queer masculinities

126 Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800
Iwata Jun’ichi (d. 1940). 7 While covering the eighth through twentieth
centuries, it focused on the late medieval period (fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries) and on samurai sexual behavior. (As of about 1600
the samurai, or hereditary martial class, is thought to have constituted
around seven per cent of the population. This remained the case up to
the early 1870s.) An English translation of La Voie appeared in 1989
(entitled The Love of the Samurai), producing widespread interest. 8 But
while Watanabe has published a number of works on issues of gender,
sexual psychology, and men’s studies (danseigaku), he has not published
this work on pre-modern homosexuality in Japanese. 9
In the same year that the English version of Watanabe’s book
appeared, Paul Schalow, an American scholar of Japanese literature,
published a significant article on Nanshoku ôkagami (The Great Mirror
of Nanshoku). This is a collection of homoerotic stories by the Osaka
writer Ihara Saikaku, published in 1687. He followed up the next year
with an annotated English translation of the work, based on his doctoral
dissertation. 10 Schalow’s translations of shorter works, with commentary,
quickly established him as the leading western authority on
‘male love’ in Japan during the early modern period. 11
Sociologist Stephen O. Murray, whose works on male–male sexuality
span continents and millennia, contributed a chapter on ‘Male
Homosexuality in Japan Before the Meiji Restoration,’ in a compilation
on ‘Oceanic Homosexualities’ published in 1992. 12 Drawing heavily on
my unfinished Male Colors manuscript, it provided an overview of the
topic, emphasizing male prostitution as a corollary to the kabuki
theater, samurai age-structured homosexuality, and the ‘effeminization’
of the youthful partner during the Tokugawa period. 13 (Murray
associated the kabuki-centered homosexual tradition with the ‘a rising,
mercantile bourgeoisie).’ 14 Eiko Ikegami’s The Taming of the Samurai
addressed the problem of violence rooted in homosexual love-triangles,
unwanted approaches and rejections among samurai men and
boys in seventeenth-century Japan. 15 Art historian Timon Screech discussed
male prostitution in Tokugawa Japan in connection with his
study of eighteenth-century erotica published in 1999. 16 The only
other western scholar at the time significantly contributing to the
study of the history of Japanese homosexuality, literature specialist
Margaret Childs, confined her work to the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. 17
My own published contributions date from 1995. 18 In Male Colors:
The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan, I attempted an
overview of male–male intimate relationships during the Tokugawa