The Pornographics of Japanese Negrophilia

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.