“As I Am” LGBTQ in Japan

 In Japan, same-sex unions remain outlawed, and children who don’t conform to traditional gender norms are routinely bullied. Japanese who are gay, transgender or nonbinary must stake out their own distinctive paths.

In these interviews, L.G.B.T.Q. Japanese — some of whom spoke despite fears of being ostracized — talked about their daily rhythms and routines. While some are politically active, others prefer to let their personal lives speak for their desire to be accepted.

‘I thought they wouldn’t be able to understand even if I tried to tell them how much I loved my girlfriend.’

When Hitomi Sawabe, 72, was in high school in Tokyo, she was told that homosexuality was akin to measles — something that could be cured.

Her affection for other women did not feel to her like an illness. Yet she was afraid to share with her family the true nature of her relationships. 

In Japan at the time, public images of lesbians tended to show them in pornographic contexts. On a trip to the United States with her partner at the time, Ms. Sawabe discovered a community that “felt free of gender,” and she was inspired to write about her own sexuality back in Japan.

She published essays, a survey of women’s sexuality and a biography about a lesbian relationship between a well-known Japanese novelist and her lover. Ms. Sawabe herself had a 10-year relationship with a woman that collapsed when her partner grew weary of Ms. Sawabe’s intense devotion to her writing and decided to marry a man and have children.

A person stands in front of a large tombstone, holding flowers.

Hitomi Sawabe visiting her former partner’s grave in Saitama Prefecture, where they once lived together.

A woman cooks in a small kitchen.

Ms. Sawabe cooking at home in Tokyo.

 

A decade of loneliness and depression followed. When Ms. Sawabe’s former partner was diagnosed with cancer, she visited her ex-lover shortly before she died but felt they had left many emotions unresolved. 

Last year, a butterfly landed on Ms. Sawabe’s eyeglasses. It felt like a sign. “I feel like she forgave me,” Ms. Sawabe said. “And since then I have visited her grave every month.”

Ms. Sawabe still lives alone, but she has opened a performance space for lesbian artists and others to gather and share their stories. She cooks, swims and visits friends.

“I want my emotions to move in the happy direction,” she said. “Recently I realized I can control that.”

‘We don’t want to send the message to the younger generation that we’re people who have to hide ourselves.’

One of Gen Suzuki’s earliest childhood memories is being told that he was so much like a boy that “you must have left your penis in your mother’s belly.”

Mr. Suzuki, now 50, did not know anybody who was transgender or gay, and at school, he was bullied for being a girl who behaved like a boy. It wasn’t until he was in his mid-20s, when he watched a popular television drama about a transgender boy, that he realized there might be others like him. 

Still, he repressed this growing awareness and married a man. After a decade, they divorced. Mr. Suzuki had his breasts surgically removed, began hormone therapy and changed his name to reflect his male identity.

He started taking classes from a bamboo craft master. He met Ryoko Kunii, the woman he now calls his wife, when she interviewed him for a magazine about his transgender identity.

 

A person with short hair and glasses gets an injection in one arm.

Mr. Suzuki received a testosterone injection.

 

The couple could not officially marry because Mr. Suzuki’s government-issued family registry listed him as female. Instead, they signed a partnership oath. Now Mr. Suzuki lives deep in the mountains of Shizuoka Prefecture making custom bamboo bags, while Ms. Kunii lives separately with her mother and grandmother, whom she cares for. She visits Mr. Suzuki once a week. 

In 2021, Mr. Suzuki filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a law that required transgender people to undergo sterilization in order to legally change their gender identity. Last year, the Shizuoka Family Court decided in his favor; a Supreme Court ruling also delivered a similar decision for a different plaintiff. While Mr. Suzuki has now legally changed his identity to male, he and Ms. Kunii haven’t married yet because they feel conflicted about an institution still off-limits to same-sex couples in Japan.

“We want to celebrate and file our marriage registrations together with the same-sex couples,” he said.

‘I want people to understand that we are trying to live seriously.’

Anna Tomiyasu, the first known Japanese transgender wrestler to compete as a woman, wanted to be cool before she wanted to wrestle.

As a young child in the countryside in Miyagi Prefecture, northeast of Tokyo, she attended a professional women’s match and was captivated by how the winner overcame a much larger competitor. 

“I just wanted to be that kind of cool girl,” said Ms. Tomiyasu, now 25. “But I realized that I was not even a girl then.”

In a wrestling ring, a person in a pink dress is in midair with arms outstretched as another person below, feet on the ground, holds her arms out too.

Anna Tomiyasu wrestling as Veny in Yokohama.

  

By her third year of high school in Yokohama, Japan’s second-largest city, Ms. Tomiyasu had been diagnosed with “sexual identity disorder,” a medical prerequisite for receiving gender-affirming care in Japan. She joined a women’s pro wrestling group.

At age 20, she had genital surgery. Still, Ms. Tomiyasu, who uses the stage name Veny, cannot yet afford all the surgical procedures that Japan still requires for a legal gender change.

She has avoided any direct political activism on behalf of transgender identity. “If I said I am trans, that might cause a burden for the pro wrestling world,” she said. “I have tried hard to make myself look like a woman so that people don’t look down on me.” 

‘I wanted a place where I could be myself, a comfortable place for me.’

Before Satoko Nagamura became a mother, she felt as if she had a hole in her heart, a sense of loneliness that she thought would never be relieved.

But after she and her female partner conceived a son through IVF, his joyful nature saved her. “There is no amount of love that I can’t give to this child,” she said.

Ms. Nagamura, 41, who runs two restaurants in a gay-friendly neighborhood in Tokyo, is lobbying against a proposal by lawmakers in Japan’s governing party to bar same-sex couples from obtaining fertility treatments.  

 

In some ways, Ms. Nagamura regards her relationship with her partner, Mamiko Moda, as traditional. They held a wedding ceremony, in part to prove to their parents that they were more than “just friends.”

Yet Ms. Nagamura said she did not feel particularly romantic toward her partner. Their relationship is grounded in the love they have discovered through shared parenting.

“People might see us as romantic partners from the outside,” she said. “But in Japan, often when people have children they become family, not romantic partners.”

‘I always liked standing out since I was a small child.’

Growing up on the outskirts of Tokyo, Takahiro Masuzaki fashioned high-heeled shoes out of a pair of slippers and some Lego blocks. He stuffed balloons under his shirt to emulate breasts.

Perhaps it was a foregone conclusion that Mr. Masuzaki, 37, would end up performing as a member of a drag queen trio. 

That group, Happo Fu-Bijin, has become something of a fixture in the L.G.B.T.Q-friendly Nichome section of Shinjuku, in central Tokyo. One of its members, Masaki Otake, 40, recently appeared as a commentator on Netflix’s “The Boyfriend,” Japan’s first same-sex dating reality series.

 

The members of Happo Fu-Bijin, a drag queen group, on stage in Tokyo.CreditCredit.

Drag queens ride in the open back of a truck, followed by a parading line of people dressed in yellow, some carrying flags.

Happo Fu-Bijin at the Tokyo Rainbow Pride Parade in April.

Mr. Masuzaki, who uses the stage name Whitmi Chiaki, got his taste for torchy singing and glittery dressing in middle school, when he became a fan of singers like Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Madonna and Janet Jackson. Later, as a business consultant, he would dress up as a woman and perform at company end-of-year parties.

Mr. Otake, who goes by Durian Lollobrigida onstage, also performed while working a corporate office job during the day. Cross-dressing does not always mean changing his gender: He often applies exaggerated makeup and wears brightly colored clothing as a man. 

“That’s the biggest attraction of being a drag queen,” he said. “I’d like to behave as antithetical to the world and society.”

Atsunobu Muramoto, 52, who performs as Esmeralda as the third member of Happo Fu-Bijin, said he wanted the audience to “receive love” through the group’s songs.

“It’s a message about living rather than a political message,” he said.

‘People who directly put money and activism toward L.G.B.T.Q. activities are not viewed well in society.’

Yota Kuki always wondered why girls were supposed to like pink and boys were supposed to like blue. “I thought within myself that was such a weird thing,” said Mx. Kuki, 36, an artist and street performer who identifies as nonbinary and uses “they” and them” pronouns.

Although Mx. Kuki still had a self-image as nonbinary, they had their breasts, ovaries and uterus surgically removed. Mx. Kuki hit a low point when a relationship with a man fell apart. Mx. Kuki thought of suicide. 

Mx. Kuki, right, with a friend, preparing for a street performance. The dolls in the background are part of another art project.

Mx. Kuki embraces friends during a visit to Ishigaki, an island in southern Japan.

But on a trip to Ishigaki, a southern Japanese island, Mx. Kuki wandered into a bar and met a photographer who began taking portraits. Mx. Kuki noticed a kewpie doll that had fallen off a shelf. That began an artistic preoccupation with painting the dolls and incorporating them into outdoor performances.

The friends Mx. Kuki made at the bar provided a self-esteem boost. Mx. Kuki began making art in earnest and selling the painted kewpie dolls. Earlier this year, Mx. Kuki and some friends threw a surprise party for the photographer back in Ishigaki.

Mx. Kuki views kewpie art as a way of communicating with people who might not yet accept gender diversity.

“My feeling is that if you suddenly say what you think to someone who is not ready for it, they won’t accept it,” they said. “And that is why I want them to look at my art and I think I can communicate my identity more smoothly that way.”