The Role of the ‘tōjisha’ in Current Debates about Sexual Minority Rights in Japan

Abstract

‘Speaking as a tōjisha’ has become an important strategy in establishing ‘correct knowledge’ about sexual minority cultures in contemporary Japan. Originally developed in a legal context where it referred to the ‘parties’ in court proceedings, in the 1970s tōjisha was taken up by citizens' groups campaigning for the right of self determination for the ‘parties concerned’ facing discrimination and has become a central concept for all minority self-advocacy groups. In the 1990s the discourse of tōjisha sei (tōjisha-ness) was adopted by gay rights groups and by spokespersons for lesbian and transgender communities in a battle to change public perceptions of sexual minorities through insisting on their right to speak about themselves in their own voices. This paper considers two unforeseen outcomes of the primacy of the tōjisha in current LGBTQ discourse. Firstly, through insisting on attending to the voice of each individual, it has proven difficult to establish common links among discriminated communities (or within communities) because of widely diverging perspectives. Also, given the broad variety in many individuals' experience of non-normative sexuality, having to identify and speak as a tōjisha has engendered normalizing effects. The current primacy of the tōjisha reinforces developmental narratives of sexual-identity formation (only the ‘out’ homosexual is truly authentic) and in so doing inadvertently silences those unable or unwilling to prioritize the sexual in their presentation of self, or whose modes of self-expression fall outside current orthodoxies that provide the boundaries for sexual-minority identification.