Japan is, needless to say, a country of diverse ethnicities and nationalities, despite claims to the contrary. The popular assumption which says that Japan is a culturally homogeneous nation only perpetuates the myth of a distinctive ‘Japaneseness’ at the expense of ethnic and national minorities living in the country (Befu 2001). Immoderate reliance on the binary opposition of Japan and the West (usually understood as North America), by activists and academics alike, can be complicit in the construction of a monolithic image of Japan’s queer culture. It is often assumed that most of the discourses on sexual orientation and gender identification in Japan concern only ethnically Japanese members of sexual minority groups. Regrettably, there have been few discussions of ethnic and national diversity, particularly within the history of Japan’s activism for gay men or transgenders alike, including in some of the texts introduced above.
In contrast, the issues of ethnic and national minorities in Japan have been far more vocally addressed within lesbian communities. For instance, one of the first ‘coming-out’ books by a lesbian author in Japan was Izumo Marou’s Manaita no ue no koi (Love on the chopping board) (1993). Izumo’s book not only addresses the great difficulty of living as a lesbian in Japan, but also of pursuing a same-sex relationship with a non-Japanese partner.
In 2005, a large-scale conference on queer studies in Asia was held in Bangkok. The First International Conference of Asian Queer Studies was indicative of the ever-increasing academic attention being given to queer cultures in Asia, and the success of the conference pointed to the much-anticipated need to call into question the hegemony of Anglophone materials and discourses within queer studies and theories (Martin et al. 2008). However the Asian queer studies conference was not the first attempt to create an inter-Asia network for queer peoples and cultures. In 1990, the first conference of the Asian Lesbian Network (ALN) was also held in the city of Bangkok. ALN was conceived in reaction to the perceived hegemony of white lesbians in some international lesbian organisations, and the network’s purpose was to recognise diverse lesbian cultures and communities and to facilitate inter-regional dialogues within Asia. Japan was the host country for the second ALN conference, which was held in 1992.
The organisers of the ALN conference in Japan met with criticism for being ethnocentric and insensitive to the issues of ethnic minorities within lesbian communities resident in Japan. One of the most vocal criticisms was made by a zainichi (resident-Korean) lesbian participant at the conference, who argued that there was a general assumption throughout the conference that all lesbians who lived in Japan were people of Japanese descent. Needless to say, zainichi Koreans are ethnic as well as social minorities in Japan. The term refers to the descendents of those who were relocated to Japan from the Korean peninsula during the colonial period (1910—45), and also to later waves of migrants from Korea known as ‘newcomers’ (see Chapman 2008). Iino Yuriko’s monograph, Rezubian de aru ‘watashi tachi’ no suton (The stories of lesbians ‘ourselves’) (2008) devotes an entire chapter to the incident at the ALN conference in Japan, pointing to the importance of taking into consideration the intersections of sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality in understanding what might otherwise be perceived as a singular queer culture in Japan (see also Iino 2006).