by Benjamin Law
For instance, Yuki told me about one TV segment where Haruna Ai told the audience that she never put her right earring in with her right hand, or her left earring with her left. Her tip: it was more elegant and appealing to men to ensure your arms crossed over at all times: right hand inserting the left earring; left hand inserting the right. ‘She puts them in crossways because it’s cuter for men,’ Yuki said, shaking her head slightly.
For weeks, I emailed Haruna Ai’s management trying to lock in an interview, but my butchered quasi-Japanese emails got me nowhere. ‘Please respond to this email with a simple question mark (?) if you cannot read English,’ I wrote at the bottom of emails in pre-translated Japanese. ‘I will arrange a Japanese translation of the email as soon as possible.’
Then someone told me to get in touch with a man called F. Kasai. I sent Kasai-san a long and respectful interview request in English, and his reply came back. It was short and blunt, haiku-like in its succinct beauty:
i say your order for HARUNA AI office
but she is very very busy TV star
she can not return soon
My heart sank. I sent more emails to Kasai-san and left messages on his phone. I pursued Haruna Ai’s TV station reps, producers and Japanese record label. My translators made phone calls on my behalf. Everything I did encountered dead ends.
Walking through Tokyo’s autumn-chilled streets, Haruna Ais hovered around me, peering out from magazines on new-stands and CDs in record shops. I was getting sick and coughed violently into my fist, feeling stupid for having even tried contacting her. Her face was everywhere, like a Sanrio cartoon character in human form. Friends and people I met in Tokyo – journalists, translators, expatriates and exchange students – all squealed when they found out I was trying to track her down, before skeptically wishing me good luck. Then one day, out of nowhere, Kasai-san yielded and gave me a phone number.
ai chans manager say your interview ok
maybe he call you
his name is MR KAZAMA
please talk with him
Several phone calls later, and we were in. The only problem was, my cough was getting worse. A couple of weeks later, a doctor would diagnose me with whooping cough.
Usually I had only one translator with me, but both my translators – Aya and Simon – insisted on coming together. It was Haruna Ai, they said, and nothing else mattered. That we’d scored the interview at all was some sort of miracle. The three of us headed to the TBS network headquarters in freezing conditions with cold rain spitting on us, my hacking cough mimicking the sound of a cat being kicked. On arrival, a female assistant came out to the foyer and greeted us with a lot of bowing, before leading us to level 4F where the magic happened. Simon, Aya and I waited in a small cafeteria-like space, from which two doors led to different TV studios.
‘Look!’ Aya said, squealing and pointing. ‘That’s her!’
The monitor showed what was being filmed in the left-hand TV studio. A pug-faced man with a giant white meringue of hair was running through a news story about a junior baseball player wanting to make the big time. The baseball player was crying and so were his family members. As the footage ran, the small box in the screen’s corner showed Haruna Ai expressing a combination of Nodding Concern and Heartfelt Sympathy. She was nailing all the facial expressions. Tonight, she was wearing a white dapple-patterned dress with Disney princess puffy sleeves and a big red bow in her hair. I got excited and started coughing again.
‘She’s only a few metres away!’ I said.
‘Oh my god, this is so exciting,’ Simon said.
Recording of the show wrapped up and the audience filed out. For a moment, Haruna Ai sailed past us towards her dressing room. Simon and Aya both made bug eyes at me and we all mimed silent screaming.
‘She will be with you in a moment,’ her assistant told us.
Then we heard a troubling, high-pitched sound, a squeal that sounded distressing and animal-like. We realised it was coming from two girls. Just being in Haruna Ai’s orbit made people in Japan emit this sound. The girls were in their twenties, dressed in monochromatic, wildly patterned and weirdly tailored Harajuku outfits, bouncing from foot to foot and bowing at Haruna Ai almost spastically. She paused, laughed, grabbed their hands and squealed along with them, as if she was delighted to meet them. One of the girls started crying. With anyone else I would be rolling my eyes, but the excitement was contagious.
Later, Haruna Ai came out of her dressing room wearing loose pyjama bottoms and a bright orange hoodie that said ‘Mississippi Ridgeland Football Club’. With glittery moisturiser still on her face, she grabbed our hands to greet us one by one, offering us chilled green tea and water. As Simon made the introductions, Haruna Ai said she remembered me from Miss Tiffany’s. I stood there grinning like an idiot, coughing into my elbow. Concerned, Haruna Ai demanded cold tea for me.
Haruna Ai’s voice was feminine – ultra-girly, even – but impossible to place. It was high-pitched with a slight gravelly quality, as though she was a twelve-year-old girl with a smoking problem. Unexpectedly, it made for a great broadcast voice.
As one of the only transsexual women on Japanese television, she was in great demand. But her fame was encumbered with the pressure that came with anything one-of-a-kind, a burden of responsibility to ensure she was a good role model.
‘It’s really hard,’ she said. ‘There aren’t that many people on TV like myself who have changed from a man to woman, so it’s difficult. It’s very hard for people in Japan to relate to me and to understand what I’ve been through. Japan’s very behind in this area. Japanese people can’t seem to understand why you’d want to change your sex. So in order to educate people – but in a fun way! – I do a lot of comedy and talk shows to help Japanese people understand. Nowadays, most people look at me as a person, instead of being a Person Who’s Been Through a Sex Change, which is good.’
That week alone, she had done product promotions in Tokyo and Hokkaido, had her regular appearances on TBS and NTV, had worked on a music video and released her second major CD single, ‘Crazy Love’, a song that – like most J-pop – was maddeningly stupid and infuriatingly catchy. Her voice was autotuned and low in the mix and the video was sexy without being sexual. It showed Haruna Ai, with four back-up dancers, first in a gown made of silver with head jewels, then a cheerleading outfit, then a pants-and-hat tomboy outfit, then finally a pink cocktail outfit made of feathers. It had no narrative and made no sense. The edits were annoying and epileptic, and the song immediately bored into my brain like some terrible parasite:
I’m so crazy
Crazy crazy for you
Need you baby
Baby baby
It’s you
Sweet lord, the song was hideous. Even so, no one could hold this against Haruna Ai.
Recently, she had raced a charity marathon after the public nominated her as the person they most wanted to see run.
‘The marathon was thirty-five kilometres, they could only choose one person, and I was selected to do it!’ Haruna Ai said, squealing. ‘In high school, I tried not to exercise a lot, so this was a big challenge for me.’ By the end of the race, Haruna Ai’s make-up had completely melted off and it looked as though someone had taken a blowtorch to her face. Yet for a woman whose fame rested mostly on her appearance, she didn’t seem that bothered – sweating and ghoulish, she was still giggling and pumping her fists in the air. And nor did other people seem to care.
After an hour, Haruna Ai apologised for having to leave and handed us complimentary copies of ‘Crazy Love’ before posing for photos, then made some phone calls. Dinner would be waiting for us at one of her restaurants, she said. After a series of giggling bows and hand-clutching, she disappeared out of the studio, into her private life, and I knew I’d never see her again, except on television.
It was only later that I’d listen to our interview and realise that it had gone awfully. When we weren’t giggling like idiots, I spent most o
f the time apparently trying to hack up my lung. We didn’t talk about anything important whatsoever. Haruna Ai skimmed over her love life and ducked any questions that were overtly political. But I also realised that I didn’t care. Haruna Ai wasn’t about serious conversation. She was about fun.
‘Educate people,’ she had exclaimed, ‘but in a fun way!’ She came off as sweet and lightheaded, but perhaps that was her gift: you never forgot she was transsexual, but by being so captivating, so lovable, so friendly, her sexual identity ceased being her sole gimmick. That, in and of itself, was kind of genius.
In Japan, there is one TV set for every 1.2 people, making it one of the most dense television-owning populations in the world. Despite the country being at the forefront of technological wizardry and craft, television remains by far the most influential and popular medium. Even on subways and trains, people watch vodcasts of their favourite shows on phones and MP3 players, while some remain resolutely old-school and watch live TV on analogue portables the size of small bricks, antennae stretched and hovering over fellow train passengers like giant praying mantises.
For me, bedridden with whooping cough, it was a beautiful thing to know that at any moment of the day, I could flick through the channels and discover some of the most flamboyantly mincing personalities this fine country had to offer. After the morning news, there was my friend Bourebonne-san, providing his snappy, tongue-in-cheek commentary about the day’s events. Prime time took us to Haruna Ai, dancing and chatting and giggling away. On the nights when I was coughing so hard I thought I’d vomit, I’d while away my insomnia by watching the delightfully hammy sprite KABA.Chan, who told me about the best handbags, vacuum cleaners, portable GPS devices and slimming tights Japan’s premier home-shopping program had to offer. From Japan’s helmet-haired transgender make-up artist Ikko to gay aerobics instructor Chris Matsumura (think Japan’s answer to Richard Simmons), no one ever needed to have a boring straight moment with Japanese television: it was just one big, exploding rainbow poof of colour!
I didn’t really have a problem with this. For a start, it was stupidly entertaining, and a lot of gay men out there just were that hyper-camp. Still, I worried about the absence of anything else. No lesbians, no transsexual men and no gay men out of drag. No LGBT people taken seriously. All the men were wacky, but never sexual. What happened to people’s headspace when they saw gay men only as camp drag queens on TV, or read about them only as aliens and wizards in comic books? And what impact did this have on young queer Japanese teenagers? So much of queerness in Japan seemed to be a performance for straight people. When the televisions were finally turned off, most straight people went about their business assuming that they didn’t know any queer people themselves. For the country with the most colourful television in the world, Japan felt like it was only just coming out of the black-and-white era.
MALAYSIA
In which we meet Christian and Muslim fundamentalists who treat homosexuality as an affliction that can be cured. Key quote: ‘Don’t tell me, “It’s okay for women to be with women, for men to be with men.” It’s not okay. It’s in the scriptures. It’s against nature.’ Time spent singing while researching this chapter: forty-five minutes.
IS IT POSSIBLE TO stop being a lesbian? Get straightened out? Un-gayed? De-faggoted? I’ve met people who say it can be done. If you’re struggling with unwanted same-sex desires – and the key word is ‘unwanted’ – you’ll be relieved to know that it’s possible to become an ex-homosexual, walking proud and straight down the path of hetero-righteousness. They’ve seen it happen to others and it’s happened to them. All you need, they say, is willpower. Willpower and faith.
They didn’t hate gays or lesbians. How could they, when they had been one themselves? And no one was born homo sexual, they told me. People became gay. No one knew how, exactly, but there seemed to be a lot of different factors: traumatic childhood experiences like abuse, parental neglect, divorce, teasing, the time you accidentally shat your pants when you were nine, and that other time when you were six and that girl chased you around the playground and kissed you on the mouth – which was, you now realise, actually a form of sexual molestation. There was no need to worry, though, because just as people became gay, anyone could become ex-gay too.
It’s possible, my friends. Believe.
At ten o’clock on a Sunday, the canal-lined streets of Melaka were unusually quiet, but the Real Love Ministry had already started its morning service. On the walls of the building’s stairwell, glittery craft letters spelled out ‘REAL ♥’ and ‘www.r-l-m.com’, and Hillsong soft-rock melodies wafted through the building. I took off my shoes, opened the doors and was immediately knocked back by the force of song.
‘We wanna see Jesus lifted high,’ people sang, ‘a banner that flies across this land!’
There were just twenty people in the room – mostly adults, some kids, a couple of elderly ladies – who all smiled, still singing, as I entered. A small band led the hymns on electric guitars, drums and bass, while a rosy-cheeked Chinese-Malaysian woman named Judith sang into the mic.
We wanna see [clap-clap-clap]
We wanna see [clap-clap-clap]
We wanna see Jesus lifted high!
Usually, I was uncomfortable with public singing unless I was drunk, but this song was infuriatingly catchy. Any song that featured prominent handclaps tended to win me over.
RLM’s church was the size of a standard classroom. Ambience-wise, it was more like a corporate call centre than a sacred place of worship. The hospital-grade fluoro lighting made it feel antiseptic, but the smiles and songs warmed the place right up. As I shuffled into one of the back seats, four kids sitting up front turned around to wave to me excitedly. One curly-haired mop of a girl giggled with sugar-rush excitement.
‘Hi!’ I mouthed, waving.
She turned to her friend and mimed squealing. This was Pastor Edmund’s seven-year-old daughter, Angel. Next to her was her six-year-old brother, Ethan. He waved too, showing off white teeth and squeezable baby gopher cheeks.
It was easy to spot Pastor Edmund and his wife, Amanda. They were standing in the front row, dancing to the music and singing the loudest. I recognised them from a Malaysian Women’s Weekly profile I’d read online, branded with the headline: ‘TRUE CONFESSION: My Husband Only Liked Men until He Met Me. Is this Malaysia’s most controversial marriage?’ The story’s lead read: ‘Until twelve years ago, Edmund Smith led a homosexual lifestyle. Now he’s happily married and a father of two. Here’s the story of his remarkable journey.’
And it was a remarkable journey. Edmund’s mother had wished for a daughter and sometimes dressed Edmund in girls’ clothes. Looking back, Edmund told the magazine reporter, this completely messed up his sexual hard-wiring. Things got worse after Edmund was sent to an all-boys school at the age of twelve and found like-minded company.
‘I found ten other boys who were just as girly,’ he said. ‘By the time I was thirteen, I was already leading a wild life with sexual escapades on stairways and at the homes of my lovers.’
Later, Edmund told me that until the age of twenty-four, he was what you would call a rampant homosexual, involved in gay cruising and gay clubs and gay sex and gay orgies and gay prostitution (generally just being super-gay, really), before a bad break-up led him to decide he’d had enough of the whole gay thing. He sought religious therapy through Choices, an ex-gay ministry in Singapore, and soon after married Amanda, who’d been his best friend since they’d taught together at a school for disabled kids.
Edmund hadn’t turned back since then. In fact, he’d gone on to build his career around his story of sexual brokenness, travelling throughout Malaysia and preaching his good news of sexual metamorphosis, insisting anyone could change. He had no less than three Facebook pages dedicated to his work. On his personal Facebook page, Edmund used the ‘relationship’ feature to list all his friends as his brothers, sisters, cousins, ‘spiritual children’ and ‘spiritual grandchild
ren’. He also listed his favourite shows: American Idol, Glee, Desperate Housewives and Oprah. In his bio, he wrote:
I am a Child of God. I am a real man. I love Jesus & Jesus loves me … no, more than that. Jesus is crazy about me. I am happily married to the most beautiful woman in MY world. I am blessed with 2 gifted kids. I have a great spiritual family! Highly Favored! Deeply Loved! Greatly Blessed!
Now at his church, the Hillsong hymn was finishing as a lone guitar continued to strum gently. Amanda came on-stage to lead us through a loud, ecstatic prayer. An ethnically Indian woman with thick black curls, Amanda had a maternal beauty, the kind of comforting face you’d want by your bedside if you were a kid with a tummy ache.
‘Thank you, Jesus!’ she said, eyes closed, microphone to her mouth. ‘Thank you, Lord! We worship you this morning, O Lord!’
People raised their hands as if testifying. In the front row, Pastor Edmund bowed with both hands held up by his face, mumbling incoherently.
‘Shak-arajabel-ahshukelasol … ekajabelahshuk-elasshak.’
It took me a while to realise he was speaking in tongues.
‘He is the peace and light,’ Amanda said, looking ecstatic. ‘He speaks to us. Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! You know our hurt. You know our disappointment!’
‘Thank you, Jesus!’ Edmund whispered.
‘You know our desperation,’ Amanda said.
‘Your grace, Looooord,’ sang Edmund in falsetto.
‘You know secrets nobody knows! You know, Lord. You know.’
The band picked up speed again, reinforcing the lone guitar and growing in volume until they hit a riff that sounded vaguely like Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. With horror, I realised the guitar had been only a bridge between songs. The entire morning was a medley of hymns.
Dear God, I thought.
