Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [38]
I began to learn about homosexuality in Japan in my late twenties. I read about a tradition of male-male sexuality that extended through the mid-nineteenth century. That tradition was similar to the Greek one—older men inducted younger ones into manhood, sexually and otherwise, while also having sexual relationships with women. In his widely sold 1687 book, The Great Mirror of Male Love, Ihara Saikaku addresses a bisexual male reader in asking a series of questions beginning, “Which is to be preferred?”—“Having lightning strike the room where you are enjoying a boy actor you bought, or being handed a razor by a courtesan you hardly know who asks you to die with her?”
This tradition of male-male sexuality withered when Japan’s self-imposed isolation from the world ended in 1868. Saddled with the infamous “unequal treaties” that subordinated it to Western nations, Japan realized it would have to modernize to be treated as a peer. Modernization included the adoption of the Meiji Constitution, the embrace of industrialization, and the repudiation of “barbaric” cultural practices such as homosexuality. Japanese history was rewritten to cast homosexuality as an atavistic practice of the hinterlands. The purge has been effective. Although I spent every summer but one from birth through college graduation in Japan, I never met an openly gay Japanese, nor did I even hear one mentioned.
I am told gay rights is now budding in Japan. The first gay pride march occurred in 1994. In 1997, a Tokyo appellate court ruled in favor of a gay rights group on a freedom of association claim. The template is again a Western one—rather than citing native traditions of same-sex sexuality, progay courts and commentators have looked to the gay rights movement in America. Like a dutiful student who concurs with his teacher even when the teacher contradicts himself over time, Japan first agreed with the West that homosexuality was an abomination, and now is beginning to agree it is a benign variation.
So far as I can tell, the pace of change has been glacial. Or perhaps it is I who am frozen. To this day, the words “I am gay” feel unspeakable in Japanese. Drawing on that double consciousness in myself, I can glimpse homosexuality through my parents’ eyes. For many years, this vantage chilled all speech.
So here we are again, sitting in perhaps the same positions as when I came out.
“We accept that you are gay,” my mother says in Japanese. “But we don’t understand why you have to be a jandaaku.”
“A what?” I ask in English. I can tell the word is a borrowed one, but do not know from which language. Japanese takes from all tongues—arubaito, for part-time work, from the German; pan, for bread, from the Portuguese.
“The banner carrier.”
“The who?” Our cross-talk is usually a form of pleasure between us.
“The woman who heard voices.”
“A Joan of Arc?”
“Yes.” From the French. “Millions of gay people live their lives without making it their cause. Why must you make it yours?”
I have wrestled with this question for years. In my self-lacerating moods, I think my activism is a form of protesting too much, a defense against my own self-loathing. Or an Oedipal rant, an attempt to speak more and more loudly until I am heard. Or an adolescent messianic impulse to have a cause. None of these answers feels correct. Yet the answer I want to give—that I have always had a commitment to social justice—also seems wrong. Growing up, I was more interested in aesthetics than in politics. Even when I went to law school, I did so to protect myself, not others.
I was drawn to my work by doing what came naturally. My work seemed the consequence of being who I was, where I