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Forbidden Colors

2018; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 35; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/07402775-6894792

1936-0924

HIROAKI SATO,

Japanese History and Culture

The most notable legal case involving homosexuality in Japan took place two decades ago, and it had to do with Yukio Mishima—the man of letters who bewildered the world in 1970 by choosing to die by seppuku, accompanied by a young man, in a meticulously staged spectacle. I, long a resident of New York City, didn’t notice the lawsuit until a decade ago, and I did then only because I was working on a book about Mishima—to be exact, expanding and reshaping an existing biography by Inose Naoki that I had initially taken on as a translation. The extensive adaptation was necessary because the original did not do full justice to the man who resembled his U.S. contemporary Gore Vidal in “the range, variety, and publicness of the career,” as Vidal himself put it.The lawsuit was brought by Mishima’s daughter Noriko and his son Iichiro, in 1998, against Jiro Fukushima’s novel, The Sword and the Cold Carthamin (Tsurugi to Kanbeni). The book included, without permission, 15 letters their father had written to Fukushima, an act that infringed copyright law, they contended. But, to many observers, copyright wasn’t really Noriko and Iichiro’s concern. Rather, it was what Fukushima described in his book: his sexual relationship with Mishima.According to Fukushima’s account, his relations with Mishima began in 1951 when he, a poor 21-year-old student, visited the already famous 26-year-old author at his residence to ask after the identity of a gay bar that Mishima had written about in Forbidden Colors (Kinjiki), a novel he was serializing in a monthly magazine. Mishima casually welcomed his visitor in and Fukushima soon became a live-in student in the Mishima household and good friends with the author’s parents. His relations with Mishima would last, on and off, until 1966. (Another Mishima visitor, photographer Eikoh Hosue, shot the image illustrating this piece after the author invited him to his house. Upon arrival, Hosue looked around the garden, noticed the tools, and asked Mishima to pose with any of them in any way he wanted, naked or half-naked.)Fukushima had initially been drawn to Mishima’s 1949 book, Confessions of a Mask (Kamen no Kokuhaku), a palpably autobiographical story. It details the narrator’s life from birth to youth—his first ejaculation over an illustration of Guido Reni’s painting of St. Sebastian; his enchantment with manly young men; his refusal, as a college freshman, to marry a woman. Reading Confessions had shaken Fukushima “as if a pill resembling a toxin, thrown into my body, had quickly spurted up blue bubbles, without melting, and spread throughout me.”It must be pointed out that Fukushima, along with his publisher, Bungei Shunju, was deliberately provocative. Fukushima called The Sword and the Cold Carthamin a “novel” but made no effort to fictionalize, going so far as to use real names; Mishima, in contrast, had never done the same, even in Confessions. And Fukushima’s publisher had advertised the book as a straight autobiography with Mishima as the main subject. Thus, even though there was no precedent determining that the copyright law covered letters, the court recognized the plaintiffs’ argument. The publisher appealed, but a higher court reaffirmed the decision.For Mishima’s heirs, however, the win was not so much pyrrhic as counterproductive. If their intent was to hide their father’s sexual preferences, the legal fracas magnified it. Japan’s major newspapers—which sell between 3 and 10 million copies a day—each devoted many columns to the case. Also, the court order to retrieve all unsold copies of The Sword and the Cold Carthamin from booksellers proved to be impossible in practical terms. The book was readily available for years afterward.There had been earlier attempts to suppress public knowledge of Mishima’s erotic preferences. Most notably, in the mid-70s, Mishima’s wife, Yoko, had blocked the Japanese translation of John Nathan’s Mishima: A Biography (1974), which detailed Mishima’s sexual activities. (A new edition of the translation was published in 2000.) It was with Yoko’s action in mind that, after the court decisions, the moderately conservative historian of modern Japan Ken’ichi Matsumoto suggested that Noriko and Iichiro should be more “relaxed” about their father’s sexuality—a comment that likely reflected the general attitude among Japanese readers.It should be stressed that the Mishima lawsuit, as charged by the plaintiffs, was about copyright infringement, not about sex. Since the 1947 Constitution guaranteed freedom of “speech, press, and all other forms of expression” (Article 21), there have been some prominent sex cases, beginning with a translation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (brought in 1951; dismissed in 1957), but all had to do with obscenity. As writer Donald Richie, a long-term observer of Japanese culture, noted in a 2008 review of Sparkling Rain, a lesbian story collection, “In Japan, homosexuality has never, strictly speaking, been criminalized and is, even now, legal unless it is done where it can be seen, in which case it becomes criminal gross indecency.”Two years before his suicide, Mishima penned a preface to Tamotsu Yato’s collection of photographs, Naked Festival (Hadaka Matsuri). Yato’s subject was Somin-sai, one of “the three great naked festivals” that originated in eighth-century Shinto ablution and crop rites, and historically required all male participants to be totally exposed. But, as Mishima wrote in his preface, attitudes toward these festivals changed in the mid-19th century, when after ending its semi-isolationist policy, Japan felt it necessary to suppress or downplay some of its own “barbaric” customs and traditions—especially ones frowned upon by Americans and Europeans, like baring flesh in public.Another “barbaric” Japanese custom that Mishima could have mentioned but did not was male homosexuality—something that certainly struck the Europeans who arrived in Japan for the first time in the mid-16th century. The Japanese, wrote Jesuit priest Alessandro Valignano, indulged in “great dissipation in the sin that does not bear mentioning.” Another Jesuit, Juan Fernández, reported that “committing sodomy with a boy did not cause him any discredit or his relatives any dishonor, because he had no virginity to lose and in any case sodomy was not a sin.”It wasn’t just Europeans who were struck by Japanese openness toward gay male love; so was the Korean scholar and scribe Shin Yu-han, who accompanied his country’s diplomatic entourage to Japan in 1719. He is noted for An Account of Traveling Across the Sea, a fascinating report packed with acute observations on the Japanese. But it was in his diary that we find his comments on the prevalent Japanese custom of flaunting homosexual love.“The sensuality of Japan’s male prostitutes is double that of female allure,” Shin wrote. (“Male prostitutes” is his term, but most were more like “kept men” or simply lovers.) “All over Japan, men older than 14 or 15 who are comely and beautiful have their glossy hair rolled up, their faces made up with cosmetics and covered with colorful cloths,” he marveled. “The fragrances, rare waist ornaments, and other tools for decoration spent on them alone are worth a thousand gold coins.” And they are pampered and indulged by all the men who can afford them, “lords, down to regular people.” This disgusted Shin partly because he found Japanese women to be attractive: “like dolls, sensuous and elegant.”At that point, Europeans—and Koreans, for that matter—did not have the influence to impose their taboos and inhibitions on Japan. As important, the Japanese did not regard the European visitors as more advanced or civilized. “The Japanese have a high opinion of themselves because they think that no other nation can compare with them as regards weapons and valor, and so they look down on all foreigners,” reported Francis Xavier, a co-founder of the Society of Jesus, who arrived in Japan in 1549. Japan was then at the height of samurai culture, and the samurai, like the ancient Greeks, took pederasty as a matter of fact.That situation had changed by the time the second wave of Europeans arrived in Japan, in the mid-19th century. Like the first wave three centuries earlier, they were Christians, many of them missionaries, but now they were regarded as holders of superior “civilization and enlightenment,” a term the Japanese adopted as a social slogan. After all, they, arriving with a fleet of mere four warships, had forced Japan to open itself to the world. These Europeans found gay male love particularly repugnant. The Japanese leaders responded and created a “sodomy crime” (keikan-zai) in 1872. The law was dropped shortly after, but the new governing milieu continued to curb displays of homosexual love.After a brief period of hedonism in the 1920s and an era of heavy-handed chauvinism and militarism in the 1930s that included an attempted coup d’état in 1936, Japan’s defeat in World War II ushered in another set of value changes. The U.S.-led occupation began by destroying the very institutions that had enabled Japan’s survival for the preceding 90 years: the powerful military and the constitutional monarchy, which depended on emperor-worship. The new Constitution, framed by New Deal idealists, turned the emperor into an ambiguous “symbol” and abolished the military. The U.S. soon started backpedaling some of its policies, but most Japanese felt the defeat spelled a complete reversal in social values, at least for a while, with many equating American “democracy” with “freedom.” Sex became far more open. However, the occupation also increased American interest in Japan, as it did Japanese interest in America. Mishima visited the United States several times, once living in New York City for half a year while in talks about staging one of his plays on Broadway. With half a dozen of his novels translated and published in this country before his death, and because of the “publicness” of his actions, he became the best-known Japanese in the United States at the time.Mishima lived his life with discipline and intensity, as if possessed, sweeping through the Japan of the 1950s and 1960s like a whirlwind. He turned out essays, short stories, novels, and plays (about 70 in total, practically all of them staged in his lifetime), one after another, covering a wide range of subject matters—boxing, dramaturgy, military policy, manga, traveling, homage to women (including his own mother), the art of writing, the body, and death, to name a few. He did not deal just with homosexual love in his novels, but also with young love modeled on Daphnis and Chloë, in The Sounds of Waves (1954); a window’s murderous lust, in Thirst for Love (1950); love between an old politician and a geisha, in After the Banquet (1960), which, incidentally, provoked Japan’s first privacy lawsuit; and a gentle, tragic love set at the height of the peerage, in Spring Snow (1969). Mishima was versatile, and over the course of his career, his treatment of love both challenged social norms and anticipated changes to come.In more recent decades, especially since around the time Mishima’s heirs sued Jiro Fukushima and his publisher, the rights of sexual minorities have come to the fore. For example, in 2009, a nonprofit called ReBit was formed, its founders explaining that the name of the organization comes from an abbreviation of its mission to keep “pushing LGBT awareness repeatedly, a little bit each time.” Though the first case of “gay marriage” was announced in Japan back in 1968, a year before the Stonewall Riots occurred in New York City, it was no more than a personal declaration, with no legal standing. It was not until 2015 that the Shibuya Ward of Tokyo (a Tokyo ward is similar to a New York City borough) became the first Japanese municipality to legally recognize “the relation corresponding to marriage,” the equivalent of civil partnership. Since then at least six other municipalities have taken similar steps, and last year, a law professor started a national campaign to legalize same-sex marriage. Still, the poet Tatsuhiko Ishii tells me that Japan remains “a backward country” when it comes to this issue.In a small, informal survey of my friends in Japan, I found that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual issues seldom grab headlines in Japan the way they do in the United States. As Paul de Vries, an Australian writer and longtime resident of Japan, suggests, it may be that keeping such matters quiet “nicely fits into the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ culture of Japan.” On the other hand, Chihiro Takagaki, a film critic, observes that nowadays there are many aspiring actors vying for gay roles. She adds that in October 2017, the daily business newspaper Nikkei—called Japan’s Wall Street Journal—chose Kenzo Takada to write its famous “My Resume” column, and the fashion designer discussed his male partner matter-of-factly, as well as his associations with Andy Warhol, Karl Lagerfeld, and Yves Saint Laurent. In the past, the column picked mostly business leaders and other famous people who at least appeared straight.Culturally and traditionally, there have been, and are, considerable differences between Japan and Western countries. At the same time, from the start of its history Japan has always sought and adopted foreign institutions, manners, and customs, as appropriate, while creating schisms and contradictions as a result. In the case of homosexuality, you might say that Japan’s traditional acceptance is beginning to merge with Western legalism.