Japanese Approaches to Research on Urban Queer Space in Japan: A Comparative Review

ABSTRACT

Queer spaces, and, in particular, urban gay villages around the world—such as the Castro in San Francisco, the West Village in New York, and Soho in London—have been intensely researched by geographers since the early 1980s. However, although Shinjuku Ni‐chōme in Tokyo is internationally recognized as the world's largest gay district by number of commercial establishments, it has received far less attention from geographers in the English‐speaking world. This review explores how Japanese geographers and other social scientists who write in Japanese, influenced by Anglo‐American scholarship as well as Japanese ethnological ( minzokugaku ) intellectual traditions, understand the question of sexuality and space in Japan, and particularly, given its dominance in the Japanese queer geographic imagination, the ontology of nightlife spaces in Shinjuku Ni‐chōme. First, in contrast to Anglo‐American scholarship on gay districts in Western cities, where there is an increasing emphasis on the intersectional aspects of exclusion and oppression, and concerns about the decline of gay neighborhoods overall, I find that despite Japan's status as a highly‐developed liberal democracy Ni‐chōme continues to be considered monovalently as a place of refuge from the oppression of homophobia, and, for any Japanese person, the sole geographic location where the truth of the queer self can be disclosed. Second, precisely because they are narrated primarily as a place of refuge, there is a scholarly focus on gay bars as social spaces, with authors arguing that gay bar districts serve as sites for cultivating types of intimacy that are specific to the Japanese context. This includes a quasi‐familial form through the “mama” system, the importance of group identities, and the salience of the bar as a site of a particular form of social reproduction, but Japanese scholars interpret this differently than Anglophone scholars who have recently begun to explore queer social reproduction (e.g. Andrucki 2021) as a mode of radical antiheteronormative labor.