Yakushi explained that the degree of ambiguity and lack of information surrounding LGBT issues is extreme. We spoke with Mika Yakushi, a trans man who runs the non-profit Tokyo-based LGBT support group ReBit, to talk about the situation for LGBT kids in Japan.
To put it bluntly, neither Japanese schools nor the country’s wider society acknowledge LGBT issues, a silence that forces children to seek information from other sources. Bullying, isolation and misunderstanding are endemic in schools, leading to alarmingly high levels of self-harm and suicide amongst LGBT youth – around 30 percent of LGBT kids contemplate suicide. In Japanese schools, as in wider society, high levels of conformity are expected from young people and children who are different can be deemed ‘damaging’ to group harmony, in fact one of the HRW reports was called “ The Nail That Sticks Out Gets Hammered Down”. The value of LGBT characters in manga has been highlighted in a number of recent Human Rights Watch reports explaining how kids are having to turn to manga because they’ve been let down by the state and by schools, which haven’t really, until very recently, acknowledged the reality of LGBT kids in the classroom.
Both Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura, perhaps two of the most well-known and best-loved manga series ever feature gay individuals – in fact, Sailor Neptune and Sailor Moon are probably the most famous animated lesbian couple out there. Both manga and its animated version, anime, are places where transgressive behaviour is allowed or lauded and they’ve long been places where gay love stories are portrayed. Japanese youth can find themselves seriously lacking in accessible information on LGBT issues, so they turn to alternative, escapist, fantasy literature to enter a world where queer people exist openly. While it might sound crazy, for many young LGBT people in Japan the only images they have of people they identify with are the stylised ones they see staring back at them from the black and white pages of manga comics. Imagine you’re flipping through a comic book when you suddenly come across a character you haven’t seen before and, for the first time in your life, you see yourself reflected openly in a public space.