Abstract
In 1974, a bizarre story, ‘Jigoku ni ochita wakamonotachi’ (‘Young
Men Fallen into Hell’), appeared in the Japanese homo magazine Adon. It described in pornographic detail the sado-masochistic torture of Japanese men
captured and forced to perform in a black circus troupe in American-occupied
Japan. ‘Jigoku’ was unremarkable except that, in its stylised ‘pornographics’, it
uniquely – for the homo imagination – configured sexual desire as a Japanese–black
inter-racial intercourse. This article explores this imagination through a close
reading of ‘Jigoku’. It traces a post-war ‘genealogy’ of blackness (Russell 2006),
which finds affinity of meaning and value cutting across sub-cultural homo sexual
fantasy, through mainstream-to-canon literature and arthouse cinema, across the
post-war era. Many of the stereotypes are familiar, but there is a twist. The ‘libidinously liminal’ scenario that sees in ‘Jigoku’ a racial play of Japanese colouring-up
and a minstrelsy of sorts upsets cultural narratives of Japan’s post-war period. So
too does the extremity of the sado-masochistic fantasy present in ‘Jigoku’. In its
audacity, the world is expunged of white men. A new moral history is suggested
in which the trauma of defeat and occupation can be re-membered and men
(re-)masculinised in the pleasurable tortures they suffer at the hands of their
black masters.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1-23 |
Number of pages | 0 |
Journal | Japan Forum: the international journal of Japanese studies |
Volume | 25 |
Issue number | 1 |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2013 |