- Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age
Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age is an important accomplishment in the field of Japan studies. It is the first full-length, comprehensive study of gay men (and to a lesser extent lesbians and and transgendered [End Page 243] people) in contemporary Japan. Building on his first book, Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan (2001), which was an empirically grounded study of the social practices and media representation of Japanese urban gay males, McLelland aims to explore a broad range of queer desires in Japan in the modern era as these have intersected with rapidly evolving social and medical understandings of "normal" sexuality, gender, and personhood, especially as expressed in popular media. As McLelland states in the introduction, "My focus is on the changing nature of narratives of nonheterosexual 'queer' or 'perverse' desires (hentai seiyoku) that have been voiced in a variety of media in Japan since the early 1930s and on relating these to wider social attitudes and events that enabled such stories to be told" (p. 8).
This focus allows McLelland to avoid the twin pitfalls that beset much scholarship on queer communities in the non-West: first, assuming that the trinity of sexual identities established in the modern West (heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual) can be unproblematically applied to Japan, and, second, assuming that Japan is inevitably marching from a premodern state of benighted sexual repression into a Westernized modern mode of gay "liberation from the closet." In contrast, McLelland scrupulously relies on Japanese terminology to keep—as much as this is possible—Japanese categories of (homo)sexuality and identity distinct. This is a painstaking task, and a complicated one, because there is no simple binary of Japanese and foreign, but rather countless Western terms (gei, gei bōi, homo, sodomia, resubian, etc.) that have come to take on Japanese meanings that veer away from their original Western meanings, although not completely. The achievement of this book is that these terms and their Japanese understandings are held in tension in their mobility and fluidity—never permitted to rest as "timeless indigenous tradition" on the one hand or "Western imposition" on the other.
Chapter one, "Heteronormativity on the Road to War," is a genealogical inquiry into the emergence of "homosexuality" as a pathologized form of perverse sexuality increasingly viewed as antithetical to the militarizing state's pro-natalist agenda. McLelland sheds new light on this period by exploring Tokyo's vibrant "perverse culture" marked by gender ambivalence and sexual experimentation (among women as well as men), as well as the open culture of homoerotic play and male-male sexuality (drawing on earlier hierarchical and role-based nanshoku traditions) in boys' schools and military academies. He notes that as intensifying state surveillance of sexuality around World War II became more insistently heteronormative and pro-natalist, actual social practices became ever more homosocial, with several autobiographical accounts from wartime depicting homosexual encounters among soldiers.
Chapter two, "Japan's Postwar Perverse Culture," demonstrates that in the immediate postwar period Japan's effervescent and uninhibited popular media were far less repressive about homosexuality than the American media, [End Page 244] which dealt with homosexuality exclusively as a pathology to be cured. McLelland shows that perverse press representations focused on the newly emerging category of gei bōi—effeminate young male hosts and entertainers who took the passive role in sex with men who were not necessarily gay-identified. The chapter also addresses the perverse press fascination with women's "lesbos love" (resubosu ai) stories, almost always written by male authors. McLelland observes that the substantial discussions of female same-sex love, and the existence of letters from women readers, suggest the possibility that women were also readers of this press and in some cases engaging in same-sex desires or acts.
Chapter three, "Gay Boys, Blue Boys and Brother Girls," focuses further on the gei bōi identity and, in doing so, reveals the earlier adoption of...