Keywords

1 Introduction

The issues of genderqueer individuals in Japan are becoming more and more visible in the public eye. For many years, only the most stereotypically feminine men were ever seen by the audiences in Japan through its rigidly corporation-controlled television networks. Although network TV remains a conservative source of media with few examples showing the diversity within LGBTQ society and culture, many queer Japanese people have found social media and the internet to be a welcoming space that is not only possible to queer, countering the negative influence of heteronormative space, but it is also a place where they are able to find a real sense of community and acceptance.

For many years, Japan’s only commonly seen example of LGBTQ individuals has been onee tarento on variety television. The term onee comes from the Japanese word for older sister and typically refers to an extremely camp and feminine gay man. These queer tarento (from the English word talent, referring to a type of minor celebrity) first started coming on the scene as part of a generic gay buumu (“boom,” a term signally a quick but typically short-lived period of heightened popularity usually marked by seeing a person, object, or topic brought up in several media sources in Japan on a very regular basis) in the 1990s followed by what Maree (2020) calls an onee kyara buumu (“older sister character boom”) in the 2000s (p. 15).

In more recent years, the rise in popularity of social media has led to decreased viewership for traditional network television programming (Bridge 2022). Along with this shift in popularity has come an increase in the number of LGBTQ social media channels where queer content creators have more freedom to express themselves and give followers a deeper insight into their lives and communities. Japan’s queer society has joined in this movement as well with a large amount of Instagram and TikTok accounts all focusing on the lives of Japanese LGBTQ individuals. YouTube in particular is already a popular site for many Japanese to begin with, given that for the past several years the job of YouTuber has ranked consistently as one of the most popular dream jobs for Japanese youth (Baseel 2019).

In addition to individual LGBTQ content creators, many queer-owned and/or operated businesses such as bars and cafes have turned to YouTube as a means to bring in business as well. This is done either by creating their own channel such as the popular channel Ao CH, which is based around a gay bar in the famous gay district of Tokyo, Shinjuku Nichome, or by collaborating with established influencers such as the duo Sekando Sutoriito, a pair of queer comedic content creators who do various skits based on the gay lifestyle or interview workers from various gay businesses. Even non-Japanese queer people living in Japan have sources like Tokyo BTM which features English videos that inform about clubbing, dating, and moving to Japan as members of the community.

This chapter will specifically look at the role that family plays in the discourse of queer Japanese content creators and how the discourse of family is used as a resource to challenge hegemonic masculinities within Japanese society. I examine two YouTube channels, created by the YouTubers Moa and Kazue-chan, both of whom are active within the larger queer community offline as well as online, to see the role and influence of family in the lives of Japanese men.

In my previous research on Japanese queer YouTubers, I have shown how these YouTube channels serve an important role for the LGBTQ society in Japan. By creating channels that consistently entertain while educating on queer issues, these sites become Japanese queered spaces that have their own rules and norms based on the specific culture of Japanese gay and trans society (Furukawa 2021). For example, Japanese transgender men will often refer to themselves as motojoshi (‘former girls’) which directly contrasts with the ideologies of English-speaking inner-circle countries that often see men of trans experience as always being men from the start (p. 186). Moreover, such sites become resources to push back against the larger heteronormative society by complex identity work on themselves and their supporters/subscribers by indexing alliance.

While collecting this data, it started to become obvious that family plays an important role for many LGBTQ individuals. Around the world there is increasing attention being paid to queer families after a long history of being mostly ignored (Bauer and Giles 2020). In the case of Japan, the idea of queer people having families is still quite new for the general populace. Typically for many Asian countries, the family plays a much stronger role in people’s lives when compared to the West, not just because of tradition but also because of economics where the family as a whole unit is often the main source of financial support (Izuhara and Forrest 2013). Because of this, coming out to one’s family in Asia often jeopardizes one’s financial well-being. It is therefore increasingly important to understand how the concept of family impacts the Asian queer community and to investigate the ways in which this can differ from Western queer discourses.

2 Theoretical Framework

The discourse analysis in this chapter draws upon sociocultural linguistics, a general term for an approach to sociolinguistic analysis that is highly flexible in its use of tools from different research traditions but tied together most strongly by a social constructionist base. In their description of this approach, Bucholtz and Hall (2005) list five key principles on which it is founded: emergence, positionality, indexicality, relationality, and partialness. The main draw of this approach is that it is ideal for examining the construction of identity which is quite central in the queer online content being analyzed here.

The first two principles relate to the reliance on interaction for insight and understanding. The principle of emergence is one found in many social science approaches regardless of whether or not the term is used. According to it, identity and the sense of self emerge in the way individuals use language and specifically in their interactions with others. Like most constructionist-based concepts, this principle requires the analyst to work with what is in the data rather than superimpose their ideas upon the speakers. The second principle of positionality is somewhat related to the first principle except that it focuses on identities. Specifically, positionality requires the analyst to use the categories that their speakers use, not broader social categories that quantitative studies might choose to use.

The third principle of indexicality tries to look at the actual way in which identity is constructed in discourse. By examining the connections of meanings in societal discourses and ideologies, we can see the complex ways that identity is constructed through reference (Bucholtz and Hall 2005, p. 594). Such an approach is not only essential for sociocultural linguistics, but I believe it is important for studying discourse in Japanese as well, given the often reported cultural tendency for inference (Haugh 2003). By this I mean that in Japanese, many things are often inferred linguistically rather than overtly stated (Okamoto 2008); this is quite common for the LGBTQ community in Japan where customers must interpret signs beyond what is referentially given to know what kind of clientele is served (Baudinette 2017).

The last two principles deal with the way identity is constructed and the limits of what we see when examining it. The fourth principle of relationality focuses on the fact that identity is often constructed in relation to others. This can be seen in the way that we see ourselves and others along dimensions of similarity or difference or realness versus artifice or by having authority or not. These specific relations are often referred to as tactics of intersubjectivity and are often part of the process we use with other people when constructing the identities of ourselves and others (Bucholtz and Hall 2004). The final principle is that of partialness which is something that most social scientists understand already: it means that what we see in our analysis is always an incomplete image. This relates to the understanding that what is being examined is limited by context. With this understanding we must accept that we can never know everything about a subject and their identity. What we are seeing is only a glimpse into a small section of who they are and how they negotiate their sense of self.

In addition to these principles, I also draw upon the concept of categories as conceived by Sacks’s Membership Categorization Analysis or MCA. MCA is quite useful for analyzing identity work because it gives an empirical means to map out culture. It is also well suited as part of a sociocultural linguistics, drawing heavily on indexicality as well as positionality, and is quite rigorous in its desire to focus on the local nature of data which are found in the principles of emergence and partialness. MCA examines social categories that people invoke in conversation and examines them in relation to other categories which form collections and the specific actions or category-bound predicates that speakers refer to define membership in said categories (Hester and Eglin 1997). In other words, in informal conversations people tend to mention, implicitly or explicitly, such social categories as gay, lesbian, son or daughter or such related actions as getting married or having children. Extending this, categories like gay, lesbian or trans can be taken together to form collections such as sexual minorities or sexualities.

An easy example of this to help in understanding these terms can be seen in coming out videos. A young man coming out as bisexual to his parents might say something like “I’m bisexual. Um, so I like guys and girls.” In this case, the young man invokes the category of bisexual for himself and then in the very next sentence he explains what it means by giving the predicate which is connected to the category. By liking guys and girls, he is bisexual. Being attracted to both genders is constructed as necessary for the category in this young man’s words. In the videos I analyze in this chapter, several categories and their predicates are involved which makes this an ideal form of analysis to draw on for this study.

3 Introducing Data

The main data in this study comes from the channels of two Japanese YouTubers. While both content creators were born and raised in Japan, it should be noted that both have had experience with living abroad in English-speaking countries. The first content creator is Moa of the channel Moa and More. Moa is a gay man from the Kansai region of Japan and has been quite prolific in his content creation since joining the platform in 2014 with nearly 400 videos many of which he subtitles in English, drawing upon his language skills to attract both a Japanese and international audience. Although Moa covers a wide range of topics from discussions about his daily life to issues facing queer individuals in Japan and abroad, his most popular videos are his recordings of him coming out to his family. The process of coming out to one’s family, being one’s “authentic” self with them, is perhaps one of the best places to look for the impact of family on queer Japanese people.

The first video like this that he recorded was uploaded on February 28 in 2017 where he comes out to his mother on camera. This is Moa’s most popular video to date and has over 6 million views. Extract 1 begins just a few seconds after the start of the video where the introductory animation shows the name of his channel, and Moa and his mother are sitting in front of the video camera. Initially, we see Moa adjusting the camera and his mother asking him what he is doing. He then tells her that he wants to talk to her.

Extract 1

Line 1 serves as the beginning of this interactive segment which can be seen pragmatically by the use of the copula ja at the beginning as a discourse marker signaling a new topic of conversation is about to start. By explaining then that he wants to talk to his mother about something indicates that the activity to come is something serious which is in contrast to the light joking that occurs before this segment when Moa is setting up the camera. He then starts line 2 with the same discourse marker again, displaying a level of discomfort by basically starting the new interaction twice. He then begins to set up the background for this discussion by framing it in terms of his upcoming trip overseas to study English. He then connects the context of this upcoming trip with the current talk in line three through the connective nde which creates cohesion between different parts of discourse (Sadler 2006). He then goes on to show the seriousness of the current discussion in line 4 by suggesting that this discussion is something he has been thinking about or planning through the past tense verb omotta (to think). This is then followed by overlapped laughter from Moa first, which is then followed quickly with the same reaction from his mother. Laughter in uncomfortable situations like this is often understood as a type of release of stress or social tension (Glenn 2003, pp. 76–77).

Moa then continues his discussion while at the same time displaying discomfort by over-explicating the set up in line 7 where he starts a new sentence that functions as an introduction to a new topic (“Before that”). This is said with some laughter carried over from the overlapped laughter. His mother responds to this over-explication by asking what this is about. The continued laughing tone in her voice, combined with the loud volume and frustrated tone, is in response to the prolonged and awkward set up but at the same time she is still not shown as angry. Moa then shifts things to a more serious tone by telling her that he is trying to be serious in line 9, a statement his mother acknowledges. Moa then continues his hedging in lines 11 and 12 through the word search token ano and the vowel stretch on iya. He then continues to show discomfort by explaining that his mother might already know what he is about to tell her. At this point, he begins to cry as seen in the sniffles in line 13. Moa’s mother gives a simple acknowledgment token or aizuchi in line 14 often understood as a gesture of encouragement or support (Iwasaki 1997).

Moa further displays his discomfort by lowering his gaze at the beginning of line 15 and repeats his previous statement. He then smiles and comes out to his mother in line 17 by using the phrase renai taisho (“object of love”) and explaining that he likes men. His mother’s first response to this is the phrase yappari na indicating that this was something she had thought for some time already. Moa laughs in response to this statement in a renewed release laughter, after which his mother restates herself in line 21 saying that she had thought this and then follows with the token nde with a rising pitch basically asking her son “and what?” at the end of the extract.

Moa’s coming out process is a bit drawn out and painful in this extract, something quite common to most queer people who come out. Like for many in the LGBTQ community, even if you are fairly confident that the statement of coming out will be accepted well, the fear of it not being accepted or resulting in emotional or sometimes physical danger is quite powerful. The obvious discomfort Moa experiences is related to such fears or insecurities. Indeed, the indirect way that Moa chooses to come out is quite striking. He could simply say boku wa gei desu (“I am gay”) or if he believed that his mother might not know the loan word gei (“gay”), he could have used any number of other terms that exist within Japanese to say it. Rather than defining himself with his coming out statement, he chooses instead to describe the kind of person he likes which indexes his gayness in a less direct way. What is even more interesting is that Moa uses this exact phrase several times during the conversation. With his mother, Moa basically says: Ano wakatteru kamoshiran kedo, sono boku wa, nani, renai taisho to shite dansei ga suki (“Um, you might already know this but I, I like men.”) in lines 15–18.

In a completely different video uploaded three days later, Moa shows himself coming out to his father with his mother sitting in for support. In that video, his words for coming out are: kono kikai ni zenbu iou to omotte, saki okaasan ni iuttan yakedo, tantou chokunyuu ni iu to, ano boku no renai taisho wa dansei (“I thought I’d take this opportunity to tell you everything, although I already told Mom earlier, to get straight to the point, um, I like men”). Again, he chooses to use the phrase renai taisho (“object of love”) to reveal his sexual preference. In another video filmed much later and uploaded two years and five months after these first two recordings, he comes out to his younger sister, saying niichan no himitsu, himitsu de wa nai kedo, niichan no, renai taisho wa dansei (“my secret, well it’s not a secret, but umm I, I like men”), again expressing his sexuality with the same phrase.

This careful indirect indexing stands in contrast to the way Moa comes out to a crowd of strangers in another video filmed between these times using the word gei (“gay”). Of course, coming out to one’s family as opposed to strangers is often something which needs to be handled more carefully since the stakes are so much higher. We can then see how different ways of expressing sexuality here can be a resource for negotiating with others based on their level of social distance.

Another interesting aspect within Moa’s coming out videos is that after coming out as gay to his family, the idea of family seems to be an important related topic. Specifically, we can see that the expectations of Moa’s mother for a gay son come into conflict with her son’s dreams for the future. In Extract 2, we can see what happens to the conversation shortly after Extract 1.

Extract 2

This talk segment starts with Moa’s use of nde, which as stated before works to create cohesion, but in this case, it is in response to his mother’s use of nde at the end of the previous extract. The one here in line 1 of Extract 2 has a downward pitch at the end showing that the forthcoming discourse, in addition to being connected to Moa’s coming out, is also pragmatically in response to his mother’s request for more information. Moa then goes on to explain that getting married is not impossible for him. Because Japanese is pro-drop (meaning “pronoun-dropping” that refers to a language in which certain pronouns may be omitted), his statement in line 1 results in confusion for his mother due to the apparent possible clash of category-bound predicates resulting in what is typically referred to as an other-initiated self-repair (Schegloff et al. 1977). This can be seen in her response in line 2 asking who is getting married and to whom. Moa then repairs the comprehension difficulty by further clarifying the predicate as marriage between two men. After his mother signals understanding, he then expands this discussion further by stating that he could also have children. Again, we can see that this predicate does not match the understanding that his mother has of the category of gay man. She displays her understanding difficulty in line 6 with the question word nande (“how”). As Moa begins to explain in line 7, his mother offers a possible method to find out if he means adoption. Rather than answering this question from line 8 directly, Moa instead tells her that there are a variety of ways for two men to have children. After his mother gives a non-committal response in line 10, Moa then unpacks the previous statement further saying these are methods she probably would not know about which she agrees with in line 12. Moa then reiterates that even though she may not know these methods, there are ways for him to have children.

As an extension of Moa’s coming out, this discussion of marriage and having children, this discussion of family, is quite significant. Moa makes similar statements when coming out to his father and his younger sister as well, as seen in Table 1. In each video, after coming out as liking men, he then immediately goes into a discussion of how he can get married and have children.

Table 1 Moa’s discussions after coming out
Full size table

It is particularly interesting that the wording that Moa chooses each time is to say that such things are not impossible. He does not state positively that he can get married and that he can have children. The use of the double negative when viewed through the lens of English often leads people to the assumption that the speaker is being obtuse or indirect; however, from the perspective of the Japanese language, this structure can also be seen as a way of seeking approval and/or displaying stance toward the topic (Akatsuka 1992). We can then see that after coming out to his family, Moa also tries to get his family’s approval on something that they do not even consider to be possible for him.

Related to this discussion is also his family’s responses to his coming out and his statement that he still can and would like to get married and have children. In Table 2, I have compiled a collection of his parents’ responses to this discussion of sexuality and family.

Table 2 Moa’s family reacting to his wanting to marry and have children
Full size table

We can see in this second table that Moa’s mother and father are not comfortable with the idea of Moa being gay even though both of them stated quite clearly in the videos that they knew that he was gay before he came out to them. His mother seems to move back and forth between perceiving it as a problem by saying akan ya (“this is no good”) to a sort of resigned perspective sore sha nai koto chau ka (“there’s nothing to do about it right”). And we can also see that the predicate of having children is still something that she cannot reconcile with the category of gay man when she states mago muri ya, mago (“grandchildren are impossible”).

Moa’s father has a similar difficulty in reconciling the notion of gay men getting married. Right after Moa mentions that he can get married as seen in his statement to his father in Table 1, his father immediately comes back with josei to kekkon shitara na (“you mean if you married a lady right?”). He does fairly openly admit that he fails to understand what Moa is going through but also tries to warn his son that the life he is choosing is difficult through the use of the word semai meaning “narrow” or “restrictive.” This concept of a restrictive life for gay people is obviously based in culture but is also shifting within the gay community to a certain degree as can be seen in Extract 3 which takes place just after Extract 2.

Extract 3

In this Extract, we can see that Moa’s mother is connecting this discussion of marrying and having children with her son traveling to study abroad. She asks him in line 1 if he plans to go looking for someone while in Canada. Moa then assures her that he is going to study (in line 2) and then he begins to modify the category-bound predicate for marriage by explaining that he is unable to get married while in Japan. It is interesting at this point that his mother then assumes he will marry a foreigner in line 3 rather than consider the possibility that Japan might allow for same-sex marriage or that he might marry a Japanese man abroad. Moa then tells her that he does not know if he will marry a foreigner or not.

For LGBTQ people in Japan, the idea of traveling abroad and the possibilities of marriage and family are very closely connected. Online discussions of gay people talking about marriage, as opposed to civil unions which are allowed in some parts of Japan yet have only limited legal power (Williams 2015), will often shift to talking about countries that allow same-sex marriage which is still not legal in Japan, or discussions about experiences while living abroad, as can be seen in this last piece of data.

The final extract in this chapter comes from the channel Kazue-chan, which has been around since 2016. The channel as a whole has over 30 million views and its stated main purpose is to inform people about LGBTQ issues. The channel features a wide range of videos from travel segments, activist movements, and interviews. The creator of the channel is nicknamed Kazuechan where the diminutive honorific chan is attached to the creator’s name Kazue.

This particular video the extract comes from is titled “‘Boku ni wa papa futari iru’: gei kappuru to musuko-kun no hanashi” (“I have two dads: discussing a gay couple and their son”). In the video, Kazue-chan interviews his friend Mittsun, who is currently a vlogger on YouTube himself although at the time of the interview in March of 2018, he mainly ran a blog about his life with his husband and son.

Extract 4

The data here starts with Kazuechan at the beginning of the interview saying that he has many things he would like to talk to Mittsun about. Using the discourse marker sa, he raises the first topic of gay marriage in Japan. Mittsun then gives a positive minimal response token in line 2 and Kazuechan then follows this up pointing out the relevance of the topic for his interviewee. Although both speakers share the principal positioning in this interaction (Goffman 1981, p. 226), it is constructed as especially relevant to Mittsun (in line 3) as a man who is himself in a gay marriage and is Japanese. After another positive minimal response, Kazue-chan shows that he also is in the principal position by saying that he can understand thinking about getting married. Although he ends his turn with a negative conjunction, Mittsun immediately picks up on Kazue-chan’s similar formulation and asks for confirmation in line 6. Kazue-chan then explains that he had thought about it while living in Canada and provides the information about Canada allowing douseikon (“same-sex marriage”) through the use of the conjunction kara, which shows causation as the reason for thinking this way. After a change of state token showing Mittsun’s understanding in line 8, Kazue-chan further unpacks the relationship between living in Japan and contemplating marriage as a gay man. He explains that while living in Japan he never even thought about getting married, but once he was in a place where it was allowed, he started to think that it might be nice to get married, especially since he had a boyfriend at the time. He then goes on to say that even then, it is not the same as Mittsun now having a child.

Kazue-chan then leads into his question of what led Mittsun and his husband to having a child (in line 15). Mittsun then begins to explain that after living in Tokyo both he and his husband moved to London. Mittsun then clarifies in line 18 how moving to London had a big impact on him. As he explains this, he also states that he never originally thought about getting married using the adverbial yappari, which roughly translates to “of course,” thus revealing that thinking about marriage before moving to a country where it is possible was not likely. Kazue-chan then agrees with him in line 19 with the ending copula plus particles da yo ne which show assertion and involvement (Matsumoto 2004, p. 253) from the speaker. They then further go on to explain that since you are unable to marry within Japan you just give it up from the start. This discussion is quite telling about the lives of queer Japanese people. It highlights how the lack of knowledge or thought of the world with other alternatives beyond Japan limits their possibilities in certain respects. While living in Japan, other options do not really exist, perhaps as a result of the often-criticized xenophobia present in Japanese society (Kubota 2016). Certainly, in these conversations there are no traces of any discussions about changing the law to allow for same-sex marriage.

4 Discussion

When examining this data, it becomes very clear that the concept of family is highly centralized for many Japanese LGBTQ individuals. In the case of Moa, a very important speech act, that of coming out, focuses heavily on his family members. Moa comes out by indexing the category of gay through the bound predicate of having a male renai taisho (“object of love”). This indirect categorization helps him to navigate a somewhat delicate and important process of articulating his sexuality. While he comes out in other videos to strangers as just gay, the coming out to family is particularly weighty leading him to index the category rather than naming it.

Coming out to one’s family is obviously not unique to Japan. It happens in many cultures and is typically a stressful and difficult process for the person coming out. What seems to be different in this Japanese context is Moa’s need to mention the desire to marry and have children. In other words, while speaking to his family about something deeply personal, Moa also connected this speech act to his role in continuing the family. By doing so he also indexes the collection of family that he belongs to as well as contests the view of the category of gay man by offering new predicates that his family does not expect. By repeatedly discussing the possibility of marrying a man and having children, he challenges the predicates that his parents felt were bound to the category of gay. This contest of bound predicates is clear from his mother’s statement of mago muri ya, mago! (“Grandchildren are impossible then, impossible.”) and from his father’s belief that getting married meant marrying a woman (Josei to kekkon shitara na? “You mean if you married a lady right?”). The verbal exchange between Moa and his family members seems to reveal, or confirm, the importance of marriage and having children in a Japanese family structure. It seems to be one of the parents’ main concerns in learning that Moa is gay.

In addition to being able to live authentically with his family and possibly changing their perceptions and beliefs about gay men, we can see that this kind of coming out discourse directly challenges hegemonic Japanese masculinities which, due to lack of linguistic contact with Western countries (Fukuda 1975, p. 15), has prevented many Japanese from realizing the fact that gay couples can marry and have children in other countries. This was made quite visible in Kazue-chan’s discussion with Mittsun where we could see how the categories and the predicates were constructed as being limited by the space in which people were living and their experiences living abroad. Perhaps this limitation is real concern of Moa’s father when he warns his son about the life he is choosing. Despite Moa’s father’s concerns about the semai (“narrow”) life that his son is leading, I have hopes that Moa’s experiences and openness will help him to find a life that instead is widening.