ANOTHER SIDE OF ME
Words and pics by Nate Shockey

(This article originally published October 2009 in Electric Ant #2, available for purchase here.)

The Killer Wore Lady Clothes (Take One)

The party was in full swing when the voluptuous beauty walked in. She took her place among the men gathered in the powerful landowner’s luxurious banquet room and began pouring drinks with a delicate hand while making small talk with the guests. Shots of liquor were taken, thighs were caressed, promises were whispered, and the gathering got raucous enough that no one noticed the woman take the hand of the best-looking man at the party and lead him into the rear bedroom.

That is, no one noticed until the walls rattled with a scream and our femme fatale burst back into the dining room with her kimono spattered in blood, holding a dagger in one hand, wig in the other. She was a he, and he had just carried out a hit on the most powerful man in southern Japan. The year? 500 AD, give or take a century.

One of the most feted heroes of Japanese pre-history is Yamato Takeru. Known as Prince Yamato the Brave, Takeru was the greatest warrior of the clan that would go on to gain control over much of what is now known as the Japanese islands. What is often glossed over in the modern mythology of Yamato Takeru’s conquests is the fact that he won his most famous victory while wearing makeup and a dress. Sent to slay the leaders of the Kumaso clan, Yamato Takeru put together the best drag outfit his father’s yen could buy and wrecked havoc on the House of Kumaso. The bloodbath that ensued would assure the dominance of the Yamato clan, whose name is still synonymous with Japan.

The Killer Wore Lady Clothes (Take Two)

Fifteen hundred or so years later, the stabbing of a bureaucrat by a man dressed as a woman doesn’t pull quite the same kind of cultural capital. You’ve got to flip to page 47 of the weekly scandal rag to find headlines like “Unbelievable! The Man Who Cut Up the Military Officer was a Big Breasted Tranny!” The incident in question took place in 1998, when a higher-up in the Japanese Self Defense Force bureaucracy ended up in a body bag after picking a fight with a streetwalker he thought was a woman. His eyes done deceived him while looking for a cheap lay in the back streets of Shinjuku, and suffice to say, he didn’t react with the kind of dignity and decorum that Lou Reed might have in a similar set of circumstances.

But perhaps I’m already giving you the wrong idea. Despite the occasional scandal that portrays the image of the cross-dressing man as a social deviant, Tokyo has been called a transvestite’s paradise. Unlike in Thailand or the Philippines, the tall and bosomy ladyboys of Japan rarely end up giving succulent tugjobs to unsuspecting bachelor party participants. If you want to see men in women’s clothes in Japan, all you need to do is switch on the TV, go to watch a Kabuki play, or take a stroll through one of Tokyo’s busiest neighborhoods.

More and more young people are taking a walk on the wild side, and a number of colleges have started clubs for josô-ko (literally, “kids in women’s clothes”), straight(ish) men who enjoy dressing as women. Recent articles in both Japanese and Western papers have described the newfound popularity of the manssiere as a piece of supplementary underwear for salarymen, and everyone is talking about the new generation of “herbivore men” – not vegetarians, but effeminate and asexual boys who wear skirts for comfort and spend their bonuses on depilatory treatments. But Tokyo’s history as a cross-dressing-friendly town goes a lot further back than these fads might lead one to believe.

Tripping out in Tranny Town Tokyo

When Tokyo (then known as Edo) was named the seat of the Tokugawa Shogunate in the early 17th century, it became the political and cultural capital of Japan. People and products flooded into the burgeoning metropolis, and while most visitors to the city were sure to visit the famous licensed geisha quarter of the Yoshiwara before leaving, plenty more turned left (hung a “Louie,” one might anachronistically say) at the fork in the road and headed over to the neighboring area of Yushima to dally with cross-dressing “ladies” of the night. And then, of course, there was the Kabuki theater, in which all the female roles were famously acted by men who performed on (and occasionally off) stage as women.

Back in the 1700s and 1800s, there was plenty of backstage banter (and banging) between the performers and the patrons, but these days Kabuki has been elevated to a Cultural Event performed in Serious Theater Venues. The burlesque quality of Kabuki is a bit more alive in the modern Takarazuka theater performances (covered by yr editor elsewhere in this fine ish!) where all the roles are played by women, but nothing compares to the spectacle of the “New Half Queer Dance Shows,” full-on drag revues put on for the enjoyment of the general public.

One sweltering summer night, I dropped in to catch the curtain at Alcazar, probably the best known of Tokyo’s drag shows. Located (where else?) across the street from Shinjuku City Hall in central Tokyo, Alcazar is on the doorstep of Kabuki-cho, the red light district where our military man met his tragic fate. Despite the name, Kabuki-cho doesn’t have anything to do with Kabuki per se, but this Shinjuku neighborhood has inherited more than its fair share of the salaciousness that characterized Kabuki in its 18th century heyday.

It’s All a Dream and I Don’t Mind

Dodging sharkskin-suited gangsters and Nigerian strip club touts, I ascended the stairs into Alcazar, where I was met with mild befuddlement by the doorman: “You do know what kind of establishment this is, right?” I nodded and forked over my 50 bucks, which bought me a ticket to the show, a plate of potato chips, and 90 minutes with all the cheap whiskey I could drink.

Once inside, I sat down on one of the sofa benches and watched the other customers file in; as with Takarazuka, the clientele of these New Half (the most common Japanese-English term for transvestite) shows is overwhelmingly female and just past middle age. There were a few straight couples on dates, a woman in her fifties with a hefty transvestite the same age, an adult family of four, and one young girl who was clearly a regular. Apparently the show is a regular stop on package bus tours for tourists visiting from the countryside, so I suppose the proper answer to the doorman’s question would have been: “a family-oriented establishment?”

The dancers made their rounds, shaking hands and introducing themselves to the audience before taking the stage. What followed was a true spectacle, somewhere between Priscilla Queen of the Desert and Pirates of the Caribbean (the ride, not the film). The show was a whirlwind world tour, from French cabarets to the plains of Africa, Arabesque harems to neon glitchcore stewardesses to Gladiator battles. A gay GWAR concert might be a good point of reference.

Each dance number was completely self-contained and performed by various permutations of three shamelessly twinked-up male players, three drag “babes,” a chubby comic relief type, and a muscle-bound dancer with a huge rack who was at once ubermensch and all woman. As for the “babes,” babes they were indeed. With necklaces to hide their Adam’s apples, they could have fooled me. Some highlights included a wolf chasing maids to the sounds of Electropop band Perfume, as well as a Naughty by Nature-era break-dance piece set to a mash-up of Public Enemy and the theme from Ghostbusters. These are the facts.

After a while it became pretty easy to see what the appeal was to the clientele. Alcazar’s show is Alice in Trans-Wonderland, framed as the dream of a sleeping girl escaping from the drudgery of everyday life. The show bills itself as stress-relieving entertainment, an enjoyable invitation to “spend an hour in the fabulous fantasy world of the cross-dressing queers” (the promotional pamphlet’s words, not mine). Surprisingly, or perhaps not, it was a remarkably heteronormative affair, the perpetual playing out of the classical courtship ritual with the added titillation of, well, the fact that it was only dudes up there.

One of the climaxes (as it were) came when one of the “female” dancers briefly removed his top to give the audience a fleeting look at what sure looked like his real nipples on his real heaving bosom. Minutes later, the fantasy ended and the audience slowly filed out, leaving the artificially transcendent space of the transvestite club to resume life as usual, albeit a bit tipsy and a bit bloated from having eaten too many potato chips.

“Another Side of Me”

New Half shows like the one at Alcazar are simply a spectacle for hire, but it doesn’t take a hundred step-walk to stumble into a different, deeper side of Tokyo’s josô (cross-dressing) culture. Turn the corner from Alcazar’s spot and you’ll find yourself in a warren of narrow alleys filled with ramshackle two-story concrete buildings studded with tiny neon signs. Welcome to Golden Gai, a collection of over 150 bars that remains one of the bastions of postwar Tokyo culture, as well as a haven for an older generation of men in women’s clothes. The area falls under the protection of the nearby Hanazono (Flower Garden) Shrine, where the god worshipped is none other than the original josô himself, Prince Yamato the Brave.

I sat perched on a stool inside Night Flight, a second-story Golden Gai bar, chatting with the proprietor, Kazue. When he tends bar, he’s a slim, handsome man with light stubble and a heavy-handed pour. But a few days later he’ll be donning a blonde wig, earrings, and extra-long eyelashes before taking to the stage as Gallantique Kazue to croon medleys of groovy and loungey 70s-era pop standards originally performed by female singers.

Tacked to every wall in the bar are photos of Chiaki Naomi, one of Kazue’s (and your author’s) favorite breathy pop chanteuses. My eye kept falling back to one of Chiaki’s album jackets, but I couldn’t figure out why until I realized that in the photo she was sitting at the same bar that I was. The other side of the jacket bears a photo of Chiaki walking ever so slightly lopsidedly through an alley in Golden Gai along with the album’s title, Mô hitori no watashi – “Another Side of Me.”

In Japan, the phrase has become a sort of talisman for many men who live part of their lives as women; there’s the “I” who gets up, puts on a suit, and goes to work, then there’s the “I” who takes off the suit, pulls on stockings, and sits swirling cocktails (careful not to smudge any lipstick) in the soft neon light until late into the night. Former salaryman, former transvestite bar hostess, and current professor of gender studies Mitsuhashi Junko uses the phrase “another side of me” to describe the image she saw in the mirror when she decided to give up her life as a married businessman and live as a woman.

In her book Josô to Nihonjin (Cross-Dressing and the Japanese), Mitsuhashi describes her first cautious trips to “Member’s Clubs” – bars that provide special spaces for men to change clothes, don wigs and makeup, and spend an evening chatting with other men dressed as women. But most of these clubs strictly forbid leaving the premises while cross-dressing, and Mitsuhashi got the boot after appearing on national TV.

But that’s not how it works in Shinjuku. Golden Gai is a town of the night (and the very early morning), and cross-dressing men have been sitting elbow to elbow with authors, singers, filmmakers, activists, and other assorted drunks on both sides of the neighborhood’s counters for decades. Yet it’s a different world altogether from Ni-chome, Tokyo’s well-known gay district just four hundred meters across the road. Although a few josô bars have popped up in Ni-chome in recent years, many of the gay bars in that district forbid women from entering, and that includes men dressed as women.

Golden Gai and Ni-Chome have been distinct from the early years after the war, when Ni-Chome was a “red light” district for licensed semi-legal prostitution, and Golden Gai was a “blue light” district for illegal unlicensed prostitution carried out under the cover of eating and drinking establishments.

Neon Flowers Blossoming in the Night

Fuki, one of the first and most famous josô bars in Golden Gai, opened its doors in 1967 when former newspaperman Kamo Kozue began tending the counter in makeup and kimono.

Perhaps the most famous kimono-clad bar owner of that generation was the recently deceased and fondly remembered Jôji Mama, whose portraits by the photographer Watanabe Katsumi have become iconic. Some bars, including Jôji’s, were straightforward drinking establishments where part of the appeal lay in the fabulous master in drag, but a few of the town’s josô bars were (and some say still are) cruising spots legendary for sweaty screws against the counter.

Fuki has long since become a mystery novel-themed bar called The Haunted Castle, and its next-door descendent Bar June is gone as well. The most famous josô spot these days is Bar Jean Genet, which takes its name from the legendary French gay vagabond writer. The night I visited, the bar was packed (which doesn’t take much, considering it only has six seats), with half the customers in drag and half in more standard men’s clothing. I drank Campari sodas and chatted with Mika, the worldly mama behind the counter, while the younger part-time assistant batted her eyelashes and wondered out loud how she could work her way up to a B-cup.

For some people, the world of josô is a place to relieve stress, either by dressing up for an evening or watching a surrealistic show, but for many others, it’s a place where men can live out the desire not only to dress as women but to live as women, the secret of which can produce a good deal of personal stress.

1980s action anime was playing on the TV and Mika was peppering me with questions about the cross-dressing scene in the US when a tall beauty in a red dress walked in. Ami had taken the first bullet train in from Osaka and spent the day in business meetings at an internationally renowned consulting firm before changing into her wig and dress and heading out to Jean Genet, which she does whenever business brings her to Tokyo. It turned out Ami was from the same faraway town where I had lived as a high school exchange student, and we spent an hour chatting about baseball, our favorite restaurants in New York, and other things of the world. If I had been drinking Scotch instead of Campari with my soda, I might have found my hand wandering over to her thigh as I asked what she was doing later that night.

But I was jolted out of my nascent fantasy as the door slammed open and a scruffy, dead-drunk man in his sixties stumbled in, mumbling “You named your bar after Jean Genet, and I love Genet, so gimme a drink!” Upon raising his head from his chin, a look of shock came over his face – “Wait a minute, you’re all men in here!” If he loved Genet as much as he claimed to, that fact shouldn’t have particularly surprised or troubled him, but he didn’t strike me as the literary type. Everyone in the room tensed up and a bit of uncomfortable back and forth followed before Mika threateningly walked out from behind the bar to escort him outside. “Come back any time honey,” one of the girls at the counter mockingly called after him.

Ami and I paid our checks, said goodbye to Mika, and walked out into the warm night. I was pointing her in the direction of Night Flight when a group of three young men walked by and gave her the gawking double take that she probably gets every time she goes out on the town.

Being that fabulous doesn’t come easy.

Nate Shockey is a PhD student living in Tokyo, working on a dissertation on Marxist literature, media, and technology in 1920s Japan. He writes an amazingly detailed blog, Ramenate.

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