Gaysia (19 page)

Just metres away from the entrance, a DVD played in a loop showing two guys going to town on each other. Twisting themselves gymnastically into a 69 position, each reamed the other's butthole with the enthusiasm of a diner at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Although Japanese law dictated that below-the-waist orifices were to be pixelated out of pornographic films, you didn't have to work your imagination to make out what was happening. All you had to do was blur your eyes and your brain filled in the blanks.

After browsing around the sex shop, I reeled outside and almost ran into a primary school kid, skipping along with his mother after finishing the day at school. It struck me as both impressive and appalling that the only thing separating this kid from a widescreen hardcore homosexual rim-job video was a semi-sheer plastic curtain.

Welcome to Shinjuku Ni-Chome – ‘Shinjuku, Second Block' – Tokyo's premier gay hub. Shinjuku is an engine of human activity, the beating heart of Tokyo's megalopolis. Its train station is the world's busiest, with 3.5 million commuters coming through its automated turnstiles every day. At night, the district throws an epileptic fit of neon light and colour. In the midst of this fluorescent wonderland sits Ni-Chome, tiny, low-key and relatively dim, despite its international reputation as a gay enclave. Even with its clubs, bars and the famous 24-hour Kaikan male sex sauna, Ni-Chome is unassuming: a cluster of narrow grey buildings with ropey tangles of power lines stretched
between them like old vines. During the day, the place is quiet and sleepy. After lunch, fast-talking salarymen and slow-moving elderly women stroll through, seemingly oblivious to the parallel world of gay hotspots.

You had to look up. The only way you could tell Ni-Chome was any different was by the small square signs that jutted out like fins on buildings, advertising gay bars on the upper levels. These were pokey places with names like BLOKE (all caps; men only) and BAR (women only), tucked away so that you had to climb stairs and knock on the right door to get in. Because of Tokyo's insane rental prices, the bars were small and restricted their clientele by type. In Ni-Chome, there were bars for guys like me –
garisen
(skinny guys) – as well as places dedicated to
fukesen
(old men),
gaisen
(foreigners) and
debusen
(fat men). And then there were the lesbian bars, most of which banned men entirely on the basis that they usually came to ogle.

Taq's Knot was one of the oldest bars in Ni-Chome, a rare place that welcomed most gay men and even the occasional woman. It was roughly the size of an economy-class cabin on a cruise ship and could barely fit ten people at a time. The bar itself was sunken, which meant the barman looked as if he had fallen into a ditch. Behind the bar were big acrylic paintings of muscled men with giant cocks, and instead of branded match-boxes Taq's Knot offered free condoms, the wrappers featuring works by local artists. Two computer monitors played '80s music videos on repeat.

Taq Otsuka started Taq's Knot in 1982, the year I was born. Over the course of my life, Taq had seen not only Ni-Chome change, but Japan's entire gay scene evolve. Taq looked like my dad with a goatee, which was to say he looked like a 62-year-old version of me: slender, wispy-haired and boyish despite his age.
He wore a striped blue-and-white shirt over athletic cargo fatigues and sported grey hair in ruffles, giving him the appearance of a retired gay Phys Ed teacher.

When Taq was a kid, he'd read magazine articles about the fabled bars of Ni-Chome, with journalists reporting wild stories from an underground world where men dressed as women and worked as prostitutes at night.

‘I didn't have television when I was a kid,' he said, ‘so the only images I could get were from these magazines. But the impression of Shinjuku Ni-Chome itself was really negative. It was represented as abnormal, as
hentai
.'

‘What does
hentai
mean?'

‘Sort of like “queer”. But, like, the bad meaning of queer, before gay liberation. Sometimes queer is used with a positive meaning nowadays, but beforehand, queer was – how do you say? Everyone feared the word. So
that
meaning of queer.'

It wasn't like homophobia in the West. Japanese attitudes were more ambivalent, more evasive and unspoken. Throughout the country's history, there had been cultural precedents for sex between men, specific relationship dynamics to which our modern-day notions of ‘homosexual', ‘gay' and ‘transgender' didn't much apply. Centuries ago, adolescent male prostitution took place around kabuki sites in Kyoto, while sexual relationships between samurai masters and apprentices, and priests and page boys had occurred since the eighteenth century. One famous poem featuring same-sex male longing –
Iwatsutsuji
(‘Azaleas on the Cliffs') – dated back to the ninth century. It wasn't anything new.

‘Japanese people see gay people as shameful, but not
sinful
,' Taq said. ‘There has never been anything against gay people. As long as they're invisible, they'll be tolerated.'

When Taq first encountered television as a young adult, there was hardly anything gay to be seen. Then in the 1990s, Taq noticed big changes. In fact, the Japanese media was suddenly caught up in an intense public fascination with gay men on screen, which became so noticeable that there was even a special term for it:
gei būmu –
literally, a ‘gay boom'. Viewers loved gay characters. Movies and TV programs showcased them, and plotlines in comedies and dramas saw gay men accidentally marrying women (whoops!) or women becoming their fag hags. It was all very festive and family-friendly. On television, gay talent –
gei tarento –
was suddenly everywhere. Still, Taq felt something was missing.

‘They're characters, like men dressing up as women. But there's no
real
gay people who behave like men who say, “I really like men.”'

‘Only a very specific type of gay person is seen on Japanese television?'

Taq nodded. ‘Colourful, feminine and over-acting. It's a kind of like – how would you say?' Taq searched his mind for an English term, but came up with a Japanese one instead:
onee
, pronounced ‘oh-neh-eh'. It meant ‘older sister'. Sassy drag queens, camp gay men and giggling transsexuals, they were all
onee
: camp, feminine, hilarious and weirdly sexless. They presented themselves as happy little eunuchs, like Japan's first gay celebrities, Piko and Osugi, twin brothers who declared themselves gay back in the 1970s, but insisted they were celibate to make everyone comfortable.

‘From a Western point of view,' Taq said, ‘there seem to be a lot of gay characters on Japanese TV, right?'

I nodded.

‘You must think, “Good: Japanese gays are on TV!” So you
are gay and entertain me? Okay! But if you are gay and insist on changing the legal system? No. It's vague what Japanese society is willing to do. Japanese culture tries to avoid conflict.'

Sure, homosexuality was legal in Japan, Western-style homophobia wasn't rampant and TV programming was relentlessly faggy, but coming out as gay or lesbian in real life was still very difficult. Talking about sexuality – actual queer sexuality, what being gay actually meant – was generally taboo. Seen in a bigger context, the situation struck me as slightly sinister: queer celebrities going on-screen to have millions of viewers laugh at them, but knowing viewers couldn't care less once the TVs were off.

When I asked Taq to list the most famous gay people on Japanese TV right now, he laughed and pretended to be overwhelmed.

‘Oh, there are so many!' he said. ‘There's Ikko-san, Matsuko-san, Bourebonne-san …'

Taq had to say Bourebonne-san, of course. Bourebonne-san was an old friend who worked at Taq's Knot when he wasn't appearing on television or rehearsing for his live drag queen variety show. Bourebonne-san's star was on the rise, Taq explained, and he also had a powerful friend and mentor in Matsuko Deluxe, a gloriously obese 140-kilogram drag queen who was one of the most renowned TV personalities. A self-described ‘fat transvestite columnist', Matsuko Deluxe was loved for her luxurious silken-tofu fat rolls and ability to shoot off rapid-fire jokes and double entendres. She was currently everywhere as part of Fuji TV's autumn marketing campaign and also advertised pizza, a mobile phone company, Nintendo games and her own chocolate-filled biscuits that came imprinted with a cartoon image of herself. If Bourebonne-san wanted to be famous, having Matsuko Deluxe on call would
help enormously.

‘So is Bourebonne-san becoming really famous now?' I said.

‘Mmm …' Taq said. He laughed teasingly. ‘
Becoming
.'

After talking to Taq, I took myself to a local 24-hour
sento
, a traditional public bathhouse where men and women separated before soaking in communal mineral baths and broiling their skin in the sauna. Although surrounded by naked, sweating Japanese men, I kept my attention focused squarely on the encased flatscreen television. It was tuned into a format that dominated the airways: variety-news shows. These followed a simple formula: the news of the day with a panel of celebrity guests. As raw footage reeled off – plane crashes, disgraced sports stars leaving court, political speeches, baby animals being born in zoos – a small box in the corner of the screen stayed on the celebrities' faces for their reactions: Nodding Concern, Startled Delight, Breathless Laughter, Muted Shock, Considered Listening, Silent Crying over Something Very Moving and Poignant. The celebrities' reactions provided a sort of emotional laugh track for the audience: when to feel sad, when to chuckle.

As always, there was one ultra-camp gay man on the panel. It was almost a prerequisite to have at least one
onee
on board. They were on morning shopping programs and late-night variety shows, or advertising dolphin-shaped toilet cleaners and demonstrating the latest in flower-arranging techniques. All this visibility had to be a good thing, I thought. In a nation of fickle viewers,
gei būmu
seemed here to stay, having outlasted the TV fads for fatties, women with massive tits, washed-up popstars and lawyers-slash-comedians. But it seemed odd that real-life queer rights hadn't grown with this trend. I decided to track down the gay stars, one by one, and find out what they thought: whether they saw themselves as offering a
sort of gay minstrel show, or whether there was more to them than that. I took out my dictaphone and notepad and started calling people, knowing I was out to violate an unspoken rule:
gei tarento
won't speak about their private lives, and journalists don't ask, to save audiences from extending their imagination in that direction.

As the weeks went on, I realised I'd seriously underestimated the difficulty of my assignment. One problem was my utter lack of written or spoken Japanese. I would scour celebrities' official websites for contact details and forcibly mash the Japanese script through Google Translate, only to get not-quite-right translations that I'd have to squint to read, such as ‘Cultural Tours pre-Haruna love and go!' and ‘For inquiries, Avex Entertainment, Inc. Medium and delivered in record straight!' When a couple of translators came on board, they made phone calls and sent countless emails on my behalf, while I prepped for interviews and pored over the bare details of these celebrities' private lives. It felt as though we were running a gossip rag.

We approached Akihiro Miwa, the beloved TV drag queen in her mid seventies, who was always accompanied on-screen by flowers and a Barbara Cartland glow. There was also KABA. Chan (real name: Eiji Kabashima), a choreographer, member of the music group DOS and contestant on Japan's
Dancing with the Stars
. We tried accessing Shogo Kariyazaki, the famous gay TV florist (a Japanese speciality), and someone named JONTE'
Moaning, an American drag queen modelled after Grace Jones who had somehow made it big in the Land of the Rising Sun.