content warning: graphic language

I attended the JET35 Conference here in Seattle this past weekend, May 20 and 21. The conference commemorated 35 years since the start of the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme in 1987.

My ten years in Japan began with the JET Programme back in 1988. Reconnecting with other JET alums brings me back to my Japan. It also reminds me what being gay in Japan was like back then (and how much has changed since I left Japan in 1998).

Steven Horowitz, an alum who created jetwit.com, hosted a storytelling hour during our reception at Optimism Brewing. The theme was secrets, and I stepped to the microphone for my five minutes of fun. (I actually completed the story in three and a half minutes: I’m good.)

When I arrived in Japan in 1988, there was no internet, there were no cell phones, and JETs could not be out of the closet.

Which is a challenge for me, because, as you can tell, I am gay in satellite photos.

And I am placed in Okegawa, a small city in Saitama Preference whose only claim to fame is the rocker, Toshinobu Kubota, and as far as I can tell, there are no other gays around.

But, after about six months of the closet, I am horny as fuck and I place personal ads in all the gay magazines I can find.

At this point in my story, my friend Dylan starts recording.

I should note that the mnemonics for the Q2 answering machine I used most frequently, 2101 0213 4804, futoi onīsan shiyō yo (太いお兄さん、しようよ) in Japanese, means chubby big brother, let’s get it on in English. Being gay in Japan was many things, but it was never boring.

Aftershocks

As much as I loved the applause, as much as I loved people telling me how much they loved my story over the course of the conference, the prize moment for me happened a little later that evening.

Joining us at the event was the Japanese consul and his wife. And as I returned to the group after using the facilities, the consul’s wife pulled me aside. An older, refined Japanese woman, she asked:

Why didn’t you just go to nichōme?

(Nichōme is a neighborhood in Tōkyō’s Shinjuku Ward famed for gay bars.)

After laughing, I explained that I indeed visited nichōme several times, but it was an expensive night out. Round trip rail tickets. Roughly seven dollars (700 yen) per drink. My expensive cigarette habit (I smoked Dunhills to keep myself from spending too much on cocktails). It adds up.

Later, I marveled that she knew about nichōme—although in recent years, articles in Lonely Planet and elsewhere have made what was once my gay mecca into an anodyne tourist attraction. Of all the things I might have predicted for what it might mean for being gay in Japan, and now, for being queer in Japan, the wider world considering us a tourist attraction was not on the list.

Japan lags behind every other G8 nation for marriage equality. The fact that the wife of a government official knows of my people and where we congregate? I’ll take that as a positive sign of increasing acceptance, tolerance, and, dare I say it, celebration.