Yoshiyuki IIMURA
I hope the reader will allow this to take the form of a personal recollection. I myself am not accustomed to writing in such a style, since, as a researcher, one is usually expected to conceal the first-person singular voice—or at most, to disguise it as the first-person plural. Here, however, I intend to adopt a quasi-autoethnographic approach. My solitude has always stemmed from the fear that, no matter how fully I articulate the way I have experienced my world, it will never be truly understood. I do not mean to suggest that anyone is more fortunate than I am. Yet even when I encounter someone similar to myself, someone who might possibly understand me, they seem to live in a world twenty billion light-years ahead of the one I inhabit. The “why” they ask of me always opens up geological layers far too deep to excavate, and it has often left me in despair. Yet now that I finally have the time to speak in full, I would like to try to explain myself.
I was born in Hokkaido in 1991. This northern land—Japan’s last frontier after the failure of its foolish attempt at colonial expansion—was a place where indigenous traditions had been systematically uprooted. People came here from all over Japan, and just as many eventually left. In this land of déracinés, unlike most parts of Japan, few traces of feudalism remained; instead, the echoes of the dawn of late modernity resounded. It was not a place of typical conservatism, yet its social norms wavered somewhere between the 1970s and 1980s.
I grew up in what could be called a typical Hokkaido family. It was moderately progressive, warm, and poor. No one in my family ever demanded that I be excessively masculine—but perhaps that was because the patriarchy itself had reached its limit. Fortunately or unfortunately, in 1990s Hokkaido, the collapse of banks had triggered a chain of corporate bankruptcies and mass layoffs, leaving no room for men in the household to assert their masculinity.
Still, the masculinity that had lost its place within the household seemed to have erupted into the wider society. At school, there was no place for anyone who did not behave in a typically masculine way. Liking musical theatre? Impossible! Fascinated by minerals? Unthinkable! When I entered secondary school, I took up kendo—it seemed, at least, more sophisticated than other masculine sports.
I had long been aware that I was not a typically masculine boy, but it was only after entering high school that this awareness gradually turned into certainty. Around this time, the atmosphere of hostility toward LGBTQ+ people in the male society I belonged to also intensified, and I realized that I could never reveal my secret. At that time, I was a boy who secretly worshipped Olivia Newton-John—a taste far from masculine, yet deeply precious, and it has been my greatest secret of all. I was always dreaming of something for which no form could be found—at least not in the countryside where I lived. Olivia always filled the void in my heart that could never be filled.
Then, did leaving my birthplace give me something new? Not at all. I left Hokkaido and enrolled at a university slightly north of Tokyo. Yet university culture in the 2010s coexisted with social media, which meant daily encounters with homophobic memes—even now, such memes remain rampant and are even exported overseas. It was during these university years that my resolve to protect my secret became a lifelong commitment. In my case, even if I protected my secret, there remained the possibility of living a “happy” life with the other half of my identity.
For someone like me—a bisexual man—there is still no stable place in Japanese society. Even within the gay community, people like me are often regarded as potential traitors who will eventually “find happiness” in a heterosexual life. In fact, I had always performed the role of a cis man to the very end. Recently, I began to dream again—of one day meeting someone who might take the time to truly understand me, and I almost believed it could come true. But after surviving the violation of being outed, all those illusions collapsed. Everybody—especially those who live within Japan’s male homosocial culture—knows that forced outing is a powerful means of violating a man; that is precisely why the police used it as a weapon against me.
I speak here in the first person singular because mere survival is no longer enough. After being spoken for and violated by others, I begin to truly live by speaking my own truth. My experience cannot be generalized, and I will let no one else speak it for me.