Tools for Smiling

10 June 2022

I can remember a great deal. Perhaps it’s genetic. My father‘s baby sister, my Auntie Ann, holds on to a massive encyclopedia of memories. All the family stories reside in her, which is one of the reasons I like talking with her so much. She makes me laugh. She makes me learn.

There are gaps in my memory.  Having a partner who has been with me for 29 years makes it easier to recall things. Hiro will zero in on different things, things that struck him as important. There are things I fail to remember, or more likely, failed to consider important.

This is not to say that his memory is infallible. I love seeing the places where his memories overlap with mine, where his memories complement mine, and then, where neither of us have memories at all. Those odd experiential lacunae.

I was researching my own memories the other day as I worked on a sidebar for my memoir. The topic? Sexual positions or roles, specifically among gay men, specifically in the early 1990s, specifically in Japanese.

In English, we referred to tops (the insertive partner) and bottoms (the receptive partner). Later additions to the vocabulary include vers, short for versatile, referring to someone who could be both a top and a bottom. Urban Dictionary reminds me that vers entered the lexicon in the early 2000s. In 2018, a new term arrived for men not interested in anal sex (but still interested in the wide array of other pleasure sports): side.

And in the 1990s in Japan? In spoken Japanese, a top was (and still is) a タチ (tachi), a homophonous reference to the state of erection. (勃つ (tatsu) is the verb, meaning to grow erect, specifically in reference to the penis, and although the nominal form for erection is 勃起 (bokki), タチor 勃ち (tachi) are cuter, less clinical.)

A bottom was (and still is) an ウケ (uke), a nominal form of the verb 受ける (ukeru), meaning to accept or to receive. I like the mental image of receiving an erection.

I have to also note that there is now single-character shorthand for tops and bottoms in use within written Japanese (like personal ads or dating app profiles). 凸 (deko, meaning protrusion or convex) is the character for top and 凹 (kubo or boko, meaning concave) is the character for bottom. Perfect ideograms!

And although vers didn’t become part of gay terminology in English until after I left Japan, there was a Japanese word for it.

両刀 (ryōtō) is, pun intended, something of a Swiss army knife in queer terminology. It originally referred to samurai who could fight with both swords at once (両刀 literally means both swords) and, in conventional Japanese, refers to someone who excels at two or more different skills.

From that sense, 両刀 can refer BOTH to versatile performers (in bed) AND to bisexuals!

In recent years, a new term has acquired popularity for men who claim versatility in bed: リバ (riba). An abbreviation from the Japanese pronunciation of reversible (リバーシブル (ribāshiburu), I think リバ conveys a fun aspect of versatility. First I go one way, next, the other.

And because side is a recent addition to the gay lexicon in English, I wasn’t sure, at first, if there was an equivalent term in Japanese. But after reviewing what is meant by side in English, my husband’s eyes lit up with knowledge. バニラ, he said.

バニラ (banira) is the Japanese pronunciation of vanilla, but within the topic of sex vanilla has a broader definition than it does in English, where it is generally used to refer to sex without kink or fetish.

In Japan, バニラ refers to non-penetrative sex. Hence the equivalence with side.

Let me switch gears here.

Japanese art, ukiyo-e woodblock prints in particular, have long been a favorite of mine. I can spend hours combing over the public domain art in wikimedia commons, looking for works I’ve not seen before.

Eisen was an ukiyo-e artist predominantly renowned for his portraits of women but he also did a lot of sex-positive woodblocks, images designed to instruct and stimulate, known as 春画 (shunga, literally spring images).

I laughed at his depictions of different sexual positions (the one at bottom where the man has a dildo strapped to his posterior so he can penetrate two women at once, complete with crumpled tissues (when the Japanese learned the art of paper making from the Chinese and Koreans at the latter half of the first millennium CE, tissue paper became common for cleaning up household messes, shall we say, a tradition that lives on). And no, Mr. Garrison, there’s no Filthy Sanchez in Edo-era sex acrobatics.

I also found a series of humorous seasonal prints he had done that depicted the sex toys (referred to in Edo-era Japanese as 笑道具 (warai dōgu, literally tools for smiling) appropriate for spring, summer, autumn, and winter.