There have been numerous works published by both academics and non-academics who have attempted to critique heteronormative understandings of Japan’s culture and society. The majority of such critical works have appeared since the early 1990s. In general, these works can be categorised into two streams. Some focus on the contemporary social situation facing members of sexual minorities, while others have looked at more historical contexts. Amongst many others, books such as Fushimi Noriaki’s Puraibeto gei raifu (Private gay life) (1991), and Hirano Hiroaki’s Anchi heterosekushizumu (Anti-heterosexism) (1994) were path breaking in discussing gay issues from the perspectives of Japanese gay men. In the late 1990s, several academics who were members of the abovementioned gay rights association OCCUR, published Gei sutadizu (Gay studies) (Vincent et al. 1997), the first comprehensive book in Japanese to combine academic theory and activism concerning sexual minorities. OCCUR is also known as the organisation that brought the first ever lawsuit in Japan demanding the recognition of the equal rights of sexual minorities (see Suganuma 2007). These Japanese-language publications were followed by Mark McLelland’s Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan: Cultural Myths and Social Realities (2000), and Wim Lunsing’s Beyond Common Sense: Negotiating Gender and Sexuality in Japan (2001), which were the first books in English to specifically address the contemporary social conditions affecting sexual minorities in Japan, particularly gay men.
Although fewer in number, during the 1990s books focused on lesbians in Japan also began to appear. Kakefuda Hiroko, who was a vocal opinion maker in lesbian politics, wrote ‘Rezubian’ de aru to iu koto (On being a ‘lesbian’) (1992) to critique not only homophobia in Japan, but also to scrutinise the male dominance still inherent within Japan’s sexual minority movements. In English, Sharon Chalmers’ research on lesbian communities in Tokyo, which was published as Emerging Lesbian Voices from Japan (2002), sheds light on the relatively less visible female sexual minorities. This is not to suggest that the issues of lesbians in Japan had not been discussed before the 1990s (see Maree, this volume). Several feminist publications have been in circulation since the 1970s, including Onna Erosu (Woman Eros), that included discussions of lesbian issues (see Mackie 2003: 159). More general magazines, too, have highlighted lesbian experience, most notably the popular culture magazine Bessatsu takarajima which published a special issue on lesbians, entitled ‘Onna o aisuru onnatachi no monogatari’ (Stories of women who love women) (Bessatsu takarajima 1987) in the late 1980s.
It was also during the mid-1990s that historical studies ofJapan’s same-sex eroticism started to emerge. Nanshoku (literally, ‘male colours’), an Edo-period (1603—1868) term for male-male eroticism, had been acknowledged as an important aspect of popular culture during Japan’s premodern past, but had never been the subject of academic research, except for a few bibliographic works (for instance, Iwata 1973). Furukawa Makoto’s seminal work entitled ‘The Changing Nature of Sexuality: Three Codes Framing Homosexuality in Modern Japan’, published in the US-Japan Women’s Journal in 1994, identified nanshoku as a code of ethics which was embraced by many Buddhist monks and their acolytes and was later taken up by samurai and their retainers. Furukawa’s article also traced the ways in which ideas about male-male eroticism were transformed as Japan not only encountered Western forms of sexual knowledge but also reinterpreted its own native traditions during the modernisation process of the late nineteenth century (Furukawa 1994; see also Driscoll 2005).
Gregory M. Pflugfelder’s Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950 (1999) together with Mark McLelland’s Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age (2005), provide comprehensive accounts of the history of male-male eroticism in Japan from the early modern to the contemporary era, including the post-war surge of publications addressing male hentai seiyoku (perverse sexuality) (see also Murakami and Ishida 2006). While these works have helped shed new light on the history of male-male sexuality in Japan, comparatively speaking, the amount of academic attention so far paid to female-female sexuality remains inadequate. Akaeda Kanako’s monograph entitled Kindai Nihon ni okeru onnadoshi no shinmitsu na kankei (Intimacies between women in modern Japan) (Akaeda 2011) presents a rare, but important historical study on intimate homo-erotic relationships between women since the early twentieth century.