, however, it was increasingly clear that something had to give. Witnessing the horrors inflicted on China during the opium wars and becoming victim to humiliation inflicted by Commodore Matthew Perry’s black ships in the 1850s, by the beginning of the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan was determined to remake itself a great power able to compete with the West. In pursuit of this goal, Meiji authorities instituted a broad series of legal and social reforms one of whose aims was to change the way Japanese people thought about sexuality and propriety. They were motivated in part by anxieties about how Western visitors, particularly those crucial to Japan’s modernization efforts, would perceive Japanese customs and cultural mores. Legal prohibitions against “indecent exposure,” cross-gender dressing, and other forms of “obscenity” (waisetsu) proliferated in the last decades of the 1800s. The government even briefly outlawed anal intercourse between 1872 and 1880. Lauding the ban, one writer commented that nanshoku befitted an earlier world of “warriors and decadent priests, not the present era of imperial influence.” An 1875 ordinance banning the publication of “obscene materials” ensured that the world of erotic prints and literature, which had thrived for centuries, would undergo a swift and terminal decline.
It is one of the great ironies of cultural history that Japan’s turn toward the West coincided with the emergence of sexology as a distinct domain of scientific activity. German sexologists in particular had an early and long-lasting influence on Japanese discourse at the turn of the century. Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), one of the first sexological works to focus on male homosexuality, was partially translated into Japanese just eight years after it first came out. Other publications disseminating sexological ideas helped to reshape attitudes about sexuality, casting same-sex interaction as an aberration, something “barbarous,” “amoral,” and “unspeakable.” Ironically, this shift made lesbian sexuality visible, whereas previously it had been, discursively speaking, almost nonexistent. As Edo Period terms like nanshoku and shudō fell out of favor, they were replaced by a new paradigm embodied by the newly coined term dōseiai (“homosexuality”), written in Sino-Japanese characters literally meaning “same sex love.”
The emergence of sexology and the establishment of dōseiai created a link between male-male and female-female sexuality that had not existed before. Incidents including a murder case between an aristocratic woman and her maid in Tokyo in 1888, and the love-suicide of two schoolgirls in Niigata Prefecture in 1911, raised media alarms and public anxieties about lesbian sexuality, while newspapers throughout the 1880s and 1900s regularly ran stories about incidents of sexual assault in all-boy schools. The transformation of homosexuality into a symptom of social disorder and maladaptive development fueled an entire set of anxieties and neuroses surrounding sex that hadn’t existed even a few decades earlier. One symptom of this shift can be seen in the so-called “nude debate” of the 1890s. The introduction of “the nude” as an artistic category engendered a great deal of debate among artists and critics, who attempted to make a distinction between the naked (hadaka) and the nude (ratai, an academic, æsthetic category).
In spite of official exhortations to bury the past, many artists and writers went against the grain by trying to discover, exhume, or reimagine Japan’s recent queer past. Male-male sexuality, linked to the nation’s samurai history, maintained an ambiguous position in Meiji Period culture, particularly as the country became increasingly militaristic and embarked on wars with China in the 1890s and Russia in the 1900s. This tension is captured by the reception of the serialized 1884 novel Shizu no odamaki (“The Thread from the Spool”). Set during the Warring States Period in the late 16th century and depicting the romantic and chivalric relationship between two samurai comrades, the story was widely read in Meiji Period boys’ schools. An introduction published ahead of the first installment captures this incoherence by describing nanshoku as “something that goes against nature” and that “cannot be positively judged by the morals of our current period of civilization,” but also as encouraging “an emphasis on duty and respect” as well as “the fulfillment of solemn vows between samurai that led them to valiantly support their nation.”
The era following the Meiji Period, the Taishō Period (1912–1926), was a time of relative political and social liberalism, particularly compared to the regimes that preceded and followed it. It was also a time when Japanese artists and writers began to take renewed interest in ideas about sexuality of the past and from abroad. This can be seen in the so-called “ero-guro-nansensu” boom in popular culture. This phrase, which links the English words “erotic,” “grotesque,” and “nonsense,” was used to describe the explosion of media interest in so-called “perverse sexual desires” (hentai seiyoku). This ethos encouraged artists of the time to engage in a greater degree of experimentation in depictions of gender, sexuality, and the body. The works of the Kyoto-based artist Kainoshō Tadaoto (1894–1979) demonstrate this trend. In contrast to the earlier generation of Meiji Period fine artists who internalized the division between high and vulgar art in their works, Kainoshō and other Taishō artists sought instead to defamiliarize the body and emphasize its unnatural, overdetermined presence in traditional Japanese artistic subjects and motifs.
The Taishō Period also saw the emergence of the first mass-marketed publications written by and for women. The journal Seitō (Bluestockings, 1911–1916) was the first feminist magazine in Japanese history. Edited by Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971) and Itō Noe (1895–1923), Seitō discussed issues seldom addressed in other publications, including women’s suffrage and divorce rights. In its early years, Seitō took a progressive stance toward same-sex relationships between women, and many of its first contributors were themselves in romantic relationships with other women. One of the magazine’s early founders, Otake Kōkichi (1893–1966), was one of the first openly gay women in Japanese history, and the short-lived journal she founded later, Safuran, published some of the earliest translations of the British homophile writer Edward Carpenter, hinting at a queer and cosmopolitan consciousness budding in 1910s Japan.
In addition to journals like Seitō and Safuran, mass-market journals aimed at female reading audiences provided greater space for discussions and depictions of relationships between women. Stories by the highly popular writer and journalist Yoshiya Nobuko (1896–1973), which were serialized from the 1920s onward in magazines such as Shōjo no tomo, often focused on relationships between schoolgirls that were explicitly romantic in nature. In writing these stories, Yoshiya drew on her own experience, as she maintained a romantic relationship with Chiyo Monma, a math teacher at a girls’ school in Tokyo, for nearly fifty years. Her works also commented on the pressures that same-sex-attracted women faced in a society that treated their desires as abnormal and pressured them to “grow out of” this attraction and become proper wives and mothers. As the narrator of one such story, “Yellow Rose,” laments: “The sadness of those who love their own sex … is redoubled by the chagrin of parents—for whom marriage represents the sole pinnacle of womanly achievement—and the opprobrium and scorn of everyone else.”
It was in the space of these magazines that some of the most iconic and recognizable Japanese æsthetics, particularly those associated with shōjo and kawaii, began to emerge. Not a small number of queer men contributed as illustrators to girls’ magazines, creating visual vocabularies and æsthetics that would be emulated by later generations of manga and anime artists. A particularly notable artist in this regard is Kashō Takabatake (1888–1966). One of the most prominent illustrators of girls’ magazines during the 1920s and ’30s, Kashō’s subjects display a playful and proto-queer sensibility to gender roles. He depicted women as modern, independent subjects acting outside of familial settings, representing their newfound independence in early 20th-century Japanese society.
Queer artists and writers of period like Yoshiya, Kashō, Otake, and Tadaoto sought to make sense of the enormous changes wrought by the Meiji Restoration and its consequences. In the decades preceding them, Japan had gone from a culture with multiple traditions of male-male love to a deeply heteronormative society. Conversely, the emergence of homosexuality as a concept allowed for female-female sexuality to be conceived in altogether new ways. Despite efforts to repress it, Japan’s premodern queer past continued to haunt, inform, and illuminate the works of its modern artists and writers.
It is interesting to note that in the 21st century, the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party has taken the opposite tack. Instead of denying the sexual diversity of Japan before 1868, they now make a point of emphasizing Japan’s “historical tolerance” to argue against the necessity of anti-discrimination laws and legalized same-sex marriage. One pamphlet, published in 2015, argued against the need for LGBT protections, stating that “historically, Japan has not been strict towards diverse gender and sexual practices, but rather has been tolerant towards them.” The irony and cynicism of this posturing has not been lost on contemporary LGBT activists in Japan, who are forced to contend with a governing elite far less tolerant than the general populace, which has consistently shown support for legalizing same-sex marriage. Yet even as queer politics in Japan today remain a mess, contemporary artists have found new ways to utilize and draw upon the works of their queer predecessors. One example worth noting here is the work of contemporary artist Matsuo Hiromi (1980–). Matsuo’s depictions of women are influenced by the visuals of manga and anime as well as by the art and æsthetics of queer artists of the early 20th century. One of her most famous works, Dance (2017), a painting of two women dancing, pays direct homage to Takabatake Kasho’s 1930 painting of the same subject. In this way, Matsuo creates a lineage of queer artists in Japan extending from the early 20th century to her own work in the present. In the works of such artists, we can see the arc of a long and very complicated queer history.
Patrick Carland-Echavarria, a PhD candidate in the Dept. of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the Univ. of Pennsylvania, has been published in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus.
