GLR May-June 2025

ESSAY When ‘Homosexuality’ Came to Japan P ATRICK C ARLAND -E CHAVARRIA

I N 1868, THE SAME YEAR that the word “homosexual” entered the European lexicon, Japan underwent a revo lution that swept away the centuries-long rule of sh ō gun warlords and saw the emergence of a modern govern ment led by a newly empowered emperor. This shift was sparked by external pressures from Western nations en croaching on East Asia as well as internal dissatisfaction with the ruling government and Tokugawa clan. Organizing around the figure of the emperor, who had until then maintained only sym bolic authority, the restorationists overthrew the sh ō gun govern ment and declared a new era of enlightened imperial rule. They named the new era the Meiji Period (1868–1912), choosing Sino Japanese characters meaning “enlightened rule,” and declared that modernization and Westernization in the name of “civiliza tional enlightenment” (bunmei kaika ) would be the overriding goal of the new regime. This drive toward Western ideals of modernity and progress would result in the erasure of almost a millennium of queer art and literature and the imposition of a het eronormative model of sexuality. Before delving further into the consequences of 1868, let’s take a look at the history of sexuality in Japan before that fate ful year. After a period of prolonged civil war, Japan was polit ically reunited in the first few decades of the 1600s under the leadership of the samurai leader Tokugawa Ieyasu. The subse quent two-and-a-half centuries of rule by the Tokugawa clan saw Japan cut off from virtually all foreign contact and the develop ment of an elaborate, hierarchical society with one of the high est rates of urbanization in the world by the 1700s. Named after the newly designated capital of Edo (modern-day Tokyo), the Edo Period (1600–1868) in Japan was characterized by a strict social hierarchy with samurai at the top and in charge of politi cal affairs. For centuries, samurai had carried on a tradition of age-structured relationships between younger and older samurai knownas sh ū d ō (the way of youths). While the word homosex ual didn’t exist, a wide variety of terms described same-sex re lationships between men, the most prominent being nanshoku , a word formed from a pair of Sino-Japanese characters meaning “male eroticism.” Nanshoku , according to one writer of the pe riod, was nothing less than the “flower” of the samurai class. Not to be outdone, Buddhist temples also had a long tradition of relationships between monks and acolytes, dating all the way back to the Heian Period (774–1185). Edo Japan was a patriarchal society that placed relatively few restrictions on male sexual pleasure. In the rapidly growing urban centers of the 1600s and 1700s, sexuality was enormously profitable. Rising literacy rates and improvements in printing Patrick Carland-Echavarria, a PhD candidate in the Dept. of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the Univ. of Pennsylvania, has been published in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus.

technology fueled the growth of commercial markets for erotic woodblock prints and books among urban commoners. Glam orized depictions of the so-called “floating world” ( ukiyo-e ) of urban red-light districts and amorous trysts between merchants and prostitutes were mainstays of popular theater, art, and liter ature. The writer Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) was one of the best-known writers of amorous ukiyo-z ō shi , tales of the floating world depicting a range of erotic scenes both gay and straight. Representative works include such titles as Tales of an Amorous Woman (1686), Five Women Who Loved Love (1685), and the highly popular The Great Mirror of Male Love (1687). Such works were frequently accompanied by lavish illus trations by leading artists. In contrast to their European coun terparts, woodblock print masters like Utamaro and Hokusai had no qualms about depicting eroticism in myriad forms. Erotic woodblock printmakers, writers, and the proprietors of brothels and teahouses specializing in male sex workers formed overlapping symbiotic relationships with each other. Even as the authorities tried on occasion to clamp down on red-light dis tricts and the circulation of erotic prints in the name of public morals, they were largely unable to stem the tide until larger so cial and economic changes in the 19th century. We should also note that the woodblock prints depicted an idealized world and not the social reality. Notwithstanding its relative toleration of male homosexuality, Edo society was highly misogynistic. Women were seen essentially as sex objects, so sex between women was invisible. Indeed Edo Japanese lacked a specific word for lesbian sexuality. The Tokugawa government and its stratified political system remained stable for a remarkably long period. By the middle of the 19th century, however, it was increasingly clear that some thing had to give. Witnessing the horrors inflicted on China dur ing the opium wars and becoming victim to humiliation inflicted by Commodore Matthew Perry’s black ships in the 1850s, by the beginning of the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan was de termined to remake itself a great power able to compete with the West. In pursuit of this goal, Meiji authorities instituted a broad series of legal and social reforms one of whose aims was to change the way Japanese people thought about sexuality and propriety. They were motivated in part by anxieties about how Western visitors, particularly those crucial to Japan’s modern ization efforts, would perceive Japanese customs and cultural mores. Legal prohibitions against “indecent exposure,” cross gender dressing, and other forms of “obscenity” ( waisetsu ) pro liferated in the last decades of the 1800s. The government even briefly outlawed anal intercourse between 1872 and 1880. Laud ing the ban, one writer commented that nanshoku befitted an ear lier world of “warriors and decadent priests, not the present era of imperial influence.” An 1875 ordinance banning the publica tion of “obscene materials” ensured that the world of erotic

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