Shinjuku Boys and Dream Girls

Following up on last night's discussion of Queer Japan, I watched the documentary Shinjuku Boys (1995, Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams) which presents the lives of  three FTM transgender people who work at a onabe host club in Shinjuku. It's a lovely film whose subjects speak candidly about their lives and work. Longinotto also directed Dream Girls, a documentary on the Takarazuka Revue School, an all-female musical theater company where women play both male and female roles.

Queer Japan

For another Meet-Up film discussion group, I watched the documentary film Queer Japan (dir. Graham Kolbeins 2019).

It gives very broad and rich survey of today's LGBTQ world in Japan, featuring interviews with at least three dozen people, representing a variety of experiences and identities.  It is somewhat less satisfying in terms of contextualizing the particularities of same-sex relations in Japan, or connecting today's queer practices to existing cross-dressing dramatic traditions like kabuki or takarazuka, or to the history of same-sex practices among samurai and monks, but I really enjoyed it and learned a lot.

Here's an interview with the director Kolbeins and producer Anne Isshi:

The Japanese language itself organizes gender through speech practices in a highly complex fashion, that is both dynamic and evolving. Negotiating the many subject pronouns and how they indicate nuances of gendered speech is a challenge to Japanese language-learners.  Gendered speech patterns exist on a spectrum from feminine extreme patterns to a masculine extreme, in  pronoun use, vocabulary, intonation, and sentence endings. These are not rigid rules for how all men and women should speak; instead they can be understood as situations and ideas about how men and women can speak, and be positioned in relation to ideas about gender (as well as age, degree of familiarity, formality, relative social status, etc).

Our group wrestled with the fact that the film is made from a Western perspective for a primarily non-Japanese audience, and most of us have relatively little experience with Japanese language and culture, so it is difficult to recognize how much we are missing. Since the film interviewed people about how they name their experiences and identities, we saw how some terms are adaptations of English terms, but when Japanese terms were used, we couldn't see from the subtitles what we were missing in translations. This article gives a thorough overview of Japanese gender and sexuality terms, and gives an idea of how they do and don't map onto foreign ideas.