Introduction
Figure 1. Comparison of Utagawa Kunisada “The Competitive Type”, Utagawa Kunisada and Utagawa Hiroshige II’s “Hiyoshi Sanno Festival”, and a Bromide of actress Ashihara Kuniko.
Utagawa Kunisada’s “The Competitive Type” from the 1820s, Kunisada and Utagawa Hiroshige II’s “Hiyoshi Sanno Festival” from 1864, and a bromide of the Takarazuka actress Ashihara Kuniko from 1938 (Figure 1) are, upon first inspection, very different images. From composition to subject and medium, they span over a century, and their relationship to each other is unclear. The simple answer to what these images have in common is that they all depict a woman cross-dressing in men’s fashion, but this answer only elicits more questions. What purpose did these images serve in their time? Were they accepted or censored? Who were the actual women depicted? What do these images tell us about the definitions of masculinity and femininity in Japan in the transition between the early modern and modern eras?
This capstone aims to answer these questions about the consistency and inconsistency of the image of the cross-dressed woman across modern Japanese visual culture. This subject remains popular even in contemporary Japan. It explores the appearance, function, and response to images of cross-dressed women between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While cross-dressed women in Japan are often seen as a twentieth-century phenomenon, as these three images demonstrate, women’s cross-dressing in performance was not new. This is also evidenced by the fact that Japanese audiences, urban and rural alike, accepted the all-female Takarazuka Revue, a musical theater troupe established in 1913 that remains popular today, despite its transgressive aesthetics and connections to a rising moral panic over same-sex love between women.
Exploring cross-dressed women and the associated visual history fills a gap in the existing scholarship on cross-dressing images in Japan. More consideration has been given to male-to-female examples and only briefly, if at all, discusses the unique implications of female-to-male examples. This gap feels significant, considering that female-to-male examples have an almost equal presence in Japanese visual history. It also, as stated above, combats the idea that representations of gender non-conforming individuals, particularly women, were new to Japan in the twentieth century and a foreign cultural import. Re-establishing a connection between the nineteenth-century and twentieth-century images forces us to consider those twentieth-century images in their local context and the gender-nonconforming aesthetics within them as natively Japanese. With this new context, even contemporary images and expressions of gender non-conformity in Japan can be reconsidered, and the complexity of those expressions can be better understood.
Jennifer Robertson, Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan
Cross-dressed Women in Pictures
Images of early modern women cross-dressing have appeared in major exhibitions and are included in broad discussions of Ukiyo-e art. The most critical exhibitions were Ota Memorial Museum’s Crossdressing in Ukyio-e in 2017 and Royal Ontario Museum’s Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Edo-Period Prints and Paintings in 2016. However, these exhibitions and studies rarely give significant attention to these specific works and their subject matter; usually, more attention is given to the larger body of images of cross-dressed men.[1] There is no concrete reason for this imbalance, but it could be the result of several factors, including the relatively more considerable amount of surviving material that depicts men cross-dressing, the fact that early modern male-to-female crossdressing practices (i.e., Kabuki) still exist relatively unchanged today, and the general centering of men even in conversations around gender and sexuality.
While no dedicated, in-depth studies of these images exist, there is a body of scholarship concerning gender presentation in Japanese prints that can be pulled from to inform this capstone. Joshua Mostow’s “The Gender of Wakashu and the Grammar of Desire.” Introduces the Wakashu to Japanese art historical discourse and explores early modern systems of gender, sex, and desire through the information we can glean from prints and illustrations.[2] Mostow not only sets a precedent for questioning the gender presentation and identity of the people we see in print, but his study also provides a model for how the design, composition, and aesthetic of prints can be used to understand the social circumstances that created them.
Furthermore, existing scholarship on gender performance in Kabuki and Kabuki’s depiction in Ukiyo-e also provide a worthwhile foundation for this project. Mark Oshima’s “The Keisei as a meeting point of different worlds: courtesan and the Kabuki Onnagata.” and Samuel L. Leiter’s “From Gay to Gei: The Onnagata and the Creation of Kabuki’s Female Characters.” Both establish the interconnected relationship between the women of the red light district and the way onnagata actors constructed their performed femininity. Mark Oshima, in particular, reads these connections in the prints that depict Kabuki onnagata and the highest-paid courtesans of the red-light districts. Isaka Maki’s Onnagata: A labyrinth of gendering in the Kabuki Theater discusses how the Onnagata constructs their idealized femininity onstage through the terms of semiotics. This exhaustive analysis of the performance style of the Onnagata presents gender as a performance that can be mastered. The cross-dressed man monopolized that mastery while biological women fell short. The Onnagata exemplifies a gap between gender performance and biological sex in early modern Japan that created a basis for the existence of the cross-dressed woman.
The Takarazuka Revue and cross-dressing in the twentieth century have enjoyed much more scholarly attention. Jennifer Robertson’s seminal 1990s study of queerness and erotic desire in the theater Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan and Deborah Shamoon’s detailed exploration of Shojo culture Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan form the foundation of the Takarazuka centric section of the project.[3] Also important for both discussions of Early modern cross-dressing and twentieth-century Takarazuka are the cultural and artistic trends of the respective periods. For this, I turn to scholars like Donald Roden and Miriam Silverberg from the early twentieth century. Roden argues for Gender ambivalence as a defining part of Taisho popular culture and its subsequent importance to the Taisho intellectuals attempting to understand it.[4] Miriam Silverberg attempts to define the enigmatic Modern Girl that become the icon of Taisho and early Showa Japan.[5] For Early Modern Tokugawa Japan, I will use Nishiyama Matsunosuke and David Pollack. The collection of Nishiyama’s writing titled Edo Culture, translated by Gerald Groemer, is a foundational text for understanding Edo period Japan. Nishiyama defines iki aesthetics and places it within the socio-economic circumstances of its time.[6] David Pollack’s more recent writing on the inextricable relationship between advertising and sexuality in Edo Japan, paints a picture of a busy metropolis with a consumer population whose tastes significantly shaped the twists and turns of Japanese culture.
Nishiyama Matsunosuke, Edo Culture: Daily life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600-1868
Dansō, androgyny, or queer? Defining Cross-Dressing
One of the challenges frequently occurring in studying East Asian socio-historical phenomena in the English language lies in the gap in theoretical vocabulary between English and the local language. This capstone’s subject is no exception. The term “cross-dressing” is commonly associated with transgression by contemporary Western viewers. This view is formed by notions of gendered dress in Western culture and a perception of Japanese society as having strictly defined and divided gender roles, so any challenge to the “norm” must be subversive. But there is no perfect equivalent in the Japanese language. Thus, it is necessary to carefully examine the various terms frequented in this capstone before going into details.
As stated above, the word crossdressing has no direct translation, and the words typically used in Japanese are gendered more precisely than the English term. In the case of a woman dressing as a man, it would be called Dansō (男装.) When broken down and translated, it means “male attire/dress,” which implies a woman dressing as a man. In popular use in contemporary Japan, Dansō has morphed into both a verb and a noun, and someone can do Dansō and be a Dansō. This means Dansō has come to refer to both a temporary state of cross-dressing and a more permanent form of personal presentation. What makes Dansō complicated as an identity is that, based on recent anthropological studies of individuals that fall under the umbrella of Dansō, there is no consistent pronoun use or preferred gender identity. Dansō, from these interviews, seem comfortable presenting themselves as being somewhere in between with the freedom to use a variety of self-referents and self-fashioning. There is some agreement among interviewees that Dansō is not transgender, but this might not always hold for every Dansō individual.[7] What this ambiguity tells us is that Dansō is more complex than just a translation of the word crossdressing. Furthermore, the actual visual result of Dansō is not as simple as female to male. Instead, Dansō can be more accurately described as a type of androgyny.
Androgyny means to identify and/or present as neither wholly masculine nor feminine. It cannot be distinguished as just one of the two ends of the gender spectrum. Typically, it incorporates visual elements associated with both. Androgyny, as a characteristic of female-to-male crossdressing in Japan, plays a significant role in this capstone since the examples explored can all be described as such. This androgyny interacts with the context of performance that all the examples fall in to create the unique conditions that allowed certain cross-dressed women to prevail in the visual culture despite social pressures. Against the backdrop of constructing this visual lineage, the project will interrogate how androgyny and performance served seemingly contradictory functions. Androgyny and performance acted as both the boundaries that confined the images to acceptable femininity while simultaneously imbuing these images with a subversive power that invited censor and criticism in the periods they were made.
The interplay between normal and abnormal displays of femininity leads to the broader second goal of this project: to consider the images of cross-dressed women in the context of Japanese queer aesthetics and history. The history of the term “queer” is much shorter than the phenomenon it explains. Queer, in popular usage, is an adjective meant to describe any individual who is not heterosexual or cisgender, but it was used as a pejorative term for gay men before being reclaimed by some members of the LGBTQIA+ community starting in the 1960s.[8] It is essential to distinguish that while queer and androgyny both describe a fluidity of identity and presentation, queer suggests a permanence that androgyny does not always have. Androgyny, in this capstone, refers to a temporary performative persona used by the women in question. Queer refers to the fluidity in people’s lived identities and orientations and is not limited to a staged performance. This is also present in this capstone in how performance personae would leak into women’s everyday lives and even influence women outside the performance sphere to explore new forms of self-presentation and identification.
Screenshot from Vice Japan’s 男装- Crossdressing
Screenshot from i-D Japan’s i-D Meets: Tokyo’s Genderless Youth
Further considering the definition of queer, in western scholarship, it becomes more challenging to pin down. The consensus is that queer is more defined by what it is not: it is a position of opposition to the norm. In foundational texts by scholars like Halperin, Butler, and Sedgewick, queer is an ephemeral, undefinable concept that pushes a person to reflect on their notions that gender or sexual orientation are fixed states of being.[9] Queer, in this context, is also anti-assimilationist.
However, this definition has a subtle shift in the Japanese context. According to the anthropologist Michelle H. S. Ho’s 2020 study titled “Queer and Normal: Dansō (female-to-male crossdressing) lives and politics in contemporary Tokyo,” despite being queer, Dansō do not see themselves as abnormal. Ho sees this inconsistency as part of the struggle of applying western theory and identity categories to non-western cultures and people. This is part of what Mclelland, Suganuma, and Welker discuss in the introduction to Queer Voices from Japan as “global queering,” in which North American theory and terminology are taken up by diverse communities creating the sense of a unified “gay world.”[10] As the authors helpfully put it, the Japanese gei and English “gay” might be homophones, but their meaning and nuance are not the same.[11]
The final term that requires some definition at the start that will appear throughout the capstone is gender ambivalence. Donald Roden identified gender ambivalence as a phenomenon of growing “fascination for sexual inversion and the intentional smashing of gender distinctions” [12] Roden attributed the appearance of this fascination in mainstream Japanese society to a variety of factors, including the rising popularity of sexology, Freudian thought, and individualistic preoccupation with the self. While this phenomenon is usually attributed to European centers like Berlin in the 1920s, Roden argued that it also manifested in Taisho Japan and gave the period a character distinct from the more conservative Meiji and Showa eras. Silverberg also uses this term to describe the attitude toward gender non-conformity in the period. [13] So choosing this term places this capstone into the broader scholarship on the liberal cultural atmosphere in the Taisho, but it also, in my view, best describes the ambiguous relationship mainstream society had to these queer representations. There was a fascination and attraction for different things, but that did not result in widespread institutional acceptance. Roden and Silverberg both use the term to discuss early twentieth century Japan, but I will be extending its use to describe the cultures of the Bunka and Bunsei era in the Tokugawa period. The Taisho and Ka’sei eras have many cultural parallels that Joshua Mostow has also observed in his discussion of iki aesthetics.[14]
Bringing this back to the project at hand, in finding a connection between Takarazuka and native early modern cross-dressing traditions, I hope to complicate the idea that Takarazuka’s queerness is solely the product of western influence. My study will also echo Michelle H.S. Ho’s findings that queerness in the Japanese context is not necessarily only abnormal or anti-assimilationist and that queerness can exist in-between the mainstream and the margins. Studying these traditions’ visual and material culture provides an understanding of the socio-historical circumstances that shaped these objects. More importantly, tracing how these objects were proliferated, to whom, and how that proliferation garnered criticism provides a window into how wider society viewed these traditions. Furthermore, visual culture provides a powerful site for considering the intersection of queerness and Japanese culture; in the absence of the people themselves, these depictions of them stand as an essential record of how they fashioned themselves and were fashioned by others. The complex web of interrelated terminology explored above becomes easier to comprehend when given visual form through these objects. The images are no less complex but more concrete than difficult-to-define terms and insufficient translations.
Capstone Structure
While earlier studies have prioritized representations of cross-dressed women on stage and in literature, this study investigates the contributions of visual representations. The capstone follows a generally chronological order, but I shall begin unraveling this history in Chapter one by analyzing Figure 2, an example demonstrating the cross-dressed woman at the critical turning point to better highlight this capstone’s issues. Next, I will go back and examine the early Bunka (1804-1818) and Bunsei (1818-1830) eras through two representative prints from 1811 and 1820 and then explore how the culture that generated those images led to the conservative reform period called the Tenpo Reforms (1841-1843). Following the end of the reforms and the end of the feudal government, I will look at how the cross-dressing geisha’s image survived into the Modern era in both print and the new medium of photography to transition to the discussion on Takarazuka Revue in Chapter two.
In the following chapter, I will introduce the Takarazuka theater from its founding years until 1940. Using two photographs from early productions in the 1920s, I will explore how Takarazuka in the early years both borrowed from the visual culture that preceded it while beginning to develop its own distinct aesthetic. Next, I will discuss the 1930s, considered the golden age of Takarazuka. I will do this through the career of Ashihara Kuniko and the visual culture produced for her 1938 production Unforgettable song. Ashihara is an ideal subject because of her popularity and subsequent large visual footprint and her personal and professional relationships with Nakahara Junichi and Yoshiya Nobuko. From Nakahara and Yoshiya, I will discuss Takarazuka’s relationship with the Shojo subculture and how it played a central role in codifying Takarazuka’s queer aesthetics.
Through a carefully conducted analysis, this capstone will contribute to the scholarly dialogue on how Japan developed its queer expressions, one that is not just a mirror of western examples but a conscious synthesis of its native traditions. Furthermore, this project will illuminate the power of material objects to embody the history of their subjects and how their handling and reception can provide a record of histories typically pushed to the margins.
[1] Also, worth mentioning is Chester Beatty Library’s Edo in Color (2021), it was not specifically concerned with issues of gender in art but did include significant eighteenth-century examples that were given some discussion by the curators.
[2] Joshua S. Mostow’s “The Gender of Wakashu and the Grammar of Desire.” In Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field, 2003 and “Utagawa Shunga, Kuki’s ‘chic,’ and the construction of a national erotics in Japan”. In Performing “Nation” Gender Politics in Literature, Theater, and the Visual Arts of China and Japan, 1880-1940, 2008.
[3] Deborah. Shamoon’s Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan, 2012 and Jennifer Robertson’s Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan, 1998.
[4] Donald Roden. “Taishō Culture and the Problem of Gender Ambivalence” In Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals during the Interwar Years, edited by J. Thomas Rimer. (Cambridge: Princeton University Press, 1990,) 37.
[5] Miriam Silverberg . Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.)
[6] Nishiyama Matsunosuke, Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600-1868.(University of Hawai’i Press, 1997.)
[7], Michelle H. S. Ho “Queer and Normal: Dansō (female-to-Male Crossdressing) Lives and Politics in Contemporary Tokyo.” Asian Anthropology 19, no. 2 (2020): 103-104.
[8] “Queer (GE, GI, S, SO)” Its Getter Better Project, accessed 2/15/2023. https://itgetsbetter.org/glossary/queer/
[9]. Noreen Giffney. “Introduction: The ‘q’ word.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory. Noreen Giffney ed., and Michael O’Rourke,( London: Routledge, 2016,) 19-20.
[10] Mark McClelland, Katsuhiko Suganuma ed and James. Welker. “Introduction: Re(claiming) Japan’s Queer Past” In Queer Voices from Japan: First Person Narratives from Japan’s Sexual Minorities. Mark McClelland ed., Katsuhiko. Suganuma ed., and James. Welker ed, (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007,) 1-2.
[11] McLelland, Suganuma, and Welker, “Introduction”, 2.
[12] Roden. “Taishō Culture”, 37.
[13] Silverberg. Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, 118.
[14] Joshua Mostow “Utagawa Shunga, Kuki’s ‘chic,’ and the construction of a national erotics in Japan”. In Performing “Nation” Gender Politics in Literature, Theater, and the Visual Arts of China and Japan, 1880-1940, 2008.