Contact Moments: The Politics of Intercultural Desire in Japanese Male-Queer Cultures by Katsuhiko Suganuma (review)

This work, by a gay male Japanese scholar who spent some years studying in the United States, asks how binaries (us/them, West/non-West, man/woman, heterosexual/ homosexual, etc.) have helped to shape what the author calls “Japanese male-queer culture” in the postwar era. He argues that these can be “signs of fixidity” but also signs of “mobility and alteration” (p. 1). The book, Suganuma explains, “investigates and focuses on an epistemological inquiry into how cross-cultural contact inflects the ways of representating the contours of Japan’s queer culture” in the postwar period (p. 10).

Suganuma argues that Japan’s male-queer culture has been largely shaped by the relationship (“politics”) between Japan and “the West,” particularly the United States. This thesis should not be controversial: in the postwar period, the experience of defeat, occupation, and exposure to U.S. culture to an unprecedented degree helped structure virtually every aspect of Japanese society and culture, including sexualities. But Suganuma shows how the interactions comprise a complex, ongoing dialectic. He shows how “in the process of identity formation, the dichotomous paradigms” (such as the masculine West/feminine Japan paradigm) “underwent mutation, and at times were reconfigured and rearticulated” (p. 178).

Suganuma examines how Japanese men attracted to other men responded to occupation (“colonization”) and its aftermath, by both accepting and challenging the foreigners’ representation of the U.S.-Japan relationship in gendered terms and by engaging U.S. postwar sexology (Alfred Kinsey) and the U.S.-based gay liberation movement. He also revisits U.S. gay scholar John Treat’s account of his experiences in Japan in the late 1980s to explore how the intercultural connection worked both ways.¹ He defends Treat from critics’ charges of Orientalism by suggesting that he is in fact “subverting Orientalism from within its own norms” (p. 106). His use of binaries is constructive. In his “intentional deployment of Orientalist, racist and sexist narratives,” Treat is “faithful to his erotic self” (p. 126).

The author examines the emergence by the 1990s of different “masks” of “queer male selves,” including those who embraced “indigenous terminologies for homosexuals, such as okama,” and those who, inspired by the global gay liberation movement, self-identified as gei (gay). Finally, he looks at cyberspace and the emergence of male-queer identity shaped by globalization that neither perpetuates the binaries operating in the immediate postwar era nor insists upon Japanese queer uniqueness but promotes a “new topographical framework” (p. 188).

Suganuma focuses on what he terms “contact moments” which are “certain historical moment[s] … that [allow] us to imagine the discursive conditions and effects enabled by cross-fertilization” (p. 18). (This is one of several “terms and notions” the author has “coined and developed” in “an attempt to articulate the complexity of the subject matter” he addresses [p. 18]). He draws on Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of “contact zone” (although the latter involves “the space of imperial encounters” rather than temporal “moments” in history).²

While the work offers no precise chronology of these “moments,” they apparently begin with the (rather protracted) moment of the Allied occupation from 1945 to 1952, during which the binary of masculine/bigger/West versus feminine/smaller/Japan prevailed in “popular discourse” (p. 56). They include the advent of hentai (perverse) magazines in the 1950s, the distant impact of Stonewall (1969) and the appearance of Barazoku (Rose tribe) magazine and a specifically homoerotic press in 1971, the outbreak of the global AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, the appearance of gay activism in the form of JILGA (Japanese International Lesbian and Gay Association) and OCCUR (also known as the Japanese Association for the Lesbian and Gay Movement) in the 1980s, the surge of Western scholarly engagement with Japanese homosexuality in the 1990s, and the emergence of the Internet as a shaper/facilitator of sexual...