Book Review

Asia

This book is an extraordinary contribution to the substantial, growing amount of English-language scholarship on the history of homosexuality in Japan. The Love of the Samurai: A Thousand Years of Japanese Homosexuality, by psychologist Watanabe Tsuneo and Iwata Jun'ichi, was published in 1989. My own Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan (1995) focused on the Edo or Tokugawa period (1602–1868). If read alongside translated Japanese homoerotic works, these books provide a historical overview of the topic up to the Meiji Restoration. Gregory M. Pflugfelder's study brings us up to the U.S. Occupation.	1
Pflugfelder examines representations of male-male sexual behavior: how people spoke and wrote about it, and what meanings they attached to it. He is less concerned (but not unconcerned) about what actually happened between men sexually. Pflugfelder repeatedly emphasizes that representations "should not be assumed to encode in any transparent fashion the realities of the behavior that they represent" (p. 8).	2
He analyzes the discussion of male-male sex in "three realms of discourse": popular, legal, and medical. These "were not discrete entities operating in isolation from one another" but rather were "implicated in a broader process of contestation over the cultural significance of male-male" sexuality (p. 13). Chapter one examines Edo popular literary sources. Chapter two treats Edo legal material. Chapters three and four analyze discourses in Meiji Japan and include more Tokugawa material. Chapter five traces the history of medical discussion of homosexuality from 1600 to 1950, and chapter six examines twentieth-century popular discourse on the topic. Male homosexuality, in Pflugfelder's analysis, is sequentially represented as a refined "way" in the Edo period; a remnant of the pre-enlightened past in the Meiji; and a psychological condition from the early twentieth century.	3
The array of sources is stunning, the analysis generally persuasive, and the prose usually smoothly readable. The discussion of the Meiji regime's efforts to discourage homosexual behavior is a particularly important contribution. I would, however, have preferred a tighter chronological arrangement of material, with summaries that highlight the specificities of male homosexual behavior in the three stages and reconcile contradictory representations. Given space limitations, I confine my comments to the Edo period.	4
In chapter one, Pflugfelder describes shud, the Edo-era sexual relationship between males involving age-graded, role-structured anal sex. Its literary representation was created by "the virile gaze" of the adult male partner or nenja (pp. 35–36). According to Pflugfelder, in this literature the wakashu (younger partner) derives no physical pleasure from his role, acting out of loyalty, compassion, or greed. Pflugfelder provides many examples from popular literature, other materials being "outside of the scope" of his study (pp. 41–43, 55–56, 70). Despite the caveat quoted above, he hints that his sampling indeed reflects reality. Thus he declares that homoerotic literature written to appeal to youths was "hardly innocent" or in the "interests of the youth himself" (p. 54). Nenjas' sexual advances were "unwanted" (p. 75). Contrary examples, affirming the existence of wakashu who enjoyed their sexual role, are relegated to substantive footnotes (pp. 42–43).	. . .