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The Orlando shooting was about homophobia, not Islam.

13/06/2016
gender, politics, USA

Fifty people are dead in Orlando, Florida. More than fifty others are wounded. A man walked into the nightclub called Pulse with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and shot them all. It’s the highest death toll in a mass shooting in the history of the United States.

There’s an equation to any act of violence. There’s the actor, the killer; there are the acted-upon, the victims; there is the mechanism, the set of circumstances that allowed the violence to take place. As the world reacts to a horrifying act of violence like the Orlando mass shooting, its focus moves between the different elements of that equation, and we can learn a lot – sometimes, some very uncomfortable truths – from where that focus is permitted to rest.

Pulse is a gay nightclub. It was running a night themed around Latin music and aimed at Latino clientele. That’s part of the equation; this was an act of violence directed against minorities – queer minorities and, more specifically, queer people of colour. Then there’s the mechanism; the killer used a powerful rifle (essentially a consumer version of the US military’s famous M16 assault rifle) which he had legally purchased, despite the fact that he appears to have been on an FBI watchlist.

Then there’s the final part of the equation – the killer. His name was Omar Mateen. He was a 29 year old American. His parents came from Afghanistan. His family is Muslim.

Ahhhh. You can almost hear the sigh of relief – from the US media, from Republican politicians, from the Trump campaign, and from conservative media and politicians around the world. A Muslim. A Muslim man who, apparently, visited ISIS websites. Suddenly the story is simple; suddenly the conservative media can stop having to wrestle with things that make it uncomfortable, like homophobic violence or people on FBI watchlists being able to buy high-powered rifles, and focus on something it’s really comfortable with; spouting uninformed nonsense about ISIS and Islamic terrorism. Business as usual.

And so it goes. Look at coverage in conservative media outlets or statements from conservative politicians, and you find the identity of the victims almost entirely erased. The reality of this attack as an act of violence against queer people is swept aside; now it is an attack on “America”, a tragedy that all Americans can wring their hands about, a senseless and incomprehensible assault on ordinary Americans.

Except it’s not senseless or incomprehensible, and it’s not an assault on ordinary Americans. It’s an assault on queer people in a venue catering specifically to them. The target wasn’t chosen at random; Omar Mateen drove nearly 160 kilometres in order to specifically, deliberately attack a large gay nightclub. To attack “America”, he’d just need to have walked into his local Wal-Mart with his rifle; he didn’t do that because he wasn’t attacking America, he was attacking queer people. To claim this as an attack on “all of America” isn’t solidarity, it’s a dismissal of the real issue and an erasure of the identity of the victims every bit as mealy-mouthed and calculated as the “All Lives Matter” riposte to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Far from being senseless and incomprehensible, this kind of attack feels wearily inevitable. Why is so much of the world uncomfortable with talking about this as an assault on queer people, so desperate to spring back into the familiar embrace of the fear-fuelled ISIS narrative? Precisely because so much of the American conservative movement, like many conservative movements around the world, has spent years demonising and attacking queer minorities. Precisely because they’ve proposed, cheered on and voted for several hundred pieces of local and state legislation attacking the rights and basic human safety of queer people in the past few years. Precisely because the idea that queer rights have gone “too far”, that laws designed to protect vulnerable minorities are themselves “discrimination”, has become a mainstream view in conservative circles. Precisely because any discussion of queer Pride always seems to be met with a question about when “straight Pride month” is. Precisely because the right of trans people to use the bathroom in safety is something half of America thinks we need to have a conversation about.

Omar Mateen didn’t kill fifty queer people because he read an ISIS website, or because he was a Muslim; he wasn’t, by all accounts, even a religious or observant Muslim. He set out to kill queer people because he hated them – a hatred which far predated the very existence of ISIS, let alone his fascination with it. He hated them because he was raised in a climate in which hating queer people is normalised and even celebrated; a climate in which every social advance, like the acceptance of equal marriage, is met with an aggressive conservative backlash that hurts minorities, empowers the bullies and abusers who prey upon them, and legitimises hatred in speech and action. Omar Mateen was an Afghan-American, and certainly, his background probably made him more susceptible to ISIS’ propaganda as a vehicle for legitimising and channeling the hatred he felt – but that hatred, that choice to specifically target queer people, wasn’t down to being Afghan; it was down to being American.

Just remember, as you see the news – not only in America but all around the world – hungrily fall upon the ISIS angle of this story, upon the Muslim angle; this was a homophobic attack on queer people. A man shot over a hundred people because they were queer. The identity of the man matters, but the identity of the victims matters more, because it’s core to the motivation, to understanding the context. Presenting this act as “a Muslim man attacked Americans” is nothing short of dishonest; a lie of omission, a lie of perspective. An American man attacked, maimed and killed queer people. That’s the starting point for the conversation that ought to be happening; but it’s a conversation large segments of the USA, and the world, will do almost anything to avoid.

Japan’s LGBT Tipping Point

09/05/2016
gender, japan, politics
1 Comment

Yesterday, Tokyo hosted the Rainbow Pride Parade – the city’s annual celebration of LGBT people and sexual minorities in Japan, now in its fifth year. The parade is the culmination of a week of Pride-related events, political, social and artistic, and is accompanied by a two-day festival at Yoyogi Park.

The speed with which Rainbow Pride has grown in the past five years is astonishing, and it continues to accelerate. When I first attended four years ago, Pride was a huddle of small booths that barely occupied half of the Yoyogi event space; now, it’s bursting at the seams, with more and more major companies, foreign embassies and retailers vying for space and attention. The parade itself is emblematic of the change; a few years ago, it was a small affair very heavily dominated by foreign faces, and many of the Japanese participants wore sunglasses and face masks to avoid being recognised or pictured. Yesterday, five thousand people marched through Shibuya and Harajuku – the vast majority of them Japanese. Five thousand appears to have been a limit set by some agreement with the authorities, because the numbers could easily have been higher; on Sunday morning, people were being turned away from signing up to march, as the parade was full.

It took almost two hours, standing in the hot sunshine, to see the whole parade pass by on its way back into Yoyogi Park – the marchers being applauded and high-fived by the spectators lining the path as they returned. There were no masks and sunglasses. There were foreigners, of course, but hugely outnumbered by local participants. There were families with children. Large groups of staff from major companies, including family brands like Johnson & Johnson, big banks and financial firms, and tech companies like Google and Netflix, all marched wearing company T-shirts and banners proclaiming the companies’ support for Pride.

None of this would be remarkable in many cities around the world, of course, and Tokyo Rainbow Pride is still a minor affair compared to Asia’s largest Pride event, in Taipei, let alone the huge Pride events in US and European cities. What is truly remarkable, though, is the speed of the growth and the rapid, yet almost unnoticed, change from a culture of anonymity and reluctant activism to genuine, open, “pride”.

In this, Rainbow Pride is merely a useful barometer of deeper, more important changes that are occurring within the fabric of Japanese society itself. More and more universities now have thriving LGBT circles – incidentally, my own university, Waseda, has what I believe is Japan’s oldest student LGBT society, GLOW – and several of them were represented at the Pride Festival, including one from the country’s most prestigious school, Tokyo University. There has been a slow but steady stream of Japanese companies stepping forward to say that they will offer the same benefits to LGBT staff and customers that they do to straight people. Several Japanese political parties now include references to LGBT rights in their manifestoes; the ruling LDP is not among them, but the party’s policy chief, Inada Tomomi, made an official visit to Rainbow Pride on Saturday, becoming the most senior Japanese politician to do so. (While Pride is a fun party, it’s also a serious political event; the address after the end of the parade yesterday was given by US ambassador Caroline Kennedy, who was joined on stage by the British and Irish ambassadors.)

Inada’s public support for Pride is a really interesting thing to think about in the context of the future of LGBT rights in Japan. That’s partially because Inada remains a rising star in the LDP, and many consider her to be a future Prime Minister – a role for which current Prime Minister Abe Shinzo appears to be grooming her. More notable, though, is that Inada is, in general, an ultra-conservative figure. She is a hardline historical revisionist who disputes the accepted history regarding the Rape of Nanjing and WW2 comfort women; she approves of the remilitarisation of Japan, makes regular official visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine and is, like many of her senior LDP peers, a member of the hard-right Nippon Kaigi organisation. You would fully expect someone with this background to be deeply conservative on the issue of LGBT rights; the experience of Western countries has been that conservative nationalists are generally extremely anti-LGBT in their stances. Yet Inada was right there at Rainbow Pride, and directly stated her support for human rights and diversity.

This highlights the key difference between Japan and western countries on the issue of LGBT rights; Japan is not, and has never been, a Christian country. It has no religious problem with homosexuality, though it has imported some negative attitudes from the west – prior to the Meiji Restoration in the late 1800s, at least among the upper classes, homosexuality was seen as an indulgent vice, at worst; even The Tale of Genji, written over a thousand years ago, reveals the eponymous prince’s bisexuality in an entirely matter-of-fact way. Human Rights Watch noted last week that homophobic bullying is a problem in schools, and that many teachers are ignorant of, or actively contributing to, the problem; but by and large, LGBT rights is not a hill that Japanese conservatives are willing to die on. Honestly, most of them don’t really care about it, or know very little about it; unlike conservatives in Western countries, those in Japan are, for the most part, generally disinterested in this whole field, and certainly not prepared to expend significant time or energy in fighting against change or progress.

That’s important, because Japan is at a tipping point for LGBT people. Five thousand smiling, waving people, their faces uncovered, marching through Shibuya’s scramble crossing and down a packed Omotesando on a Sunday afternoon is just the tip of the iceberg. There is a line in Japan’s demographic chart; above it, most LGBT people are in the closet, living double lives and keeping their sexuality, for all intents and purposes, invisible. Below the line, you have LGBT young people who, increasingly commonly, come out to their family, their friends, their classmates and even, sometimes, their employers. Hard data on this is impossible to source, but anecdotally, the proportion of LGBT people in their 20s who live openly is an order of magnitude higher than for those in their 40s. Each year, that demographic line rises up the chart, and more and more young people choose to come out.

That tipping point will be familiar to anyone who knows the history of LGBT rights in the west. It’s the point where coming out of the closet becomes the rule rather than the exception; where coming out becomes a rite of passage for young LGBT people, rather than a rare and often forced event some of them have to endure. It’s the point where society has to confront and seriously think about its attitudes to LGBT people and their needs, because they’re no longer an abstract – strange people who do peculiar things and dress oddly and sometimes make funny jokes on TV – but a concrete living reality; your son or daughter, your brother or sister, your cousin, your best friend, your neighbour, your colleague. The single most powerful weapon in the fight for LGBT rights is actually opening ordinary people’s eyes to the LGBT people around them, among their friends and loved ones. Reaching that point is slow, but once it’s reached, change happens very quickly; “gradually, then suddenly”, as Hemingway would have it.

In the West, that sudden burst of change was opposed bitterly by entrenched conservatives; in Japan, though, there’s no interest or appetite for that fight from the conservative camp. There are plenty of old men in political positions who are utterly ignorant of LGBT issues and say stupid, bigoted things – the world won’t run out of those any time soon – but the prospects for any organised conservative resistance to progress on LGBT rights, once that progress becomes a populist position, are very slim. Once Japan advances beyond the tipping point, change will happen very quickly indeed, and with minimal friction.

Viewed in this light, even the high instance of homophobic bullying in schools can be seen as growing pains; homophobia in schools has risen precisely because it is increasingly common for LGBT students to be open about their identities. This is enormously brave, and it’s heart-rending to hear of them being bullied or taunted for it; but they are of a generation who can’t imagine hiding their sexuality, who would prefer to be bullied than to lie to the world about themselves, and as a result they’re a generation that is going to change Japan profoundly.

Cries of “Misandry!” didn’t sink Himozairu

28/10/2015
gender, japan, politics

Acclaimed manga author Akiko Higashimura (famous for Kuragehime, or Jellyfish Princess, a series about female otaku) this week cancelled her latest series, Himozairu, after just two chapters, following an online outcry. The publisher, Kodansha (it was being serialised in their Morning magazine) announced the author’s decision on their website, noting that it was in response to various feedback received over social media.

There was some discussion over what had happened in the Japanese language press – here’s the Asahi Shimbun, Jiji Press, Mainichi Shimbun (all traditional news providers), Blogos and NicoNicoNews (portal news sites), and Joshi-Spa and Cyzo Woman (online women’s magazines). Some TV news sites devoted short segments to getting talking heads to give their views on the manga and its cancellation. It was all fairly civil, low-level stuff – there’s certainly no indication in these accounts or on Higashimura’s own Twitter account to suggest that she was facing some awful, GamerGate-esque campaign of hatred (though don’t get me wrong, those things do happen in Japan and they’re spectacularly horrible).

Then the Asahi Shimbun translated its story into English, and it spread from there to fansites (here’s AnimeNewsNetwork’s take) and eventually to the mainstream media (here’s the Washington Post). The narrative as it’s reached the Washington Post, and hence a wider audience, is that Kodansha and/or Higashimura have been forced to pull the series due to a “torrent of criticism” from people who think the comic is “demeaning to men” because it shows them “doing laundry, cooking and washing dishes” – and that suggesting that men should learn domestic skills in Japan is “close to sacreligious”. The Post concludes that in Japan, “there’s no room for women to even dream about a world where men might whip up dinner and pick up their own socks.”

Those of you who read Japanese might now find it interesting to flick through the links provided above and contrast the tone and content of the Japanese articles with that of the Washington Post piece. The Post’s narrative is that this is a backlash from the patriarchy to the mere suggestion of men doing housework; Post writer Anna Fifield links the manga’s message to the likes of Sheryl Sandberg and Anne-Marie Slaughter and accuses the manga’s critics of rallying to a call of “misandry!”. It’s a strong message, not least because it fits so neatly with the established narrative; we know that Japan is a sexist place that’s far behind other developed countries in its treatment of women and in the workplace opportunities which they are offered. We know that career women in Japan are criticised for failing to have babies and stay at home to look after them, and that women who do have babies are forced out of their workplaces. Fifield’s account in the Post fits that narrative neatly and gives us something straightforward to feel outraged about for a few minutes of our coffee break.

Yet in the original Japanese news coverage, the story is quite different. Sure, the Asahi piece notes that critics disliked the manga for “putting down her male assistants” (“mocking” or “looking down on” might also be reasonable translations), though I note that the “and other men” part added to the English translation of the piece is not in the Japanese original. Other stories give lots more context to the criticism, though. Jiji Press cites a critic saying that the manga “doesn’t show consideration for house husbands” (literally, men engaged in work in the home). The Blogos piece notes, alongside a sense that the manga ungently mocks its subjects, criticism of the manga’s conflation of “himo” (parasitical men who live off their spouse’s earnings) and “house husbands”. The Joshi-Spa piece accuses the manga of looking down on unmarried women and house-husbands alike. Only the Cyzo Woman piece implies that the gender-related nature of the manga earned it unwarranted bashing, suggesting that Kodansha’s staff should have realised it wasn’t suitable for free publication online (make what you will of that – I think it’s rather condescending, personally).

So which is it? Did Himozairu fall to a hate campaign by thin-skinned men horrified at this assault on traditional gender roles? Or, on the contrary, did critics who disliked its very support for traditional gender roles and mocking of men who fall outside those roles derail it by convincing the author she had made an error in her depiction?

Though it’ll be hard to say for sure until such time as Higashimura makes a further statement on her decision to suspend publication, I lean towards the latter interpretation. Firstly, because the former interpretation seems to have crept in when a (dubiously translated) Asahi Shimbun article was picked up and spun into quite a different narrative by the Washington Post, seemingly without reference to any other original sources (seriously, the WaPost story cites the translated Asahi story and the AnimeNewsNetwork story, which itself solely cites the translated Asahi story, and not a single other source – I found the seven articles above in under five minutes on Google!). Secondly, because the content of the manga itself is genuinely uncomfortable not from a weird Men’s Rights Activist perspective but from a progressive perspective. Its essential contention is that “loser” men who are no good at getting ahead in “proper” careers should learn household skills in order to attract a career woman who’ll marry them as a “kept man”. This is incredibly problematic; it implies, all at once, that only “loser” men should do household work; that house husbands are men who have failed at other things; and that the relationship between a career woman and a house-husband is an unequal, “kept man” situation. Looked at from another angle, it’s also not saying anything progressive or praiseworthy about women who become housewives and their relationships with their husbands.

Honestly, the problems with this manga start from the word “himo” itself, which the Washington Post gently translates as “string”, implying that it refers to a man who lives off his wife’s purse strings. It’s got far more negative connotations than that; it also means “leash”, for a start (and the manga refers to women who marry “himo” men as their “owner”), and more troublingly means “pimp”, in the sense of a man who lives off a woman’s (immoral) earnings. It’s a term utterly steeped in regressive, traditional and unpleasant gender connotations. Perhaps Higashimura intended to challenge those connotations and reclaim the term; if so, she went about it entirely the wrong way, starting from the very moment when she described (in the pitch line for the manga!) her “training” for housework and chores as being aimed at “men who have dreams, but have no money, no job, no popularity and no style”.

Japan has huge problems with gender; roles are traditionally constructed and strongly socially enforced, which contributes to a lack of opportunity for women (slowly but surely being overturned by a combination of policy and economic reality) and a relentlessly sexist media environment, not to mention being a major factor, I believe, in both the low birth rate and the high suicide rate (especially among men). There is, however, progress occurring, both on a policy level (criticise Shinzo Abe’s motivation for Womenomics all you like; the policies are real and they’re slowly, all too slowly, starting to move previously intractable business culture in a good direction) and on a cultural level (the outcry over sexist heckling in the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly about a year ago would probably never have happened in the recent past, because nobody would have thought it untoward). It’s important that we don’t try to pigeonhole gender issue related news events into our own pre-selected narrative for convenience, because doing so risks missing the important detail of the picture. In the case of Himozairu, my sense of what has happened is not that the patriarchy has lashed out and silenced a woman’s voice, but that a very talented young author has reconsidered her stance on an issue of gender following progressive criticism. If so, it’s a good thing – and I for one would love to see Higashimura return to the issue in future with a more thoughtful approach.