Gender in Japan: Homosexuality

For this week's post about gender in Japan, I decided to take a look at homosexuality in Japan. One of my conceptions about Japan is that gender roles are generally conservatively defined, and so therefore being gay in Japan would fall outside of the box, and hence not be easily accepted. To look into this matter, I decided to interview my gay friend Yuki-chan (I find it interesting that he likes people to use the female suffix "-chan" after saying his name, rather than the male "-san" or "-kun" traditionally used) in order to gain an insider's perspective on the issue.

Yuki said that he thinks Japanese people's point of view regarding gay people is very narrow, probably stemming from the fact that Japan is a very isolated country both geographically and culturally, and that there is a considerable amount of discrimination. He said that he has never personally never really been discriminated against in any direct way, however he knows other gay friends who have. However I asked him if his family knew he was gay, and he said no, that no one in his hometown (Eihimeken on Shikoku) knows he is gay, not even his best friends. I asked him why, and he said he just didn't want them to know because he doesn't think they would be able to accept him.
He spent a considerable amount of time talking about how there are no real appropriate words in the Japanese language for gay people - the only word that actually originated in Japan is お釜 (okama, which literally translates as honorable tea pot...weird right?), which carries a considerable amount of negative connotation in its use. Other than お釜, almost all the other words in Japanese for gay like レズ (lesbian) and ゲイ (gay) are foreign loan words, making it almost seem like homosexuality is a result of foreign influence, and that it is not endogenous to Japan, which Yuki thinks contributes to the negative stereotypes perpetrated against gay people in Japan.
Yuki said that the other major negative influence perpetrating negative or false stereotypes against gay people in Japan is from the media. He talked about Razor Ramon Hard Gay, a Japanese comedian and professional wrestler who is heterosexual but plays a flamboyantly homosexual man who exhibits almost every negative stereotype about gay men, who is apparently extremely popular in Japan. Yuki said it is negative stereotypes like this that contribute to the bad reputations attached to homosexuals in Japan.


Yuki intentionally posing in a stereotypical flamboyantly gay pose as a joke, poking fun at the stereotype of all gay people being flamboyant.

If you hadn't seen the above picture first, and you looked at this picture, would you be able to tell that one of these two individuals is gay and the other is not? If you knew one of them was gay, but didn't know which it was, who would you guess? Yuki said that people often look at his appearance and misjudge him to be straight. He said that on more than one occasion a girl has asked him if he was single, and he said sorry I'm actually gay, at which point the girl would say "物体ない,” translating a "wasteful" or "what a waste!", seeming to imply that he is too attractive to be gay. I find this to be pretty interesting.

Links:
"Queer Japan" - Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context. Great website providing a wealth about anything and everything regarding being Gay in japan:
http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue12_contents.html
Razor Ramon Hard Gay's website: http://www.hard-gay.org/
link to an archive of his video clips: http://www.thejapanesearecrazy.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=4&id=14&Itemid=27