In this final episode of The Provocateur‘s miniseries for LGBT History Month 2018, we move the spotlight to contemporary Japan, its attitudes to homosexuality and the ways in which sexuality and gender play out in its gay bar industry. Japan has historically had few laws criminalizing homosexual sex, though a ban on anal sodomy was briefly enforced between 1872 and 1880. In the postwar period, as Japan entered its economic miracle, the leisure industry gained greater prominence and with it came the emergence of the first gay bars in the 1950s and 1960s. Just as the Western world experienced the sexual revolution in the latter half of the twentieth century, Japan’s gay bar subculture can also arguably be seen as a marker of liberalizing attitudes to sexuality. At the same time, it combines Western-style norms of consumerism with a distinctly Japanese take on notions of leisure and service.
Today on The Provocateur I talk to Marcello Francioni, a PhD student in the department of anthropology and sociology at SOAS, University of London, to discuss masculinities and sexuality in contemporary urban Japan. We first talk about the norms of the service industry and what ‘service’ means in Japan, before going on to discuss the evolution of Marcello’s research, the history of homosexuality in Japan and the relationship between language and gender in Tokyo’s gay bars.
You can listen to the podcast here:
Further Reading:
Allison, A. (1994) Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Christensen, P. (2014) Japan, Alcoholism, and masculinity: suffering sobriety in Tokyo. Lexington Books.
Graeber, D. (2001) Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hochschild, A. R. (2012) The managed heart. Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.
Ishida, H. (2006) ‘Interactive Practices in Shinjuku Ni-Chōme’s Male Homosexual Bars,’ Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 12: 1–21.
Livia, A. and K. Hall (1997) Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mackintosh, J. D. (2009) Homosexuality and Manliness in Postwar Japan. New York: Routledge.
Maree, C. (2013) Onee-Kotoba. Tokyo: Seidosha.
Pflugfelder, G. M. (1999) Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Robertson, James, and N. Suzuki, eds. (2005) Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan: Dislocating the Salaryman Doxa. Routledge.
Singleton, J. (1998) Learning in likely places. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The Provocateur 