queer masculinities

Gary P. Leupp: Japan 127
shogunate (1603–1868), emphasizing the commodification of sexuality
within the emerging capitalistic economy, and the development of a
bourgeois homosexual tradition at variance with pre-existing monastic
and samurai nanshoku traditions. 19 This was the first English-language
work to broadly examine male homosexuality in the Tokugawa period,
drawing on primary and secondary historical sources and attempting
to position nanshoku within a comparative historical framework. In
subsequent papers I amplified an argument I had made in Male Colors,
namely that there was a conspicuous decline in the nanshoku tradition
after around 1750; and also broached the topic of female–female sexuality
in Tokugawa Japan. 20
Gregory M. Pflugfelder, an historian at Columbia University, brought
further sophistication to the field with his Cartographies of Desire:
Male–Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950. 21 About half of
this richly documented study deals with the Tokugawa period, wherein
he too, finds a substantial ‘commodification’ of homosexual behavior.
In addition, during the 1990s, western scholars interested in the topic
of sexuality in Buddhist societies gave some attention to premodern
Japanese homosexuality. 22 Thus at the opening of the new millennium,
there was a critical mass of English-language scholarship on
early modern Japanese male homosexuality, allowing those with a
general interest in the history of sexuality to grasp the basic features of
nanshoku and consider them in global historical perspective.
Meanwhile, Japanese scholars aside from Watanabe have begun to
address the topic, inspired in part by the prolific western-language bibliography
on the global history of homosexuality. 23 (Ujiie, for example,
has been influenced by Alan Bray’s Homosexuality in Renaissance
England.) 24 The emergence of a gay rights movement in Japan also
encouraged research on male–male relationships, although the relationship
between the movement and academe is not nearly as close in
Japan as it is in, for example, the US. A group to promote Kuia Sutadiizu
(Queer Studies) was active in Tokyo by 1996. 25
Recent Japanese work on the history of Japanese male–male
sexuality
Ujiie Mikito, an archivist at the National Institute for Public
Documents in Tokyo, has produced the most significant body of work
on nanshoku. His Bushidô to eros (Bushidô and Eros) focuses upon
male–male sexual relations within the samurai class in the castle-town
of Edo (modern Tokyo) during the Tokugawa period, when the city