queer masculinities

8
Male Homosexuality in Early
Modern Japan: The State of the
Scholarship
Gary P. Leupp
Serious historical study of same-sex relationships came of age in the
1980s, heralded by Kenneth J. Dover’s magisterial Greek Homosexuality,
appearing in 1978. 1 Given its careful scholarship and warm critical
reception, Dover’s work emboldened historians to research homosexualities
in classical antiquity, medieval and early modern Europe, and in
the west in more recent times. 2 Such works as John Boswell’s
Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, Michael Goodich’s The
Unmentionable Vice, and Alan Bray’s Homosexuality in Renaissance
England stimulated dozens of articles and monographs on sexual intimacy
between males in the western world. 3 Work on non-western
homosexuality lagged behind, although only by about a decade. In
1990 Bret Hinsch published his Passions of the Cut Sleeve, an examination
of male–male relationships in premodern China. Since then a
number of works have addressed the question of homosexuality in
India, Islamic societies, Africa, and Japan.
Recent western work on the history of Japanese male–male sexuality
Japanese sexuality has for well over a century attracted an unusual
degree of western interest and so, not surprisingly, Japan’s traditions of
male–male sex received particular attention from western scholars even
before the recent boom in studies of the history of homosexuality. 4
(The relative abundance of source materials has encouraged this interest;
Hinsch notes the ‘enormous literature on homosexuality’ in Japan
as compared with China.) 5 In 1986, a French scholar translated an
unpublished work by the Japanese psychologist Watanabe Tsuneo (b.
1946), entitling it La Voie des éphêbes: Histoires des homosexualités au
Japon. 6 Half of this slim volume consisted of material drawn from the
pioneering work on male–male sex in Japan, Honchô nanshoku kô
(Studies of Nanshoku in Our Country) written by the literary critic
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