Homosexuality and Manliness in Postwar Japan

Jonathan D. Mackintosh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780415421867
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135230388
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

Japan's first professionally produced, commercially marketed and nationally distributed gay lifestyle magazine, Barazoku ('The Rose Tribes'), was launched in 1971. Publicly declaring the beauty and normality of homosexual desire, Barazoku electrified the male homosexual world whilst scandalising mainstream society, and sparked a vibrant period of activity that saw the establishment of an enduring Japanese media form, the homo magazine. Using a detailed account of the formative years of the homo magazine genre in the 1970s as the basis for a wider history of men, this book examines the relationship between male homosexuality and conceptions of manliness in postwar Japan. The book charts the development of notions of masculinity and homosexual identity across the postwar period, analysing key issues including public/private homosexualities, inter-racial desire, male-male sex, love and friendship; the masculine body; and manly identity. The book investigates the phenomenon of 'manly homosexuality', little treated in both masculinity and gay studies on Japan, arguing that desires and individual narratives were constructed within (and not necessarily outside of) the dominant narratives of the nation, manliness and Japanese culture. Overall, this book offers a wide-ranging appraisal of homosexuality and manliness in postwar Japan, that provokes insights into conceptions of Japanese masculinity in general.

Part I
Producing homo

Homophobic discourses contain no fixed prepositional content. They are composed of a potentially infinite number of different but functionally interchangeable assertions, such that whenever any one assertion is falsified or disqualified another one – even one with a content exactly contrary to the original one – can be neatly and effectively substituted for it.

David Halperin (1995: 33)¹

August 1971: homo b

mu and homo panic

The launch of Barazoku caused something of a sensation. No sooner had it hit the stands at the end of July 1971 than the homo sex it celebrated became the latest hot controversy in the national tabloid press. ‘D

seiai [homosexuality] is the ruin of the nation’ declared the Sh

kan Posuto (‘ “D

seiai wa kuni o horobosu” ’ 1971: 43). The title of Weekly Pureib

i’s twelve-page full-colour special investigation was nowhere near as inflammatory but no less provocative either: ‘HOMOSEXUAL … It’s in you too!! The Homo Factor’ (HOMOSEXUAL 1971: 111). Not to be outdone, Heibon Panchi (‘Takahashi Mutsuo no dankon sanka’, 1971: 14), Sh

kan Asahi, and Tokyo Sup

tsu (It

1971a: 60) all put out feature articles in rapid succession while Sh

kan Bunshun focused on the man himself behind the furore, Barazoku founder It

Bungaku: The Standard Bearer of the Porno Era – The Homo Magazine Started by a Straight Man!’ (‘Poruno jidai no kishutachi’ 1971: 33–4).

Unsurprisingly given the medium, coverage of the homo issue was hardly elevated. Designed more to shock than inform, its style of journalism was sensationalist. It was with a tenor of moral doubt that the Sh

kan Bunshun article asked, ‘Is Barazoku for the betterment of society?’ And, it was with an almost palpable sense of disbelief that it sought to reveal ‘why it has come about that a man who isn’t homo has produced a homo magazine’. As if to convince itself of the possibility that It

was indeed a man who had no carnal interest in men in spite of his magazine, nearly every reference to him stressed this fact repeatedly: homo de nai otoko – a non-homo man; It

-san jishin wa homo de wa nai – Mr It

himself is not homo; homo de mo nai hito – a person who isn’t even a homo; and so on (Poruno jidai no kishutachi 1971: 33–4).

Debate was similarly presented in an unchallenging manner with nuance and subtlety giving way to the starkest of positions. Take for example Sh

kan Posuto’s ‘Magazine Court’ case in which the readership was the judge. Cast in the role of the ‘plaintiff’ was Sugawara Michinari, President of the Association for the Eradication of the Three Vices (prostitution, venereal disease and drugs) and author of a pamphlet that he delivered to both houses of the National Diet calling for the criminalization of homo. Standing against him was the ‘defendant’ T

g

Ken (1935 – present), the (in-) famous cross-dressing gei (gay, celebrity) political activist of the 1970s. ‘Homo is the behaviour of beastly lust that violates morality’ accused Sugawara in the purple tones of moral indignation. ‘What utter nonsense’ retorted the defendant T

g

in the affected campy drawl of the drag queen,

what in heaven’s name is he arguing about, saying that homo should be legally punished because they stray from morality? It is said nowadays that the world is one, this being the age of the universe when the ways of love are free. The plaintiff’s view of the world is a relic like a mummy, belonging to the past century.

(‘“D

seiai wa kuni o horobosu”’ 1971: 43–4)

Finally, in their bid to titillate, all the articles focused on the prurient and the irrelevant. Pureib

i was a case in point, dedicating its weekly ‘Cool English Conversation’ column to a lesson on the language of gay oral sex: ‘Nanshoku-ka to wa “fuebuki d

ji” ’, that is, ‘Queers are cocksuckers’ (Okuyama 1971: 70). While there may have been pedagogical value in the grammatical analysis of this article’s model English statement of the week: ‘His prick was tingling, his balls alive. He wanted to feel with glans that rush of hot sperm into his quivering ass’ (ibid.: 70), it was nevertheless the case that much of what appeared in the tabloids in August 1971 was conducted with tongues deeply lodged in cheeks. At the butt end of these jokes, designed for the pleasures of a primarily male heterosexual readership, were, of course, homo.

It may have been the case that August 1971 witnessed what Heibon Panchi (‘Takahashi Mutsuo no dankon sanka’ 1971: 13) called a homo b

mu (boom) ignited by the ‘curious publication’ of the homo magazine Barazoku. So great was all the hype that It

likened it to a tidal wave (interview with It

, 21 March 2002). Yet for all the sound and fury that appeared to make the b

mu truly explosive, it was an event that in the end seemed to signify very little. Homo and their new magazine did not really need to be taken seriously. Or did they?

Histories of homo-phobia

To a large extent, the flippant treatment of the homo issue by the tabloids can be attributed to this genre’s stylistic conventions. Excessive and parodic, its articles on homo were like individual scenes from the pantomime theatre, their primary purpose being to entertain and incite. Yet it is wrong, perhaps, to write off August 1971, the homo b

mu, and the commotion attending it as just another fleeting trend. Peel away the bravado, and the trivializing power of tabloid devices like hyperbole, pastiche and sarcasm dissipate to reveal a deeply felt aversion towards – panic even of – homo, a fear that operated at a number of historical levels: the short-term, a longer-term discursive and, most powerfully, the emotional.

Short-term history – postwar sexual propriety

From the perspective of the postwar era, the arguments raised against homo in the tabloids reflected a societal insecurity concerning sexual commodification and health. Consider, for example, the objections lodged against Barazoku by a member of the Youth Policy Department of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government:

Barazoku is presented as ‘Your and My Magazine of Friendship’, and as such, it may be easy for youth to obtain. It really is a frightening prospect if youth not yet fully mature read it and come to think of the homo world as natural. If this results in the escalation of sexual expression, it should be designated an unwholesome book without further ado.

(‘Poruno jidai no kishutachi’ 1971: 34)

Or, Sugawara’s indictment against homo sexual practices:

If you look at the main investigations on venereal disease which the Osaka Prefecture Public Health Bureau conducted, the cases in which it is spread by homosexuals are increasing greatly. This is a really alarming trend. (‘“D

seiai wa kuni o horobosu”’ 1971: 43)

The tactic of each argument is quite different with the former wielding the incendiary power of speculation and the latter making appeals to apparently incontrovertible quantified evidence. Nevertheless, both can be understood to be mutually supportive since they are expressions coming directly out of a wider debate concerning sexual morality that finds its roots in some of the civic activism of post-Occupation Japan.

Galvanized by a new democratic ethos, many in Japan, and women in particular, mobilized themselves into sometimes quite powerful lobbying organizations (Koyama 1961: 135–6). One of the most important groups was the 1954 All-Japan Congress for Anti-Prostitution Reforms, whose efforts were in part responsible for the passage of anti-prostitution legislation in 1956 (Buckley 1994: 153). The attempt to rein in sexual indecency through the restriction of the commodification of sex was not limited to prostitution, and in the two decades following thereafter, attention was turned to pornography. In the mid-1960s, as a result of an anti-manga (comic book) movement, laws were tightened concerning the sale to minors under the age of eighteen of materials like manga, which contained pornographic imagery (Kinsella 2000: 142–3). In the 1970s, pornography, which nearly doubled in the number of its titles (Diamond and Uchiyama 1999), and prostitution, in the form of overseas sex tours, proved to be some of the most contentious issues that grass-roots and other organizations attempted to tackle (Yunomae 1996: 102–9; Okura 1996: 112).

While civic activism may be explained in terms of Japan’s unique interpretation and practice of popular democracy as autonomy and responsibility, it is not necessarily the case that all its groups were progressive. Sandra Buckley notes of the All-Japan Congress for Anti-prostitution Reforms, for example:

While the group’s stated goal was the elimination of the exploitation of prostitutes, this was widely perceived to be a very conservative or...

Table of contents

• Routledge Contemporary Japan Series
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Producing homo
• Part II Confessions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index