Speak of the Devil: Nanshoku in Chambara
In the interest of not clogging up one of ezrael's LJ posts any further, I thought I'd mention this example of "Speak of the Devil, and he appears:"
I mentioned in one of my replies to his "Identity" post of 12 August that I didn't know of any chambara movie that even alluded to homosexuality (as opposed to homoeroticism), much less the pedophiliac relationships that samurai had with the young samurai-in-training they were mentoring (admittedly my knowledge of chambara is far from exhaustive); that gap in my knowledge was remedied last night when I saw Takeshi Katano's (a.k.a. "Beat" Takeshi; no, I don't believe he was nicknamed "Beat" because of his affinity for the works or lifestyle of the so-called "Beat Generation") remake of Zatoichi, the blind massuer and master swordsman of numerous films of the 1960s and 1970s starring Shintaro Katsu. (And yes, a Westernized, loose Zatoichi remake called Blind Fury starring second-tier action movie actor-cum-portrayer of psychopaths Rutger Hauer was made in the late 1980s, directed by Phillip Noyce [Dead Calm the two Tom Clancy movies starring Harrison Ford as Clancy's hero Jack Ryan, The Bone Collector, Rabbit-Proof Fence, the second adaptation of The Quiet American], but I've been afraid to see it.)
Takeshi's remake of Zatoichi marks the first chambara movie I've seen that features homosexuality. Actually, it's as though Takeshi was working off of a shopping list when he made (specifically: wrote, directed, starred in and edited; he may not have written the music for it as Robert Rodriguez did for his Once Upon a Time in Mexico, but in all fairness, Rodriguez didn't star in OUaTiM either) this movie: Homosexual relationships? Check. Paedophilia? Check. Cross-dressing and a concomitant blurring of gender identity? Check.
Since I want to keep this a "spoiler-free" zone, however, I'll limit myself to two further remarks about this movie: (1) Takeshi had an absolutely brilliant flashback scene wherein one of a pair of sibling geishas ruefully reflected on how they had to make their way in the world; this scene alone should prove that Takeshi has the potential to blossom into an extremely powerful director of mainstream movies, not merely genre exercises (no, I haven't seen Kikujiro; for all I know, this movie has already proved this, if anyone thought that Sonatine didn't); and (2) the musical number at the very end -- a rousing tap-dance routine that plays like "Stomp Meets The Ballad of Narayama" -- gave me mental whiplash since it was tacked, Bollywood-like, at the end of an emotionally intense and involving story. This number was more jarring and disconcerting than the Three Stooges-type bits of slapstick that were salted throughout the movie (which I actually liked), or the modern instruments used on the score, and I probably would've enjoyed it more if some of the (surviving....) characters didn't join in the fun towards the end, in true Bollywood fashion. Granted, a Takeshi Kitano movie can be an -- odd -- affair, but this was unusually incongruous even for him.
I suspect that Takeshi's Zatoichi will be mined for what it has to say about gender identity and man-boy love in late-feudal Japan, but I'll refrain from citing the elements that I normally would, in the interest of not giving the game away.
By way of compensation and background, however, I thought I'd briefly quote the minimal information that I have on this topic on the theory that someone somewhere might be vaguely interested.
First from Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay & Lesbian Past, edited by Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey, Jr. (NY: NAL Books; 1989; ISBN: 0-453-00689-2), the essay "Male Love in Early Modern Japan: A Literary Depiction of the 'Youth'" by Paul Gordon Schalow:
"In early modern Japanese sexuality, both the love of women (joshoku, or 'female love') and the love of men (nanshoku, or 'male love') were considered normal components of sexual love and represented the two varieties of sexual activity open to adult males. Male homosexual relations occurred almost exclusively within a context of bisexuality, the assumption being that sex with youths did not preclude sex with women, and vice versa. Those who pursued sexual relations exclusively with women or exclusively with youths were in a minority and were considered mildly eccentric for limiting their pleasurable options. Because homosexual relations were not marked as aberrant, men with an exclusive preference for youths were identified not in terms of their preference for youths, but as onnagiri, or 'woman-haters.' This should be understood not as misogyny or hatred of women in the normal sense, but in terms of the failure of such men to love women sexually."
-- pps. 119-20
Schalow offers two endnotes to this passage that are also of interest: first, at the terminus of the sentence concluding "--the two varieties of sexual activity open to adult males," Note #6 on p. 507 remarks, "There were no equivalent terms for a similar choice available to women;" second, at the end of the sentence concluding "--and vice versa," Note #7 on p. 507 states:
"The evidence in literature for the bisexual norm is convincing, but it has not been discussed by Japanese or Western scholars because it is implicitly assumed. [Ihara] Saikaku's first work of fiction, The Man Who Loved Love (Koshoku ichidai otoka, 1682) depicts a hero whose sexual experiences with women and men, and later youths, number in the hundreds. Similar heroes in Tokugawa literature are too numerous to mention, and there are innumerable historical cases to corroborate the literary impression that bisexuality was the social norm."
Incidentally, the role of "youth" (wakashu) in a nanshoku relationship need not always be occupied by an actual youth, just as the wakashu need not have always played the passive role:
"Evidence from the narratives [of Saikaku's short story collection The Great Mirror of Male Love (Nanshoku okagami), 1687] suggests that male homosexual relations were accepted as a normal component of male sexuality and followed established social conventions, though the conventions differed when prostitution was involved, and that the roles assumed in man-youth relations sometimes superseded literal definitions of 'man' and 'youth.'"
-- p. 119
Schalow also comments, "[The Great Mirror of Male Love] still holds its place in Tokugawa literature as the definitive literary expression of the social construct called wakashudo, or 'the way [of loving] youths'" (ibid). Note #5 (p. 507) explains that "Wakashudo is frequently abbreviated to shudo or jakudo in The Great Mirror of Male Love.")
Here's this bit from Ian Buruma's Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters, and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes (NY: Meridian Books; 1984; April 1985 reprint; ISBN: 0-452-00738-0):
"Homosexuality as an ideal form of love goes back further than girls' comics or the Takarazuka theatre. For many centuries homosexuality was not just tolerated, but was actually encouraged as a purer form of love. As in Sparta and Prussia, to name the two most obvious examples, this was part of the warrior tradition: gay lovers make good soldiers, or so it was hoped. At the height of samurai power during the Kamakura period (1185 - 1333) women were despised as inferior creatures, 'holes to be borrowed' for producing children. Only manly love was considered worthy of a true warrior.
"By the beginning of the Edo period, at the start of the seventeenth century, the wars were over, the battles fought. The two-and-a-half centuries of Tokugawa rule were a time of frustrating peace during which the samurai had hardly any recourse to use their weapons at all, except to cut an uppity peasant or merchant down to size. The ideal Way of the Warrior, however, stayed long after it had served its purpose. It was further refined as a form of dandyism. This includes the ideal of manly love and the cult of the bishonen [which Buruma earlier identifies as the "androgynous young heroes" called "bishonen, beautiful youths"]. Its manifestations were rather like the belated chivalry of European knights in the middle-ages, which also became fashionable when knights had little else to do but organize jousts and pine after unattainable ladies.
"Nothing was thought to be purer than the torment of unfulfilled love....
"Knabenliebe [German for "pederasty;" literally, "lad-love"] among the samurai is possibly the closest thing the Japanese ever had to this Western ideal of romantic love. The Hakagure, an influential eighteenth-century treatise on samurai ethics, teaches that 'once love [for a boy] has been confessed, it shrinks in stature. True love attains its highest and noblest form when one carries its secret into the grave.' In an essay on this text Mishima Yukio wrote that 'the bishonen embodies the ideal image -- he lives an ideal of undeclared love.' This is quite different from the sexual passions ending in romantic suicides in Chikamatsu's plays, or the maternal sentiments of golden-hearted prostitutes.
"To be sure, homosexual chivalry, like the love of knights for their ladies, was based on sacrifice, or more precisely, it being Japan, death. Because loyalty could no longer be proved on the battlefield, the ideal of sacrificial suicide took its place. The difference with Chikamatsu's love suicides is that there death was often the only way out of a socially impossible match. While between males it was more a sign of pure loyalty and honour -- or so it was presented.
"There are many tales of bishonen following their older mentors in death by slitting their bellies in various ways, one of which was to make an excruciatingly painful incision in the shape of the friend's name. This kind of self-torture was in fact probably quite rare, but the many stories about it attest to the power of the ideal."
-- pps. 127-29
Buruma's Behind the Mask has many other interesting bits, of course, but there's a particular passage that made me think of jaeix's contribution to ezrael's post; quite probably she's already aware of the information contained therein, but I offer it here in case she's not, as well as for any other interested readers:
"Covers of girls' comics -- and sometimes boys' comics too -- often feature bishonen. --- One girls' comic, called June, is quite explicit, showing decadent English aristocrats in velvet dinner jackets seducing exquisite bishonen under the crystal chandelier. This magazine is rather exceptional in that it represents the extreme fringe of girls' tastes, but it is suffused with the same heady combination of high romance and fascinating evil that characterizes those girls' comics which do not feature naked boys having sex with decadent old men."
-- p. 125
I've read Nicholas Bornoff's Pink Samurai: Love, Marriage & Sex in Contemporary Japan (NY: Pocket Books; 1991; ISBN: 0-671-74265-5), but I read it before I was committed to highlighting and scribbling marginalia in my books; as it has no index, it would take me a bit longer to tweeze out any relevant passages. I don't remember Bornoff devoting much space to homosexuality, but that could be my incipient senility talking.
I mentioned in one of my replies to his "Identity" post of 12 August that I didn't know of any chambara movie that even alluded to homosexuality (as opposed to homoeroticism), much less the pedophiliac relationships that samurai had with the young samurai-in-training they were mentoring (admittedly my knowledge of chambara is far from exhaustive); that gap in my knowledge was remedied last night when I saw Takeshi Katano's (a.k.a. "Beat" Takeshi; no, I don't believe he was nicknamed "Beat" because of his affinity for the works or lifestyle of the so-called "Beat Generation") remake of Zatoichi, the blind massuer and master swordsman of numerous films of the 1960s and 1970s starring Shintaro Katsu. (And yes, a Westernized, loose Zatoichi remake called Blind Fury starring second-tier action movie actor-cum-portrayer of psychopaths Rutger Hauer was made in the late 1980s, directed by Phillip Noyce [Dead Calm the two Tom Clancy movies starring Harrison Ford as Clancy's hero Jack Ryan, The Bone Collector, Rabbit-Proof Fence, the second adaptation of The Quiet American], but I've been afraid to see it.)
Takeshi's remake of Zatoichi marks the first chambara movie I've seen that features homosexuality. Actually, it's as though Takeshi was working off of a shopping list when he made (specifically: wrote, directed, starred in and edited; he may not have written the music for it as Robert Rodriguez did for his Once Upon a Time in Mexico, but in all fairness, Rodriguez didn't star in OUaTiM either) this movie: Homosexual relationships? Check. Paedophilia? Check. Cross-dressing and a concomitant blurring of gender identity? Check.
Since I want to keep this a "spoiler-free" zone, however, I'll limit myself to two further remarks about this movie: (1) Takeshi had an absolutely brilliant flashback scene wherein one of a pair of sibling geishas ruefully reflected on how they had to make their way in the world; this scene alone should prove that Takeshi has the potential to blossom into an extremely powerful director of mainstream movies, not merely genre exercises (no, I haven't seen Kikujiro; for all I know, this movie has already proved this, if anyone thought that Sonatine didn't); and (2) the musical number at the very end -- a rousing tap-dance routine that plays like "Stomp Meets The Ballad of Narayama" -- gave me mental whiplash since it was tacked, Bollywood-like, at the end of an emotionally intense and involving story. This number was more jarring and disconcerting than the Three Stooges-type bits of slapstick that were salted throughout the movie (which I actually liked), or the modern instruments used on the score, and I probably would've enjoyed it more if some of the (surviving....) characters didn't join in the fun towards the end, in true Bollywood fashion. Granted, a Takeshi Kitano movie can be an -- odd -- affair, but this was unusually incongruous even for him.
I suspect that Takeshi's Zatoichi will be mined for what it has to say about gender identity and man-boy love in late-feudal Japan, but I'll refrain from citing the elements that I normally would, in the interest of not giving the game away.
By way of compensation and background, however, I thought I'd briefly quote the minimal information that I have on this topic on the theory that someone somewhere might be vaguely interested.
First from Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay & Lesbian Past, edited by Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey, Jr. (NY: NAL Books; 1989; ISBN: 0-453-00689-2), the essay "Male Love in Early Modern Japan: A Literary Depiction of the 'Youth'" by Paul Gordon Schalow:
"In early modern Japanese sexuality, both the love of women (joshoku, or 'female love') and the love of men (nanshoku, or 'male love') were considered normal components of sexual love and represented the two varieties of sexual activity open to adult males. Male homosexual relations occurred almost exclusively within a context of bisexuality, the assumption being that sex with youths did not preclude sex with women, and vice versa. Those who pursued sexual relations exclusively with women or exclusively with youths were in a minority and were considered mildly eccentric for limiting their pleasurable options. Because homosexual relations were not marked as aberrant, men with an exclusive preference for youths were identified not in terms of their preference for youths, but as onnagiri, or 'woman-haters.' This should be understood not as misogyny or hatred of women in the normal sense, but in terms of the failure of such men to love women sexually."
-- pps. 119-20
Schalow offers two endnotes to this passage that are also of interest: first, at the terminus of the sentence concluding "--the two varieties of sexual activity open to adult males," Note #6 on p. 507 remarks, "There were no equivalent terms for a similar choice available to women;" second, at the end of the sentence concluding "--and vice versa," Note #7 on p. 507 states:
"The evidence in literature for the bisexual norm is convincing, but it has not been discussed by Japanese or Western scholars because it is implicitly assumed. [Ihara] Saikaku's first work of fiction, The Man Who Loved Love (Koshoku ichidai otoka, 1682) depicts a hero whose sexual experiences with women and men, and later youths, number in the hundreds. Similar heroes in Tokugawa literature are too numerous to mention, and there are innumerable historical cases to corroborate the literary impression that bisexuality was the social norm."
Incidentally, the role of "youth" (wakashu) in a nanshoku relationship need not always be occupied by an actual youth, just as the wakashu need not have always played the passive role:
"Evidence from the narratives [of Saikaku's short story collection The Great Mirror of Male Love (Nanshoku okagami), 1687] suggests that male homosexual relations were accepted as a normal component of male sexuality and followed established social conventions, though the conventions differed when prostitution was involved, and that the roles assumed in man-youth relations sometimes superseded literal definitions of 'man' and 'youth.'"
-- p. 119
Schalow also comments, "[The Great Mirror of Male Love] still holds its place in Tokugawa literature as the definitive literary expression of the social construct called wakashudo, or 'the way [of loving] youths'" (ibid). Note #5 (p. 507) explains that "Wakashudo is frequently abbreviated to shudo or jakudo in The Great Mirror of Male Love.")
Here's this bit from Ian Buruma's Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters, and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes (NY: Meridian Books; 1984; April 1985 reprint; ISBN: 0-452-00738-0):
"Homosexuality as an ideal form of love goes back further than girls' comics or the Takarazuka theatre. For many centuries homosexuality was not just tolerated, but was actually encouraged as a purer form of love. As in Sparta and Prussia, to name the two most obvious examples, this was part of the warrior tradition: gay lovers make good soldiers, or so it was hoped. At the height of samurai power during the Kamakura period (1185 - 1333) women were despised as inferior creatures, 'holes to be borrowed' for producing children. Only manly love was considered worthy of a true warrior.
"By the beginning of the Edo period, at the start of the seventeenth century, the wars were over, the battles fought. The two-and-a-half centuries of Tokugawa rule were a time of frustrating peace during which the samurai had hardly any recourse to use their weapons at all, except to cut an uppity peasant or merchant down to size. The ideal Way of the Warrior, however, stayed long after it had served its purpose. It was further refined as a form of dandyism. This includes the ideal of manly love and the cult of the bishonen [which Buruma earlier identifies as the "androgynous young heroes" called "bishonen, beautiful youths"]. Its manifestations were rather like the belated chivalry of European knights in the middle-ages, which also became fashionable when knights had little else to do but organize jousts and pine after unattainable ladies.
"Nothing was thought to be purer than the torment of unfulfilled love....
"Knabenliebe [German for "pederasty;" literally, "lad-love"] among the samurai is possibly the closest thing the Japanese ever had to this Western ideal of romantic love. The Hakagure, an influential eighteenth-century treatise on samurai ethics, teaches that 'once love [for a boy] has been confessed, it shrinks in stature. True love attains its highest and noblest form when one carries its secret into the grave.' In an essay on this text Mishima Yukio wrote that 'the bishonen embodies the ideal image -- he lives an ideal of undeclared love.' This is quite different from the sexual passions ending in romantic suicides in Chikamatsu's plays, or the maternal sentiments of golden-hearted prostitutes.
"To be sure, homosexual chivalry, like the love of knights for their ladies, was based on sacrifice, or more precisely, it being Japan, death. Because loyalty could no longer be proved on the battlefield, the ideal of sacrificial suicide took its place. The difference with Chikamatsu's love suicides is that there death was often the only way out of a socially impossible match. While between males it was more a sign of pure loyalty and honour -- or so it was presented.
"There are many tales of bishonen following their older mentors in death by slitting their bellies in various ways, one of which was to make an excruciatingly painful incision in the shape of the friend's name. This kind of self-torture was in fact probably quite rare, but the many stories about it attest to the power of the ideal."
-- pps. 127-29
Buruma's Behind the Mask has many other interesting bits, of course, but there's a particular passage that made me think of jaeix's contribution to ezrael's post; quite probably she's already aware of the information contained therein, but I offer it here in case she's not, as well as for any other interested readers:
"Covers of girls' comics -- and sometimes boys' comics too -- often feature bishonen. --- One girls' comic, called June, is quite explicit, showing decadent English aristocrats in velvet dinner jackets seducing exquisite bishonen under the crystal chandelier. This magazine is rather exceptional in that it represents the extreme fringe of girls' tastes, but it is suffused with the same heady combination of high romance and fascinating evil that characterizes those girls' comics which do not feature naked boys having sex with decadent old men."
-- p. 125
I've read Nicholas Bornoff's Pink Samurai: Love, Marriage & Sex in Contemporary Japan (NY: Pocket Books; 1991; ISBN: 0-671-74265-5), but I read it before I was committed to highlighting and scribbling marginalia in my books; as it has no index, it would take me a bit longer to tweeze out any relevant passages. I don't remember Bornoff devoting much space to homosexuality, but that could be my incipient senility talking.