Turning Japanese

Gay.com UK
18 April, 2005

Turning Japanese--the East Asian alternative gives an intriguing insight into a culture steeped in history and tradition

By Lotte Jeffs

27-year-old Chris, a graphic designer from London, spent a year discovering the joys of the Japanese gay scene in Osaka and Tokyo after studying the language for his degree course. Chris, a fan of Japan's music, art, culture and people was the perfect person to fill me in on the finer points of the country's gay-etiquette before I headed eastward-ho myself:

‘Homosexuality isn't treated in a particularly negative way in Japan', Chris explains. ‘For a start there's not the same religious background as there is here, so you don't get so much animosity generally. I think it's more that the gay scene is quite hidden – it exists freely, it's just not really talked about.

You don't tend to get mixed gay and lesbian dance clubs like you do here, partly because going out dancing is not as big an activity, but also because the men and women's scenes are kept very separate.

Gay bars will have a specific purpose. People go out to eat or to karaoke if they want to meet friends. Gay bars are where you go to pick up ; that's why the idea of gay men and lesbians wanting to go out together doesn't really make sense to them.
The gay sex industry works pretty much in the same way as it does here. There are male equivalents of geishas that can be hired as hosts, but saunas are the main thing - they're everywhere!

I encountered a couple of what I presumed to be gay porn Manga comics when I was living in Osaka. But they were about men having relationships in a very romanticised way; a man comes and whisks another man off on a horse, they have long, flowing hair and sit and watch sunsets together. I found out that these comics are written for girls. Gay male porn for straight girls is a big industry in Japan.

I went to some great monthly gay nights in Osaka and Tokyo, which are worth looking out for, as a much greater variety of people turn up. They did this whole ‘shag tag' thing, but it was really detailed – there were all these symbols you had to wear to indicate your type. And then, when you wanted to post a message to someone you had to fill out this questionnaire saying, ‘I came from this place… I'm wearing this today… I'd like to meet you here… I'd like to talk about this…'

Although I didn't appear to meet anyone's exact specifications that night, I was getting the kind of attention I had got used to. There are certain stereotypes about western guys having big dicks and I quite often got groped!

Some men are interested in western guys, but the majority are really only into other East Asians. In the UK we call white guys who go out with young Asian boys ‘rice queens', in Japan they call guys who fancy English men ‘potato queens'."
According to Chris, a lot of what we know and expect from a western gay scene may be lost in translation, but the East Asian alternative gives an intriguing insight into a culture steeped in history and tradition while ever negotiating its reputation for progression and forward-thinking.