Factual“The other Japan” (3/6). In the Archipelago, rampant ostracism strikes gays, lesbians and transgender people who often prefer to compartmentalize “their circles of life (private, family, professional)”.
Like the rest of the nightlife in Tokyo, Nichome, the gay and lesbian neighborhood in Shinjuku Ward, is bleak. New wave of contamination by Covid-19 obliges. Trapezoidal space of 250 meters per side, it brings together more than 200 bars, cabarets, gays or lesbians, cafes, saunas, bistros and sex shops that line the main street and perpendicular alleys, or upstairs. floor in buildings. Tiny, bars are a meeting place but also a space of effusion.
For many gays, dating Nichome, despite its hypersexual and commercial nature, marks an awareness of identity. “Diversity has always been accepted in Shinjuku”, says Junko Mitsuhashi, a transgender who haunted neighborhood nights in the 1980s and 2000s before becoming a reader specializing in the history of gender in Japan at Meiji University in Tokyo.
Before the pandemic, summer evenings in Nichome had a carnival side: groups gathered in front of cafes to drink and heckle, while drag queens took the streets for the podium of their extravagance. The neighborhood had become a “territory of oversight” of the sexual minority subculture. Appearing in tourist guides, it was a stage of the Tokyo towers by night – scare away to other places the followers of discretion.
Not far from Nichome, Pride House Tokyo opened its offices adorned with rainbow banners in October 2020. A conviviality and information center on the LGBT + movement, Pride House, supported by some twenty foreign embassies in Japan, wanted to take advantage of the Olympic Games to highlight the principle of non-discrimination based on sexual orientation, enshrined in the Olympic charter. Equal Marriage Alliance (EMA) Japan is also campaigning in this direction, hoping that the Archipelago, the last G7 country not to recognize gay marriage, will follow the example of Taiwan, which authorized it in 2019.
To appear civilized in the eyes of the West, Japan espoused the obsessive distinction between the normal and the pathological.
Nichome’s story reflects the transformations of the planet of sexual minorities in the Archipelago. Female prostitution district deserted following the entry into force of the law prohibiting the sex trade in 1958, it had been taken over by transvestites exercising the same activities before becoming a discreet district of gay bars, recalls Junko Mitsuhashi.
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