oshiro
Mifune, the popular actor famed for his characterizations of
quick-witted, taciturn samurai, never uttered a word about it.
Akira Kurosawa, the well-known movie director, kept inscrutably
mum. Not one of the many hundreds of samurai movies made
in the past century even as much as hinted at it nanshoku,
the love of the samurai*.
From its pivotal position in the education, code of honor, and
erotic life of the samurai class, the love of youths has sunk
below the level of the untouchable to the level of the unmentionable,
truly the love that dare not speak its name. But
the indelible fact remains that one of the fundamental aspects
of samurai life was the emotional and sexual bond cultivated
between an older warrior and a younger apprentice, a love for
which the Japanese have many names, as many perhaps as the Eskimo
have for snow.
The samurai often called it bi-do, the beautiful
way, and guarded the tradition jealously. Ijiri Chusuke,
in 1482 argued:
In our empire of Japan
this way flourished from the time of the great master Kobo. In
the abbeys of Kyoto and Kamakura, and in the world of the nobles
and the warriors, lovers would swear perfect and eternal love
relying on no more than their mutual good will. Whether their
partners were noble or common, rich or poor, was absolutely of
no importance
In all these case they were greatly moved
by the spirit of this way. This way must be truly respected,
and it must never be permitted to disappear.(1)
Known also as wakashudo,
the way of the youth, it was a practice engaged in
by all members of the samurai class, from lowliest warrior to
highest lord. Indeed it has been said that it would never have
been asked of a daimyo, lord, why he took
boys as lovers, but why he didnt. This last is not a question
that would have troubled, for example, the three great shoguns
who unified Japan, Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, or Tokugawa
Ieyasu, nor for that matter Miyamoto Musashi, the author of The
Book of Five Rings.(2)
In
its key aspects, wakashudo (often abbreviated to shudo
and synonymous with nanshoku, the current term for male
love, written with the glyphs for male and color)
was an eerily accurate analog of the institution of pederasty
which flourished two thousand years earlier in classical Greece. Like pederasty it was a
relationship between an adult man and an adolescent male. Like
it, it ended or transformed into platonic friendship as the youth
came of age. Like pederasty, it was a pedagogic relationship
fired by the energy of mutual erotic attraction. And in like
fashion, it was not exclusive of the love of women. Samurai married,
though usually later in life, just as the Greek warriors did. |
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The Japanese as well as
the Greeks equated the love between a man and a beardless youth
with all that was best in human nature, seeing it at times as
the path to such ideals, and at other times as the goal itself.
Simonides, in a famous drinking song from the fifth century BCE
declares:
Hear the four best
things a man can ask of life:
Health unmarred lifelong, beauty of form and act,
Honest gain of wealth, and while one is still a boy,
To come to brightest bloom among heroic lovers.(3)
Those words were to be echoed two thousand years later, on a
more Confucian if less exuberant note, by an anonymous writer
in 1653, the author of Inu Tsurezure, A Dogs
Idle Hours:
It is natural for
a samurai to make every effort to excel with pen and sword. Beyond
that, what is important to us is not ever to forget, even to
our last moment, the spirit of shudo. If we should forget it,
it will not be possible for us to maintain the decencies, nor
gentleness of speech, nor the refinements of polite behavior.(4)
In some important aspects
the traditions diverged: in Japan the youngster was expected
to make the first advance, while the Greeks held that it was
proper only for the man to court the youth. Hagakure,
Hidden by Leaves, Yamamoto Tsunetomos famous
samurai manual from the early eighteenth century admonishes:
A young man should
test an older man for at least five years, and if he is assured
of that persons intentions, then he too should request
the relationship
If the younger man can devote himself
and get into the situation for five or six years then it will
not be unsuitable.(5)
It would appear that this process would have had to start at
an early age indeed, since such relationships formally ended
at the time of the coming-of-age ceremony, usually around the
age of eighteen or nineteen. At that time the youth would
receive the tonsure (a cutting of the forelocks to simulate a
receding hairline, a symbolic grasp for status in a society in
which people to this day compare birth dates in an effort to
establish pecking order) and become available in turn for taking
the role of the adult in other shudo relationships. As in ancient
times however, the partners would usually remain close friends
even after the end of the pedagogic/erotic phase, and some of
these relationships did not dissolve with the passing of time,
becoming instead life-long love affairs.
Paradoxically, wakashudo was both integral to the tradition of
unqualified devotion that a retainer had to have towards his
lord, and at odds with it. Yamamoto Tsunetomo had this to say
about the quandary:
To lay down ones
life for another is the basic principle of nanshoku. If it is
not so it becomes a matter of shame. However, then you have nothing
left to lay down for your master. It is therefore understood
to be both something pleasant and unpleasant.(6)
Samurai shudo had its early
beginnings in the Kamakura period in the 1200s, reached
its apogee at the beginning of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603
and subsequently declined as the country was unified and the
importance of the warrior class diminished. The history of male
love in Japan however both predates and outlasts the samurai
period. Though its prehistoric origins are invisible to us, written
records exist starting with the Heian (Peace and Tranquility)
period (794-1185). A time of enlightened rule, this era, marked
by the founding of the great imperial capital at Kyoto, saw a
flowering of culture and civic life. Genji Monogatari
Tale of Genji dates from this time and contains one
of the first known allusions to male love, in which a spurned
suitor consoles himself with the younger brother of his beloved:
Well, you at least
must not abandon me. Genji pulled the boy down besides him. The
boy was delighted, such were Genjis youthful charms. Genji
for his part, or so one is informed, found the boy more attractive
than his chilly sister.(7)
Likewise, Ise Monogatari
Tale of Ise, written in 951, contains a poem from
a man separated from his friend:
I cannot believe that
you
Are far away
For I can
Never forget you
And thus your face
Is always before me.(8)
Afterwards mentions of male
love become more and more common. In the 1100s we see the
first mentions of Kukai as the father of nanshoku. Kukai, or
as he was known after his death, Kobo Daishi the great
master from Kobo, was the founder of the Japanese branch
of Vajrayana Buddhism, founding the esoteric Shingon school in
the year 816 at Mount Koya after his return from China where
he received the teachings and transmission from the sixth Patriarch.
Great as his religious and linguistic achievements were (he also
translated the sacred texts from Chinese into Japanese, and devised
the first Japanese alphabet), we have no basis to credit him
with the introduction of male love as well. Nonetheless legend
has it that he learned about the joys of nanshoku in China (universally
renowned from ancient times for its rich homoerotic tradition,
ranging from imperial favorites at the court to sanctioned boy-marriages
for the commoners) and then implanted the practice in Japan upon
his return. Indeed, Mount Koya became synonymous with shudo in
the poetry and prose of medieval Japan.(9)
Though the tales ascribing the provenance of shudo to Mt. Koya
may be doubtful, the prevalence of that love in Buddhist monasteries
is not. In fact, male love in the form of affairs between monks
and chigo, their acolytes, predates by many years its
incorporation into samurai practice (and was to give rise in
later years to a rich homoerotic literature known as chigo
monogatari, acolyte stories). The Tendai priest
Genshin inveighs against those
who have accosted
anothers acolyte and wickedly violated him in a text
printed as early as 985.(10) Of course we may fairly ask whether
he railed at the violation per se, or at the fact that the acolyte
was not ones own. Despite his fulminations, the practice
continues unabated, supported by the logic that the monkish vows
of chastity apply to the love of the opposite sex only, as expounded
by the writer and poet Kitamura Kigin seven hundred years later:
The Buddha preached
that Mount Imose (a metaphor for the love of women) was a place
to be avoided, and thus priests of the dharma first entered this
way as an outlet for their feelings, since their hearts were,
after all, made of neither stone nor wood.(11)
In another parallel with
Greek culture, the practice of male love spawned a voluminous
body of prose, drama, and poetry. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly,
little has been translated to date, however recent scholarship
in gay studies is beginning to make up for past neglect. Besides
the work of Kitamura Kigin, who compiled an anthology of male
love poetry titled Rock Azaleas we also have Ihara
Saikakus The
Great Mirror of Male Love, a collection of forty short
stories on the subject of love between men and youths, published
in 1687. These two titles will have to stand alone as examples
of classical Japanese homoerotic literature rendered in English,
but hundreds of works remain to be translated, including a great
number of kabuki and noh plays.
While the history of Japan through the end of the sixteenth century
is one of warring feudal lords, with the ascendance of Tokugawa
Ieyasu to the shogunate in 1603 the strife came to an end, and
the country entered a period of tranquility that was to last
two hundred and fifty years. One of the effects of this pacification
was the decline in the power and influence of the warrior class.
Conversely, the bourgeoisie thrived under the new stability,
and began adopting many of the customs and practices that had
been the exclusive domain of the samurai. The fighting techniques
of the bushi, warriors, were adapted as sports
or spiritual disciplines (judo, kyudo, kendo, etc.), and the
practice of shudo gave way to a culture of traveling boy actors
whose favors were vied for (or bought) by hordes of admiring
dandies. The public displays of the fans caused such commotion
that laws had to be passed restricting the haircuts and costumes
of the actors, so as not to over-inflame the passions of the
audience. Boy brothels also came to be a common feature of the
pleasure districts of the larger towns, and the currency of nanshoku
was gradually converted from honor and giri, duty,
into gold and silver coins.
This shift presaged the eventual decline and disappearance of
socially sanctioned male love in Japan:
the decline
of shudo had already begun in the eighteenth century when Japan
was still in the middle of its long period of voluntary seclusion.
The spirit of shudo as a way began to retreat, whereas
a sensualist homosexuality flourished more and more. The fact
that after the end of the eighteenth century the kagema
(boy actors) mostly dressed themselves as girls, while during
the Genroku period they had dressed themselves gracefully as
beautiful young men, also indicates a serious degeneration of
the homosexual tradition.(12)
This latest turn of events
again precisely mirrors the Greek experience, and evokes in haunting
fashion the dynamics of the decline and fall of pederasty in
the Greco-Roman world. There too male love lost its identification
with the warrior ethic and pedagogic ideals, and with it its
moral foundations. It too became commercialized as it succumbed
to the decadence and abuses of the late Roman empire. The reaction
to those excesses solidified as the anti-erotic utilitarian view
of sexuality of the early Christian dogma, the same teachings
which, fifteen hundred years later, were to administer the coup
de grace to nanshoku as well.
Thus Western influence had
a decisive role to play in this reversal of fortune. From their
very first contacts with the remote island empire, European explorers
and merchants bristled at the loose morals and depravity
of their hosts. The Portuguese writer Luis Frois, in his Historia
do Japao, documents an encounter in 1550 between the party
of Jesuit friar Francis Xavier and the daimyo of Yamaguchi, Ouchi
Yoshitaka:
The lord welcomed
them warmly and said that he would like to hear the new doctrine
of the kirishitan (Christians). Brother Juan Fernandez
read in a loud voice from a notebook in which were translated
into Japanese the account of the Creation and the Ten Commandments.
Having touched on the sin of idolatry and on the other faults
committed by the Japanese, he arrived at the sin of Sodom, which
he described as something so abominable that it is more
unclean than the pig and more low than the dog and other animals
without reason. Yoshitaka then seemed to be angered and
made a sign for them to go out. But the king made not a word
of reply, and Fernandez believed that he would order them to
be killed.(13)
Though the slowly increasing presence of Christian missionaries
lent support to those who disapproved of male love practices,
it was not until the Meiji restoration of 1867, a direct result
of the opening of Japan carried out under the threat of American
guns in 1854, that Western Christian morality began to dominate
Japanese thought, and wakashudo went into its final eclipse.
Tahuro Inagaki, in The Aesthetics of Adolescent Love,
writes:
Without our noticing
it this cultural tradition has been lost to us
When we
were schoolboys we often heard of an affair in which two students
had quarreled on account of a beautiful young boy and had ended
by drawing knives... But since the new era of Taisho (19121926)
we no longer hear of this kind of thing. The shudo which had
clung on to life has now reached its end.(14)
Written by Andrew Calimach © 2008
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY:
- Leupp, Gary. Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan. University of California Press, 1997.
- Pflugfelder, Gregory. Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950. University of California Press, 2000.
- Saikaku, Ihara (Paul Gordon Schalow, trans.). The Great Mirror of Male Love. Stanford University Press, 1990.
- Watanabe, Tsuneo and Iwata, Jun'ichi. The Love of the Samurai: A Thousand Years of Japanese Homosexuality. GMP, London, 1989
CITATION: If you cite this Web page, please use the following form of citation:
Andrew Calimach, World History of Male Love, "Homosexual Traditions", The Beautiful Way of the Samurai, 2000 <http://www.gay-art-history.org/gay-history/gay-customs/japan-samurai-male-love/japan-samurai-homosexual-shudo.html>
Author's note: I am thrilled to
report that the new century has already made a decided break
with the past one: as we were winding up the updating of the
Androphile site, a new movie was being released at the Cannes
Film Festival (May 2000). Titled Gohatto, (taboo
or forbidden), directed by the renowned director
Nagisa Oshima (of In the Realm of the Senses fame), and with
Ryuhei Matsuda in the lead role, the movie depicts the turmoil
caused in a samurai detachment when a young and flirtatious warrior
joins the troop, and several of the older samurai compete for
his favors. The topic of male love is (reportedly) treated openly
and depicted in a historically accurate way, up to and including
the tragic ending.
Gohatto
http://www.bacfilms.com/gohatto/splash/index.html
Back
to text.
- Ijiri Chusuke, 1482 "The
Essence of Jakudo" in The Love of the Samurai, A Thousand
Years of Japanese Homosexuality by Tsuneo Watanabe and Junichi
Iwata, 1989, London, The Gay Mens Press, p. 109.
- Gary P. Leupp, 1995, Male
Colors, the Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan,
Berkely, The University of California Press, p. 53
- J. Z. Eglinton, trans. 1964,
Greek Love, New York, Oliver Layton Press, p. 248.
- Watanabe and Iwata, 1989,
p. 113.
- William Scott Wilson, trans.
1979. Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure, The Book of the Samurai
New York and Tokyo, Kodansha International, p. 58.
- Idem, p. 59.
- Edward C. Seidensticker, trans.
1976, The Tale of Genji, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, p. 48.
- Helen Craig McCullough, trans. 1968,
The Tales of Ise, Lyrical Episodes from Tenth-Century Japan,
Stanford, Ca., Stanford University Press pp. 101-102.
- Leupp, 1995, pp. 28-32.
- Ibid., p. 31.
- Paul Gordon Schalow, trans.
1996, Kitamura Kigin, "Wild Azaleas" (Iwatsutsuji)
in Partings at Dawn, an Anthology of Japanese Gay Literature,
San Francisco, Gay Sunshine Press p. 103.
- Watanabe and Iwata, 1989,
p. 121.
- Ibid., pp. 20-21.
- Ibid., p. 124.
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