by Benjamin Law
I met Ayaka in a ground-level café in Ni-Chome that was around the corner from the DVD porno shop of horrors. Though I had seen photos in which Ayaka was topless and bent over in a G-string, on this occasion she was dressed conservatively in a beige zip-up dress. Accompanying Ayaka was her manager, Nakazawa-san, whose weathered face made him look like a Japanese Tommy Lee Jones.
‘The majority of lesbians in Japan don’t come out,’ Ayaka explained. ‘So the interviews in my DVD were trying to address those issues. What are lesbians really like? What are they interested in? What do they do in their spare time? What kind of fashion are they into?’ They may as well have been fantastic and mythological creatures, such as hydras or mermaids: mysterious and vaguely heard about, but rarely seen in everyday life.
‘I get the sense that seeing gay men, drag queens and transsexual women is really common here,’ I said. ‘But not lesbians.’
‘Yeah-yeah-yeah,’ Ayaka said. She got this question a lot. ‘It’s true: you don’t really hear about lesbians in Japan, mainly because it’s still a man’s world. In the gay scene here, the majority of the venues – the saunas, the bars – are targeted at men. A lot of females aren’t as interested in that. Or they try to hide it. When I was young, I knew I had feelings for girls, but didn’t actually know I was even a “lesbian”. There was no point in coming out, because I didn’t even know I was one.’ No one spoke about lesbians, so Ayaka hadn’t realised that such a thing existed.
In her twenties, Ayaka worked part-time at a mixed-sex bar in Shinjuku Ni-Chome. Very quickly, her looks attracted the attention of local glamour photographers. Modelling scouts approached her and she picked up gravure modelling easily, as well as minor acting jobs and TV appearances. About two years into her career, her prospects were looking good. Then she decided to come out as a lesbian. It wasn’t an easy decision.
‘There had been no lesbians that had come out in this industry,’ she said. ‘So it was like, “Oh my god, should we be doing this?”’
Part of the probem, Ayaka said, was that a lot of Japanese people didn’t actually understand what a lesbian was. Even her manager hadn’t suspected.
Nakazawa-san laughed now, thinking about it. ‘Oh, I was shocked,’ he said. ‘She was the first lesbian I had ever met.’
They knew her coming out was a risk, but neither had any clear idea what the consequences could be. There weren’t many precedents. In the 1970s, there had been a hugely popular pop-folk singer named Naomi Sagara. Her chaste and memorable songs were family-friendly hits across the country. Then a woman claiming to be Sagara’s scorned lover went public with the news that they had been a couple, which caused a minor scandal. The news was talked about in hushed tones, but it was enough to cut short Sagara’s career. She had more or less disappeared from the music circuit.
‘But that was thirty years ago,’ Ayaka said. ‘And thirty years ago, they didn’t really have the kind of gay vocabulary that exists now, like “LGBT”. I mean, there weren’t even many men who were gay back then.’
Ayaka said she hadn’t wanted to make coming out a massive drama. In any case, she wasn’t yet a household name. In the end, she took a low-key approach. ‘It wasn’t a big deal. People would ask whether I had a boyfriend and I’d just say, “No, I have a girlfriend.”’
Where it was a big deal was in Japan’s close-knit lesbian scene. Even now, she stood relatively alone. When we tried to list other women in Japan in the public eye who were openly gay – not just entertainers, but anyone: athletes, artists, news anchors, musicians, actors, directors – the only person either of us could think of was Kanako Otsuji, a now-retired politician who had been a member of the 110-member Osaka assembly.
In a sense, there was also the manga artist Takeuchi Sachiko, whose work focused on lesbian romances. Sachiko was open in her professional life but closeted to the extent that not even her parents – with whom she still lived – knew the nature of her work. Rather than tell her parents about her lesbian romance manga, Sachiko told them she wrote pornographic manga instead, because writing explicit comic book smut was apparently more acceptable than loving the ladies. When Sachiko appeared on television to talk about sexual minorities, she came on stage with a paper mask attached to her face.
‘Do you ever feel a burden of responsibility, because you’re the only lesbian out?’ I asked Ayaka. ‘You know, the burden to represent all lesbians? To be a good role model?’
‘So des ne,’ she said, agreeing. She paused, then added brightly, ‘But because I’m new and the only woman who has come out, it’s easy in another way. People don’t really have any expectations.’
I’d originally read about Ayaka Ichinose on a website called Tokyo Wrestling, which was pretty much Japan’s only source of queer news for women. Because Tokyo Wrestling’s coverage of Ayaka had gained her a cult following, Ayaka returned the favour and posed in skimpy Tokyo Wrestling–branded gear on her DVD. Even though I wasn’t exactly Tokyo Wrestling’s target demographic, I’d become a fan. It was both serious and playful, with a sexy, muscular, 1980s neon-maritime aesthetic that spoke to me.
I contacted Tokyo Wrestling’s founder, Yuki Keiser, the daughter of a Swiss father and a Japanese mother, who looked like a Eurasian version of the British actress Carey Mulligan. Yuki was in her thirties, with fingernails painted baby blue and a bold Susan Sontag streak of white in her short brown hair. Yuki told me she understood where Ayaka was coming from, but added that Japanese people, or at least horny Japanese men, did have expectations of lesbians.
‘Lesbians are associated with porn,’ Yuki said simply. ‘You just don’t see any lesbians on normal TV, though. We have no faces. We don’t have a lesbian media. We have lesbian blogs, but that’s not the same. When Ayaka Ichinose came out last year, that was news among Japanese lesbians, but I wouldn’t say everybody knows her. If I switched on the TV, I’m not going to see her. You can’t say there’s a lesbian icon or role model on TV now. If you go into the streets and ask, “Do you know any lesbians?” they would say no.’
All this made being openly gay hard for Japanese women, even for someone like Yuki. Although she was the editor and public face of Tokyo Wrestling, she wasn’t always open about her sexuality either. Once, when she had been interviewed on television about the website, she had used her real name and allowed her face to be shown. Then, at her daytime workplace, a colleague said they had seen Yuki on television and asked about the interview. Yuki became evasive. You could never anticipate other people’s attitudes and Yuki didn’t want to broadcast her sexuality at work. Recently, she had been dining with her colleagues and a Japanese client, when people started asking Yuki whether she had a boyfriend or was married.
‘I’m not interested in marriage,’ she’d said, honestly. And that was where she left the conversation.
This was probably something familiar to most gays and lesbians: everyone had ways to mislead people without it descending into outright lies. ‘No, I don’t have a wife (because I have a boyfriend).’ ‘I’m not interested in marriage (because marrying my girlfriend isn’t possible).’ Yuki never referred to her girlfriend as ‘he’ or ‘him’ at work, but she never denied her existence either. She was vocal and visible within the queer scene, but made her queerness invisible in the workplace. I got the sense that Yuki was someone who refused to turn her sexuality into a show for spectators.
Eventually, some celebrities’ managers started returning our calls. This was excellent, except that I had started to develop a wheezing cough, which was getting more intense as the nights wore on, and wouldn’t help me during my interviews. Locking these interviews in was important, but obtaining sufficient time was crucial: relying on a translator meant interviews usually took twice – sometimes three times – as long as speaking to someone in the same language.
One gay celebrity who agreed to an interview was Maeda Ken. Everyone I’d talked to – Yuki Keiser, Bourebonne-san, Taq Otsuka, Ayaka Ichinose – said Ken was different to other gei ta
rento. Sure, like all the others, Ken had started out as a TV drag queen, so flamingly camp he may as well have been on fire, lapping up the applause and hoots on set before retreating backstage to take off his make-up and become anonymous again. But recently, he had also become the only gay man on Japanese television who appeared as … well, himself. No wigs. No schtick. No fake tits. Yuki Keiser told me Ken was more or less the only openly gay man on Japanese television who wasn’t constantly presenting himself as onee.
Initially, Maeda Ken was difficult to track down. He was famous to the extent that most Japanese people knew his name, partly because he worked like a dog. As well as being an actor – about to star in a suspense telemovie called The Seven Suspects – Ken had written a book, performed as a stand-up comic and directed films, with his next project being an adaptation of his short-story collection, due for release in the spring.
Eventually, I was told to meet Ken after hours in the building of his management agency. His staff led me and my translator into a conference room, where Ken was waiting for us like a company chairman across a large wide table. He had the wide, friendly face of a kid plonked on an adult’s body. Despite being almost forty years old, he dressed like a teenager. Or maybe it was more that he dressed like the idea of a teenager, wearing a baseball cap turned on an angle, a bright-red baseball jacket and a t-shirt screenprinted with a teddy bear playing an electric guitar. To begin with, he wasn’t in the mood to talk.
‘Thanks for making the time. I know you’re in very high demand at the moment …’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘What’s a typical week for you right now?’
‘There’s no certain schedule to what I do.’
‘Are you working on anything right now?’
‘I’m going to do dramas.’
‘What sort of drama?’
‘TV drama.’
I figured it had been a long day, or maybe he was wary of me probing where I shouldn’t. Ken warmed up when we started talking about his career history, the early days, where he scored his first breaks on TV by excelling at monomane – the type of hammy, queeny celebrity impersonations everyone loved so much in Japan – doing brutally hilarious impersonations of J-pop singer Aya Matsura, made even funnier by the fact Ken had a super-masculine face: big cheeks, strong eyebrows and a five o’clock shadow, like a giant otter in women’s clothes.
Ken had come out to his family and friends long ago, well before he achieved national fame, but it took him a long time to come out publicly. He didn’t want to make a big deal of it. After he released a book, during his promotional tour someone had asked if he was gay, like one of his book’s characters. Ken simply said yes and people nodded politely. He hadn’t chased publicity, but soon there was a buzz in the press about it. Emails and letters from fans poured in saying things like, ‘Through listening to you, reading your book and hearing you on the news, you’ve given me the courage and made me more brave to come out.’
‘That was a big boost,’ Ken said. ‘It made me really happy to know I had that impact. The best thing about coming out is helping other people – particularly in rural areas of Japan – to get the confidence and the courage to come out.’
In terms of Ken’s job prospects, nothing had changed too much. The only thing it had affected was his private life. Once he had come out publicly, he found it harder to pick up boyfriends.
‘Why was that?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘A lot of people in Japan aren’t open and gays don’t come out, which actually makes it easier for them to pick up. But because I’ve already come out, I’ve written a book, I’m on TV …’
‘Because being gay in Japan is about discretion, right?’
‘Exactly.’
As his career flourished, Ken branched out into projects where he didn’t have to be flamboyant or camp, at least not all the time. Still, he had fun with being known as gay. Recently, he had starred in Yurusugi Kogi, a quasi-mockumentary that followed him as he dated men in an effort to find love. One of Ken’s dates was at an aquarium, another was getting Japanese waffles, another was hanging out in an onsen sauna. The show was aimed at families, so it was played for laughs. Audiences knew Ken was gay, and that the men he was ‘dating’ were straight male comedians playing a character. That struck me as sad, somehow.
‘How do you think people would have responded if it wasn’t played for laughs?’ I said. ‘Like, if it had been a straightforward documentary about a man looking for same-sex love?’
Ken raised his eyebrows. ‘It’s difficult to imagine,’ he said. ‘If we were to have done it for real?’ He trailed off, thinking. ‘People would have been a lot more shocked.’
As much as Ken presented himself as an ordinary guy, he had no problem with acting camp on screen. Even now, he was asked to do TV appearances where producers would tell him to be more flamboyant and girly. It was what audiences wanted from their gay men and Ken was more than happy to amp up the camp. (‘If they want me to play camp, I can do it,’ he said. ‘I am an actor.’)
Still, Ken wanted to expand Japan’s idea of what a gay man could be. In 2009, he appeared on the TV program Haato O Tsunago (‘Heart to Heart’) on Japan’s national public broadcaster NHK to talk frankly about life as a gay man. Haato O Tsunago had first focused on what it was like to come out as an LGBT person in 2007.
Several nights later, I met the program’s founding producer, an efficient-looking man who introduced himself to me as Mr Miyata. Originally, Miyata-san said, the idea of the show was to get people to talk about any issue Japanese people felt they couldn’t discuss in everyday life. Haato O Tsunago featured three hosts and a large panel of eight guests, who sat in an Alpine-themed set of mountains and pine trees, everyone inexplicably surrounded by replica woodland creatures, plus a random camel. The three hosts of the special LGBT episode – the pop musician Sonim, the writer and actor Ira Ishida and the news anchor Yoko Sakurai – all had different levels of knowledge and friendships with LGBT people beforehand, which is exactly what Miyata-san wanted.
‘They were almost representatives of what viewers at home would be like,’ he said.
After filming, the female hosts Sonim and Sakurai compared notes. Both were struck by the fact that while they had gay male friends, neither of them had met a single lesbian until the show’s filming. Miyata-san felt he was onto something, put the episodes to air and watched as viewer feedback rolled in.
‘Viewers said a lot of things, but mostly they said they felt alone,’ he said. ‘Not all of them, but most of them. Some of them are very happy people. They had come out to their families already, had good, accepting parents and friends. But especially in regional, rural areas, they felt terribly isolated. Some of them were trapped in families that didn’t accept their situation at all. They didn’t have anyone to talk to and felt extremely alone, like no one was like them. Some people wrote in, talking about how much they disgusted themselves, that they could barely admit it to themselves that they were gay.’
It wasn’t common for Haato O Tsunago to touch on the same topic again soon afterwards, but Miyata-san knew immediately they had to do another show on LGBT issues. It was the kind of viewer response you couldn’t ignore.
Something else unexpected started to happen. Young people from Tokyo and beyond began to make treks to sit in the NHK studio audience on the days of filming. Some were members of queer campus groups from nearby universities, but a lot were young people who came by themselves. Some even allowed themselves to be interviewed on camera, though they asked to have their faces blurred and their voices altered, in case their parents or bosses recognised them. In time, Haato O Tsunago became synonymous with LGBT issues. One of the country’s most stuffy and conservative TV stations found itself a driving force in disseminating information about queer sexuality. Slowly, things were starting to change.
Let’s put it crudely. If there was a hierarchy of queer visibility in Japan, lesbians would
be at the bottom, nowhere to be seen. Very camp gay men and drag queens were everywhere. But ruling over everyone, with her recently won beauty pageant sceptre in her hand, was someone entirely different: the undisputed reigning queen of Japanese television and pop music, post-op transsexual woman, bubblegum princess … ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Haruna Ai!
I had met Haruni Ai briefly while trailing the Miss Tiffany’s pageant in Thailand. In Japan, I tried getting back in touch with her, only to discover that she was a huge star, like, absolutely-impossible-to-interview huge. Besides her weekly TV appearances across several stations, she also had a major recording deal and was the CEO of a chain of successful restaurants, popular with artists, media types and young cigarette-smoking hipsters.
Among queer people in Japan, opinions were split on Haruna Ai. Most loved the fact that one of the most famous TV personalities in Japan was a transsexual woman. In a country that had only legalised sex-change procedures in the past decade, her rise to become an adored mainstream darling was startling. Others had reservations.
‘With people like Haruna Ai,’ Maeda Ken told me, ‘the audience generally likes them because they’re easy to understand. They’re soft and fun, friendly and happy.’ I got the sense his feelings toward her were ambivalent at best. Yuki Keiser didn’t mind Haruna Ai, but felt tarento like her weren’t challenging anyone’s perception of sex or gender roles. If anything, she reinforced them.
‘Gender binary pressure is very strong in Japan,’ Yuki said. ‘If you want to generalise, women in Japan have to act in certain ways. Transsexuals are more accepted, because they fit into those ideas. Haruna Ai is very feminine and wants to please men.’
