At Tokyo Kinky, we hope we don't moralize. We like to stay as open as possible, even -- and perhaps especially -- when the tastes do not match our own. And given the kind of content we share, we are hardly qualified to get on a high horse and start preaching to the masses.
As such, it is with a touch of bemusement that we are watching a dispute unfold, first on Twitter and now in the mainstream media.
An article titled "I am not alone -- we are all alone: Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan" appeared in the respected academic journal ...
This video by i-D features interviews with young people who identity as genderless.
The makers say that this "hypnotic youth movement are [sic] rejecting ideas of fashion defining sexuality" and call it "Tokyo's most boundary-pushing scene". The interviews are with four people -- Yutaro, Muyua, Yoshiaki, and Satsuki Nakayama (pictured below) -- who all have quite large followings on social media.
Genderless identity has particularly risen to the fore in the Japanese media recently with the popularity of the model and television personality Ryucheru.
"When I first wore a skirt, my ...
Overseas there has recently been a lot of talk about making things like public toilets "genderless" so as not to show bias towards people who do not identity by binary genders.
Japan has not embraced this kind of debate in the same way, not least because the LGBT community is largely reduced to being a subculture without real legal rights. On the other hand, fluid gender identity has been part of Japanese culture for a long time in Kabuki and so on. In many ways people just don't need all the labels and legal discussions that have obsessed other countries for the past generation.
Things ...
We want to introduce the work of Masaki C Matsumoto, a queer activist, feminist, and YouTuber working hard to challenge stereotypes about sexual minorities in Japan.
As he (perhaps provocatively) says:
"Hate crime is nonexistent in Japan," "Japan only recently started having pride marches," "homosexuality is accepted in Japan because of the traditional male-male shudo sexual/romantic culture," "Japanese media are LGBT-friendly," and "Taiga Ishikawa is the first openly gay politician in Japan" are all false!
In general, Matsumoto's main point -- and it's a good one -- is that ...
Remember Hikaru Toda?
She's the filmmaker who produced a documentary about love hotels we featured in 2014.
Now the Osaka- and London-based Toda (who has lived abroad for over 20 years) and her production studio, Little Stranger Films, is working on a documentary, Of Love & Law, about Japan's first LGBT law firm.
She has launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter to raise $30,000 to finish the project.
This is a documentary for anyone that has ever found themselves challenging or being challenged by the status quo.
Of Love & Law tells the hidden stories of people who ...
Ignition has posted an article about transgender artist Pyuupiru, who makes costumes such as the elaborate "Planetaria" series.
The article also provides a glimpse into the domestic arrangements of someone in Tokyo who has undergone sex realignment, living in the suburbs and taking in stray cats.
She was born a man, she explains, but always felt she had the soul of a woman. Having suffered for much of her life from obsessive-compulsive disorder and severe depression, she began making art around the same time she began to think about changing her body and identity. Born out of such ...
Gaycation is a new series from Viceland, Vice's TV channel, featuring Ellen Page and her friend traveling the world in search of gay stuff.
Episode 1 is Japan, especially Tokyo and Nichome.
Of course, Vice likes to veer toward the sensationalism, as its previous "schoolgirls for sale" article showed, and as such this episode does have some bad choices ("rent-a-friend agency and joining the party in the world's smallest gay bar").
It also starts with some cliched footage of Shibuya and halfway through resorts to shots of Scramble Crossing, but if you keep watching, there is some ...
7.6% of people in Japan are gay, lesbian or have gender identity disorder.
That's according to a Dentsu survey published in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper on April 24th (and that's also the sway they word the "groupings" too). It equates to 1 in 13 people.
The results were released on April 23rd. They were conducted on around 70,000 adults in Japan through an online questionnaire.
A similar survey in 2012 found that 5.2% of people, or 1 in 19 people, identified as LGBT.
The new survey was conducted on April 7th and April 8th with 69,989 people aged 20-59 across Japan.
However, ...
