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What difference does a region make? Are the new regional cultures of Northeast Asia the product of individuals fighting to overcome national trade barriers, or are they driven by governments promoting national interests in new ways? Are they the result of

Japan’s first professionally produced, commercially marketed and nationally distributed gay lifestyle magazine, Barazoku (‘The Rose Tribes’), was launched in 1971. Publicly declaring the beauty and normality of homosexual desire, Barazoku electrified the male homosexual world whilst scandalising mainstream society, and sparked a vibrant period of activity that saw the establishment of an enduring Japanese media form, the homo magazine. Using a detailed account of the formative years of the homo magazine genre in the 1970s as the basis for a wider history of men, this book examines the relationship between male homosexuality and conceptions of manliness in postwar Japan. The book charts the development of notions of masculinity and homosexual identity across the postwar period, analysing key issues including public/private homosexualities, inter-racial desire, male-male sex, love and friendship; the masculine body; and manly identity. The book investigates the phenomenon of ‘manly homosexuality’, little treated in both masculinity and gay studies on Japan, arguing that desires and individual narratives were constructed within (and not necessarily outside of) the dominant narratives of the nation, manliness and Japanese culture. Overall, this book offers a wide-ranging appraisal of homosexuality and manliness in postwar Japan, that provokes insights into conceptions of Japanese masculinity in general. Introduction Part 1: Producing Homo 1. Homo ‘Movings’ – Rentaikan and Shiminken 2. White Dreams: The Coming and Going of Porn Americana Part 2: Confessions - The Buntsuran and The Body 3. Eroto-Morphemic Revolutions of the Everyday 4. Age Differentiation and the Redemption of Men. Conclusion: Modernity and the Contradictions of Certainty Jonathan D. Mackintosh is Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. His research interests include gender/sexuality in postwar Japan, masculinities and the body, and historical East Asian diasporic identities.

Fist of Fury, starring Bruce Lee, debuted in Japan in 1974. Whilst its critical reception reflected its box-office success, a complex emotional reaction is nevertheless detectable towards the film's unsympathetic portrayal of the Japanese. This paper will explore this reaction and suggest that a post-colonial angst was piqued, one that betrayed fundamental shifts in current racial, erotic, cultural, moral, and historical understandings of Japanese manliness. At one level, the response to Lee is a hermeneutic cue into the manifold ways that this angst was constructed through contesting understandings of an emergent China and unresolved memories concerning failed imperial Japanese adventure. At another level, the phenomenon of Lee's Japanese reception points to longer-term shifts in the visual-cultural representation of masculinity: vulnerability as articulated in the cinema's ‘new man’, male nudity as ‘discovered’ in women's magazines, and most potently, modern Japanese manliness to challenge American neo-colonial hegemony. It is this panorama of masculinity that this paper seeks to open through an inter-disciplinary survey of a variety of media—film, pulp fiction, women's magazines, and homo porn; a panorama into which Bruce Lee exploded on screen, alerting us to the images and contradictory aspirations that script a visual poetry of Japanese manliness.

Japan's first professionally produced, commercially marketed and nationally distributed gay lifestyle magazine, Barazoku ('The Rose Tribes'), was launched in 1971. Publicly declaring the beauty and normality of homosexual desire, Barazoku electrified the male homosexual world whilst scandalising mainstream society, and sparked a vibrant period of activity that saw the establishment of an enduring Japanese media form, the homo magazine. Using a detailed account of the formative years of the homo magazine genre in the 1970s as the basis for a wider history of men, this book examines the relationship between male homosexuality and conceptions of manliness in postwar Japan. The book charts the development of notions of masculinity and homosexual identity across the postwar period, analysing key issues including public/private homosexualities, inter-racial desire, male-male sex, love and friendship; the masculine body; and manly identity. The book investigates the phenomenon of 'manly homosexuality', little treated in both masculinity and gay studies on Japan, arguing that desires and individual narratives were constructed within (and not necessarily outside of) the dominant narratives of the nation, manliness and Japanese culture. Overall, this book offers a wide-ranging appraisal of homosexuality and manliness in postwar Japan, that provokes insights into conceptions of Japanese masculinity in general.

Of nanshoku, premodern Japan’s tradition of male-male eroticism that Watanabe Tsuneo likened to the homosexual erotics of ancient Greece, Barazoku’s secondin-command Fujita Ryū wrote,it’s a little archaic, isn’t it. It somehow is of the world of Nobunaga and Ranmaru. That’s it. As for me, I think of it as a word for when you substitute [a man] for a woman. So, the partner is only ever a teen of excellent beauty; and that is the situation in which this word is used.

In 1989, author turned politician Ishihara Shintarō launched an inflammatory diatribe against the United States. The Japan that Can Say No not only became a million-copy bestseller at home, but also through unofficial and official translated editions, it caused an ‘uproar’ in America, according to Ezra Vogel (Isihara 1989: 8). Ishihara’s manifesto holds no punches in its vitriolic attacks on white racism, which were all the more provocative when read against America’s fitful bouts of ‘Japan bashing’ in the 1980s that only seemed to confirm how much yellow-peril racism was still very much alive (Bailey 1996: 1, 2, 175, 176; Berger 2004: 175-9). Yet, in its angry charges, an equally as recidivist sentiment of national projection is betrayed that is all the more disturbing because of the prewar attitudes it unashamedly resuscitated: a renewed clash of civilizations of East versus West, in which Japan assumes the paramount role in leading an Asian renaissance.

Something quite remarkable occurred in 1971 and thereabouts when men encountered the first buntsūran. From the depths of a world hitherto shrouded in silence, there came forth an outburst of energy and emotion. For some, there was a moment of awakening: ‘When I happened to see Barazoku, my eyes were opened’ (B-7, 09/72, #22). The encounter could be profoundly joyous:Kyoto City Daimonji [mountain name and festival in Kyoto] Last year I received so many letters from every region in Japan. For me, it was the best year ever. Everybody in Osaka and Kyoto (young men, gentlemen), I’m waiting to hear from you. So send me your letters.

Setting – everyday Japan Shōwa 46, 1971. For the Japanese, it was a year of no great significance when many significant things happened. As they viewed their colour TVs over breakfast and in the newspapers they read on the commuter trains, they did see that for some it was truly a momentous year. The terrible near-decade of butchery was just beginning for Ugandans, and while Bangladeshis celebrated their independence, Indians and Pakistanis joined the Vietnamese and Americans as populations embroiled in war. Though not on the apocalyptic scale of these events, big things did happen in Japan, too. The accord for the Reversion of Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty was signed to begin the end of the American occupation, and while Japanese and Americans watched their post-colonial moment unfold on television, some Okinawans protested the start of a renewed Japanese colonial ever-after,and a policeman was killed with a bamboo spear. Protest, in fact, was prevalent that year. The government clashed with protesters in Sanrizuka over its forced expropriation of land for the construction of Narita airport; three policemen were killed. Meanwhile, a bemused majority watched news about Shigenobu Fusako, the female leader of the Japanese Red Army who inspired women to wear paramilitary berets, as featured on the cover of the women’s fashion magazine AnAn; eleven people were taken hostage in her organization’s seizure of the French Embassy in The Hague in 1974.

The homo būmu wasn’t just a tabloid phenomenon even if the phrase itself was coined in its pages. Nor can it simply be equated with some sort of manufactured homo panic cynically whipped up to sell more copy to a shocked, if titillated, heterosexual readership. Indeed, the appearance of Barazoku in August 1971 heralded what to some really seemed to be a new era, one which might see homo men across Japan uniting to step out of the shadows to live according to their desires, free of the fear of homo-phobic persecution. Over the next few years, optimism ran high. Barazoku went from strength to strength and the more overtly activist magazines of Minami Teishirō – The Adonis Boy and Adon – appeared on the scene to develop and propel an increasingly political homo agenda. By the mid-1970s, it seemed that a new period was about to emerge; a time when ‘the many homo who have been hiding can emancipate themselves’ (Fujita 1986: 304), a momentous occasion of what Minami identified in grand historical fashion as ‘epochal change’ (Minami 1991: 130).