Edges of the Rainbow: LGBTQ Japan (Photos)

As modern as Japan is, it's been slow to embrace LGBT rights. Things are changing slowly, with an increasing number of high-profile people coming out as gay, bi, transgender, and even instersex. A new book from photographer Michel Delsol and journalist Haruku Shinozaki captures Japanese queer life in all its complicated beauty. Edges of the Rainbow: LGBTQ Japan highlights people like Yoshiki, a gay Episcopal priest, and Ari Haruna, a trans pop idol and civil rights activist. Browse through some of the images in Edges of the Rainbow on the next pages, and find out more about the book here.

Chiga is the owner and manager of Gold Finger, a bar in Ni-cho–me, the best-known gay neighborhood in Tokyo. Chiga wanted a place where lesbians could find friendship and love and simply look each other in the eye — where they could be themselves.

The bar is known for its successful productions of women-only shows, drag king performances, F-to-M nights, and its many parties. She offers this without any pressure and with a sense of protection. She is the constantly moving center of a large community that spans generations and class.

Chiga lives with her dog about 15 minutes by foot from her bar. Her apartment is comfortable and sparsely furnished. She loves Grace Jones and Debbie Harry.

Makoto is a trans man. He lives with his wife, Fuyumi, in Osaka. Both were born deaf to deaf parents. When he was young, Makoto liked women. He also liked men but wanted men to like him as a man. He has had boyfriends and girlfriends, and when he is out with friends who are women, he does not want them to treat him as a woman.

After transitioning, he says, “I became myself. I experienced various combinations of male and female feelings. One day I would feel more like a woman, but the next day more like a man.” Fuyumi identifies as queer. She went to a junior high school for the deaf, where she was bullied and suffered depression.

Makoto and Fuyumi have known each other for 11 years and have been married for five. Because of Makoto's official transgender status, they are a recognized heterosexual couple under the law.

Fuyumi and Makoto organize work groups in the deaf LGBTQ community to identify and influence relevant legislative issues and to produce educational leaflets on discrimination. They are also developing new sign language as new words become part of the lexicon of queer culture, such as “newhalf” and “gender-fluid.”

Mandy is the owner of a cabaret club in Roppongi in central Tokyo, an area known for its nightlife. The club is famous for its all-male Broadway dance revues and drag shows. Mandy can often be found greeting his customers in a woman’s kimono.

Until high school, Mandy lived in Hokkaido. “I was in to sports as a child, not questioning my sexual preferences, until I arrived in Shinjuku, Tokyo, around when I was 18.”

One day, while in a teahouse, he noticed the attractive clothes of the staff and applied for a job. He was hired. While working there, he saw a cross-dresser for the first time. Then he started going to discos.

In his early 20s, he went to fashion school and met a woman there who was a dressmaker. Because she had a sewing machine and he visited her all the time, they ended up living together.

“I can say that I feel more comfortable with men,” he says. “I lost my virginity to an African-American man in Hawaii.”

Haruna is a civil rights activist and pop idol. She started her career as a drag queen in small clubs and cabarets in Tokyo, then as a singer and guest on television and radio talk shows. Currently she is one of the hosts of the prime-time show about fighting prejudice, Barrier Free, on Japan’s national public broadcasting network, NHK.

Ai Haruna is a trans woman — also known in Japanese as a “newhalf.” Her chosen name, Ai, means love in Japanese. A rare positive role model in contemporary Japanese queer culture, she works to help people challenge sexual and gender norms and to bring comfort to many who feel isolated from the society around them.

Akta is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention located in Ni-cho–me, a well-known gay neighborhood in Tokyo.

The center houses a library stocked with HIV/AIDS, LGBTQ-themed literature and magazines, and information on cultural programming. Staff provides counseling services, curates art exhibits, and hosts meetings. The center publishes a monthly newsletter and collaborates with medical and educational specialists to establish a nationwide LGBTQ network.

Akta is led by (right to left in portrait photo) board chair Kohta Iwahashi, center director and self-identified female drag queen Junko Araki, and health project leader Takuya Kinami. Araki speaks about the importance of having a safe space for LGBTQ people to be comfortable and learn more about the community. “People realize they are gay around 15. They meet a partner around 20, have sex, and finally get a boyfriend around 27 or so. But because of Japan’s strongly conformist culture, it’s still very difficult to come out. That’s why many queer people have considered suicide at one point or another.”

Keiki is a tarot card reader. He lives with his wife in Niigata, a major metropolitan center northwest of Tokyo.

Keiki is a trans male and an LGBTQ community activist. He founded Love 1 Peace, which organizes conferences and group discussions, often followed by potluck dinners. The organization is mixed: roughly 30 percent of the members are cisgender and/or straight. Keiki is in the process of setting up a support group for parents of LGBTQ sons and daughters so they can learn ways to discuss sexuality with their children.

As a child, Keiki was always playing with boys and referred to himself as male. When he was four or five, he was given an expensive skirt. He hated it, he recalls. He wanted to wear pants, so he cut it up with a pair of scissors.

Around 19 he came out to his friends, and around 20 to his mother, but not to his father. Her response was: “It’s your life. Do what you want.”

Natsue and Maika are civil partners. They share an apartment with Natsue’s father in Nerima in the suburbs of Tokyo. While Maika has identified as a lesbian since she was a teenager, this is Natsue’s first relationship with a woman.

Even before she realized she was a lesbian, Maika had an intuition she liked women. She first fell in love when she was 13 or 14, but she could not tell the girl because she felt it was not right.

Natsue and Maika first met at the Tokyo offices of the NGO Peace Boat, where they both worked. Maika was seeing another woman at the time, while Natsue had a boyfriend. Five years later, Natsue and Maika became lovers. When Natsue told her father that she was dating Maika, her father lovingly said, “I know. Just looking at the two of you, I knew.”

Natsue and Maika are often invited to talk about their life choices at universities and on radio and TV programs.

Tatsuki, who is intersex, was born in a hospital in Nara in central Japan, where the doctors designated him neither male nor female but “other.”

In elementary school, Tatsuki was registered as female. In his co-ed junior high school and high school he was considered male or female depending on the teacher. Sometimes he was placed in the boys' group, sometimes in the girls' group. He now identifies as male. Tatsuki is a publisher of handmade notebooks and diaries. He lives with his wife, Eishin, a Reiki healer and practicing Buddhist, in Kyoto.

Eishin proposed to Tatsuki on their first meeting. At the time, she didn’t know that he was intersex. “I like you not because you’re a man,” she told him. “I just like you because you’re you.” 

Yoshiki is an Episcopal priest. Every Sunday, he conducts a prayer and worship service for LGBTQ people and their supporters in a “church” in the Ni-cho–me district of Tokyo.

Religious from a young age, Yoshiki originally studied to become a Catholic priest, but on completing his studies, he decided to become an Episcopal priest because the Catholic Church would not accept a gay priest. “I’ve had a partner for 15 years,” he says. “We celebrated our civil partnership at the Shinjuku Community Church. It was officiated by a friend who is also a priest, but in the census we aren’t registered as legally married.”

Yoshiki and his partner, K, live in the Shinonome district of Tokyo. They live separately for now, but K lives only one building away from Yoshiki.