In which we discover that drag queens, camp gays and transsexuals are popular on television. (Lesbians and non-camp homosexuals: not so much.) Key question: ‘Why is Japanese television so gay?’ Key quote: ‘Sure, there are gay characters on TV, but they are only characters.’ Celebrities approached for this story: twenty-two. Celebrities actually spoken to: four.
IT’S TRUE: YOU WILL find the most breathtakingly messed-up porn in Japan. From outside, the gay sex shop looked innocent enough – decorated with cartoon motifs of Popeye with his muscular, vein-bulging forearms (the perfect icon for hardcore gay porn, I later realised) – but inside, it housed some of the most dizzyingly intense examples of filth I’d ever seen.
Fisting was a given. So were blow jobs, anal sex, muscled gods, twinks, interracial stuff, locker-room fantasies and transsexuals. I had expected all that. But because Japan specialised in catering to super-specific niches, the until-now-unheard-of (at least to me) genre of Fat Men Masturbating in Business Suits took up an entire shelf. So did DVDs of predatory gay men sucking off kidnapped and rope-bound ‘straight’ boys, and videos of boys so young, feminine, fine-featured and hairless that the images on the covers veered close to underage lesbian territory. There was also the infamous guro (gore) porn, an umbrella category of nightmarish stuff that involved blood, disfiguration, beatings, urine, enemas or faeces, as well as a generous and diverse bukkake selection, one of Japan’s more successful inter national exports.
Just metres away from the entrance, a DVD played in a loop showing two guys going to town on each other. Twisting themselves gymnastically into a 69 position, each reamed the other’s butthole with the enthusiasm of a diner at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Although Japanese law dictated that below-the-waist orifices were to be pixelated out of pornographic films, you didn’t have to work your imagination to make out what was happening. All you had to do was blur your eyes and your brain filled in the blanks.
After browsing around the sex shop, I reeled outside and almost ran into a primary school kid, skipping along with his mother after finishing the day at school. It struck me as both impressive and appalling that the only thing separating this kid from a widescreen hardcore homosexual rim-job video was a semi-sheer plastic curtain.
Welcome to Shinjuku Ni-Chome – ‘Shinjuku, Second Block’ – Tokyo’s premier gay hub. Shinjuku is an engine of human activity, the beating heart of Tokyo’s megalopolis. Its train station is the world’s busiest, with 3.5 million commuters coming through its automated turnstiles every day. At night, the district throws an epileptic fit of neon light and colour. In the midst of this fluorescent wonderland sits Ni-Chome, tiny, low-key and relatively dim, despite its international reputation as a gay enclave. Even with its clubs, bars and the famous 24-hour Kaikan male sex sauna, Ni-Chome is unassuming: a cluster of narrow grey buildings with ropey tangles of power lines stretched between them like old vines. During the day, the place is quiet and sleepy. After lunch, fast-talking salarymen and slow-moving elderly women stroll through, seemingly oblivious to the parallel world of gay hotspots.
You had to look up. The only way you could tell Ni-Chome was any different was by the small square signs that jutted out like fins on buildings, advertising gay bars on the upper levels. These were pokey places with names like BLOKE (all caps; men only) and BAR (women only), tucked away so that you had to climb stairs and knock on the right door to get in. Because of Tokyo’s insane rental prices, the bars were small and restricted their clientele by type. In Ni-Chome, there were bars for guys like me – garisen (skinny guys) – as well as places dedicated to fukesen (old men), gaisen (foreigners) and debusen (fat men). And then there were the lesbian bars, most of which banned men entirely on the basis that they usually came to ogle.
Taq’s Knot was one of the oldest bars in Ni-Chome, a rare place that welcomed most gay men and even the occasional woman. It was roughly the size of an economy-class cabin on a cruise ship and could barely fit ten people at a time. The bar itself was sunken, which meant the barman looked as if he had fallen into a ditch. Behind the bar were big acrylic paintings of muscled men with giant cocks, and instead of branded match-boxes Taq’s Knot offered free condoms, the wrappers featuring works by local artists. Two computer monitors played ’80s music videos on repeat.
Taq Otsuka started Taq’s Knot in 1982, the year I was born. Over the course of my life, Taq had seen not only Ni-Chome change, but Japan’s entire gay scene evolve. Taq looked like my dad with a goatee, which was to say he looked like a 62-year-old version of me: slender, wispy-haired and boyish despite his age. He wore a striped blue-and-white shirt over athletic cargo fatigues and sported grey hair in ruffles, giving him the appearance of a retired gay Phys Ed teacher.
When Taq was a kid, he’d read magazine articles about the fabled bars of Ni-Chome, with journalists reporting wild stories from an underground world where men dressed as women and worked as prostitutes at night.
‘I didn’t have television when I was a kid,’ he said, ‘so the only images I could get were from these magazines. But the impression of Shinjuku Ni-Chome itself was really negative. It was represented as abnormal, as hentai.’
‘What does hentai mean?’
‘Sort of like “queer”. But, like, the bad meaning of queer, before gay liberation. Sometimes queer is used with a positive meaning nowadays, but beforehand, queer was – how do you say? Everyone feared the word. So that meaning of queer.’
It wasn’t like homophobia in the West. Japanese attitudes were more ambivalent, more evasive and unspoken. Throughout the country’s history, there had been cultural precedents for sex between men, specific relationship dynamics to which our modern-day notions of ‘homosexual’, ‘gay’ and ‘transgender’ didn’t much apply. Centuries ago, adolescent male prostitution took place around kabuki sites in Kyoto, while sexual relationships between samurai masters and apprentices, and priests and page boys had occurred since the eighteenth century. One famous poem featuring same-sex male longing – Iwatsutsuji (‘Azaleas on the Cliffs’) – dated back to the ninth century. It wasn’t anything new.
‘Japanese people see gay people as shameful, but not sinful,’ Taq said. ‘There has never been anything against gay people. As long as they’re invisible, they’ll be tolerated.’
When Taq first encountered television as a young adult, there was hardly anything gay to be seen. Then in the 1990s, Taq noticed big changes. In fact, the Japanese media was suddenly caught up in an intense public fascination with gay men on screen, which became so noticeable that there was even a special term for it: gei būmu – literally, a ‘gay boom’. Viewers loved gay characters. Movies and TV programs showcased them, and plotlines in comedies and dramas saw gay men accidentally marrying women (whoops!) or women becoming their fag hags. It was all very festive and family-friendly. On television, gay talent – gei tarento – was suddenly everywhere. Still, Taq felt something was missing.
‘They’re characters, like men dressing up as women. But there’s no real gay people who behave like men who say, “I really like men.”’
‘Only a very specific type of gay person is seen on Japanese television?’
Taq nodded. ‘Colourful, feminine and over-acting. It’s a kind of like – how would you say?’ Taq searched his mind for an English term, but came up with a Japanese one instead: onee, pronounced ‘oh-neh-eh’. It meant ‘older sister’. Sassy drag queens, camp gay men and giggling transsexuals, they were all onee: camp, feminine, hilarious and weirdly sexless. They presented themselves as happy little eunuchs, like Japan’s first gay celebrities, Piko and Osugi, twin brothers who declared themselves gay back in the 1970s, but insisted they were celibate to make everyone comfortable.
‘From a Western point of view,’ Taq said, ‘there seem to be a lot of gay characters on Japanese TV, right?’
I nodded.
‘You must think, “Good: Japanese gays are on TV!” So you are gay and entertain me? Okay! But if you are gay and insist on changing the legal system? No. It’s vague what Japanese society is willing to do. Japanese culture tries to avoid conflict.’
Sure, homosexuality was legal in Japan, Western-style homophobia wasn’t rampant and TV programming was relentlessly faggy, but coming out as gay or lesbian in real life was still very difficult. Talking about sexuality – actual queer sexuality, what being gay actually meant – was generally taboo. Seen in a bigger context, the situation struck me as slightly sinister: queer celebrities going on-screen to have millions of viewers laugh at them, but knowing viewers couldn’t care less once the TVs were off.
When I asked Taq to list the most famous gay people on Japanese TV right now, he laughed and pretended to be overwhelmed.
‘Oh, there are so many!’ he said. ‘There’s Ikko-san, Matsuko-san, Bourebonne-san …’
Taq had to say Bourebonne-san, of course. Bourebonne-san was an old friend who worked at Taq’s Knot when he wasn’t appearing on television or rehearsing for his live drag queen variety show. Bourebonne-san’s star was on the rise, Taq explained, and he also had a powerful friend and mentor in Matsuko Deluxe, a gloriously obese 140-kilogram drag queen who was one of the most renowned TV personalities. A self-described ‘fat transvestite columnist’, Matsuko Deluxe was loved for her luxurious silken-tofu fat rolls and ability to shoot off rapid-fire jokes and double entendres. She was currently everywhere as part of Fuji TV’s autumn marketing campaign and also advertised pizza, a mobile phone company, Nintendo games and her own chocolate-filled biscuits that came imprinted with a cartoon image of herself. If Bourebonne-san wanted to be famous, having Matsuko Deluxe on call would help enormously.
‘So is Bourebonne-san becoming really famous now?’ I said.
‘Mmm …’ Taq said. He laughed teasingly. ‘Becoming.’
After talking to Taq, I took myself to a local 24-hour sento, a traditional public bathhouse where men and women separated before soaking in communal mineral baths and broiling their skin in the sauna. Although surrounded by naked, sweating Japanese men, I kept my attention focused squarely on the encased flatscreen television. It was tuned into a format that dominated the airways: variety-news shows. These followed a simple formula: the news of the day with a panel of celebrity guests. As raw footage reeled off – plane crashes, disgraced sports stars leaving court, political speeches, baby animals being born in zoos – a small box in the corner of the screen stayed on the celebrities’ faces for their reactions: Nodding Concern, Startled Delight, Breathless Laughter, Muted Shock, Considered Listening, Silent Crying over Something Very Moving and Poignant. The celebrities’ reactions provided a sort of emotional laugh track for the audience: when to feel sad, when to chuckle.
As always, there was one ultra-camp gay man on the panel. It was almost a prerequisite to have at least one onee on board. They were on morning shopping programs and late-night variety shows, or advertising dolphin-shaped toilet cleaners and demonstrating the latest in flower-arranging techniques. All this visibility had to be a good thing, I thought. In a nation of fickle viewers, gei būmu seemed here to stay, having outlasted the TV fads for fatties, women with massive tits, washed-up popstars and lawyers-slash-comedians. But it seemed odd that real-life queer rights hadn’t grown with this trend. I decided to track down the gay stars, one by one, and find out what they thought: whether they saw themselves as offering a sort of gay minstrel show, or whether there was more to them than that. I took out my dictaphone and notepad and started calling people, knowing I was out to violate an unspoken rule: gei tarento won’t speak about their private lives, and journalists don’t ask, to save audiences from extending their imagination in that direction.
As the weeks went on, I realised I’d seriously underestimated the difficulty of my assignment. One problem was my utter lack of written or spoken Japanese. I would scour celebrities’ official websites for contact details and forcibly mash the Japanese script through Google Translate, only to get not-quite-right translations that I’d have to squint to read, such as ‘Cultural Tours pre-Haruna love and go!’ and ‘For inquiries, Avex Entertainment, Inc. Medium and delivered in record straight!’ When a couple of translators came on board, they made phone calls and sent countless emails on my behalf, while I prepped for interviews and pored over the bare details of these celebrities’ private lives. It felt as though we were running a gossip rag.
We approached Akihiro Miwa, the beloved TV drag queen in her mid seventies, who was always accompanied on-screen by flowers and a Barbara Cartland glow. There was also KABA. Chan (real name: Eiji Kabashima), a choreographer, member of the music group DOS and contestant on Japan’s Dancing with the Stars. We tried accessing Shogo Kariyazaki, the famous gay TV florist (a Japanese speciality), and someone named JONTE’ 
Moaning, an American drag queen modelled after Grace Jones who had somehow made it big in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Our requests were met with radio silence.
I decided to just go ahead and visit Bourebonne-san when he was at work. On the night we met, he was working in Taq’s Knot, pulling beers from the sunken bar and dressed as a regular guy. He wore a loud checked shirt with ironed-on scout’s badges displaying words like MAXIMUM and CALIFORNIA. He was handsome, and tall by Japanese standards.
As a kid, Bourebonne-san hadn’t seen many images on television of what he wanted to be, but as an adult, he watched RuPaul and the Australian film Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. Something clicked.
‘Priscilla and RuPaul changed my heart,’ he told me in English, putting his hands to his chest and fluttering his eyelashes.
The music system had been playing Lionel Ritchie’s ‘All Night Long’, Culture Club’s ‘Karma Chameleon’ and Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Relax’, but when Bourebonne-san discovered I was Australian, he clapped his hands, squealed and flicked the system to Kylie Minogue’s ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ in my honour. Businessmen in their spectacles and ties surrounded me and my translator, curious and eager to chat.
‘So Otsuka-san told me you were becoming famous!’ I told Bourebonne-san, recalling my conversation with Taq.
Bourebonne-san beamed at the news, delighted.
‘Nooooooo,’ he said with typical Japanese modesty. ‘But you want to see me on television?’
He stopped the Kylie song and loaded YouTube on the monitor. We all watched as the opening credits for a daytime talk show called You Wanted to Know! came on. The male host introduced three apparently female guests who sat alongside each other in carrels, as in a game show. Bourebonne-san was unrecognisable. In this episode, he wore a long brown wig, a flowery black ribbon in his hair, a long dress in autumnal colours and a flowing pearl necklace. It wasn’t a conventionally outrageous drag outfit, but rather something you’d expect a classy aunty in her fifties to wear. Bourebonne-san told me he got most of his clothes from a costume website in the United States, though some pieces were made to order. Unlike many other drag queens, he chose to dress with class.
On the show, the three guests watched rolling news footage before making quips or offering their sympathetic take on the news. The camera loved Bourebonne-san. He was the most striking of the women – probably because he was a man – and offered the most arch jokes. But he was also very pleasant, polite and feminine, not vulgar or overly sexual like most drag queens on American TV. In the commercial break, the show cut to an advertisement showing a deliciously fat Matsuko Deluxe, seemingly pregnant, reclining in a white gown and breathing hard. I had no idea what the advertisement was for, but later discovered it was a teaser for Fuji Television’s new season. Matsuko Deluxe was pregnant with the TV schedule, telling the audience it was due any day now.
When the video clip ended, the Taq’s Knot clientele offered a smattering of applause.
‘Is it easier to be a drag queen on TV than an ordinary gay guy?’ I asked.
Bourebonne-san thought about it. ‘Well, it’s much easier to work with make-up and dress-up. Because you have to be – how would you say? – “catchy” to get work. You know?’
‘Is there a difference between this Bourebonne-san,’ I said, pointing to the TV, ‘and the one I’d see at your drag show?’
‘Perhaps I’m less funny on this,’ he said, pointing to the monitor. ‘There are less dirty jokes. Because this is a nationwide TV show, the whole country is watching, you know?’
I nodded, understanding.
‘The good jokes come,’ he said, ‘when you’re talking about sex.’
Several days later, Bourebonne-san pulled some strings and invited me to his drag queen extravaganza Campy, which was taking place in the basement of a seven-level entertainment complex called the Loft/Plus One: Talk Live House. Underneath the Loft’s flashing green sign, someone had stuck a childlike, hand-drawn sign in big blobby texta letters saying, ‘Campy! Vol. 8.’ Everyone in line was in good spirits as they clutched their tickets, content in the knowledge they had scored entry to a sold-out event.
The line seemed to be chiefly gay men who had arrived in hordes, teasing and slapping each other good-naturedly. My translator pointed out a prominent TV news anchor who was known to be gay in queer circles but wasn’t open about his sexuality in public. Lesbians had come in small groups or couples. And surprisingly, there was a contingent of straight people, who had come in couples or rowdy packs. Macho straight men stood in line, hand in hand with their girlfriends.
A short, compactly muscled Japanese man with a beard took our tickets. He was naked except for a fake tiger skin that wrapped around his crotch and ribboned over his shoulder where it was attached to a plush tiger’s head. After collecting our complimentary Campy DVDs, we were greeted by five drag queens.
‘Benjamin!’ one of them said, putting his open palms by his face as a hello.
There was no mistaking Bourebonne-san’s broad shoulders. Tonight, he was dressed sleekly in the outfit of a chic First Lady, complete with Jackie O wig.
‘Bourebonne-san,’ I said, planting a kiss on his cheek.
Another drag queen wore giant heart-shaped glasses like Lolita. A third had the hard, pumped body of an elite swimmer poured into a tight blue cocktail dress. When I reached out to shake his hand, I accidentally dropped my notebook. When I went to stand up, he’d shoved his arse right in front of my face. The queens hooted with laughter.
The Loft was a grungy parlour that had the look of an old strip club with exposed wiring and lights hanging off banisters. Seats filled quickly and people crammed in around small tables the size of lazy Susans. My interpreter and I made friends with a table of raucous straight men and women who’d come just because they thought drag queens were a scream. We shared snacks and ordered rounds of beer and Japanese lemon sours.
It didn’t take long for the entertainment to become a blur: partly because I didn’t understand the Japanese jokes, but mainly because I was drunk. Most of the jokes, my translator told me, were saucy and foul but the puns were so linguistically and culturally specific that they were nearly impossible to translate. From what I could gather, no topics were off limits. They joked about eating disorders and how ugly they all looked. Bourebonne-san delivered a sordid monologue about going to a love hotel with a guy he’d met while still in drag. When they discovered the love motel only played boring straight porn, Bourebonne-san had to use gay porn on his iPod to get his lover into the mood, by which time the man had fallen asleep. One of the drag queens made a really graphic joke about hanging a shit so big it wouldn’t flush down the toilet. I didn’t need a translator for that one. Let’s just say it was all in the miming.
When it was all over, Bourebonne-san came up to me, sweating through his make-up.
‘People love you guys!’ I said.
‘Yes, drag queens are getting very popular!’ he said, dabbing at his face.
The audiences left the Loft grinning stupidly, Campy DVDs in their bags. Bourebonne-san said I was right: a chunk of the audience tonight were straight. Most were gay or lesbian, but about a third were heterosexuals who loved seeing drag queens, camp men and giggly transsexual women on their televisions and stages. Still, I felt there was an obvious missing element.
‘What about lesbians?’ I asked.
Bourebonne-san nodded, as though he’d given this some thought.
‘Oh, being lesbian is harder than gay,’ he said. ‘For gays, it’s much easier to be seen as funny. Boys getting dressed as women? That’s already entertaining. For ladies, it’s a different story.’
Ayaka Ichinose responded to my interview request pretty quickly. Perhaps she needed any publicity she could get. If Ayaka had a business card, it would have said something like ‘model/actress/writer’ or simply ‘Japan’s first celesbian’. Ayaka was blessed with the kind of looks Japanese women would kill for: soft, long hair and flawless skin, like a teenage boy’s fantasy avatar for a video game. Though she had recently turned thirty, she still looked like a high-school student.
Ayaka had started out as something called a ‘gravure model’, which wasn’t exactly nude modelling, but posing in just enough clothes to give the impression you were naked. She was also smart enough to know that modelling got you only so far in Japan. To be successful, you had to diversify. Lately, Ayaka had been branching out into writing a thirteen-episode manga series called Real Bian, lesbian comics based on her own experiences. She had also produced and starred in SekuMai, a gravure modelling DVD that combined footage of her in skimpy, barely-there gear with a discussion of issues pertinent to lesbians in Japan. In between sequences of Ayaka posing in her underwear, she talked about what it was like to live as a lesbian, recounted the history of the Ni-Chome district and interviewed other queer women. Her work was sexy and educational. Sexucational.
I met Ayaka in a ground-level café in Ni-Chome that was around the corner from the DVD porno shop of horrors. Though I had seen photos in which Ayaka was topless and bent over in a G-string, on this occasion she was dressed conservatively in a beige zip-up dress. Accompanying Ayaka was her manager, Nakazawa-san, whose weathered face made him look like a Japanese Tommy Lee Jones.
‘The majority of lesbians in Japan don’t come out,’ Ayaka explained. ‘So the interviews in my DVD were trying to address those issues. What are lesbians really like? What are they interested in? What do they do in their spare time? What kind of fashion are they into?’ They may as well have been fantastic and mythological creatures, such as hydras or mermaids: mysterious and vaguely heard about, but rarely seen in everyday life.
‘I get the sense that seeing gay men, drag queens and transsexual women is really common here,’ I said. ‘But not lesbians.’
‘Yeah-yeah-yeah,’ Ayaka said. She got this question a lot. ‘It’s true: you don’t really hear about lesbians in Japan, mainly because it’s still a man’s world. In the gay scene here, the majority of the venues – the saunas, the bars – are targeted at men. A lot of females aren’t as interested in that. Or they try to hide it. When I was young, I knew I had feelings for girls, but didn’t actually know I was even a “lesbian”. There was no point in coming out, because I didn’t even know I was one.’ No one spoke about lesbians, so Ayaka hadn’t realised that such a thing existed.
In her twenties, Ayaka worked part-time at a mixed-sex bar in Shinjuku Ni-Chome. Very quickly, her looks attracted the attention of local glamour photographers. Modelling scouts approached her and she picked up gravure modelling easily, as well as minor acting jobs and TV appearances. About two years into her career, her prospects were looking good. Then she decided to come out as a lesbian. It wasn’t an easy decision.
‘There had been no lesbians that had come out in this industry,’ she said. ‘So it was like, “Oh my god, should we be doing this?”’
Part of the probem, Ayaka said, was that a lot of Japanese people didn’t actually understand what a lesbian was. Even her manager hadn’t suspected.
Nakazawa-san laughed now, thinking about it. ‘Oh, I was shocked,’ he said. ‘She was the first lesbian I had ever met.’
They knew her coming out was a risk, but neither had any clear idea what the consequences could be. There weren’t many precedents. In the 1970s, there had been a hugely popular pop-folk singer named Naomi Sagara. Her chaste and memorable songs were family-friendly hits across the country. Then a woman claiming to be Sagara’s scorned lover went public with the news that they had been a couple, which caused a minor scandal. The news was talked about in hushed tones, but it was enough to cut short Sagara’s career. She had more or less disappeared from the music circuit.
‘But that was thirty years ago,’ Ayaka said. ‘And thirty years ago, they didn’t really have the kind of gay vocabulary that exists now, like “LGBT”. I mean, there weren’t even many men who were gay back then.’
Ayaka said she hadn’t wanted to make coming out a massive drama. In any case, she wasn’t yet a household name. In the end, she took a low-key approach. ‘It wasn’t a big deal. People would ask whether I had a boyfriend and I’d just say, “No, I have a girlfriend.”’
Where it was a big deal was in Japan’s close-knit lesbian scene. Even now, she stood relatively alone. When we tried to list other women in Japan in the public eye who were openly gay – not just entertainers, but anyone: athletes, artists, news anchors, musicians, actors, directors – the only person either of us could think of was Kanako Otsuji, a now-retired politician who had been a member of the 110-member Osaka assembly.
In a sense, there was also the manga artist Takeuchi Sachiko, whose work focused on lesbian romances. Sachiko was open in her professional life but closeted to the extent that not even her parents – with whom she still lived – knew the nature of her work. Rather than tell her parents about her lesbian romance manga, Sachiko told them she wrote pornographic manga instead, because writing explicit comic book smut was apparently more acceptable than loving the ladies. When Sachiko appeared on television to talk about sexual minorities, she came on stage with a paper mask attached to her face.
‘Do you ever feel a burden of responsibility, because you’re the only lesbian out?’ I asked Ayaka. ‘You know, the burden to represent all lesbians? To be a good role model?’
‘So des ne,’ she said, agreeing. She paused, then added brightly, ‘But because I’m new and the only woman who has come out, it’s easy in another way. People don’t really have any expectations.’
I’d originally read about Ayaka Ichinose on a website called Tokyo Wrestling, which was pretty much Japan’s only source of queer news for women. Because Tokyo Wrestling’s coverage of Ayaka had gained her a cult following, Ayaka returned the favour and posed in skimpy Tokyo Wrestling–branded gear on her DVD. Even though I wasn’t exactly Tokyo Wrestling’s target demographic, I’d become a fan. It was both serious and playful, with a sexy, muscular, 1980s neon-maritime aesthetic that spoke to me.
I contacted Tokyo Wrestling’s founder, Yuki Keiser, the daughter of a Swiss father and a Japanese mother, who looked like a Eurasian version of the British actress Carey Mulligan. Yuki was in her thirties, with fingernails painted baby blue and a bold Susan Sontag streak of white in her short brown hair. Yuki told me she understood where Ayaka was coming from, but added that Japanese people, or at least horny Japanese men, did have expectations of lesbians.
‘Lesbians are associated with porn,’ Yuki said simply. ‘You just don’t see any lesbians on normal TV, though. We have no faces. We don’t have a lesbian media. We have lesbian blogs, but that’s not the same. When Ayaka Ichinose came out last year, that was news among Japanese lesbians, but I wouldn’t say everybody knows her. If I switched on the TV, I’m not going to see her. You can’t say there’s a lesbian icon or role model on TV now. If you go into the streets and ask, “Do you know any lesbians?” they would say no.’
All this made being openly gay hard for Japanese women, even for someone like Yuki. Although she was the editor and public face of Tokyo Wrestling, she wasn’t always open about her sexuality either. Once, when she had been interviewed on television about the website, she had used her real name and allowed her face to be shown. Then, at her daytime workplace, a colleague said they had seen Yuki on television and asked about the interview. Yuki became evasive. You could never anticipate other people’s attitudes and Yuki didn’t want to broadcast her sexuality at work. Recently, she had been dining with her colleagues and a Japanese client, when people started asking Yuki whether she had a boyfriend or was married.
‘I’m not interested in marriage,’ she’d said, honestly. And that was where she left the conversation.
This was probably something familiar to most gays and lesbians: everyone had ways to mislead people without it descending into outright lies. ‘No, I don’t have a wife (because I have a boyfriend).’ ‘I’m not interested in marriage (because marrying my girlfriend isn’t possible).’ Yuki never referred to her girlfriend as ‘he’ or ‘him’ at work, but she never denied her existence either. She was vocal and visible within the queer scene, but made her queerness invisible in the workplace. I got the sense that Yuki was someone who refused to turn her sexuality into a show for spectators.
Eventually, some celebrities’ managers started returning our calls. This was excellent, except that I had started to develop a wheezing cough, which was getting more intense as the nights wore on, and wouldn’t help me during my interviews. Locking these interviews in was important, but obtaining sufficient time was crucial: relying on a translator meant interviews usually took twice – sometimes three times – as long as speaking to someone in the same language.
One gay celebrity who agreed to an interview was Maeda Ken. Everyone I’d talked to – Yuki Keiser, Bourebonne-san, Taq Otsuka, Ayaka Ichinose – said Ken was different to other gei tarento. Sure, like all the others, Ken had started out as a TV drag queen, so flamingly camp he may as well have been on fire, lapping up the applause and hoots on set before retreating backstage to take off his make-up and become anonymous again. But recently, he had also become the only gay man on Japanese television who appeared as … well, himself. No wigs. No schtick. No fake tits. Yuki Keiser told me Ken was more or less the only openly gay man on Japanese television who wasn’t constantly presenting himself as onee.
Initially, Maeda Ken was difficult to track down. He was famous to the extent that most Japanese people knew his name, partly because he worked like a dog. As well as being an actor – about to star in a suspense telemovie called The Seven Suspects – Ken had written a book, performed as a stand-up comic and directed films, with his next project being an adaptation of his short-story collection, due for release in the spring.
Eventually, I was told to meet Ken after hours in the building of his management agency. His staff led me and my translator into a conference room, where Ken was waiting for us like a company chairman across a large wide table. He had the wide, friendly face of a kid plonked on an adult’s body. Despite being almost forty years old, he dressed like a teenager. Or maybe it was more that he dressed like the idea of a teenager, wearing a baseball cap turned on an angle, a bright-red baseball jacket and a t-shirt screenprinted with a teddy bear playing an electric guitar. To begin with, he wasn’t in the mood to talk.
‘Thanks for making the time. I know you’re in very high demand at the moment …’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘What’s a typical week for you right now?’
‘There’s no certain schedule to what I do.’
‘Are you working on anything right now?’
‘I’m going to do dramas.’
‘What sort of drama?’
‘TV drama.’
I figured it had been a long day, or maybe he was wary of me probing where I shouldn’t. Ken warmed up when we started talking about his career history, the early days, where he scored his first breaks on TV by excelling at monomane – the type of hammy, queeny celebrity impersonations everyone loved so much in Japan – doing brutally hilarious impersonations of J-pop singer Aya Matsura, made even funnier by the fact Ken had a super-masculine face: big cheeks, strong eyebrows and a five o’clock shadow, like a giant otter in women’s clothes.
Ken had come out to his family and friends long ago, well before he achieved national fame, but it took him a long time to come out publicly. He didn’t want to make a big deal of it. After he released a book, during his promotional tour someone had asked if he was gay, like one of his book’s characters. Ken simply said yes and people nodded politely. He hadn’t chased publicity, but soon there was a buzz in the press about it. Emails and letters from fans poured in saying things like, ‘Through listening to you, reading your book and hearing you on the news, you’ve given me the courage and made me more brave to come out.’
‘That was a big boost,’ Ken said. ‘It made me really happy to know I had that impact. The best thing about coming out is helping other people – particularly in rural areas of Japan – to get the confidence and the courage to come out.’
In terms of Ken’s job prospects, nothing had changed too much. The only thing it had affected was his private life. Once he had come out publicly, he found it harder to pick up boyfriends.
‘Why was that?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘A lot of people in Japan aren’t open and gays don’t come out, which actually makes it easier for them to pick up. But because I’ve already come out, I’ve written a book, I’m on TV …’
‘Because being gay in Japan is about discretion, right?’
‘Exactly.’
As his career flourished, Ken branched out into projects where he didn’t have to be flamboyant or camp, at least not all the time. Still, he had fun with being known as gay. Recently, he had starred in Yurusugi Kogi, a quasi-mockumentary that followed him as he dated men in an effort to find love. One of Ken’s dates was at an aquarium, another was getting Japanese waffles, another was hanging out in an onsen sauna. The show was aimed at families, so it was played for laughs. Audiences knew Ken was gay, and that the men he was ‘dating’ were straight male comedians playing a character. That struck me as sad, somehow.
‘How do you think people would have responded if it wasn’t played for laughs?’ I said. ‘Like, if it had been a straightforward documentary about a man looking for same-sex love?’
Ken raised his eyebrows. ‘It’s difficult to imagine,’ he said. ‘If we were to have done it for real?’ He trailed off, thinking. ‘People would have been a lot more shocked.’
As much as Ken presented himself as an ordinary guy, he had no problem with acting camp on screen. Even now, he was asked to do TV appearances where producers would tell him to be more flamboyant and girly. It was what audiences wanted from their gay men and Ken was more than happy to amp up the camp. (‘If they want me to play camp, I can do it,’ he said. ‘I am an actor.’)
Still, Ken wanted to expand Japan’s idea of what a gay man could be. In 2009, he appeared on the TV program Haato O Tsunago (‘Heart to Heart’) on Japan’s national public broadcaster NHK to talk frankly about life as a gay man. Haato O Tsunago had first focused on what it was like to come out as an LGBT person in 2007.
Several nights later, I met the program’s founding producer, an efficient-looking man who introduced himself to me as Mr Miyata. Originally, Miyata-san said, the idea of the show was to get people to talk about any issue Japanese people felt they couldn’t discuss in everyday life. Haato O Tsunago featured three hosts and a large panel of eight guests, who sat in an Alpine-themed set of mountains and pine trees, everyone inexplicably surrounded by replica woodland creatures, plus a random camel. The three hosts of the special LGBT episode – the pop musician Sonim, the writer and actor Ira Ishida and the news anchor Yoko Sakurai – all had different levels of knowledge and friendships with LGBT people beforehand, which is exactly what Miyata-san wanted.
‘They were almost representatives of what viewers at home would be like,’ he said.
After filming, the female hosts Sonim and Sakurai compared notes. Both were struck by the fact that while they had gay male friends, neither of them had met a single lesbian until the show’s filming. Miyata-san felt he was onto something, put the episodes to air and watched as viewer feedback rolled in.
‘Viewers said a lot of things, but mostly they said they felt alone,’ he said. ‘Not all of them, but most of them. Some of them are very happy people. They had come out to their families already, had good, accepting parents and friends. But especially in regional, rural areas, they felt terribly isolated. Some of them were trapped in families that didn’t accept their situation at all. They didn’t have anyone to talk to and felt extremely alone, like no one was like them. Some people wrote in, talking about how much they disgusted themselves, that they could barely admit it to themselves that they were gay.’
It wasn’t common for Haato O Tsunago to touch on the same topic again soon afterwards, but Miyata-san knew immediately they had to do another show on LGBT issues. It was the kind of viewer response you couldn’t ignore.
Something else unexpected started to happen. Young people from Tokyo and beyond began to make treks to sit in the NHK studio audience on the days of filming. Some were members of queer campus groups from nearby universities, but a lot were young people who came by themselves. Some even allowed themselves to be interviewed on camera, though they asked to have their faces blurred and their voices altered, in case their parents or bosses recognised them. In time, Haato O Tsunago became synonymous with LGBT issues. One of the country’s most stuffy and conservative TV stations found itself a driving force in disseminating information about queer sexuality. Slowly, things were starting to change.
Let’s put it crudely. If there was a hierarchy of queer visibility in Japan, lesbians would be at the bottom, nowhere to be seen. Very camp gay men and drag queens were everywhere. But ruling over everyone, with her recently won beauty pageant sceptre in her hand, was someone entirely different: the undisputed reigning queen of Japanese television and pop music, post-op transsexual woman, bubblegum princess … ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Haruna Ai!
I had met Haruni Ai briefly while trailing the Miss Tiffany’s pageant in Thailand. In Japan, I tried getting back in touch with her, only to discover that she was a huge star, like, absolutely-impossible-to-interview huge. Besides her weekly TV appearances across several stations, she also had a major recording deal and was the CEO of a chain of successful restaurants, popular with artists, media types and young cigarette-smoking hipsters.
Among queer people in Japan, opinions were split on Haruna Ai. Most loved the fact that one of the most famous TV personalities in Japan was a transsexual woman. In a country that had only legalised sex-change procedures in the past decade, her rise to become an adored mainstream darling was startling. Others had reservations.
‘With people like Haruna Ai,’ Maeda Ken told me, ‘the audience generally likes them because they’re easy to understand. They’re soft and fun, friendly and happy.’ I got the sense his feelings toward her were ambivalent at best. Yuki Keiser didn’t mind Haruna Ai, but felt tarento like her weren’t challenging anyone’s perception of sex or gender roles. If anything, she reinforced them.
‘Gender binary pressure is very strong in Japan,’ Yuki said. ‘If you want to generalise, women in Japan have to act in certain ways. Transsexuals are more accepted, because they fit into those ideas. Haruna Ai is very feminine and wants to please men.’
For instance, Yuki told me about one TV segment where Haruna Ai told the audience that she never put her right earring in with her right hand, or her left earring with her left. Her tip: it was more elegant and appealing to men to ensure your arms crossed over at all times: right hand inserting the left earring; left hand inserting the right. ‘She puts them in crossways because it’s cuter for men,’ Yuki said, shaking her head slightly.
For weeks, I emailed Haruna Ai’s management trying to lock in an interview, but my butchered quasi-Japanese emails got me nowhere. ‘Please respond to this email with a simple question mark (?) if you cannot read English,’ I wrote at the bottom of emails in pre-translated Japanese. ‘I will arrange a Japanese translation of the email as soon as possible.’
Then someone told me to get in touch with a man called F. Kasai. I sent Kasai-san a long and respectful interview request in English, and his reply came back. It was short and blunt, haiku-like in its succinct beauty:
i say your order for HARUNA AI office
but she is very very busy TV star
she can not return soon
My heart sank. I sent more emails to Kasai-san and left messages on his phone. I pursued Haruna Ai’s TV station reps, producers and Japanese record label. My translators made phone calls on my behalf. Everything I did encountered dead ends.
Walking through Tokyo’s autumn-chilled streets, Haruna Ais hovered around me, peering out from magazines on new-stands and CDs in record shops. I was getting sick and coughed violently into my fist, feeling stupid for having even tried contacting her. Her face was everywhere, like a Sanrio cartoon character in human form. Friends and people I met in Tokyo – journalists, translators, expatriates and exchange students – all squealed when they found out I was trying to track her down, before skeptically wishing me good luck. Then one day, out of nowhere, Kasai-san yielded and gave me a phone number.
ai chans manager say your interview ok
maybe he call you
his name is MR KAZAMA
please talk with him
Several phone calls later, and we were in. The only problem was, my cough was getting worse. A couple of weeks later, a doctor would diagnose me with whooping cough.
Usually I had only one translator with me, but both my translators – Aya and Simon – insisted on coming together. It was Haruna Ai, they said, and nothing else mattered. That we’d scored the interview at all was some sort of miracle. The three of us headed to the TBS network headquarters in freezing conditions with cold rain spitting on us, my hacking cough mimicking the sound of a cat being kicked. On arrival, a female assistant came out to the foyer and greeted us with a lot of bowing, before leading us to level 4F where the magic happened. Simon, Aya and I waited in a small cafeteria-like space, from which two doors led to different TV studios.
‘Look!’ Aya said, squealing and pointing. ‘That’s her!’
The monitor showed what was being filmed in the left-hand TV studio. A pug-faced man with a giant white meringue of hair was running through a news story about a junior baseball player wanting to make the big time. The baseball player was crying and so were his family members. As the footage ran, the small box in the screen’s corner showed Haruna Ai expressing a combination of Nodding Concern and Heartfelt Sympathy. She was nailing all the facial expressions. Tonight, she was wearing a white dapple-patterned dress with Disney princess puffy sleeves and a big red bow in her hair. I got excited and started coughing again.
‘She’s only a few metres away!’ I said.
‘Oh my god, this is so exciting,’ Simon said.
Recording of the show wrapped up and the audience filed out. For a moment, Haruna Ai sailed past us towards her dressing room. Simon and Aya both made bug eyes at me and we all mimed silent screaming.
‘She will be with you in a moment,’ her assistant told us.
Then we heard a troubling, high-pitched sound, a squeal that sounded distressing and animal-like. We realised it was coming from two girls. Just being in Haruna Ai’s orbit made people in Japan emit this sound. The girls were in their twenties, dressed in monochromatic, wildly patterned and weirdly tailored Harajuku outfits, bouncing from foot to foot and bowing at Haruna Ai almost spastically. She paused, laughed, grabbed their hands and squealed along with them, as if she was delighted to meet them. One of the girls started crying. With anyone else I would be rolling my eyes, but the excitement was contagious.
Later, Haruna Ai came out of her dressing room wearing loose pyjama bottoms and a bright orange hoodie that said ‘Mississippi Ridgeland Football Club’. With glittery moisturiser still on her face, she grabbed our hands to greet us one by one, offering us chilled green tea and water. As Simon made the introductions, Haruna Ai said she remembered me from Miss Tiffany’s. I stood there grinning like an idiot, coughing into my elbow. Concerned, Haruna Ai demanded cold tea for me.
Haruna Ai’s voice was feminine – ultra-girly, even – but impossible to place. It was high-pitched with a slight gravelly quality, as though she was a twelve-year-old girl with a smoking problem. Unexpectedly, it made for a great broadcast voice.
As one of the only transsexual women on Japanese television, she was in great demand. But her fame was encumbered with the pressure that came with anything one-of-a-kind, a burden of responsibility to ensure she was a good role model.
‘It’s really hard,’ she said. ‘There aren’t that many people on TV like myself who have changed from a man to woman, so it’s difficult. It’s very hard for people in Japan to relate to me and to understand what I’ve been through. Japan’s very behind in this area. Japanese people can’t seem to understand why you’d want to change your sex. So in order to educate people – but in a fun way! – I do a lot of comedy and talk shows to help Japanese people understand. Nowadays, most people look at me as a person, instead of being a Person Who’s Been Through a Sex Change, which is good.’
That week alone, she had done product promotions in Tokyo and Hokkaido, had her regular appearances on TBS and NTV, had worked on a music video and released her second major CD single, ‘Crazy Love’, a song that – like most J-pop – was maddeningly stupid and infuriatingly catchy. Her voice was autotuned and low in the mix and the video was sexy without being sexual. It showed Haruna Ai, with four back-up dancers, first in a gown made of silver with head jewels, then a cheerleading outfit, then a pants-and-hat tomboy outfit, then finally a pink cocktail outfit made of feathers. It had no narrative and made no sense. The edits were annoying and epileptic, and the song immediately bored into my brain like some terrible parasite:
Crazy crazy for you
Need you baby
Baby baby
It’s you
Sweet lord, the song was hideous. Even so, no one could hold this against Haruna Ai.
Recently, she had raced a charity marathon after the public nominated her as the person they most wanted to see run.
‘The marathon was thirty-five kilometres, they could only choose one person, and I was selected to do it!’ Haruna Ai said, squealing. ‘In high school, I tried not to exercise a lot, so this was a big challenge for me.’ By the end of the race, Haruna Ai’s make-up had completely melted off and it looked as though someone had taken a blowtorch to her face. Yet for a woman whose fame rested mostly on her appearance, she didn’t seem that bothered – sweating and ghoulish, she was still giggling and pumping her fists in the air. And nor did other people seem to care.
After an hour, Haruna Ai apologised for having to leave and handed us complimentary copies of ‘Crazy Love’ before posing for photos, then made some phone calls. Dinner would be waiting for us at one of her restaurants, she said. After a series of giggling bows and hand-clutching, she disappeared out of the studio, into her private life, and I knew I’d never see her again, except on television.
It was only later that I’d listen to our interview and realise that it had gone awfully. When we weren’t giggling like idiots, I spent most of the time apparently trying to hack up my lung. We didn’t talk about anything important whatsoever. Haruna Ai skimmed over her love life and ducked any questions that were overtly political. But I also realised that I didn’t care. Haruna Ai wasn’t about serious conversation. She was about fun.
‘Educate people,’ she had exclaimed, ‘but in a fun way!’ She came off as sweet and lightheaded, but perhaps that was her gift: you never forgot she was transsexual, but by being so captivating, so lovable, so friendly, her sexual identity ceased being her sole gimmick. That, in and of itself, was kind of genius.
In Japan, there is one TV set for every 1.2 people, making it one of the most dense television-owning populations in the world. Despite the country being at the forefront of technological wizardry and craft, television remains by far the most influential and popular medium. Even on subways and trains, people watch vodcasts of their favourite shows on phones and MP3 players, while some remain resolutely old-school and watch live TV on analogue portables the size of small bricks, antennae stretched and hovering over fellow train passengers like giant praying mantises.
For me, bedridden with whooping cough, it was a beautiful thing to know that at any moment of the day, I could flick through the channels and discover some of the most flamboyantly mincing personalities this fine country had to offer. After the morning news, there was my friend Bourebonne-san, providing his snappy, tongue-in-cheek commentary about the day’s events. Prime time took us to Haruna Ai, dancing and chatting and giggling away. On the nights when I was coughing so hard I thought I’d vomit, I’d while away my insomnia by watching the delightfully hammy sprite KABA.Chan, who told me about the best handbags, vacuum cleaners, portable GPS devices and slimming tights Japan’s premier home-shopping program had to offer. From Japan’s helmet-haired transgender make-up artist Ikko to gay aerobics instructor Chris Matsumura (think Japan’s answer to Richard Simmons), no one ever needed to have a boring straight moment with Japanese television: it was just one big, exploding rainbow poof of colour!
I didn’t really have a problem with this. For a start, it was stupidly entertaining, and a lot of gay men out there just were that hyper-camp. Still, I worried about the absence of anything else. No lesbians, no transsexual men and no gay men out of drag. No LGBT people taken seriously. All the men were wacky, but never sexual. What happened to people’s headspace when they saw gay men only as camp drag queens on TV, or read about them only as aliens and wizards in comic books? And what impact did this have on young queer Japanese teenagers? So much of queerness in Japan seemed to be a performance for straight people. When the televisions were finally turned off, most straight people went about their business assuming that they didn’t know any queer people themselves. For the country with the most colourful television in the world, Japan felt like it was only just coming out of the black-and-white era.