Published in the Nichi Bei Times Weekly June 18-24, 2009.

By GREG ROBINSON
Nichi Bei Times Contributor

Since I started writing “The Great Unknown” in 2007, I have marked GLBT Pride Week each year with an article on the Queer heritage of Japanese Americans. The struggle for equality by gays and lesbians is of special importance to Japanese communities, not just because Japanese Americans have themselves been targets of bigotry and injustice, but also because the increasingly visible presence of gays and lesbians within Nikkei circles ensures that antigay discrimination touches the community directly and powerfully.

My first column focused on the contributions of proud, self-affirming Nikkei activists such as Joy Masuhara, George Takei, Tak Yamamoto, Stan Yogi, and especially Kiyoshi Kuromiya, who participated in redress or other struggles on behalf of Japanese Americans, as well as defending gay and lesbian rights. The goal of the column was to remind readers that gays and lesbians have always comprised an essential element of Japanese communities. I was highly honored and gratified when Harry Honda, the legendary Nisei journalist and longtime editor of The Pacific Citizen, later praised and endorsed this piece in his own PC column.

The second year’s column focused on the hidden history of Queer sexuality among Japanese Americans. My main argument, which took off in part from the groundbreaking scholarship of Amy Sueyoshi and Nayan Shah, was that conventional categories of homosexual and heterosexual are not terribly helpful for understanding the lives of Japanese Americans, particularly the Issei. Many immigrant couples, made up of spouses who never met before marriage, were united not through love or desire but family or economic interest. Conversely, like other Asian immigrants, Issei communities boasted groups of bachelors, who regularly shared homes and even beds. Whether or not they had actual physical relations, their closest emotional and intimate relationships were with each other.

Through an article by Ken Kaji, I have since learned of the life of one immigrant, Jiro Onuma. Onuma came to the United States in 1923, never married, collected erotic male photomagazines and developed close relationships in camp with younger Japanese American men. Interestingly enough, though, no arrests of Japanese bachelors for sodomy have as yet come to light.

Conversely, there were several cases in which Chinese were prosecuted. For example, in 1895 Ah Fook, a cook in Los Angeles, was arrested for “crime against nature” with a Scandinavian sailor. In 1901, Quong Ho and Charles Wong were imprisoned in North Adams, Massachusetts for rape and “unnatural crime,” while Charlie Lum, a laundryman in Worcester, was charged with sodomy in 1904 on the complaint of a local white boy who was revealed to be suffering from “an infectious disease.”

My question today is how the varied (and sometimes freewheeling) sexuality of the Issei gave way to silence and suspicion of alternative sexuality among many Nisei and Sansei.

While causality is always complex, we can say that Issei tended toward Japanese views. In traditional Japanese culture, unlike in the West, male homosexuality was not a sin, but something essentially private, separate from marriage. There was some history of glorification of same-sex love among samurai, as demonstrated by Ihara Saikaku’s renowned 1687 collection “The Great Mirror of Male Love.”

In imperial Japanese society, where the sexes often remained separated, same-sex social relations flourished. Issei artist Chuzo Tamotsu, an antimilitarist, later recalled that when he did his military service, circa 1900, a superior officer propositioned him while they were in the bath. When Tamotsu refused, his superior reported him for disobedience. Fortunately, Tamotsu was able to persuade the high commander that the Emperor did not expect him to do such things as part of his oath of allegiance.

Once settled in America, Japanese immigrants and their children absorbed dominant views of homosexuality as contemptible and unmentionable. Under the influence of Protestant missionaries, Issei were pressured, and pressured each other, to conform to heterosexual norms. (The preaching was apparently less successful at curbing endemic gambling and prostitution within Japanese communities). As John Howard reveals in his provocative book “Concentration Camps On The Home Front,” internal community policing was augmented during World War II by official policies of enforced heterosexual interaction between Nisei soldiers and women from camp, via USO dances. Nisei men, frequently relegated to gardening or domestic labor and sensitive over dominant stereotypes of Asians as unmasculine, may also have wished to distance themselves from homosexuality as effeminate.

The result was that gays and lesbians were largely invisible and unwelcome in Japanese communities. I have heard various Nisei women recount the story of an unnamed boy — or maybe it is several different ones — a gentle and scholarly Nisei whom everyone knew to be “different,” who no doubt faced constant harassment, and who suffered so badly that he committed suicide at a young age. Worse, even as the larger society began changing in the 1970s and 1980s, community homophobia and denial remained rampant, even among progressives.

S.I. Hayakawa, a conservative who nonetheless championed black equality, called himself “deeply, deeply, deeply offended by homosexuality.” In 1977 he endorsed the failed Briggs Amendment, which would have barred gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools. Two years later, he publicly asserted that there was a link between marijuana and homosexuality, and thus opposed decriminalization.

James Omura, who denounced Executive Order 9066 as totalitarian and bravely supported the Heart Mountain draft resisters, was less supportive of homosexuality. Because a fellow Japanese American worker once made a pass at him during his early years, when he worked in fish canneries in Alaska, he claimed that he developed a strong prejudice and opposed equality for gays and lesbians (Omura added that homosexuals were generally disdained and ostracized by Issei).

Perhaps the most striking example of a homophobic civil rights activist was William Marutani, the long-serving JACL attorney and later judge, who had been confined as a teenager at Tule Lake. During the 1960s, Marutani spent summers in Louisiana as a volunteer lawyer and in 1967 he represented the JACL in the Supreme Court’s famous case Loving v. Virginia, which struck down all laws against interracial marriage — Marutani’s was the first-ever argument by a Nisei lawyer in any civil rights case before the High Court.

In 1980 Marutani was selected as a member of the U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the official commission whose report led to the granting of redress. In 1982, however, Marutani remarked in his Pacific Citizen column that he felt an instinctive aversion and moral abhorrence for what Issei pejoratively called “Hentaisei” (abnormal or sexual perversion) and the Nisei called “Queers”; he did not know any homosexual Japanese Americans and did not wish to.
While he conceded that those practicing homosexuality (he refused the term “gay”) should not be arbitrarily persecuted, Marutani felt that the “practice should not be encouraged or advanced.” Thus, he opposed “civil rights” for gays and lesbians, like the right to teach in public schools. When challenged by a reader, Marutani countered that his view reflected the views of the vast majority of Nisei, if not of all Nikkei.

It is unclear, and doubtless unknowable, how right Marutani was in 1982. Nonetheless, since then many Nikkei have clearly changed their minds, even as a new generation, gay and straight, came of age free of the culture of silence and shame. We must give credit to various mentors who pointed the way. There is Dana Takagi, author of pioneering essays on politics and sexuality. There is Kenneth Kumashiro, author of “Restored Selves,” the collection of autobiographies by GLBT Asian American activists. There is Yoshiko Matsui, who came out in 1992 as a 17-year-old in Seattle (moving in with her partner’s family because she found living at home impossible) and organized groups for local lesbians. But perhaps we should save something for next year’s column!

Greg Robinson, Ph.D., the author of “By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans,” is an associate professor of history at the Université du Québec a Montréal. He can be reached via e-mail at robinson[dot]greg[at]uqam.ca. The views expressed are not necessarily those of the Nichi Bei Times.

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