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.

Kare ga Hoshii

If you are a girl in Japan reading this, chances are you are already very familiar with this phenomenon.  You meet another Japanese girl, who seems as though she may want to be friends.  While you’re making small talk with her, one of the first things she will ask you (if not the very first) is this: “Do you have a boyfriend?”  

The flow of this conversation is pretty predictable.  If you say “No”, it’s “But why not? You’re so pretty!” If “Yes”, it’s either “Urayameshi!! (I’m jealous)” or “How is he?” A Japanese girlfriend of mine tells me that this is kind of a way to facilitate conversation—it either leads to a compliment or a new topic of conversation—but that she doesn’t like to use it because it’s a bit shallow.

I’m not saying that this doesn’t happen in America, but one of the first things I’ve picked up on after coming to Japan is that Japanese girls seem to have boyfriend fever.  I’ve been wondering about it ever since I got to Japan, and I think there’s much more societal pressure for girls to have boyfriends in Japan than in America.  Again, I don’t mean to say that there isn’t pressure in America.  There certainly is.  But it seems to be so much more pronounced in Japan.  There is so much pressure not to be alone on Valentine’s Day, on White Day, on Christmas. 

This love hotel was right outside of the entrance to a temple in Kyoto.  It seems that if you're single in Japan, you can't escape being reminded of it!

 In addition, Japanese boys seem to have much higher, and more specific, standards than their Western counterparts as a generalization—it’s not just “I like blondes” or “I like cute girls”, it’s “I like a girl of this height, no more than this specific weight, who wears heels about four inches high and wears this specific fashion”.  Which, in turn, leads to my next point: beautiful, interesting Japanese girls with depressingly low standards when it comes to men—particularly Western men.

Are you familiar with this comic strip? It’s not so far-fetched—I’ve seen rather awkward, plain guys, who would draw little to no attention in America, surrounded by Japanese girls who should be far out of their league.  Not all Japanese girls prefer gaijin boyfriends, but many do.  In Christine Tan’s article on China Smack, she describes the phenomena of Asian girls with white boyfriends and gives a list of the reasons Asian women give for this, which rang eerily true to what I’ve heard from several Japanese girls; Asian boys aren’t romantic, they aren’t fun, White men are better looking, etc., etc. 

Karen Kelsky also discusses this in her article “Gender, Modernity, and Eroticized Internationalism in Japan”, in which she suggests that Japanese women see Western boyfriends as a gateway to travel, freedom, and work opportunities without Japan’s unfortunate glass ceiling when it comes to women. 

It’s not my place to suggest that they do otherwise, but it seems to me that this method of self growth leaves girls still dependant on a man.  As a feminist, I can’t help but wish that girls of every nationality could stop defining themselves by whether or not they have a boyfriend.

Sources:

Kelsky, Karen (1999) "Gender, Modernity, and Eroticized Internationalism in Japan." Cultural Anthropology 14 (2): 229-255.

Links:

http://free-extras.com/images/holding_hands-1425.htm --Where I got the "holding hands" image

http://diaspora.chinasmack.com/2011/malaysia/christine-tan-asian-women-with-white-men-suck.html --Christine Tan's excellent article on Diaspora

http://translate.google.co.jp/translate?hl=ja&sl=en&u=http://www.charismaman.com/&ei=XBe5TvO-G6TJmAXf7J2fCA&sa=X&oi=translate&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCQQ7gEwAA&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dcharisma%2Bman%26hl%3Dja%26gbv%3D2%26rlz%3D1R2GGLL_en%26biw%3D1024%26bih%3D578%26prmd%3Dimvns --The one, the only, Charisma Man!

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/20/11-asian-girls/ --For a more humorous viewpoint, Stuff White People Like.