by Benjamin Law
Taq’s Knot was one of the oldest bars in Ni-Chome, a rare place that welcomed most gay men and even the occasional woman. It was roughly the size of an economy-class cabin on a cruise ship and could barely fit ten people at a time. The bar itself was sunken, which meant the barman looked as if he had fallen into a ditch. Behind the bar were big acrylic paintings of muscled men with giant cocks, and instead of branded match-boxes Taq’s Knot offered free condoms, the wrappers featuring works by local artists. Two computer monitors played ’80s music videos on repeat.
Taq Otsuka started Taq’s Knot in 1982, the year I was born. Over the course of my life, Taq had seen not only Ni-Chome change, but Japan’s entire gay scene evolve. Taq looked like my dad with a goatee, which was to say he looked like a 62-year-old version of me: slender, wispy-haired and boyish despite his age. He wore a striped blue-and-white shirt over athletic cargo fatigues and sported grey hair in ruffles, giving him the appearance of a retired gay Phys Ed teacher.
When Taq was a kid, he’d read magazine articles about the fabled bars of Ni-Chome, with journalists reporting wild stories from an underground world where men dressed as women and worked as prostitutes at night.
‘I didn’t have television when I was a kid,’ he said, ‘so the only images I could get were from these magazines. But the impression of Shinjuku Ni-Chome itself was really negative. It was represented as abnormal, as hentai.’
‘What does hentai mean?’
‘Sort of like “queer”. But, like, the bad meaning of queer, before gay liberation. Sometimes queer is used with a positive meaning nowadays, but beforehand, queer was – how do you say? Everyone feared the word. So that meaning of queer.’
It wasn’t like homophobia in the West. Japanese attitudes were more ambivalent, more evasive and unspoken. Throughout the country’s history, there had been cultural precedents for sex between men, specific relationship dynamics to which our modern-day notions of ‘homosexual’, ‘gay’ and ‘transgender’ didn’t much apply. Centuries ago, adolescent male prostitution took place around kabuki sites in Kyoto, while sexual relationships between samurai masters and apprentices, and priests and page boys had occurred since the eighteenth century. One famous poem featuring same-sex male longing – Iwatsutsuji (‘Azaleas on the Cliffs’) – dated back to the ninth century. It wasn’t anything new.
‘Japanese people see gay people as shameful, but not sinful,’ Taq said. ‘There has never been anything against gay people. As long as they’re invisible, they’ll be tolerated.’
When Taq first encountered television as a young adult, there was hardly anything gay to be seen. Then in the 1990s, Taq noticed big changes. In fact, the Japanese media was suddenly caught up in an intense public fascination with gay men on screen, which became so noticeable that there was even a special term for it: gei būmu – literally, a ‘gay boom’. Viewers loved gay characters. Movies and TV programs showcased them, and plotlines in comedies and dramas saw gay men accidentally marrying women (whoops!) or women becoming their fag hags. It was all very festive and family-friendly. On television, gay talent – gei tarento – was suddenly everywhere. Still, Taq felt something was missing.
‘They’re characters, like men dressing up as women. But there’s no real gay people who behave like men who say, “I really like men.”’
‘Only a very specific type of gay person is seen on Japanese television?’
Taq nodded. ‘Colourful, feminine and over-acting. It’s a kind of like – how would you say?’ Taq searched his mind for an English term, but came up with a Japanese one instead: onee, pronounced ‘oh-neh-eh’. It meant ‘older sister’. Sassy drag queens, camp gay men and giggling transsexuals, they were all onee: camp, feminine, hilarious and weirdly sexless. They presented themselves as happy little eunuchs, like Japan’s first gay celebrities, Piko and Osugi, twin brothers who declared themselves gay back in the 1970s, but insisted they were celibate to make everyone comfortable.
‘From a Western point of view,’ Taq said, ‘there seem to be a lot of gay characters on Japanese TV, right?’
I nodded.
‘You must think, “Good: Japanese gays are on TV!” So you are gay and entertain me? Okay! But if you are gay and insist on changing the legal system? No. It’s vague what Japanese society is willing to do. Japanese culture tries to avoid conflict.’
Sure, homosexuality was legal in Japan, Western-style homophobia wasn’t rampant and TV programming was relentlessly faggy, but coming out as gay or lesbian in real life was still very difficult. Talking about sexuality – actual queer sexuality, what being gay actually meant – was generally taboo. Seen in a bigger context, the situation struck me as slightly sinister: queer celebrities going on-screen to have millions of viewers laugh at them, but knowing viewers couldn’t care less once the TVs were off.
When I asked Taq to list the most famous gay people on Japanese TV right now, he laughed and pretended to be overwhelmed.
‘Oh, there are so many!’ he said. ‘There’s Ikko-san, Matsuko-san, Bourebonne-san …’
Taq had to say Bourebonne-san, of course. Bourebonne-san was an old friend who worked at Taq’s Knot when he wasn’t appearing on television or rehearsing for his live drag queen variety show. Bourebonne-san’s star was on the rise, Taq explained, and he also had a powerful friend and mentor in Matsuko Deluxe, a gloriously obese 140-kilogram drag queen who was one of the most renowned TV personalities. A self-described ‘fat transvestite columnist’, Matsuko Deluxe was loved for her luxurious silken-tofu fat rolls and ability to shoot off rapid-fire jokes and double entendres. She was currently everywhere as part of Fuji TV’s autumn marketing campaign and also advertised pizza, a mobile phone company, Nintendo games and her own chocolate-filled biscuits that came imprinted with a cartoon image of herself. If Bourebonne-san wanted to be famous, having Matsuko Deluxe on call would help enormously.
‘So is Bourebonne-san becoming really famous now?’ I said.
‘Mmm …’ Taq said. He laughed teasingly. ‘Becoming.’
After talking to Taq, I took myself to a local 24-hour sento, a traditional public bathhouse where men and women separated before soaking in communal mineral baths and broiling their skin in the sauna. Although surrounded by naked, sweating Japanese men, I kept my attention focused squarely on the encased flatscreen television. It was tuned into a format that dominated the airways: variety-news shows. These followed a simple formula: the news of the day with a panel of celebrity guests. As raw footage reeled off – plane crashes, disgraced sports stars leaving court, political speeches, baby animals being born in zoos – a small box in the corner of the screen stayed on the celebrities’ faces for their reactions: Nodding Concern, Startled Delight, Breathless Laughter, Muted Shock, Considered Listening, Silent Crying over Something Very Moving and Poignant. The celebrities’ reactions provided a sort of emotional laugh track for the audience: when to feel sad, when to chuckle.
As always, there was one ultra-camp gay man on the panel. It was almost a prerequisite to have at least one onee on board. They were on morning shopping programs and late-night variety shows, or advertising dolphin-shaped toilet cleaners and demonstrating the latest in flower-arranging techniques. All this visibility had to be a good thing, I thought. In a nation of fickle viewers, gei būmu seemed here to stay, having outlasted the TV fads for fatties, women with massive tits, washed-up popstars and lawyers-slash-comedians. But it seemed odd that real-life queer rights hadn’t grown with this trend. I decided to track down the gay stars, one by one, and find out what they thought: whether they saw themselves as offering a sort of gay minstrel show, or whether there was more to them than that. I took out my dictaphone and notepad and started calling people, knowing I was out to violate an unspoken rule: gei tarento won’t speak about their private lives, and journalists don’t ask, to save audiences from extending their imagination in that direction.
As the weeks went on, I realised I’d seriously underestimated the difficulty of my assignment. O
ne problem was my utter lack of written or spoken Japanese. I would scour celebrities’ official websites for contact details and forcibly mash the Japanese script through Google Translate, only to get not-quite-right translations that I’d have to squint to read, such as ‘Cultural Tours pre-Haruna love and go!’ and ‘For inquiries, Avex Entertainment, Inc. Medium and delivered in record straight!’ When a couple of translators came on board, they made phone calls and sent countless emails on my behalf, while I prepped for interviews and pored over the bare details of these celebrities’ private lives. It felt as though we were running a gossip rag.
We approached Akihiro Miwa, the beloved TV drag queen in her mid seventies, who was always accompanied on-screen by flowers and a Barbara Cartland glow. There was also KABA. Chan (real name: Eiji Kabashima), a choreographer, member of the music group DOS and contestant on Japan’s Dancing with the Stars. We tried accessing Shogo Kariyazaki, the famous gay TV florist (a Japanese speciality), and someone named JONTE’ Moaning, an American drag queen modelled after Grace Jones who had somehow made it big in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Our requests were met with radio silence.
I decided to just go ahead and visit Bourebonne-san when he was at work. On the night we met, he was working in Taq’s Knot, pulling beers from the sunken bar and dressed as a regular guy. He wore a loud checked shirt with ironed-on scout’s badges displaying words like MAXIMUM and CALIFORNIA. He was handsome, and tall by Japanese standards.
As a kid, Bourebonne-san hadn’t seen many images on television of what he wanted to be, but as an adult, he watched RuPaul and the Australian film Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. Something clicked.
‘Priscilla and RuPaul changed my heart,’ he told me in English, putting his hands to his chest and fluttering his eyelashes.
The music system had been playing Lionel Ritchie’s ‘All Night Long’, Culture Club’s ‘Karma Chameleon’ and Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Relax’, but when Bourebonne-san discovered I was Australian, he clapped his hands, squealed and flicked the system to Kylie Minogue’s ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ in my honour. Businessmen in their spectacles and ties surrounded me and my translator, curious and eager to chat.
‘So Otsuka-san told me you were becoming famous!’ I told Bourebonne-san, recalling my conversation with Taq.
Bourebonne-san beamed at the news, delighted.
‘Nooooooo,’ he said with typical Japanese modesty. ‘But you want to see me on television?’
He stopped the Kylie song and loaded YouTube on the monitor. We all watched as the opening credits for a daytime talk show called You Wanted to Know! came on. The male host introduced three apparently female guests who sat alongside each other in carrels, as in a game show. Bourebonne-san was unrecognisable. In this episode, he wore a long brown wig, a flowery black ribbon in his hair, a long dress in autumnal colours and a flowing pearl necklace. It wasn’t a conventionally outrageous drag outfit, but rather something you’d expect a classy aunty in her fifties to wear. Bourebonne-san told me he got most of his clothes from a costume website in the United States, though some pieces were made to order. Unlike many other drag queens, he chose to dress with class.
On the show, the three guests watched rolling news footage before making quips or offering their sympathetic take on the news. The camera loved Bourebonne-san. He was the most striking of the women – probably because he was a man – and offered the most arch jokes. But he was also very pleasant, polite and feminine, not vulgar or overly sexual like most drag queens on American TV. In the commercial break, the show cut to an advertisement showing a deliciously fat Matsuko Deluxe, seemingly pregnant, reclining in a white gown and breathing hard. I had no idea what the advertisement was for, but later discovered it was a teaser for Fuji Television’s new season. Matsuko Deluxe was pregnant with the TV schedule, telling the audience it was due any day now.
When the video clip ended, the Taq’s Knot clientele offered a smattering of applause.
‘Is it easier to be a drag queen on TV than an ordinary gay guy?’ I asked.
Bourebonne-san thought about it. ‘Well, it’s much easier to work with make-up and dress-up. Because you have to be – how would you say? – “catchy” to get work. You know?’
‘Is there a difference between this Bourebonne-san,’ I said, pointing to the TV, ‘and the one I’d see at your drag show?’
‘Perhaps I’m less funny on this,’ he said, pointing to the monitor. ‘There are less dirty jokes. Because this is a nationwide TV show, the whole country is watching, you know?’
I nodded, understanding.
‘The good jokes come,’ he said, ‘when you’re talking about sex.’
Several days later, Bourebonne-san pulled some strings and invited me to his drag queen extravaganza Campy, which was taking place in the basement of a seven-level entertainment complex called the Loft/Plus One: Talk Live House. Underneath the Loft’s flashing green sign, someone had stuck a childlike, hand-drawn sign in big blobby texta letters saying, ‘Campy! Vol. 8.’ Everyone in line was in good spirits as they clutched their tickets, content in the knowledge they had scored entry to a sold-out event.
The line seemed to be chiefly gay men who had arrived in hordes, teasing and slapping each other good-naturedly. My translator pointed out a prominent TV news anchor who was known to be gay in queer circles but wasn’t open about his sexuality in public. Lesbians had come in small groups or couples. And surprisingly, there was a contingent of straight people, who had come in couples or rowdy packs. Macho straight men stood in line, hand in hand with their girlfriends.
A short, compactly muscled Japanese man with a beard took our tickets. He was naked except for a fake tiger skin that wrapped around his crotch and ribboned over his shoulder where it was attached to a plush tiger’s head. After collecting our complimentary Campy DVDs, we were greeted by five drag queens.
‘Benjamin!’ one of them said, putting his open palms by his face as a hello.
There was no mistaking Bourebonne-san’s broad shoulders. Tonight, he was dressed sleekly in the outfit of a chic First Lady, complete with Jackie O wig.
‘Bourebonne-san,’ I said, planting a kiss on his cheek.
Another drag queen wore giant heart-shaped glasses like Lolita. A third had the hard, pumped body of an elite swimmer poured into a tight blue cocktail dress. When I reached out to shake his hand, I accidentally dropped my notebook. When I went to stand up, he’d shoved his arse right in front of my face. The queens hooted with laughter.
The Loft was a grungy parlour that had the look of an old strip club with exposed wiring and lights hanging off banisters. Seats filled quickly and people crammed in around small tables the size of lazy Susans. My interpreter and I made friends with a table of raucous straight men and women who’d come just because they thought drag queens were a scream. We shared snacks and ordered rounds of beer and Japanese lemon sours.
It didn’t take long for the entertainment to become a blur: partly because I didn’t understand the Japanese jokes, but mainly because I was drunk. Most of the jokes, my translator told me, were saucy and foul but the puns were so linguistically and culturally specific that they were nearly impossible to translate. From what I could gather, no topics were off limits. They joked about eating disorders and how ugly they all looked. Bourebonne-san delivered a sordid monologue about going to a love hotel with a guy he’d met while still in drag. When they discovered the love motel only played boring straight porn, Bourebonne-san had to use gay porn on his iPod to get his lover into the mood, by which time the man had fallen asleep. One of the drag queens made a really graphic joke about hanging a shit so big it wouldn’t flush down the toilet. I didn’t need a translator for that one. Let’s just say it was all in the miming.
When it was all over, Bourebonne-san came up to me, sweating through his make-up.
‘People love you guys!’ I said.
‘Yes, drag queens are getting very popular!’ he said, dabbing at his face.
The audiences left the Loft grinning stupidly, Campy DVDs in their bags. Bourebonne-san said I was right: a chunk of the audience tonight were straight. Most were gay or lesbian, but about a third were heterosexuals who loved seeing drag queens, camp men and giggly transsexual women on their televisions and stages. Still, I felt there was an obvious missing element.
‘What about lesbians?’ I asked.
Bourebonne-san nodded, as though he’d given this some thought.
‘Oh, being lesbian is harder than gay,’ he said. ‘For gays, it’s much easier to be seen as funny. Boys getting dressed as women? That’s already entertaining. For ladies, it’s a different story.’
Ayaka Ichinose responded to my interview request pretty quickly. Perhaps she needed any publicity she could get. If Ayaka had a business card, it would have said something like ‘model/actress/writer’ or simply ‘Japan’s first celesbian’. Ayaka was blessed with the kind of looks Japanese women would kill for: soft, long hair and flawless skin, like a teenage boy’s fantasy avatar for a video game. Though she had recently turned thirty, she still looked like a high-school student.
Ayaka had started out as something called a ‘gravure model’, which wasn’t exactly nude modelling, but posing in just enough clothes to give the impression you were naked. She was also smart enough to know that modelling got you only so far in Japan. To be successful, you had to diversify. Lately, Ayaka had been branching out into writing a thirteen-episode manga series called Real Bian, lesbian comics based on her own experiences. She had also produced and starred in SekuMai, a gravure modelling DVD that combined footage of her in skimpy, barely-there gear with a discussion of issues pertinent to lesbians in Japan. In between sequences of Ayaka posing in her underwear, she talked about what it was like to live as a lesbian, recounted the history of the Ni-Chome district and interviewed other queer women. Her work was sexy and educational. Sexucational.
