Mark J. McLelland - Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age

A s previous chapters have shown, by the final decade of the twentieth century there had emerged in Japan communities of gay men, lesbians and transgender individuals such as might be encountered in many large western cities. These communities are serviced by an extensive market, including online and print media, and by numerous community and commercial enterprises. This development of lesbian and gay media, particularly literature and film, as well as characteristically western modes promoting activism and visibility, such as LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) organizations, film festivals and parades in societies like Japan has been taken by some as evidence of a global queering. As Dennis Altman, for instance, points out, globalization has helped create an international gay/lesbian identity, which is by no means confined to the western world (2001: 86).

However, as outlined, Japan was never a passive recipient of western influence. The Meiji period did not see the sidelining of original or authentic Japanese sexualities by new notions imported wholesale from the west. Rather, sexuality was constituted through a highly complex and contested process in which traditional terminologies were continually being overwritten by new meanings and in which foreign loanwords and ways of knowing were strategically redeployed to serve local uses. The Allied occupation following the end of the Second World War too was a time of great hybridity when the emerging American category gay was deployed alongside indigenous categories such as okama, historical terms such as nanshoku and late-nineteenth-century German notions such as urning a term that had long since lost currency in Europe. The history outlined in these pages demonstrates, then, that in the realm of sexuality, globalization results in creative indigenization and cultural admixture much more than it does in any unilateral imposition of western sexual identities. As Martin Manalansan points out, we are right to be wary of global stories of lesbian and gay liberation in which all same-sex phenomena are placed within a developmental and teleological matrix that ends with Western gay identity (1995: 428). The reality, in Japan as elsewhere, is less tidy and more complex.

Given this background, it should come as no surprise to discover that contemporary Japanese notions of queer identity, despite some resemblance to western models, have their own distinct histories and trajectories, resulting as they do from a social context very different from that which produced the gay, lesbian and transgender liberation movements of the west. It is not the case that Japan is simply one among many sites for the elaboration of a kind of homogenized, international queer culture; rather, Japan is home to an alternative sexual modernity, a modernity produced by hybrid globalizing processes as much as by the continuation of identities, practices and mentalities inherited from the past.

The account given in these pages of Japans postwar queer history has attempted to recover and give voice to local Japanese perspectives using archival material from the popular as well as the perverse press and from the Internet. These kinds of local knowledge, which are often overlooked in academic analyses, tend to be ignored because they are considered nave knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges, knowledges that are below the required level of erudition or scientificity (Foucault 2003: 7). The perverse press, in particular, despite its wide range and longevity, is a genre that has been entirely overlooked by English-language scholarship on postwar Japan. Yet there are many more important stories buried in that archive that deserve to be told. Ethnographic work with members of Japans queer communities, particularly the gathering of oral narratives, has barely begun as well, and it is imperative that peoples local knowledge be preserved before this resource is lost to us. Websites also come and go; already much pioneering material placed on the Internet by sexual minorities in the early 1990s has been lost. If this book is to have any effect at all, I hope that it will be to encourage others to engage with kono sekai in multiple ways in search of other stories, other lives.