“‘Why in the world did ‘the man who loved love’ waste such vast quantities of gold and silver on his myriad women, when the only pleasure and excitement to be found is in male love?”1
The concluding words to Ihara Saikaku’s introduction of his work The Great Mirror of Male Love (Nanshoku Okagami) encapsulates his message. Why love women when you can love men? His work, which chronicled forty stories of male–male sexuality, enjoyed broad appeal and faced little controversy at publication.2 In today’s Japan however this is difficult to imagine, with contemporary lawmakers describing same-sex relations as ‘unproductive’ and threatening a ‘breakdown of the family.’3
Through various literary works, Sabine Frühstück surveys the iterations of queer identities that ‘ultimately lead to today’s LGBTQIA+ community,’ arguing that today’s queer communities in Japan variably ‘insist on an ordinariness’ and ‘normalisation’.4
Frühstück’s starting point, Ihara’s The Great Mirror of Male Love, provides an insight into the long tradition of male–male sexual culture present in the warrior class, Buddhist monks, and in the entertainment world. Ihara attempts ‘to reflect in this mirror all of the varied manifestations of male love.’5 In premodern Japan, popular literature incorporated male love as a natural part of the broader literary theme of sexual relationships within society, and as a marker of sophistication and culture.6 For Ihara then, the central tension was not to prove male–male love as natural, but as superior to male–female love.
From The Great Mirror of Male Love, Frühstück takes us to Mori Ōgai’s Vita Sexualis (Wita Sekusuarisu). Published in 1909, reception to Mori’s novel marked a change in attitudes to same-sex love. The semi-autobiographical novel which detailed the sexual history of the protagonist received backlash and was banned.7 The novel’s title marks this shift as well, with the title being derived from Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, which describes same-sex attractions as sexual anomalies and mental degeneration.8 Frühstück describes this change in attitude as a result of an increase in Western influence.9 Indeed, Mori seems to be influenced by a range of European authors. In a two-part article published in 1902 to 1903, he mentions more than fifty European scholars of sexual psychology, including Sigmund Freud.10 By the 1900s, the ‘love of beautiful boys’ illustrated by Ihara was replaced by ‘hentai seiyoku’ or ‘perverse sexual desire’ which emphasised the physicality of relationships over their spirituality.
Next in Frühstück’s survey is Yoshiya Nobuko’s works. Yoshiya was Japan’s first public figure in the twentieth century to openly identify as a lesbian. Notably, she published Flower Tales (Hana Monogatari, 1916–1924), a collection of short stories centering female romantic friendships, and a novel, Women’s Friendship (Onna no Yūjō), serialized in Fujin Kurabu (1933–1935). The author in her own life delayed ‘adopting’ her partner as a means to civil union to advocate for same-sex marriage.11
Miyatake Gaikotsu’s Hannannyokō (Thoughts on Hermaphroditism, 1922), was a collection of stories that centered sexually and gender nonnormative individuals from a mix of rumors and legends. Distributed under the counter and aimed as much at entertaining readers as at imagining a utopian future of universal hermaphroditism, it echoed contemporary European sexology, such as the works of German researcher Magnus Hirschfeld.12 Reflecting a transnational exchange of ideas, the text shows how early twentieth-century thinkers in both Japan and Europe were beginning to question binary gender and sexual norms.
Approaching the present day, Being Lesbian (‘Rezubian’ to aru to iu koto, 1992) by Kakefuda Hiroko critiques ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and gave impetus to genres of media specifically catering for sexual minorities. The text preceded the HIV/AIDS epidemic which enabled network building between previously disparate gay and lesbian groups, as well as reframing discussions about queer identities as a human rights issue.13
Today’s Japan faces a range of issues concerning LGBTQ+ rights. While public sentiment increasingly recognises the discrimination queer people face, and both corporations and lawmakers move toward institutionalising anti-discrimination measures, same-sex marriage remains unrecognised. Stagnant policies continue to shape the ruling parties’ approach to explicit prohibition of sex and gender-based discrimination.14 The recent election of conservative Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae further signals limited prospects for progressive reform.
- Ihara Saikaku, The Great Mirror of Male Love, trans. Paul Gordon Schalow (Stanford, 1990), p. 56. ↩
- Sabine Frühstück, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan (Cambridge, 2022), p. 144. ↩
- Ibid, p. 159. ↩
- Ibid, p. 60. ↩
- Ihara, The Great Mirror of Male Love, p. 56. ↩
- Ibid, p. 6. ↩
- Frühstück, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan, p. 146. ↩
- Yoshiyuki Nakai, ‘Ōgai’s Craft: Literary Techniques and Themes in Vita Sexualis’, Monumenta Nipponica, 35:2 (Summer 1980), p. 228. ↩
- Frühstück, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan, p. 146. ↩
- Nakai, ‘Ōgai’s Craft: Literary Techniques and Themes in Vita Sexualis’, p. 229. ↩
- Jennifer Robertson, ‘Yoshiya Nobuko: Out and Outspoken in Practice and Prose,’ in Same-Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader, ed. Jennifer Robertson (London, 2005), p. 164. ↩
- Frühstück, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan, p. 149. ↩
- Ibid, p. 152. ↩
- Ibid, pp. 154–156. ↩