The Lolita Complex: - Scholarly Commons Home

In Japan, the notion of female impersonation, and the effort one makes
to achieve it, is perceived and received on a much higher level than in the
West. As Ian Buruma claims, “an important point [about this craft]… is that
it rarely becomes caricature; it is never a send-up”. 34 He writes that “sexual
confusion was an integral part of the earliest kabuki theatre… helped by the
fact that after 1629 female players were [actually] banned by the
government” creating an environment for “perhaps the highest art of female
impersonation in the world: the onnagata”. 35 The onnagata does not resemble
or behave in the manner of a drag queen. There is no equivalent element of
camp in the idea of Japanese transvestism or a general desire for physical
transexuality. Buruma maintains that, even if an onnagata lives his daily life as
his female persona, “he still remains a man” and is never called “she”. 36
In regard to Visual-kei, it is the precise theatrical, “gender-bending”
presence of the onnagata that gives the movement its particular Japanese
persuasion. Therefore, just as Monden observes that “it is too narrow to
describe a Japanese street fashion as homogenised on the basis of…
Western… style as its inspiration”, it is ignorant to claim that Visual kei
merely copies Western ideas, based on surface values such as dress, “since
localisation and interaction with local cultural elements such as aesthetics,
preferences or sociality are [also]… reflected in Japanese” fashion-based
music genres. 37 The most visible example shown here of this fusion of East
and West can be seen in the image of Xodiack (Fig. 54).
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