GLR May-June 2025

prints and literature, which had thrived for centuries, would un dergo a swift and terminal decline. It is one of the great ironies of cultural history that Japan’s turn toward the West coincided with the emergence of sexology as a distinct domain of scientific activity. German sexologists in particular had an early and long-lasting influence on Japanese discourse at the turn of the century. Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), one of the first sexological works to focus on male homosexuality, was partially translated into Japanese just eight years after it first came out. Other publica tions disseminating sexological ideas helped to reshape attitudes about sexuality, casting same-sex interaction as an aberration, something “barbarous,” “amoral,” and “unspeakable.” Ironically, this shift made lesbian sexuality visible, whereas previously it had been, discursively speaking, almost nonexistent. As Edo Pe riod terms like nanshoku and shud ō fell out of favor, they were replaced by a new paradigm embodied by the newly coined term d ō seiai (“homosexuality”), written in Sino-Japanese characters literally meaning “same sex love.” The emergence of sexology and the establishment of d ō seiai created a link between male-male and female-female sexuality that had not existed before. Incidents including a murder case between an aristocratic woman and her maid in Tokyo in 1888, and the love-suicide of two schoolgirls in Niigata Prefecture in 1911, raised media alarms and public anxieties about lesbian sexuality, while newspapers throughout the 1880s and 1900s regularly ran stories about incidents of sexual assault in all-boy schools. The transformation of homosexuality into a symptom of social disorder and maladaptive development fueled an entire set of anxieties and neuroses surrounding sex that hadn’t ex isted even a few decades earlier. One symptom of this shift can be seen in the so-called “nude debate” of the 1890s. The intro duction of “the nude” as an artistic category engendered a great deal of debate among artists and critics, who attempted to make a distinction between the naked ( hadaka ) and the nude ( ratai , an academic, æsthetic category). In spite of official exhortations to bury the past, many artists

of civilization,” but also as encouraging “an emphasis on duty and respect” as well as “the fulfillment of solemn vows between samurai that led them to valiantly support their nation.” The era following the Meiji Period, the Taish ō Period (1912–1926), was a time of relative political and social liberal ism, particularly compared to the regimes that preceded and fol lowed it. It was also a time when Japanese artists and writers began to take renewed interest in ideas about sexuality of the past and from abroad. This can be seen in the so-called “ ero guro-nansensu” boom in popular culture. This phrase, which links the English words “erotic,” “grotesque,” and “nonsense,” was used to describe the explosion of media interest in so-called “perverse sexual desires” ( hentai seiyoku ). This ethos encour aged artists of the time to engage in a greater degree of experi mentation in depictions of gender, sexuality, and the body. The works of the Kyoto-based artist Kainosh ō Tadaoto (1894–1979) demonstrate this trend. In contrast to the earlier generation of Meiji Period fine artists who internalized the division between high and vulgar art in their works, Kainosh ō and other Taish ō artists sought instead to defamiliarize the body and emphasize its unnatural, overdetermined presence in traditional Japanese artistic subjects and motifs. TheTaish ō Period also saw the emergence of the first mass marketed publications written by and for women. The journal Seit ō ( Bluestockings , 1911–1916) was the first feminist maga zine in Japanese history. Edited by Hiratsuka Raich ō (1886– 1971) and It ō Noe (1895–1923), Seit ō discussed issues seldom addressed in other publications, including women’s suffrage and divorce rights. In its early years, Seit ō took a progressive stance toward same-sex relationships between women, and many of its first contributors were themselves in romantic relationships with other women. One of the magazine’s early founders, Otake K ō kichi (1893–1966), was one of the first openly gay women in Japanese history, and the short-lived journal she founded later, Safuran , published some of the earliest translations of the British homophile writer Edward Carpenter, hinting at a queer and cosmopolitan consciousness budding in 1910s Japan.

and writers went against the grain by trying to discover, exhume, or reimagine Japan’s recent queer past. Male-male sexuality, linked to the nation’s samurai history, maintained an ambiguous position in Meiji Period culture, particularly as the country became increasingly militaristic and em barked on wars with China in the 1890s and Russia in the 1900s. This tension is captured by the reception of the serialized 1884 novel Shizu no odamaki (“The Thread from the Spool”). Set during the Warring States Period in the late 16th cen tury and depicting the romantic and chival ric relationship between two samurai comrades, the story was widely read in Meiji Period boys’ schools. An introduc tion published ahead of the first installment captures this incoherence by describing nanshoku as “something that goes against nature” and that “cannot be positively judged by the morals of our current period

TheG & LR Unknown artist (Utagawa school, Meiji Period). Hyaku tori, ca. 1870s. Collection of Brian P. Coppola.

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