Bishōnen – Japanese Media and Popular Culture (2024)

The appreciation of youthful male beauty has a long tradition in Japan, with Genji, the “shining prince,” being the most notable literary example (ibid.). His adventures are detailed in a series of stories known as the Genji monogatari, or The Tale of Genji, written by Heian-period (794–1185) lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu. Genji is depicted as a voracious lover of women, but Murasaki makes it clear that men and women were equally impressed by his good looks and refined behavior, men sometimes proclaiming “If only he were a woman!” (Leupp 1997, 26). That beautiful male youths have long been appreciated by both sexes in Japan is clear from the historical record, and at times, their admirers have included Buddhist priests, samurai warriors, and even emperors and shoguns.

The first antecedent of the bishōnen is the chigo, or temple page, who played an important role in Buddhist monastic life from the ninth century onward (Ishihara 2003, 118). The introduction of romantic attraction to chigo is credited to the Japanese priest Kōbō Daishi (774–835) who supposedly introduced male-male love into Japan, having heard about the practice on his visit to Tang China. These chigo were chosen from bidō (beautiful—male—children) and, unlike monks themselves, wore makeup, had long hair, and wore bright, costly fabrics. The chigo featured in Buddhist art (Ishihara 2003, 118–19), and references to their allure were common in medieval literary tales.

It is, however, among the samurai, the military rulers of Japan from 1185 to 1868, that the love of beautiful boys was most clearly entrenched as a tradition, or “way” (dō), accompanied by complex rules and etiquette and celebrated in diverse ways, including kabuki and nō plays, literature, woodblock prints, and poetry. It was during the Edo period (1603–1867) that nanshoku became a visible part of the popular culture of the time. Nanshoku, made up of the Chinese characters for “male” and “color” (the latter denoting eroticism), can be translated as “male eroticism” or “male-male love.” This term was sometimes juxtaposed with joshoku or “female eroticism,” but the latter did not refer to love between women (which was never codified into a “way”) but between men and women. This discrepancy illustrates the relentlessly phallocentric or masculinist bias of the period: it was men’s attributes and desires that were accorded social significance.

How then was male-male love negotiated? Generally, love between men involved clear status differentials, with one partner being accorded a junior role. This was most apparent in kabuki theater, where the male actors who performed female roles, the so-called onnagata, were courted by rich townsmen and samurai alike. The other way in which a young man could be accorded a separate status was via distinct clothes and hairstyle. The wakashu or “youth” was an adolescent male who had left childhood behind but who had not yet taken on the social status and apparel of an adult man. The wakashu was therefore somewhat older than the chigo, who counted prepubescent boys among their numbers, and was instead between about twelve and twenty years old. During this time, he wore his hair with distinctive forelocks (maegami) and his kimono with longer, open sleeves. Joshua Mostow draws attention to this interstitial status, arguing that the wakashu was neither man nor woman but a kind of “third gender” and that his beauty and attributes were attractive to both men and women (2003, 65). Unlike the onnagata, who could remain a love object well into his career, the period of time when a wakashu was available as a lover for men was short. It necessarily came to an end when he went through the genpuku ceremony, which was when his forelocks were cut and he adopted the shorn head of an adult.

A clear example of the prominence of male-male love and the widespread appreciation of the beauty of adolescent youths is Ihara Saikaku’s Great Mirror of Male Love (Nanshoku Ōkagami), published in 1687. Saikaku was one of the most popular writers and satirists of the time, whose many books focused on the scandalous love lives of samurai and merchants in Edo. This text is divided into two sections: one dealing with the love of youths in the kabuki theater and the other with love between older and younger samurai. Saikaku’s books were illustrated with pictures of these beautiful youths, and they were part of a long tradition of the pictorial celebration of male beauty—from early temple paintings of chigo through to woodblock prints of famous kabuki actors. Kabuki onnagata were even trend setters for women and held up as exemplars of the bijin or “beautiful person” (Ishihara 2003, 122).

As noted above, nanshoku stood alongside joshoku, not as its opposite but as a complementary expression of adult male desire: Were a man to have the position and the means, he was able to engage in both forms of erotic encounter, since both were considered “as natural as the alteration of the seasons” (Leupp 1997, 147). Indeed, it has even been argued that since the venue for the expression of male-female love was the “floating world” of tea houses and brothels, with professional courtesans and other women hired for the purpose, it was male-male love, specifically as it was practiced as shudō, or a way of “devoted male love” between older and younger samurai, that was considered the greater ideal (Yokota-Murakami 1998, 41).

All this was to change, however, with Japan’s opening to the West and the reestablishment of imperial rule that came with the Meiji Restoration in 1868. At that time, most influential Japanese powerbrokers and cultural leaders turned away from what was seen as a “feudal” past and were keen to demonstrate their commitment to the pursuit of “civilization and enlightenment.” This involved negotiating and implementing Western ideas across the whole sociopolitical spectrum, including the establishment of a national constitution and legal code, the reorganization of marriage and family life, and the invention of new (to the Japanese at least) cultural forms in theatre, art, and literature (McLelland 2012, 13–34). These changes were to have a significant impact on gender roles and forever change the way in which the “way of boys” was viewed.

To an extent, men’s appreciation of youthful male beauty carried on into the early years of the twentieth century, as not all were enthusiastic supporters of the new trend that idolized the love of women. Some former samurai viewed the elevation of marital love as an affront to the canons of masculine superiority. Indeed, the new idea—that the most profound expression of human emotion is revealed through male-female love—was fiercely resisted by some “hard-line” (kōha) former samurai. These tensions are exposed in a famous literary work by Mori Ōgai that was published in 1909. In Vita Sexualis, a semifictionalized account of his youth and early manhood, including his time spent at an elite military training facility, Ōgai writes how his fellow students were split into two camps. The “dandies” (nanpa) wore elegant clothes, were avid readers of p*rnographic books, and chased after geisha, whereas the “hard liners” (kōha) were more masculine in dress and behavior and were practitioners of nanshoku (Mori 1971, 116). Military academies, which were full of the sons of former samurai, gave rise to a culture of sexual relations in which older boys would pursue the younger ones, sometimes referring to them as their chigo-san (McLelland 2005, 26). These intense youthful bonds between male students were also alluded to in the popular boys’ magazines of the period, such as Japan’s Boys (Nippon shōnen), where the spiritual affinity between older and younger boys was emphasized. It was not uncommon for the youthful beauty of the boys to be dwelt upon by the authors, an attribute also emphasized in the many illustrations, some of them provided by the famous artist Takabatake Kashō.

Kashō (who never married) was one of the most prominent illustrators of the Taishō period (1912–25) renowned for his illustrations of beautiful boys as well as girls. His depictions of both genders are similar in many respects—emphasizing their youth, beauty, delicate features, and rosy complexions—thus giving his male figures “an air of hom*oeroticism” (Hartley 2015, 26). It is in the refined style developed by Kashō in his illustrations, as well as the narratives of male friendship and bravado they accompanied, that we see the emergence of the bishōnen or “beautiful youth” still familiar across Japanese culture today.

The beginning of the Shōwa period (1926–89) saw an increasingly censorious and closeted atmosphere leading up to Japan’s engagement with and eventual defeat in the Pacific War. During this time, there was a clamp down on frivolous entertainment and a renewed emphasis on masculine vigor and physique. Yet, although illustrations of beautiful boys disappeared from display, there are suggestions that appreciation for and love of youthful male beauty carried on to some extent in a military context. Accounts published in the early years after the war suggest that in some contexts there was a tolerance for the “love between comrades” (senyūai), where an older and superior officer might establish a bond with a younger soldier, especially if the latter were a bishōnen (Asakura 1952, 6). These relations between older soldiers and “beautiful male youths” were sometimes spoken of as “brothers in law” and accounts specifically reference the nanshoku ideal of the past (see McLelland 2005, 46–52).

It was not until the 1950s, however, that representations of the beautiful boy reentered the public gaze, this time associated with the world of entertainment. From the early 1950s onward, prominent bishōnen entertainers, such as the singer Miwa Akihiro, swept to popularity, embodying an androgynous kind of masculinity. Interest in gender ambiguous male stars has been a conspicuous feature of Japan’s postwar cultural scene. The late 1950s and early 1960s saw interest in a range of “boys,” beginning with the “sister boy,” a term associated with Miwa, and leading to the “blue boy” boom sparked by the Japan tour of the French transsexual cabaret Le Carrousel de Paris in 1964. Probably the most famous of the beautiful boys of this period is Peter (named after his resemblance to Peter Pan), who was discovered working as a go-go boy in Tokyo’s Roppongi district in the mid-1960s. Peter was one of the “gay boys” featured in Matsumoto Toshio’s Funeral Parade of Roses (Bara no soretsu) in 1969, which first introduced Tokyo’s burgeoning gay bar scene to a general public (McLelland 2005, 111–16). Peter went on to have a mainstream career as a singer, actor, and television personality, as indeed did Miwa—both still visible in the Japanese media today.

It was also about this time in the early 1970s that the bishōnen received a new incarnation, this time in manga form when female artists began to take control of the masculine image and create characters that embodied an androgynous kind of beauty. Among these artists are those known as the “Fabulous Year 24 Group” (Hana no nijūyo-nen gumi), since their birthdays all fall around the twenty-fourth year of Emperor Shōwa’s reign (1949). The artists Ikeda Riyoko (1947–), Hagio Moto (1949–), and Takemiya Keiko (1950–) were instrumental in developing a prominent genre of girls’ (shōjo) manga known as “boys’ love” (shōnen ai), in which the beautiful male protagonists fell in love, not with their female counterparts but with each other (Welker 2016, 44–45).

Professionally produced boys’ love (also known as BL) series have proven a significant mainstay of girls’ manga since the 1970s, but of equal importance is the large number of amateur manga known as dōjinshi (fan magazines) that developed alongside official manga series at this time. Many dōjinshi borrow characters from boys’ manga and develop same-sex love themes around them. This process involves redrawing the characters to reflect a bishōnen aesthetic as well as inscribing them with status differentials according to their role in the relationship, as either the active (seme or “attacker”) or subordinate (uke or “receiver”) partner. These markers include depicting the seme as older, taller, stronger, and often darker than the uke—although both protagonists are depicted as beautiful, it is the beauty of the uke that is emphasized. Another characteristic of many uke characters is their vulnerability. Several of the lead characters in early shōnen ai narratives were victims of sexual abuse by male relatives or older boys, such as Juli in Hagio’s Heart of Thomas (1974) and Gilbert in Takemiya’s Song of the Wind and Trees (1976).

The 1970s also saw a further explosion of bishōnen performers on Japan’s screen and stage who were associated with producer Johnny Kitagawa’s talent company. Known as “Johnny’s,” boys as young as ten, referred to as “Johnny’s Jr.,” are recruited and undergo intensive training in singing, dancing, and acting in the hopes that they will emerge as “talents” or “idols” with the chance to perform across the Japanese media industries. The trend has been for these boys to be assembled into groups; one such group—Hikaru Genji—dominated charts in the late 1980s and directly referenced the tradition of beautiful boys mentioned earlier, linking back to the “shining” Prince Genji. Johnny’s idols have proven a mainstay of Japanese popular entertainment, enthusiastically received by female and male fans. Although, in the early years, there was the tendency for these boys to retire from the stage once their youthful looks and energy had faded, these days many manage to transition into biseinen (beautiful youths) and even binan (beautiful men)—as can be seen in the long-lived careers of the members of two of Johnny’s most successful bands, SMAP and Arashi. So important are the highly stylized youths of Johnny’s company in popularizing the image of the bishōnen that the term Janiizu or Janiizu-kei (Johnny’s type) is often used as a stand-in for the term, especially when describing one’s preference for a romantic “type.”

The most successful and long-lived of all of Johnny’s beautiful boys has been singer, dancer, and actor Kimura Takuya, who debuted at the age of fifteen in 1987, initially as a backup dancer for Hikaru Genji. He later found his first major success as part of the boy band SMAP (to date the best-selling boy band in Asia) and went on to be one of Japan’s most successful all-round media idols. Entertainers such as Kimutaku, as he is playfully known, embody an ambiguous form of masculinity quite distinct from the “hard” (kōha) masculine style associated with past screen greats, such as the swashbuckling Takakura Ken, or with the violent yakuza protagonists made popular in films by director Kitano Takashi. According to Kazumi Nagaike, the secret of Johnny’s idols such as Kimura, lies “precisely in their proximity to shōnen (boys), who in the Japanese sociocultural context project a sense of androgyny” (2012, 104). Indeed, the “extreme androgyny” of several of SMAP’s members has been noted as surprising to Western audiences, who expect more conventional masculine performances in a boy band (Darling-Wolff 2004, 360).

All Johnny’s idols are recruited while they are still boys and maintain boyish looks and innocence throughout their careers, never quite progressing into conventional manhood with its patriarchal associations of power and emotional restraint. With this in mind, idols are expected to scrupulously avoid any kind of sex scandal and usually only get married once their careers have already started to fade. Kimura is something of an exception here, marrying in 2000 but maintaining his super idol status since he “seldom mentions anything about his family and he maintains his shōnen image” (Nagaike 2012, 106).

Indeed, at times, Kimura has explicitly disrupted normative expectations about masculine self-presentation. In 1995 for instance, he appeared in a Kanebo cosmetics advertisem*nt wearing red lipstick (ibid., 103) and in the early 2000s he sometimes appeared on stage in women’s clothing. Cross-dressing as part of a male artist’s performance is of course not unusual in Japan, and appearing in exaggerated feminine attire is a staple of the visual-kei (visual style) glam rock bands. However, Kimura’s cross-dressing is much more homely, appearing in the women’s magazine Frau, for instance, in a low-cut dress and makeup. In one of these shots Kimura was portrayed wrapped in a torn cloth, “suggesting he might have just been the victim of sexual assault” (Darling-Wolff 2004, 361). The presentation of Kimura in this way underlies his androgyny and vulnerability in a manner very similar to the shōnen characters drawn by female BL artists such as Hagio Moto, whose early works featured sexually ambiguous, vulnerable, and emotionally complex characters. Kimutaku, along with the other members of SMAP, have proven the most successful of all Johnny’s collaborations—establishing the Johnny’s aesthetic as a mainstream trend among male performers and among young Japanese men in general. Their influence is felt across East Asia, too, due to the success of their music and their starring roles in popular Japanese television dramas. The 1996 drama Long Vacation, in which Kimura played a soft and gentle pianist and was the love interest of his older female roommate, was widely pirated in VCD form and viewed in Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China—further reinforcing the Johnny’s aesthetic across the region (Nakano 2002, 240). Kimura specializes in these “soft” masculine roles, for instance playing a hairstylist in the 2000 drama Beautiful Life, where he is in love with a dying disabled woman. The vulnerability and emotionality he brings to these performances are far from the traditional “hegemonic” masculine ideals in Japan, but they have much in common with the qualities of the bishōnen in BL manga.

Both Johnny’s idols and the BL phenomenon are part of a broader feedback loop in Japanese popular culture that has led to a growing emphasis on what has been described as “soft masculinity” in the media and beyond (Sung 2009). As Laura Miller points out, there has been “a shift to beautification as a component of masculinity” (2006, 126), and the bishōnen aesthetic is no longer restricted to the entertainment world but is increasingly a set of codes by which young men style themselves. What Miller refers to as “beauty work” has become an important component of masculine stylization and self-representation, not just in Japan but across East Asia, as can be seen in the many Japan-inspired boy bands that have sprung up around the region. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that male beauty—as embodied in the figure of the bishōnen, and Kimutaku in particular—has been one of Japan’s most popular and enduring cultural exports, surpassing former masculine ideals such as the samurai or the salaryman by far.