Long Read: A History of the Japanese LGBTQ+ Community

Updated 22 June 2023

By Zac Fairbrother

A national anthem is innately patriotic, and Japan’s, Kimigayo, is a case in point. Titled ‘His Imperial Majesty’s Reign’ in English, the song is overtly nationalistic, containing lyrics calling for a thousand-year imperial era. Indeed, it was first adopted during Japan’s age of colonial expansion (which resulted in millions of deaths). After being removed by US forces in 1945, it was then controversially re-adopted in 1999 - and remains Japan’s official national anthem today. 

Like national anthems, the Olympics have been used across the world to showcase national strength and prosperity. In 1964, the Tokyo Olympics demonstrated just how far the nation had come since its decimation in WW2 – complete with gleaming skyscrapers, modern infrastructure, and an apparently thriving population (Tokyo’s many homeless people had been forcibly moved to make the city appear pristine to visitors). Japan was on the rise, and in just four years would become the world’s second-largest economy. If Kimigayo represents a troubling past, then the Olympics inspire hope for a bright national future. 

So, the performance of the anthem at the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo would seem to be a simple projection of nationalism, by a country which is presented both within and without as homogenous. Just as the 1964 Olympics showed a country bouncing back from war, the 2021 games came a decade after the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown. Yet one important detail complicates this narrative – the singer of the anthem, the popstar Misia, was dressed in rainbow colours. 

There is no doubt that Misia used the unique platform of the opening ceremony to make a political statement. Not only is she an outspoken LGBTQ+ ally, but the dress itself was also designed by Tomo Koizumi, who was introduced to fashion through the gay bars of Tokyo. What many fashion news outlets reported as just a pretty gown (‘cotton candy’ according to one) was an interjection of queerness into an otherwise conservative event. Japan’s athletes were about to boost national pride through the literal display of their bodily strength – and here was Misia, using her own body as a canvas on which a counter-cultural statement was inscribed. The tension between the accepted idea of Japanese national growth and another story of the Japanese queer community is shown most clearly by a photo of Misia looking straight at the Japanese flag, held aloft by soldiers – both emblems of a contested history.  

It should be self-evident that queer people have always had a place in the Japanese story. The titular character of Murasaki Shikibu’s 11th-century text The Tale of Genji, considered by some to be the world’s first novel, sleeps with a woman’s brother to get back at her. Major samurai maintained relationships with young males called wakashū who dressed in feminine clothes and have been described as a third gender. And arguably Japan’s most famous postwar author besides Haruki Murukami – Mishima Yukio – was sexually involved with other men. Despite the centrality of queer figures in modern Japan, history has largely overlooked them. 

What follows is not a comprehensive history. Nor does it cover all of Japan’s past – I focus on Japan’s modern history from 1868, and mostly on the 20th/21st centuries in which an actual ‘community’ of queer people formed. It is an attempt to recover a lost side of the story of a major world power, and to introduce readers to a community they’ve likely not encountered.

From 1603-1868, Japan was under the rule of a military samurai government, known as the Shogunate, while the emperor’s court was relegated to a ritual position in Kyoto. To curb dangerous outside influences such as Christianity, the government had sealed the country off. The degree to which this actually worked is debatable, but what is true is that by the 1850s, Japanese of all stripes were confronted with Western technology and felt that they’d fallen behind. When the Shogunate failed to adequately deal with the foreign threat, an alliance of samurai ousted the Shogun and replaced him with the young emperor Meiji. The new government immediately sent missions abroad to learn from the West and embarked on a process of ‘modernisation’ and emulation of the Great Powers. 

Until this point, homosexuality and certain transgender practices were fairly widespread and visible. Homosexual sex was prevalent amongst the upper samurai class, who relied on codes of homosexual civility dating back to ancient China. For both samurai and Buddhist monks, taking on a young ‘boy’ as a sexual companion was a way to tutor them into manhood, though the gender identities of these wakashū or chigo were complicated and fluid. Commoners in urban areas, meanwhile, could enjoy kabuki plays where male actors played women’s roles. These onnagata were considered the height of feminine beauty – the ability to convincingly portray a woman on and off stage was viewed as more impressive than natural looks. 

But as the Meiji state sought to emulate Western norms in its quest for ‘civilisation and enlightenment’, sex and gender became central. For one thing, the adoption of Western clothing prevented certain forms of androgyny. The kimono has myriad aspects that distinguish a person’s gender, even down to the shape of the sleeves, but its gendered forms are variants of the same garment, allowing some flexibility in presentation. This was lost when the Western suit and dress – fundamentally different outfits – were introduced. Ideologically, the government fostered a natalist position, wherein men’s and women’s roles were strictly defined – men contributed to the nation through work, and women by being a ‘good wife, wise mother’, producing the next generation of Japanese. Women’s subjugation was not new, but before they were expected to be producers as well as wives, blurring the line between male and female roles. The new state of affairs made gender transgression more complicated. Moreover, for the first time, sexual activity was separated into ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’. , and h Homosexuality, given its historic acceptance by the now defunct samurai elite, was condemned as feudal and therefore improper for a modern nation. And then there was the Meiji civil code, which sought to emulate Western and especially French law. The West banned sodomy and was economically successful and so, the logic went, there had to be a correlation. Japan followed suit and outlawed sodomy in 1872. The success of these efforts was, however, middling. In rural areas traditional clothing customs persisted, the kimono experienced a chic revival within decades, and it took until only 1880 for the sodomy law to be repealed as the state’s stance on which western laws to emulate shifted. Homosexuality has never been outlawed since, and even when the law was in effect, it effectively ignored lesbianism. 

Contrasting its official aims, Meiji modernisation offered new spaces where gay relationships could flourish. Through military conscription, men who had previously spent their lives in multi-generational, multi-gender households were thrust into homosocial spaces, and some lived openly as partners in their barracks even up to WW2. These relationships were not unproblematic; the Imperial Japanese military is infamous for its brutality towards recruits, and gay relationships in the ranks were often hierarchical, involving an older officer sleeping with a younger private in a situation of explicit control. But nonetheless, the military did provide men with an opportunity to explore their sexuality, and many left the army claiming that it had ‘turned them homosexual.’ The figure of the ‘beautiful boy’, a holdover from explicitly homosexual samurai practices, persisted into the Meiji era as young soldiers and sailors were admired for their beauty. 

Similarly, women were mobilised by the state as factory workers; the silk industry was the first to be modernised, and sericulture was considered women’s work. Textile factories were undoubtedly exploitative. Many rural women and girls as young as seven were forcibly sent to work in the factories by impoverished parents in hopes that their daughters’ wages and down payments offered by employers could supplement their income, but in reality, wages were pitiful and conditions harsh. To discourage union activity, textile workers were forced to live in all-female dormitories to limit their outside exposure. For all its negatives, this arrangement had the effect of cultivating strong bonds between women who worked, ate, and slept together – bonds that were often romantic. 

Modernisation also brought urbanisation, education, and rising literacy – by the Taishō period (from Meiji’s death in 1912 up to 1926), new discursive spaces had fostered openly queer relationships. For instance, as increasing numbers of girls attended school together for the first time, some entered romantic relationships, and there was a minor boom in the 1920s of newspapers reporting stories of schoolgirl couples committing suicide together as the supposed ultimate act of love (a classic trope of Japanese love stories). In cities, especially Tokyo, ‘mōdan (modern) boys/girls’ began to play around with gender presentation and more openly challenge the natalist status quo. Moreover, many of the period’s major commentators were queer. The pioneering feminist society Seitō (Bluestocking) was practically full of gay, lesbian, and bisexual writers whose escapades with each other prompted lively public debate. Even Hiratsuka Raichō, founder of Seitō and perhaps the period’s premier feminist, was romantically involved with another woman, though she later married a man. As a side note, reading about Taishō intellectuals and celebrities can be quite amusing and refreshing, since so many of them turn out to have been queer – from anarchist Ōsugi Sakae to writer Yuasa Yoshiko. 

To be sure, prewar life for queer Japanese was not easy. The press published sensational stories of especially lesbian love through a highly pathologizing lens, presenting lesbians as disgusting or predatory, or waving away same-sex love as an immature prelude to ‘real’ heterosexual love. The urban intelligentsia certainly partook in much homosexual sex and romance, but they had to do so in secret, and their stories come down to us through unpublished diaries and writings or news articles in which they were non-consensually outed. And trans people scarcely made themselves known. Nonetheless, the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw Japanese exploring their identities more and more, and sometimes carving out spaces for themselves to express queer love and desire. Wartime publishing restrictions and the intensification of heteronormative state ideology brought all this to a temporary end, but the postwar period saw queer experience mainstreamed as never before. 

WW2 presents a bit of a blind spot for Japanese queer history. From the 1930s, the Japanese government enforced greater publication restrictions in the name of national unity. The few discursive spaces which queer Japanese had been able to inhabit – notably leftist journals – were closed to them. Progressives of all stripes were imprisoned, executed, or silenced, and the same radicals who had once formed safe spaces for queer experience were forced to convert to the cause of empire. Some queer figures shifted to the right willingly – sapphic feminist Yosano Akiko came to support Japan’s expansion into Manchuria. 

The military, however, being an all-male space, continued to offer room for homosexual expression right up to the end of the war. Where Western militaries viciously rooted out gay servicemen, the Imperial Japanese Army acted with general indifference. It is important to note that while this is certainly positive, it also implicates many queer men in various atrocities committed by the Japanese military, including mass rape and murder. Some soldiers used their status as imperial overlords to coerce boys from occupied territories into sex. Placing queer people back into national history also requires recognising that they contributed to some highly troubling aspects of that history. 

As ever-growing numbers of men were drafted into service and underwent physical examinations, the presence of intersex Japanese became more apparent. Many had grown up in rural areas where they had never encountered this kind of exam and had been exposed to little sex education, so the army physical was the first time they even realised there was something ‘different’ about their bodies, such as the presence of both a penis and a vagina or breasts. The treatment of these people was highly varied depending on when and where they underwent their exams. Some were forced into surgeries to ‘correct’ their bodies so that they appeared properly male. Others had bodies which were ‘really female’ (including some who had been assigned female at birth but socially transitioned so successfully that they were conscripted), so were forced to abandon their male presentation and adopt female clothing – in the state’s view, gendered roles were crucial for the health of the nation, so cross-dressing was a threat. But in other cases, there was flexibility. A few people who had both male and female characteristics were given a choice of which to ‘choose’, and then given surgery and recognised as that gender. Many such individuals had lived as men their entire lives but had always felt uncomfortable, and embraced femininity once they found out it was an option – the army, then, basically provided free sex reassignment surgery to people who might now be called trans women. They were often legally recognised as women and allowed to choose new names since, while cross-dressing was viewed as dangerous, there was no framework for subjugating someone whose body matched their clothing and presentation, even if that body had undergone surgical transition. 

Nonetheless, the number of intersex individuals who we know benefited from the army physically is minuscule. Most found it degrading and embarrassing, some were forced into medical correction, and some were trans men who had passed until the examination outed them. And, notably, all these people were classified as unfit for service, and since military service had become the highest masculine ideal, they were thus characterised as inferior men and national failures. The shame that accompanied this was immense. 

From 1945-1952, following its defeat in WW2, Japan was occupied by US military forces. The Americans lifted wartime censorship, expanded the franchise, and wrote a new constitution for Japan to adopt that protected freedom of speech and expression. Though the US cracked down on those same rights in the early 1950s to stop the spread of leftist ideas, they had set in motion an explosion of popular writing and media which allowed queer Japanese to express themselves. Some of the realities of queer life in the early postwar, though, are difficult to confront. The presence of so many sex-starved American men, and the economic destitution faced by many Japanese, caused prostitution to proliferate; even the state got involved, coercing women into a short-lived formal prostitution programme in 1945. But straight servicemen weren’t the only ones seeking out sex, and Japanese men, often cross-dressed as women, also got involved in the GI sex trade. Some of these male prostitutes were gay men – others used their difficult position somewhat to their advantage and adopted overtly transfeminine identities. Some, it must be said, were forced into the trade out of desperation. But for others, prostitution was a voluntary and wholly positive opportunity to express marginal desires. 

As censorship was lifted, popular literature exploded, and a major part of this was the ‘Perverse Press,’ an outgrowth of kasutori pulp culture. Foreign sex and love manuals such as Ideal Marriage by Theodor Van de Velde were translated and sold in record numbers, and new magazines for the first time took a genuine interest in such topics as foreplay and the female orgasm. The Perverse Press was kasutori at its most extreme – it was, in effect, kink writing. Some of the most important publications included Kitan Kurabu (Strange-Talk Club, 1952-1975), Ura-Mado (Rear Window, 1956-1965), and Fūzoku Kitan (Strange-Talk About Sex Customs, 1960-1974), which all focused on BDSM and sadomasochism. Queer sex was discussed and portrayed openly in these magazines, but with the caveat that it was lumped in with kinks – gay sex was, in this formulation, not indicative of an inner identity, but rather a ‘perverse’ act. This does not limit the importance of these magazines in giving the queer community a voice; literary figures contributed stories of queer love and sex, and readers sent in their own accounts to be published. Some magazines, such as Ningen Tankyū (Human Research, 1950-1953) and Fūzoku Kagaku (Sex Customs Science, 1953-1955), adopted titles which presented them almost as academic journals and claimed to be written by expert sexologists, which, while pathologizing to a degree, gave the queer experiences expressed in their pages a certain scientific legitimacy. The fact that queerness was equated to kink in the Perverse Press may be problematic, but it did mean that the publications reached a wider readership of straight Japanese interested in learning about sex and relationships, exposing them to queer people for perhaps the first time. 

There were also more spaces for physical interaction as gei ba (gay bars) began to pop up all over Japan, including in rural areas where open homosexual expression had been previously very difficult. But the gei ba were more than just homosocial – they were some of the first spaces where a trans identity could develop in Japan. Gei seems like a simple transliteration of ‘gay’, but it actually had specific cultural connotations; the term gei also means artistic expression in Japanese (as in Geisha), so it connoted outward transgender expression as well as homosexual sex. Gei boi, the waitstaff at a gei ba, invariably cross-dressed or, in some cases, took steps to medically transition, such as by taking hormones to grow breasts. Importantly, gei boi typically kept their penises, even if they felt themselves to be women, since the ability to act ‘as a man’ in bed was a crucial part of their jobs. The identity was thus deeply personal, but also mediated through commercial consumption in a burgeoning service industry. Moreover, for much of the postwar period, gay men were expected to act in a feminine manner – trans and homosexual expression was so interlinked that neither gay men nor trans women developed their own distinct communities until the 1970s. Female-centred bars were less common but operated along similar lines; servers dressed in male clothing and acted as men, and therefore the line between lesbians and trans men was blurred. This all led to an interesting divergence from Western queer history, as both gay men and lesbians felt deeply intertwined with people who would now be described as transgender, while not seeing any correlation between each other at all. The term gei referred exclusively to males for decades and only recently has come to encompass lesbians as well. 

It seems appropriate here to cover terminology. There were few terms in the prewar years that could adequately describe all queer people; the closest had been doseiai (same-sex love), but in practise this mostly referred to lesbians, whose relationships were considered to be more emotional than gay men’s and more worthy of the term ai (love). In the 1950s, the terms most used to describe all queer people collectively were hentai and sodomia (sodomy). Both carried connotations of perversity, but when used in the context of the Perverse Press, as that phrase suggests, they shed negative meanings, much like the word ‘queer’ in English. We have already covered gei boi, but some gay men also began to use the terms okama or danshoku, which refer to the receiving party in anal sex. These terms’ sexual, rather than romantic, focus, and links to prostitution, have led to their decreased use recently. But some activists, notably Tōgō Ken, have insisted on still describing themselves as okama as a subversive act. 

Lesbian relationships were conceived of in less overtly sexual terms; resubosu ai (Lesbos Love) was, like doseiai, problematically thought to be emotional whereas men’s desire was sexual. Yet paradoxically, in mass publications sexual stories were often written from the perspective of rezu (short for rezubian). These were written by men under female pseudonyms and thus appropriated lesbian desire to satisfy a male fantasy. As a result, lesbians adopted other terms to distance themselves from the commodified rezu, such as the full rezubian, bian (the final two syllables instead of the first), and daiku (dyke, another English slur which queer Japanese stripped of its negative meanings). To recount all the other terms used since the 1950s would be impossible, but it is vital to note that as time went on, Japanese began to adopt new words to better encapsulate their experiences. Gay men sick of always being perceived as submissive, for example, adopted the terms tachi (sword-bearer) and neko (cat) to specify whether they were a top or bottom, and lesbians used the term onabe (meaning pots or pans) for the same purpose. 

Japanese were exposed to queer experiences through more than just the Perverse Press, as many celebrities in the 1960s and 70s were openly and unashamedly queer. Miwa Akihiro began his drag career in the 1950s and soon garnered national fame. The film star Peter became famous in the late 1960s for his androgynous style, having adopted his name as a reference to the childlike features of Peter Pan, and Carrousel Maki, a transgender woman, became famous as an actress at the same time. In the theatre world, the new format of Butoh embraced strange or uncomfortable conventions to uproot viewers’ preconceptions, including setting stages on fire, and gender transgression was one of their core tactics. Its founder Hijikata Tatsumi danced in women’s clothes from the very start of his Butoh career in the 1950s, and Ōno Kazuo, who started dancing in his 70s, made cross-dressing an integral part of his style. The Takarazuka dance troupe, which was founded in the 1910s but reached its peak of popularity in the postwar, inverts kabuki traditions: all roles are played by women. 

Mishima Yukio, however, had perhaps the most varied and complicated life and career. Mishima’s novels are considered some of the most important in Japanese history, and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968. His books explore erotic desire and – crucially – his own experiences in the gay bar scene. But Mishima was also, increasingly, fascistic. He opposed what he saw as feeble Western sensibilities and called on the Japanese to return to their past sense of warrior virtue. In the 1950s he got into bodybuilding and used photos of his body to evoke national strength, and in 1968 formed the Shield Society, a far-right militia, to restore honour to the emperor, who he considered to have been emasculated by the postwar constitution. Mishima’s life ended dramatically in 1970 when he marched into a Japanese Self-Defence Forces base with his militia and tried to convince the troops there to launch a coup. When the soldiers incredulously refused, he committed seppuku – samurai ritual suicide – right then and there. Mishima’s sexuality is a complicated topic. He had many gay relationships yet married a woman and had children in pursuit of his version of heteronormative national values. His queer identity would usually place him in line with progressives, yet he actually adopted a traditionalist, ultranationalist, and regressive ideology. He demonstrates how the queer history of Japan is far from simple or clear-cut.  

From the late 1970s, the Japanese queer community started to resemble the western queer community more closely. To some extent this was certainly a process of emulation; as international organisations such as the International Lesbian and Gay Alliance opened offices in Japan, the perceived need for a united community developed and gei lost its specifically transfeminine and male connotations to mean all homosexuals just as gay does in the west. But new terminologies also developed organically from specific conditions within the Japanese community. Gay men, still feeling that existing terms were overly commodified or offered little opportunity for egalitarian relationships, adopted the term homo to mean any gay man, regardless of their position within the relationship. Concurrently new publications such as Adonis were released which catered specifically to gay men, rather than the kink community overall. 

Similarly, to distance themselves from the gei boi stereotype, trans-Japanese began to refer to themselves as nyuhafu (new half). Magazines developed to cater to this new distinct trans community, too – one of them charmingly called Kuiin. The term nyuhafu importantly highlights that the Japanese queer community was beginning to become more intersectional, since it was originally coined to describe mixed-race Japanese. Collaboration between queer and other minority activists has led to overlap in strategies as well as language. For example, from the 1990s they have emphasised the role of tojisha (persons directly concerned) – that is, queer people rather than straight sexologists – in discourse, a strategy first adopted by disability, Korean, and burakumin (former outcaste) rights groups to better assert themselves in the 1970s. 

New movements also began to build. While they have indigenous origins with Japanese terms to match, they often also use words which are explicitly Western to foster a sense of familiarity within the global kuia community that the internet age has allowed Japanese to envision. Intersex activists, for instance, use the term intāsekushuaru, an English loan word, but also the older haninyō – literally ‘both yin and yang’. Bisexuals use baisekushuaru and pansexuals use pansekushuaru; they lack purely Japanese terms because gei had encompassed multi-gender desire until it came to mean gay/lesbian, so the need for specific orientations only arose when Western terms were already mainstream. Asexuals, who have long used the term museiai (no sex love), have begun to favour asekushuaru/nonsekushuaru. However, older terms such as okama and rezu still remain prominent. Some queer Japanese feel that the period of the Perverse Press in the 1950s-70s offered more overlap and flexibility, and thus greater freedom to express their specific identities, so they insist on using older terms that other queer people might find offensive.  

Which brings us to today. In many ways, life for queer Japanese in the immediate postwar years was freer than their Western contemporaries – they faced less of the violent legal oppression that Western activists had to overcome. But this also meant that the community was slow to coalesce as a political force; the absence of targeted police oppression meant that there was no Japanese Stonewall to galvanise them to act together. As a result, Japan has recently fallen behind. 

Gay marriage is still not legal in Japan. The US-imposed constitution was highly progressive for its time and ensured marital equality, but by defining marriage as an equal relationship between a man and a woman. Making same-sex marriage legal at the national level would thus require a constitutional amendment, but the constitution is notoriously hard to amend – in fact, it has not been amended once since its adoption in 1947. There is some progress at the local level, and prefectural governments including in Tokyo have begun to recognise civil partnerships, but most LGBTQ+ Japanese can still only access anything approaching marriage benefits by having the older partner adopt the younger, thereby absorbing them into their legal household. While there is little established religious opposition to gay marriage, many Japanese feel that the nation’s efforts to increase its birth rate would be damaged if people were ‘encouraged’ not to marry an opposite-sex partner. ‘Coming out’ is also not a common concept in Japan – partly because Japanese tend to be more comfortable than Westerners with having multiple identities depending on the context and so feel no need to bring up their sexual and romantic lives to their friends and families, but also because they fear not being accepted by their loved ones. Being openly gay in the workplace is especially difficult, since employers see marriage as a sign of maturity and favour married men for promotion (the opposite is true of married women, who are expected to quit to become housewives). 

Trans people, meanwhile, continue to face extreme medicalisation. Sex-change surgery was only legalised in 1998 (though illegal surgeries had not been rare before this), and the process of getting diagnosed with ‘Gender Identity Disorder’ to access surgery is arduous and demeaning. To change gender legally, a person must fully transition from male to female or vice versa, causing significant issues for non-binary Japanese who wish to change only part of their sexed bodies, for people in the entertainment industry who wish to transition but must retain aspects of their present expression for their careers, and for Japanese who want to socially transition but don’t desire surgery. And to make things worse, legal transition still must include sterilisation. 

Misia’s performance at such a high-profile event as the Olympics demonstrates that things are certainly getting better for the LGBTQ+ community in Japan. Pride parades and thriving gay nightlife in the big cities have made queer Japanese more visible. The wife of Abe Shinzo – Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, who was assassinated in 2022 – is an outspoken advocate for LGBTQ+ rights and a regular attendee at pride events. Opposition parties in Japan mostly endorse positive reforms, and while a pro-gay marriage candidate did not win the recent race for leadership of the governing Liberal Democratic Party, the fact that one was in the running is itself a step forward. In education, a few universities, such as Chuo University, have added queer studies to their programmes, and some high schools are beginning to introduce gender-neutral facilities and uniforms. Progress, however, is slow. 

When the Meiji government undertook modernising policies from 1868, new spaces opened for queer Japanese to express themselves, including in homosocial arenas such as the military and factories and in a developing liberal press. WW2 rolled back these advances, but the postwar period saw a boom in LGBTQ+ writing in kink magazines, and queer celebrities exposed straight Japanese to their existence. There was little notion of a singular queer community – gay men and lesbians felt that they had more in common with trans people than with each other – but this changed as Japanese tried to better capture their specific identities with new terminologies that also emphasised overlap. The Japanese queer community today faces serious legal difficulties and lacks social acceptance but is drawing on a rich history to fight for better treatment. 

History is a valuable tool for recovering lost voices. And it is also a way to influence the present. To shine a light on the ignored experiences of Japanese queer people and the global LGBTQ+ community is to insist that we have always been here and always will be. These experiences matter as much as any other and need to be recognised. It is also profoundly inspiring that, even in times of extreme hardship, queer people have always been able to find community. 

Category: Ancient, Early Modern, Modern

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