While academic studies as well as equal rights movements for gays and lesbians in Japan have advanced since the 1990s, concerns for other sexual minorities have also been raised. Amongst these others, issues surrounding transgendered persons have garnered much public as well as academic attention since the early 2000s. The use of the term ‘transgender’ or ‘trans’ as an identity category is relatively new to the Japanese context. This does not mean that people who cross-dress or change their gender did not exist prior to the advent of a ‘transgender’ identity. In fact, Japan has a long history of cross-dressing. Mitsuhashi Junko, a social historian, has traced the genealogy of joso (males dressing in female attire) culture from the pre-modern period to the present in her book Joso to nihonjin (Male-to-female cross-dressing and the Japanese) (2008). As Mitsuhashi’s book illustrates, acts of male-to-female cross-dressing have been rather prevalent in Japanese history. Indeed in recent years many well-known male TV entertainers and celebrities openly cross-dress, including Miwa Akihiro, ‘Peter’, Matsuko Deluxe, and Mitz Mangrove. On the other hand, instances of female-to-male cross-dressing have received less acknowledgement in historical or contemporary contexts. Journalist Toyama Hitomi’s book of interviews and photographs, Misu dandi (Miss dandy) (1999), is a rare exception which discusses the lives of biological women who live and identify as men in contemporary Japanese society. Female-to-male cross-dressing culture has largely only been recognised within a particular sector of the Japanese performing arts, such as the Takarazuka, an all-female revue in which male roles have traditionally been performed by female actresses (Stickland 2008; Robertson 1998).
The rise of ‘transgender’ as an identity category since the 1990s opened up a new horizon for the Japanese perception of people who transgress gender boundaries. During the 1990s, many transgender activists mobilised to demand social as well as legal recognition of the rights of transgendered people. Some of their immediate concerns included access to national health insurance for sex reassignment surgery and the change of their official gender on legal documents. One of the most prominent transgender activists from this period was Torai Masae, a female-to-male (FtM) transgendered person. His book Onna kara otoko ni natta watashi (A woman who became a man) (1996), was one of the first monographs by an FtM transgendered person, and drew much public attention.
The rise of the transgender movement coincided with the medical institutionalisation of the diagnostic category of ‘gender identity disorder’ (GID) in Japan. It was only in 1996 that the Japanese Society ofPsychiatry and Neurology officially accepted sex reassignment surgery (SRS) as a treatment for the disorder, and it was not until 1998 that the first legal SRS was conducted in Japan for a patient diagnosed with GID. During this period, Japanese medical authorities adopted knowledge on GID mainly from Western precedents. Subsequently the Japanese government passed the Act on Special Cases for the Treatment of People with Gender Identity Disorder (hereafter GID Act) to allow post-operation GID patients to legally change their gender in the family register (the primary identity document in Japan) under certain conditions. It was through this series of medical as well as legal reforms that the identity category of ‘transgender’ entered public discourse in Japan. There has been much academic research since the late 1990s looking at the effects of these legal and social changes. Ishida Hitoshi’s edited anthology, entitled Seidoitsuseishogai: Jenda, iryo, tokureiho (Gender Identity Disorder: Gender, Medicine, and the Special Law) (2008), provides one of the most comprehensive analyses of these issues.
The strict conditions governing who could access treatment, however, led to debate within the newly emergent transgender communities over whether these reforms in fact simply perpetuated the traditional gender binary — that one must be either a man or a woman but not something in-between. In more recent years, new gender categories which cannot be contained within a binary framework have attracted attention. The notion of intersex has started to become more widely recognised in Japanese popular media — so much so that the TV drama, IS: otoko demo onna demonai sei (Intersex: the sex which is neither male nor female), which was based on a manga series written by Rokuhana Chiyo (2003—9), was broadcast in 2011. Contemporaneously, what might be termed as a non-category, X-gender has also started to gain currency within both online and offline communities in Japan. This new (non)category — neither male nor female — merits further academic attention in order to see how X-gender can relate to preceding polemics surrounding transgender people in contemporary Japan (Dale 2012).
In comparison to academic as well as public attention to the issues of gay, lesbian, and transgender cultures, little has been said about bisexuality or bisexual persons in Japan. More studies are needed to understand the range and diversity of subjects within sexual minority groups.