ADORATION OF BOYS IN JAPAN
For more than 2½  millennia
by Peter de Jong

The following article was published in issue 2 of Koinos, Amsterdam, Summer 1993, pp. 20-22. The two black-and-white illustrations accompanied the original article.

People love each other all over the world. It also happens between men and boys, although western culture rejects this. In Japan there seems to be more tolerance. A Japanese reader of Koinos has enlightened us about his country. “Japan has 2653 years of history where there has been no special bias for any kind of erotic relations.”

Let’s first take a look at Japanese moral law. The age of consent is 13 years. Prosecution for sexual contact with a minor does not take place, unless the boy or girl or the parents make an accusation, which must fit strictly into the terms of the law. Cases where no violence is involved mostly end up in a suspended sentence of two or three years imprisonment, and about fifty percent of the cases are dismissed by the prosecutor.

Most districts have their own by-laws on sexual acts between adults and minors under the age of 18. These by-laws vary from place to place, and in general they forbid sexual contacts where compulsion is used and where the adult takes advantage of the minors perplexity.

In fact the Japanese judicial system differs quite a lot from that in European countries.

A boy’s day

The same counts for the lives of Japanese teenage boys. Their main concern is to study school subjects as hard as possible, to be able to pass the entrance exam for a well known high school. Once admitted to such a school, the very hard study continues in order to be able to enter a famous university and to complete courses there.

As an example, it’s not unusual for a thirteen year old boy to get up at 6 in the morning and start studying. At 8 a.m. he goes to school, and stays there until 3 p.m. After school he goes to a “private school for entrance exam” where he studies until 9 p.m. Then he returns home and studies school subjects until 1 a.m., when he goes to sleep.

This may sound crazy, but, according to our informant, it is common for Japanese school boys, especially if they want to enter a famous high school.

Anyway, boys are boys, even in Japan, and they still find some spare time to enjoy themselves. If a boy studies school subjects seriously, parents, teachers and other adults will not blame him for eventually having sexual contacts or collecting erotic materials. There do exist a huge number of comic strip magazines, aimed at teenage boys and showing all kinds of sexual varieties such as man-boy, boy-boy, Lolita, and sado-masochism.

Magazines

What can be found in Japanese bookstalls in this field will astonish the Western visitor. Boy-love seems to be a topic, but again, in quite a different perspective to that in the western world.

Boy-love magazines as they are published in Europe did exist in Japan on a small scale, but seem to have ceased. One was Shonen, meaning “Lovely Boys”, which published photos (non-pornographic) and articles on films, boy singers, experience stories and things like that. Emancipation or political matters were hardly covered. Also some photo magazines existed, but all were short lived and had a very small circulation.

Three monthly gay magazines offer articles on boy-love in each issue. These include stories, s&m-fantasies, illustrations of nude boys, slightly more explicit photos, and some contact advertisements where men search for boys or for like-minded. News items are contained as well as articles on boy prostitution in Japan and other Asian countries. Generally speaking, the magazines show an optimistic view on boylove.

“June”

The same is true for another category of publications of which more than 100,000 copies are sold each month: the periodicals on boylove aimed at girl readers. This is something we do not know in the West.

Let’s take a look at a copy of such a periodical which is called June (no. 55 from 1990). The front cover shows a colour illustration of a boy, gracefully putting a finger into his mouth. Decorated with elegant Japanese characters, it makes a beautiful drawing. The “magazine” numbers more than 200 pages, so it gives the impression of a book.

The first page is a fold-out drawing by a female illustrator, showing a boy with his hands bound by rope. The boy has large eyes, beautiful long hair, and the whole drawing is aimed at aesthetic pleasure. This is the case all through the magazine. The eyes and beauty of the figures make it a pleasure to look at, and really only the anatomic details convince you that boys are meant. The Japanese seem to love the idea of androginy.

Glancing through the book you see photos of well known movies and theatre plays where you can feel boy eroticism, followed by a comic strip about two high school boys who love each other for a rather long period, and their meeting again in their late twenties. “Boys treble voice in cinema films” is an article written by a woman on Heintje, the Wiener Sangerknaben, and other boy-singers. The next comic strip shows two boys fighting each other who later become friends and lovers.

The centre pages contain a written boy-love story with romantic illustrations by the most popular writer in this field, Miss Keiko Takemiya, printed on special paper in a special colour. The story deals with the friends Henry and Victor in southern France. According to our Japanese reviewer, the way in which the love-scenes are depicted in words is very nice: “Soft but in depth, as in other boy-love stories written by women.”

This is followed by a comic strip called “Without”, written by a female reader of the magazine and featuring the love and jealousy of two boys in junior high school, Kaoru and Ikuo, who are about 13 years old. Kaoru falls in love with Ikuo when he has entered the school football team. After having many “wet dreams” he eventually has sexual contact with his friend. The boys wear their school uniforms and are depicted too girlish to be real.

The last part of June contains instructive articles on how to write boy-love cartoons, reviews of books on gay love, offers of comic books like The complete Keiko Takemiya, and letters from girl readers. The girls tell how they feel about boylove relationships, for instance how they “found” such relationships in their schools and on TV. They also send in photos which are published under the heading “My Boy”.

Man-first society

As a conclusion you can say it’s all fantasy, it’s all beautiful and it’s all amazing: so many boy-love stories, written and read by women and girls. In Japan it’s also girls that form the public for films like Death in Venice or Du er ikke alene. As an explanation of this phenomenon our reviewer points to the fact that male-male relations, whether platonic or not, are quite important in Japanese society, which would make women jealous and want to take part. “I could easily imagine that if KOINOS Magazine was published in Tokyo, almost all the readers and writers would be females aged between 12 and 40 or so. They would be maniacal in sending illustrations, stories they had written and photos they had taken!”

“Incredible? But wouldn’t Western girls of this age think it extremely and ultra beautiful if a handsome man were to love a very beautiful boy in both a platonic and a physical way?”

Well, maybe our female readers can answer that question?

As long as they like it

It’s time to come down from fantasy to reality. Again I’ll leave the word to our correspondent.

“If I may sum it up in a word, public opinion is tolerant on boy love. It’s completely free for teenager boys to have homosexual contacts with other boys, as long as they like it. The homosexual contact itself is sometimes even regarded as positive, and always as a private matter, a question of one’s emotions. Sometimes boys consider such relationships as being better than having heterosexual contacts, as one rank higher than a boy who just seeks girls. Anyway Japan is a kind of ‘man-first society’, and great value is put on mental relationships between men.”

‘The same thing counts for a sexual relationship between a boy (over 13 years) and a man. If the relationship is educational, nice and gentle, the social attitude towards it is always rather tolerant. Why should one find out at any cost whether there is a sexual aspect to the relation or not?” “Japan knows no Christian taboos, especially after World War II and the movements of the seventies. This means there is no boy who hates homosexual sex specifically. The question is more whether he enjoys it, and whether he can find a partner with whom to share it.”

“Recently a quality newspaper printed an article in a series called ‘Answers for your Life’. A boy was in doubt because in his eyes some males looked very attractive. The answer was quite simple: ‘The only thing you can do now is to find a nice, older male who loves you in depth. You see many homosexual people in our world. They are not a fantasy. It is very natural if you want to be loved by males older than you are’.”