8 April 2022
Calendars trigger memories and Monday of this past week, the fourth day of the fourth month, dredged up a few.
One of the best aspects of my ten years in Japan is the constellation of friends I now have there. Some were more than friends at one point before I met my husband—Hiro refers to them as my fan club, without any jealousy—but that is part of the beauty of queerness. Not only do we live on a wonderful of identities, we get to craft a rainbow’s array of relationships.
Anyway, before my prose gets overly purple, let me return to the fourth of April.
Japan once had distinct holidays to celebrate girls and boys. The third day of the third month, 桃の節句 (momo no sekku, the season of peach blossoms) was Girls’ Day, and the traditions live on. Pink, pale green, and white candy, chirashi sushi with rape blossoms, and displays of dolls. (I have a pair, just the Emperor and Empress dolls and not the full set as shown in the second photo).
The fifth day of the fifth month is 端午の節句 (tango no sekku, the season of the first ox—the ancient Japanese calendar was inspired by the Chinese calendar. The fifth month was the ox month, and the fifth day of that month was the first ox day of the month.) was Boys’ Day. During the reforms after the end of WWII, Boys’ Day became a national holiday, now called Children’s Day, and Girls’ Day was relegated to cultural observances only—no holiday. (Don’t get me started on misogyny in modern Japan—another newsletter’s topic to be sure.)
I’m guessing you’ve picked up on the pattern here. Third day of third month, fifth day of fifth month… what then, was the fourth day of the fourth month? If you’re guessing it’s a reaction against the binary of gender roles, you’d be really close!
But here’s where things enter urban legend or apocryphal territory, because not even Wikipedia Japan includes an entry on this holiday. Among my constellation of Japanese friends, rainbow-dwellers all, the fourth of April was very unofficially celebrated as オカマの日 (okama no hi, f—t day).
I chose that translation, f—t, for a reason. Regardless of its beginnings in Japanese, use of the term okama to refer to gay men or to drag queens or to MTF members of the trans community is now considered a slur, as the f—t word in English is.
Okama had that power in the 1990s when I lived in Tōkyō, too, but I never had the word punched at me as an insult—one advantage of being nearly two meters tall in a country where the average male height is more than twenty centimeters less than that. Instead, okama marked community. We used it among friends to denote friends, sometimes with the bitter sting that gay men can master, regardless of nationality.
オカマ is a tough word to tie down etymologically. Several people I knew thought it was related to the homophone, お釜 (okama), the word for a rice cooking pot. I heard many reasons. For example, rice pots have a round bottom and gay men have round bottoms (my data samples suggest variability in bottom shapes, however). Or, rice pots are as tough as gay men are. Maybe that’s true?
The theory that Wikipedia Japan favors dates back to Edo period Japan, when that word, お釜, was slang for a male anus (and I have not yet investigated why that was). By extension, fans of that orifice were referred to by that word as well.
The theory I loved most is one I cannot substantiate, but the way it was related to me was thus:
When Buddhist monks first arrived in Japan from China and Korea in the sixth century CE, the monks brought the teachings of the sutras with them, including the Kama Sutra (カマ経, kama kyō), that amazing testament to the creativity of physical love. Adepts of that sutra would have known about sex between males as a result, and that particular teaching and its adherents were referred to with an honorific version of the sutra’s name, 御カマ, okama.
But I must sadly admit that theory is most likely part urban legend, part wishful thinking.
One final note, after a rejoinder to not use オカマ when speaking Japanese, please, is that the word for a woman who prefers the company of gay men (what we used to refer to as a fag hag in English, another term that has rightly become a pejorative) is オコゲ (okoge), which, I am assured, comes from the homophone お焦げ (okoge), the burned bits of rice stuck to the bottom of the お釜. Gay men and straight women, best buddies forever.
