GLR May-June 2025

conceived in altogether new ways. Despite efforts to repress it, Japan’s premodern queer past continued to haunt, inform, and illuminate the works of its modern artists and writers. It is interesting to note that in the 21st century, the long-rul ing Liberal Democratic Party has taken the opposite tack. Instead of denying the sexual diversity of Japan before 1868, they now make a point of emphasizing Japan’s “historical tolerance” to argue against the necessity of anti-discrimination laws and legal ized same-sex marriage. One pamphlet, published in 2015, ar gued against the need for LGBT protections, stating that “historically, Japan has not been strict towards diverse gender and sexual practices, but rather has been tolerant towards them.” The irony and cynicism of this posturing has not been lost on con temporary LGBT activists in Japan, who are forced to contend with a governing elite far less tolerant than the general populace, which has consistently shown support for legalizing same-sex marriage. Yet even as queer politics in Japan today remain a mess, contemporary artists have found new ways to utilize and draw upon the works of their queer predecessors. One example worth noting here is the work of contemporary artist Matsuo Hiromi (1980–). Matsuo’s depictions of women are influenced by the vi suals of manga and anime as well as by the art and æsthetics of queer artists of the early 20th century. One of her most famous works, Dance (2017), a painting of two women dancing, pays di rect homage to Takabatake Kasho’s 1930 painting of the same subject. In this way, Matsuo creates a lineage of queer artists in Japan extending from the early 20th century to her own work in the present. In the works of such artists, we can see the arc of a long and very complicated queer history. OWT Trips in 2025

In addition to journals like Seit ō and Safuran , mass-market journals aimed at female reading audiences provided greater space for discussions and depictions of relationships between women. Stories by the highly popular writer and journalist Yoshiya Nobuko (1896–1973), which were serialized from the 1920s onward in magazines such as Sh ō jono tomo , often focused on relationships between schoolgirls that were explicitly roman tic in nature. In writing these stories, Yoshiya drew on her own experience, as she maintained a romantic relationship with Chiyo Monma, a math teacher at a girls’ school in Tokyo, for nearly fifty years. Her works also commented on the pressures that same sex-attracted women faced in a society that treated their desires as abnormal and pressured them to “grow out of” this attraction and become proper wives and mothers. As the narrator of one such story, “Yellow Rose,” laments: “The sadness of those who love their own sex ... is redoubled by the chagrin of parents—for whom marriage represents the sole pinnacle of womanly achieve ment—and the opprobrium and scorn of everyone else.” It was in the space of these magazines that some of the most iconic and recognizable Japanese æsthetics, particularly those associated with sh ō jo and kawaii , began to emerge. Not a small number of queer men contributed as illustrators to girls’ maga zines, creating visual vocabularies and æsthetics that would be emulated by later generations of manga and anime artists. A particularly notable artist in this regard is Kash ō Takabatake (1888–1966). One of the most prominent illustrators of girls’ magazines during the 1920s and ’30s, Kash ō ’s subjects display a playful and proto-queer sensibility to gender roles. He de picted women as modern, independent subjects acting outside of familial settings, representing their newfound independence in early 20th-century Japanese society. Queer artists and writers of period like Yoshiya, Kash ō , Otake, and Tadaoto sought to make sense of the enormous changes wrought by the Meiji Restoration and its consequences. In the decades preceding them, Japan had gone from a culture with multiple traditions of male-male love to a deeply hetero normative society. Conversely, the emergence of homosexual ity as a concept allowed for female-female sexuality to be May–June 2025 “Tamechika” (possible ref. to Reizei Tamechika), Yugi-e (detail), ca. 1850. Collection of Brian P. Coppola.

LGBTH ISTORY &A RT T OURS Northern Italy: May 17 – 27 Gay Scandinavia: September 19 – 28 Gay Greece: October 1 – 10

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The Delphi Antinous

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