"Hate crime is nonexistent in Japan," "Japan only recently started having pride marches," "homosexuality is accepted in Japan because of the traditional male-male shudo sexual/romantic culture," "Japanese media are LGBT-friendly," and "Taiga Ishikawa is the first openly gay politician in Japan" are all false! (more…)
Queer Filmmaker Graham Kolbeins talks about interviewing queer people, funding for queer documentary filmmakers, creative freedom vs focus, the Western gaze, the male gaze, the issue of representation of minorities, and his upcoming project Queer Japan. (more…)
In this vlog from 2 years and half ago, I talk about allyship, gay marriage/partnership, representation, and Western queer media——all relevant topics to this date. (more…)
Amelia Cook, Editor-in-chief at Anime Feminist, contacted me after I posted this video on YouTube. (more…)
As I was going through the daily routine of browsing Facebook & Twitter, I found a NYT article, Gay Couples, Choosing to Say ‘I Don’t’, the title of which caught my eye, as I oppose the institution of marriage, and the like-minded people who shared the link in FB/TW seemed content with anti-marriage opinions circulating at last in the mainstream media. Excited, I read on, only to be disappointed, but in a way that was quite unexpected, by the elitist tone of the article. (more…)
ORIGINALLY POSTED ONLINE MAY 3, 2011.
The following quote has been and still is circulating rapidly on the Internet, even spreading beyond the English-language online communities:
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Japan tsunami and earthquake: 30 children sit silent in classroom after parents vanish | Mail Online. Ok. I almost cried. I almost cried not because of the devastation that those people in those stories and photos are experiencing, but because they are now a target of the Western pornographic gaze. I mean, look at that picture of 'an old Asian woman standing in the rain' - how photographically well-crafted it is! Oh my god, it surely provokes some emotional, sympathetic, um, hard-on (figuratively). (more…)
When I first got that name, “gay,” I felt jubilant. I accepted the name and told people that I was gay. Since I was also bisexual from time to time, I sometimes called myself a “part-time bisexual.” At that time, I lived in the country where I was recognized as racial minority, which already made me “different.” So, through gayness, I thought I could become part of mainstream culture. I put myself out to the public as gay, rather than Asian. That was my assimilation tactics. (more…)
From September 8 to 12, I was in London. The flight connecting from Kuala Lumpur to Heathrow, London was delayed for a good 14 hours and me and another presenter, Sonja, were sent to a hotel by heavy loaded buses. But that was the only thing that I hated about my trip, and that hotel turned out to be a luxurious one anyway. On the night of the 11th, two of my co-presenters and I went to see Billy Elliot the Musical. The boys were cute, the dancers did a pretty good job, and I loved the ballet teacher and the particular accents the actors had (due to which, unfortunately, I probably understood as little as 50-60% of what they were saying, though). But towards the end of the story, I found myself having to wipe my tears off my cheeks because I was too sad. I was sad not because the story was touching. I was sad because I realized that I was that Billy boy, of course metaphorically. I'm not as cute or talented as Billy, but we have so much in common in terms of upward mobility. (more…)