Romit Dasgupta

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.

Emotional Spaces and Places of Salaryman Anxiety in Tokyo Sonata

In this article I discuss the ways in which the 2008 film Tokyo Sonata engages with the contrasting emotional and physical geographies of comfortable suburbia and the contemporary reality of socio-cultural despondency. The Sasaki family is the embodiment of the quintessential nuclear family of urban, middle-class Japan. Their world starts unravelling the day the father, Sasaki Ryūhei, is laid off from his middle-management job. Unwilling to reveal this to his family, Ryūhei continues to leave for work each morning dressed in his suit, but spends his days in a park inhabited by homeless men. Ultimately, he finds employment as a cleaner in a shopping mall. Ryūheis journey from white-collar salaryman to menial worker is set against the backdrop of collective anxiety in the intermeshing physical and emotional ‘scapes’ of recession-era Tokyo. I argue that, at the core, this is an anxiety about the loss of masculine authority in the home and the workplace, and at the level of Japan as a nation. Moreover, it is an anxiety that cannot be fully appreciated without reference to the framing social, cultural, economic and emotional topographies of post-bubble Japan.

Acting Straight? Non-heterosexual Salarymen Working with Heteronormativity in the Japanese Workplace

This chapter draws attention to the intersections and collisions between discourses of work, masculinity, and sexuality in the context of Japanese corporate culture. Despite significant socio-cultural shifts over recent decades, the discourse of the middle-class, white-collar heterosexual “salaryman” continues to be a signifier for Japanese corporate masculinity, and indeed, for Japanese masculinity as a whole. Yet, the reality is that there are salarymen who may not be heterosexual, but nevertheless need to engage on a day-to-day basis with the heteronormative ideological expectations of corporate masculinity. This chapter, drawing on interviews with individual salarymen who identify as non-heterosexual, explores the complex relationship between the publicly articulated heteronormative ideology of the workplace and the day-to-day micro-negotiations with the expectations of this ideology by non-heterosexual individuals.

Conversations about Otokorashisa (Masculinity/'Manliness'): Insider/Outsider Dynamics in Masculinities Research in Japan

This chapter draws upon my fieldwork experience conducting research about ‘masculinities’ in Japan for my doctoral dissertation in the late 1990s. As I outline below, I returned to an area of Japan where I had lived in the past, had spent some of the most significant years of my life, and had extensive personal as well as more formal networks and relationships. However, this time I returned in a new guise — almost a new incarnation — that of ‘researcher’. This, as well as my often ambiguous ‘insider/outsider’ position, provided challenges, as well as added richness, to the research project. Adding to the complexity (and richness) of these insider/outsider dynamics was the gendered and sexualized undercurrents informing the research process. I was a male researcher, and, in addition to that, a male researcher who was constructed by his informants as sharing a gendered world view that, at least in terms of its public articulations, was essentially a heteronormative one. How these intersecting and interacting cross-currents informed the research process is something I would like to reflect on in this chapter. The sociocultural context of this chapter is a non–Euro-North American-Australian-New Zealand one. In this regard, the chapter provides a much needed spotlight on the complexities of conducting masculinities research in a ‘non-Western’ setting. At the same time, Japan is an affluent, urbanized, industrialized society, and hence, there may well be crossovers with ‘Western’ sociocultural contexts.

Queer Imaginings and Traveling of “Family” Across Asia

This chapter engages with the theme of migration and journeying in what may come across as slightly unconventional. I am not primarily concerned with the actual physical movement of individuals across national and cultural borders. Rather, I focus on the transborder travelings of ideas, imaginings, discourses across what Arjun Appadurai in his much-cited theorization of globalization refers to as “scapes” of ideas, imaginings, and discourses. The term, as Appadurai explained in his original discussion, “allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes [of globalization]” (1990, 296). Moreover, rather than being rigidly defined, these scapes are “deeply perspectival constructs” (296). In his analysis, Appadurai was concerned specifically with the five scapes of techo-, finance-, ethno-, idea-, and media-scapes. In this chapter, I am specifically concerned with the last two, as well as what I term “emotion-scapes” (Dasgupta 2011) in relation to imaginings of notions of family and kinship, and the ways in which they traverse borders and scapes, both globally but more specifically in the context of Asia.1

Romancing Urban Modernity in Tokyo, Taipei, and Shanghai: The Film About Love and the Shaping of a Discursive East Asian Popular Culture

Written at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Japanese critic and film historian Yomota Inuhiko’s observation about the interchangeability of the East Asian metropolises of Tokyo, Seoul, and Hong Kong through a shared consumption of “nostalgia/familiarity” rings true.2 What is debatable is whether such an observation would have had equal resonance two or three decades ago, when the cityscapes of Hong Kong, Seoul, Taipei, Singapore, and Tokyo in the 1960s and 1970s would have been more distinct from one another. However, over the intervening decades, interconnected socio-economic, cultural, and political factors—ranging from the emergence of urban middle classes across most East and many Southeast Asian societies, to the emergence of civil societies in previously authoritarian societies such as South Korea and Taiwan—have facilitated the emergence of the kind of commonality across urban East Asia that Yomota makes reference to in the above comment. Just as someone from Hong Kong would be overwhelmed by a sense of deja vu upon visiting Tokyo or Seoul, a person from Tokyo travelling to Hong Kong or Seoul would be struck with the same feeling. Before setting foot in a place, we are forced to associate with all sorts of images about that place. At the end of a labyrinth of copies of copies, we finally arrive, tired and exhausted, at the actual city, but it is no longer a heart-pounding adventure, but a simulation of an adventure — a “hyperreal” experience, to borrow Umberto Eco’s term. As long as we are in the midst of the structure of deja vu, we can no longer visit “real” unknown places anywhere on this earth.1