Mark J McLelland

Virtual Ethnography: Using the Internet to Study Gay Culture in Japan

After English and Chinese, Japanese is the most widely represented language on the internet and yet few studies have been made of how communities in Japan engage with this new technology. This article looks at the internet both as a virtual space in which Japanese and foreign gay men can meet as well as a means for making offline assignations. The author reflects on his own use of the internet in his research on gay communities in Japan, suggesting that the internet has made it possible to reach out to and work with a wider variety of Japanese gay men than was previously possible. It is suggested that gay mens use of the internet in Japan is illustrative of Appadurais argument that this new technology provides a unique opportunity for relationship building between individuals who are otherwise deterritorialized, diasporic and transnational.

The World of Yaoi: The Internet, Censorship and the Global ‘Boys‘ Love’ Fandom

As Arjun Appadurai has noted, the ease of information sharing enabled by the development of new media, most prominently the internet, has resulted in the proliferation of ‘communities of imagination and interest’ among people who are otherwise geographically ‘diasporic’.1 Mathews, too, notes that individuals are now able to choose ‘information and identities from the global supermarket’ on a scale not seen before.2 One result has been a proliferation of subcultures and an increase in diversity, what Giddens refers to as ‘lifestyle sectors’.3 Many of these communities are now truly global and involve participation from people of diverse backgrounds from many parts of the globe. However, alongside the creative and enabling effects of increased interpersonal and inter-cultural communication, there is also a dark side — an increase in criminal and harmful activity conducted online. In tandem with the rise of the internet as a new medium of global communication, there has been ‘an explosion of cultural concern, a veritable incitement to discourse’4 regarding pedophilia and child sex-abuse more generally. As Lumby points out, media treatment of child sex-abuse is somewhat paradoxical since on the one hand it is, ‘characterized as a practice so aberrant that its practitioners are monsters who by definition live entirely outside the mores of ordinary people; on the other, it is depicted as so pervasive that it has rotted the core of our most important institutions—the family, the church, the police force, our schools’.5 Accordingly, child sex-abuse ‘attains a phantasmic status;’ its ‘effects are seen everywhere but its source is impossible to locate’.6

Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Japan

This essay recognises the power of reading and intertextuality (embedding texts within texts) in fiction targeted at girls and young women.Incorporating Japanese language materials and field-based research, this compelling collection of essays takes a comparative look at the changing notions of gender and sexual diversity in Japan, considering both heterosexual and non-heterosexual histories, lifestyles and identities. Written by key Japanese authors and Western scholars the volume examines how non-conformist individuals have questioned received notions and challenged social norms relating to sex and gender. The chapters depict the plurality of gender positions; from housewives opposed to gender roles within marriage to heterosexual men wishing to be more involved in family life. Including material not previously published in English, this volume gives an overview of the important changes taking place in gender and sexuality studies within Japanese scholarship.

Australia’s ‘child-abuse material’ legislation, internet regulation and the juridification of the imagination

This article investigates the implications of Australia’s prohibition of ‘child-abuse material’ (including cartoons, animation, drawings and text) for Australian fan communities of animation, comics and gaming (ACG) and slash fiction. It is argued that current legislation is out of synch with the new communicative environment brought about by the internet since a large portion of the fans producing and trading in these images are themselves minors and young people. Habermas’s analysis of the conflict between instrumental and communicative rationality is deployed to demonstrate that legislators have misrecognized the nature of the communicative practices that take place within the ‘lifeworlds’ of fan communities, resulting in an unjust ‘juridification’ of their creative works. Drawing on Japanese research into the female fandom surrounding ‘boys’ love’ (BL) manga, it is argued that current Australian legislation not only forecloses the fantasy lives of young Australian fans but also harms them by aligning them with paedophile networks. Finally, drawing upon Jean Cohen’s paradigm of ‘reflexive law’ the article considers a possible way forward that opens up channels of communication between regulators, fans, domain host administrators and media studies professionals that would encourage a more nuanced approach to legislation as well as a greater awareness of the need for self-regulation among fan communities.

From the stage to the clinic: Changing transgender identities in post-war Japan

This paper looks at the transformation of male-to-female transgender identities in Japan since the Second World War. The development of print media aimed at a transgender readership is outlined, as is the development of bars, clubs and sex venues where transgendered men sought both partners and commercial opportunities. The origin of various transgender ‘folk categories’ such as okama, gei bōi, burūbōi and nyūhāfu is discussed and their dependence upon and relationship to the entertainment world is outlined. Finally, the paper looks at how the resumption of sex-change operations in Japan in 1998 has led to a new public discourse about transgender phenomena that utilizes a range of medical terminology. While the recent establishment in Japan of clinics for individuals who consider themselves to be transsexual is an important development, it is argued that other transgenders who identify with indigenous categories are sceptical about the new medical model which they regard as both reductionist and pathologizing, and that their experience should not be overlooked when giving an account of constructions of transgender experience in contemporary Japan.

The Newhalf Net: Japan's “Intermediate Sex” On-Line

After English, Japanese is the most widely represented language on the Internet; yet, because Japanese is not widely spoken outside Japan, very little information exists in English about the ways in which the Internet is being used by queer communities in Japan. This essay looks at how one group within Japans transgender community is deploying Internet technology. Japans “newhalf” (nyuuhaafu) are transgendered men who consider themselves to be a “third” or “intermediate” sex, and they work in clearly-defined roles as hostesses, companions, and sex workers within Japans extensive sex and entertainment industry. The contents of several newhalf Websites are analyzed, and their different applications are discussed. It is suggested that the Internet is being used to disseminate information about sexual services and identities that have a long history in Japan, rather than to encourage the development of more “politicized” sexual identities.

Love, Sex and Democracy in Japan during the American Occupation

Love, Sex and Marriage on the Road to War Sex and Censorship during the Occupation Sexual Liberation The Kiss Debate The New Couple Curiosity Hunting Afterword: Postwar Legacies

Sexual minorities and human rights in Japan: an historical perspective

Contemporary Japan maintains longstanding and well-documented traditions of same-sex eroticism and yet the terminology for describing these traditions as well as the contexts and identities through which they have been expressed have changed greatly since Japans opening to the West at the end of the nineteenth century. These changes have been most striking in the post-war period, when new rights-centred discourses concerning issues of sexual identity and sexual citizenship began to develop alongside enduring Japanese notions situating sexual expression in the private realm of personal interest or play. Taking a broad historical view, this paper shows that it is only since the mid-1980s that a voluble discourse linking same-sex sexual activity and human rights has gained mainstream attention. The factors that led to this paradigm shift are outlined as are the current and future challenges facing a range of sexual minorities in Japan.

Socio-cultural aspects of mobile communication technologies in Asia and the Pacific: a discussion of the recent literature

David Gauntlett, in his foreword to Japanese Cybercultures, notes the tendency in the anglophone West to ‘assume that people in other countries, using other languages, are probably doing things with Internet technology that are pretty similar to those applications we are familiar with’ (Gauntlett, 2003, p. xii; emphasis in the original). However, as that collection goes on to make clear, particularly regarding mobile Internet applications, this is not always the case. As a researcher with a background in Japanese studies, in an attempt to help undergraduate students think critically about the interrelationship between society, culture and (new) technologies, I try to encourage them to consider that technologies have a history and that the meanings underlying their deployment are highly culture specific. Until recently the (now ubiquitous and quotidian) mobile phone was a helpful example to use. However, this particular technological innovation is becoming increasingly difficult to debate in class, since few students can remember a time before mobile phones and not one grew up in a household (as I did) where the landline telephone was a seldom-used late arrival. (My mother first rented one solely for ‘emergencies’, of which we thankfully had precious few. Accordingly, that original phone set lasted my family for 20 years.) My students look at me with blank expressions when I point out that at the end of the nineteenth century, for instance, the telephone was regarded by people in ‘society’ as a proletarian device, to be used by servants to telephone orders to florists and department stores; or that Proust seldom used it (preferring along with other educated people to communicate via letter). Indeed, in In Search of Lost Time, although the

Australia's Proposed Internet Filtering System: Its Implications for Animation, Comics and Gaming (ACG) and Slash Fan Communities

This paper investigates the implications of the federal governments proposed internet filtering system in the light of Australias blanket prohibition on ‘child pornography’ (including cartoons, animation, drawings, digitally manipulated photographs and text) for Australian fan communities of ACG and slash. ACG/slash fan groups in Australia and elsewhere routinely consume, produce and disseminate material containing ‘prohibited content’ (i.e. featuring fictitious ‘under-age’ characters in violent and sexual scenarios). Moreover, a large proportion of the fans producing and trading in these images are themselves ‘under age’. Focusing specifically on the overwhelmingly female fandom surrounding the Japanese Boys’ Love (BL) manga, the paper argues that legislators have misrecognised the nature and scope of these online communities. It is also argued that the sheer scale of this kind of material, and the fact that it is legal to download and purchase in jurisdictions such as the United States and Japan, make attempts to prohibit access to these purely fictional depictions in Australia unworkable.