Gaysia (22 page)

‘Viewers said a lot of things, but mostly they said they felt alone,' he said. ‘Not all of them, but most of them. Some of
them are very happy people. They had come out to their families already, had good, accepting parents and friends. But especially in regional, rural areas, they felt terribly isolated. Some of them were trapped in families that didn't accept their situation at all. They didn't have anyone to talk to and felt extremely alone, like no one was like them. Some people wrote in, talking about how much they disgusted themselves, that they could barely admit it to themselves that they were gay.'

It wasn't common for
Haato O Tsunago
to touch on the same topic again soon afterwards, but Miyata-san knew immediately they had to do another show on LGBT issues. It was the kind of viewer response you couldn't ignore.

Something else unexpected started to happen. Young people from Tokyo and beyond began to make treks to sit in the NHK studio audience on the days of filming. Some were members of queer campus groups from nearby universities, but a lot were young people who came by themselves. Some even allowed themselves to be interviewed on camera, though they asked to have their faces blurred and their voices altered, in case their parents or bosses recognised them. In time,
Haato O Tsunago
became synonymous with LGBT issues. One of the country's most stuffy and conservative TV stations found itself a driving force in disseminating information about queer sexuality. Slowly, things were starting to change.

Let's put it crudely. If there was a hierarchy of queer visibility in Japan, lesbians would be at the bottom, nowhere to be seen. Very camp gay men and drag queens were everywhere. But ruling over everyone, with her recently won beauty pageant sceptre
in her hand, was someone entirely different: the undisputed reigning queen of Japanese television and pop music, post-op transsexual woman, bubblegum princess … ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Haruna Ai!

I had met Haruni Ai briefly while trailing the Miss Tiffany's pageant in Thailand. In Japan, I tried getting back in touch with her, only to discover that she was a huge star, like, absolutely-impossible-to-interview huge. Besides her weekly TV appearances across several stations, she also had a major recording deal and was the CEO of a chain of successful restaurants, popular with artists, media types and young cigarette-smoking hipsters.

Among queer people in Japan, opinions were split on Haruna Ai. Most loved the fact that one of the most famous TV personalities in Japan was a transsexual woman. In a country that had only legalised sex-change procedures in the past decade, her rise to become an adored mainstream darling was startling. Others had reservations.

‘With people like Haruna Ai,' Maeda Ken told me, ‘the audience generally likes them because they're easy to understand. They're soft and fun, friendly and happy.' I got the sense his feelings toward her were ambivalent at best. Yuki Keiser didn't mind Haruna Ai, but felt
tarento
like her weren't challenging anyone's perception of sex or gender roles. If anything, she reinforced them.

‘Gender binary pressure is very strong in Japan,' Yuki said. ‘If you want to generalise, women in Japan have to act in certain ways. Transsexuals are more accepted, because they fit into those ideas. Haruna Ai is very feminine and wants to please men.'

For instance, Yuki told me about one TV segment where Haruna Ai told the audience that she never put her right earring
in with her right hand, or her left earring with her left. Her tip: it was more elegant and appealing to men to ensure your arms crossed over at all times: right hand inserting the left earring; left hand inserting the right. ‘She puts them in crossways because it's cuter for men,' Yuki said, shaking her head slightly.

For weeks, I emailed Haruna Ai's management trying to lock in an interview, but my butchered quasi-Japanese emails got me nowhere. ‘Please respond to this email with a simple question mark (?) if you cannot read English,' I wrote at the bottom of emails in pre-translated Japanese. ‘I will arrange a Japanese translation of the email as soon as possible.'

Then someone told me to get in touch with a man called F. Kasai. I sent Kasai-san a long and respectful interview request in English, and his reply came back. It was short and blunt, haiku-like in its succinct beauty:

i say your order for HARUNA AI office

but she is very very busy TV star

she can not return soon

My heart sank. I sent more emails to Kasai-san and left messages on his phone. I pursued Haruna Ai's TV station reps, producers and Japanese record label. My translators made phone calls on my behalf. Everything I did encountered dead ends.

Walking through Tokyo's autumn-chilled streets, Haruna Ais hovered around me, peering out from magazines on new-stands and CDs in record shops. I was getting sick and coughed violently into my fist, feeling stupid for having even tried contacting her. Her face was everywhere, like a Sanrio cartoon
character in human form. Friends and people I met in Tokyo – journalists, translators, expatriates and exchange students – all squealed when they found out I was trying to track her down, before skeptically wishing me good luck. Then one day, out of nowhere, Kasai-san yielded and gave me a phone number.

ai chans manager say your interview ok

maybe he call you

his name is MR KAZAMA

please talk with him

Several phone calls later, and we were in. The only problem was, my cough was getting worse. A couple of weeks later, a doctor would diagnose me with whooping cough.

Usually I had only one translator with me, but both my translators – Aya and Simon – insisted on coming together. It was Haruna Ai, they said, and nothing else mattered. That we'd scored the interview at all was some sort of miracle. The three of us headed to the TBS network headquarters in freezing conditions with cold rain spitting on us, my hacking cough mimicking the sound of a cat being kicked. On arrival, a female assistant came out to the foyer and greeted us with a lot of bowing, before leading us to level 4F where the magic happened. Simon, Aya and I waited in a small cafeteria-like space, from which two doors led to different TV studios.

‘Look!' Aya said, squealing and pointing. ‘That's her!'

The monitor showed what was being filmed in the left-hand TV studio. A pug-faced man with a giant white meringue of hair was running through a news story about a junior baseball player wanting to make the big time. The baseball player was crying and so were his family members. As the footage ran, the small
box in the screen's corner showed Haruna Ai expressing a combination of Nodding Concern and Heartfelt Sympathy. She was nailing all the facial expressions. Tonight, she was wearing a white dapple-patterned dress with Disney princess puffy sleeves and a big red bow in her hair. I got excited and started coughing again.

‘She's only a few metres away!' I said.

‘Oh my god, this is
so
exciting,' Simon said.

Recording of the show wrapped up and the audience filed out. For a moment, Haruna Ai sailed past us towards her dressing room. Simon and Aya both made bug eyes at me and we all mimed silent screaming.

‘She will be with you in a moment,' her assistant told us.

Then we heard a troubling, high-pitched sound, a squeal that sounded distressing and animal-like. We realised it was coming from two girls. Just being in Haruna Ai's orbit made people in Japan emit this sound. The girls were in their twenties, dressed in monochromatic, wildly patterned and weirdly tailored Harajuku outfits, bouncing from foot to foot and bowing at Haruna Ai almost spastically. She paused, laughed, grabbed their hands and squealed along with them, as if
she
was delighted to meet
them
. One of the girls started crying. With anyone else I would be rolling my eyes, but the excitement was contagious.

Later, Haruna Ai came out of her dressing room wearing loose pyjama bottoms and a bright orange hoodie that said ‘Mississippi Ridgeland Football Club'. With glittery moisturiser still on her face, she grabbed our hands to greet us one by one, offering us chilled green tea and water. As Simon made the introductions, Haruna Ai said she remembered me from Miss Tiffany's. I stood there grinning like an idiot, coughing into my elbow. Concerned, Haruna Ai demanded cold tea for me.

Haruna Ai's voice was feminine – ultra-girly, even – but impossible to place. It was high-pitched with a slight gravelly quality, as though she was a twelve-year-old girl with a smoking problem. Unexpectedly, it made for a great broadcast voice.

As one of the only transsexual women on Japanese television, she was in great demand. But her fame was encumbered with the pressure that came with anything one-of-a-kind, a burden of responsibility to ensure she was a good role model.

‘It's really hard,' she said. ‘There aren't that many people on TV like myself who have changed from a man to woman, so it's difficult. It's very hard for people in Japan to relate to me and to understand what I've been through. Japan's very behind in this area. Japanese people can't seem to understand why you'd want to change your sex. So in order to educate people – but in a fun way! – I do a lot of comedy and talk shows to help Japanese people understand. Nowadays, most people look at me as a person, instead of being a Person Who's Been Through a Sex Change, which is good.'

That week alone, she had done product promotions in Tokyo and Hokkaido, had her regular appearances on TBS and NTV, had worked on a music video and released her second major CD single, ‘Crazy Love', a song that – like most J-pop – was maddeningly stupid and infuriatingly catchy. Her voice was autotuned and low in the mix and the video was sexy without being
sexual.
It showed Haruna Ai, with four back-up dancers, first in a gown made of silver with head jewels, then a cheerleading outfit, then a pants-and-hat tomboy outfit, then finally a pink cocktail outfit made of feathers. It had no narrative and made no sense. The edits were annoying and epileptic, and the song immediately bored into my brain like some terrible parasite:

I'm so crazy

Crazy crazy for you

Need you baby

Baby baby

It's you

Sweet lord, the song was hideous. Even so, no one could hold this against Haruna Ai.

Recently, she had raced a charity marathon after the public nominated her as the person they most wanted to see run.

‘The marathon was thirty-five kilometres, they could only choose one person, and I was selected to do it!' Haruna Ai said, squealing. ‘In high school, I tried not to exercise a lot, so this was a big challenge for me.' By the end of the race, Haruna Ai's make-up had completely melted off and it looked as though someone had taken a blowtorch to her face. Yet for a woman whose fame rested mostly on her appearance, she didn't seem that bothered – sweating and ghoulish, she was still giggling and pumping her fists in the air. And nor did other people seem to care.

After an hour, Haruna Ai apologised for having to leave and handed us complimentary copies of ‘Crazy Love' before posing for photos, then made some phone calls. Dinner would be waiting for us at one of her restaurants, she said. After a series of giggling bows and hand-clutching, she disappeared out of the studio, into her private life, and I knew I'd never see her again, except on television.

It was only later that I'd listen to our interview and realise that it had gone awfully. When we weren't giggling like idiots, I spent most of the time apparently trying to hack up my lung. We didn't talk about anything important whatsoever. Haruna Ai
skimmed over her love life and ducked any questions that were overtly political. But I also realised that I didn't care. Haruna Ai wasn't about serious conversation. She was about fun.

‘Educate people,' she had exclaimed, ‘but in a fun way!' She came off as sweet and lightheaded, but perhaps that was her gift: you never forgot she was transsexual, but by being so captivating, so lovable, so friendly, her sexual identity ceased being her sole gimmick. That, in and of itself, was kind of genius.