Download 10. The Beautiful Way Homosexuality in Japan

U3A Course SBS 19/2006
“A World History of Homosexuality”; Presenter: Bob Hay
Summary Session 10:
10. The Beautiful Way
Homosexuality in Japan
The first humans entered Japan about 30,000 years ago. By about 10,000 BC they had
invented pottery, at least two thousand years before it was invented anywhere else in
the world and before even they had invented agriculture. These were the Jomon or
Ainu people. The ancestors of the Japanese however were the Yayoi, originally
Chinese people from the region of what became the Great Gobi Desert when climate
change pushed them out and down through the Korean peninsula. They brought a
knowledge of rice cultivation and metal working with them. About 300AD, a new
wave of immigrants called Kofun settled near Osaka and created the first unified
Japanese state known as Yamato. This political unity was created by a clan-based
military aristocracy which became fundamental to the social and political structure of
Japan until the Meiji Restoration in 1868.
It was during this Kofun period that Confucian and Buddhist teachers first arrived in
Japan (in 513 and 522 AD respectively), mostly again from Korea, and with them, the
art of writing. Significantly, although the Yamato court adopted Chinese writing, the
Chinese calendar and a Chinese form of government, a Constitution was imposed by
Prince Shotoku in 604 AD which effectively made Buddhism the state religion. Japan
thus became a nation with three religions, Confucian, Buddhism and their ancestral
Shinto. As far as Shinto was concerned, homosexual activity was acceptable as long
as it did not disrupt the community. Confucian beliefs did not ban homosexuality as
long as it did not conflict with one’s duty to sire children. Buddhism taught that
procreative sex was undesirable because it continued the cycle of re-birth from which
we all need to escape; however, homosexual and other non-procreative sex was
generally regarded as acceptable.
It was in the Buddhist monasteries during the latter part of the Classical age, the
Heian period, 794-1192 AD that a form of institutionalised homosexuality emerged.
This was known as nanshoku1. This is said to have been introduced from China by
the monk Kukai (774-835) who studied for a long time at monstries in T’ang Dynasty
China and from there, brought back to Japan a form of Buddhism called “True
Words” or, in Japanese, Shingon. This became the most influential form of Buddhism
in Japanese culture. As Richard Hooker2 wrote: True Words transcended speech, so
he encouraged the cultivation of artistic skills: painting, music, and gesture.
Anything that had beauty revealed the truth of the Buddha; as a result, the art of the
Hiei monks made the religion profoundly popular at the Heian court and deeply
influenced the development of Japanese culture that was being forged at that court. It
is not unfair to say that Japanese poetic and visual art begin with the Buddhist monks
of Mount Hiei and Mount Koya.
1
From the Chinese “nanse”, written with the same characters and which has the same meaning
although the Chinese did not have the same altruistic overtones as the Japanese.
2
Richard Hooker: on “World Civilisations – an Internet Classroom and Anthology”, Washington State
University at http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/ANCJAPAN/YAYOI.HTM
1
Nanshoku literally means “male colours” but is generally used to mean male-male
love and specifically refers to the practice of monks forming sexual alliances with
their younger acolytes or chigo3. Although it is generally claimed that Kukai himself
was responsible for importing nanshoku, he himself never discussed it in any of his
writings and he seems to have been an advocate for the Vinaya code whereby monks
were forbidden any form of sexual activity.
Another and more famous form of instutionalised homosexuality called wakashudo
— usually abbreviated to shudo — (the way of youth) or bi-do (the beautiful way)
also emerged in Japan among the sophisticated and socially elevated samurai. It owed
much to the nanshoku of the Buddhist monks of the Heian era, but reached its peak
during the Tokugawa shogunate which began in 1603. From then on, however, the
practice gradually declined as the country became increasingly unified and the need
for a warrior class diminished. This was a master/apprentice kind of relationship
which in many ways was like pederasty in Ancient Greece except that in wakashudo it
was the adolescent youth who sought out and wooed the older man. Also, as in
Greece, this shudo relationship did not rule out marriage because most Samurai
married but generally later in life than was common among other classes.
The traditions of both shudo and nanshoku infiltrated the high society then known as
the “Floating World”, the life in the pleasure quarters of the cities, but especially Edo
(modern Tokyo) from about the 17th until the end of the 19th centuries. This was the
world depicted in many of the famous Japanese wood-block prints, the ukiyo-e. It
was also the time when the kobuki and no theatres were at their peak of popularity
where, as in Shakespeare’s theatre, young men performed the female roles. Strange
as it might seem to us, young male faces made up in the female manner were
considered the ideal of female beauty!
Kabuki actors known as kagema, became the media stars of their day, able to charge
fortunes for their sexual favours from the wealthy patrons who pursued them. Famous
artists produced portraits of these kagema in wood-block prints known as ukiyo-e
(“pictures of the floating world”) or, where their pictures were more erotic, as shunga
(“pictures of spring”). Great artists whose names are house-hold words among
Western collectors, such as Hokusai and Hiroshige, produced works of this kind. But
the “floating world” came to an end with the more puritan Meiji Restoration in 1868
and the opening up of Japan to western influences.
In modern Japan many anime (movies) and manga (comics) contain male
homosexual stories and bedroom scenes. Since the 1970s, a genre of manga and
anime has developed especially for women fascinated by the “boy-love” theme, a
genre increasingly written and drawn by women themselves. Some say women are
attracted to these comics because in the sex between these androgenous and youthful
males, women see an equality they themselves have never known. However, despite
the plethora of images of homosexual men in the women’s media, men themselves
seem to be relatively unaffected by them. Many regard these as figments of women’s
imagination, ideals of beauty which would be unattainable in real life.
3
Gary Leupp: Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
2