Something Missing

When I was planning my trip to Japan, sexuality and gender studies was my primary interest.  There is so much in Japan that falls under this category that is simply fascinating to me.  The geisha, hosts and hostesses, the role of homosexuality in modern Japanese society.  This last category is what I want to talk about in this blog post.

Something I did in the last few weeks, and it was one of the most enjoyable days and nights I’ve ever had, was get made up by two gyaru and then go out to a gay club in Osaka.

This club was packed with Japanese people and gaijin alike, and several fantastic drag queens as well as a group of male go-go dancers.  I had a wonderful time dancing with my friends and was several times pulled up on stage to dance with the drag queens and/or go-go boys.  There was, however, something that seemed a little lacking all night.  Where were the girls?

There were a lot of straight girls, to be sure.  They came because they had gay male friends (I actually befriended a Japanese gay man who introduced his girl friend to me saying, “She is fag hag.”  I was impressed) or because they were fans of boys’ love, etc.  But where were the lesbians?

This is something I’ve been wondering about ever since I came to Kansai Gaidai.  I often feel as if gay women are just kind of… absent.  Boys’ love manga seems to be wildly popular, while its counterpart, yuri, lags behind.  I think this is because girls are drawn to boys’ love with its too-beautiful male protagonists and romanticized visions of homosexual love, while most straight boys are more interested in porn than Japanese schoolgirls getting innocently dewy-eyed over each other.

An article on CNN puts the ratio of exclusively lesbian bars to gay bars at 12 to 400—and this is in Shinjuku’s “gay district” in Tokyo.  In Kirara’s article “A Lesbian in Hokkaido”, she describes her mother’s response to her coming out as a lesbian—“Don’t worry.  You’ll get over it.” This kind of “You’ll get over it” mentality is very present in Yuri as well—love between girls is often portrayed as a phase that girls go through in high school, before they grow up and marry men and become happy wives and mothers.  Why is this?

My theory is that because women’s sexuality has historically been so undervalued, especially in Japanese society, the idea of sexual relationships with no men involved is simply baffling.  There’s also the fact that gay relationships between men have been historically condoned by society within certain cultures—for example, Buddhist priests or samurai, whereas women were seen as unclean.  This could also have contributed to divisions in the modern gay culture, reflected in the high amount of gay clubs and low amount of lesbian clubs, and relative absence of lesbians from gay or “mixed” clubs.  I’m going to Tokyo in a couple of days and am hoping to be able to learn a bit more about the gay culture there.  For now, this is my theory.

“Japan’s lesbians still scared to come out”—http://www.cnngo.com/tokyo/life/lesbians-in-Japan-struggle-to-build-their-own-community-814836.  19 Nov, 2010.

Check out this link to see the full article I referenced, it's really interesting.

Kirara (1998) "A Lesbian in Hokkaido," in Queer Japan: Personal Stories of Japanese Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transsexuals, Barbara Summerhawk, C. McMahill and D. McDonald, eds. Norwich, Vermont: New Victoria, pp. 188-199.

A reference of Kirara's article.