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The Love of the Samurai: A Thousand Years of Japanese Homosexuality

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Just as "Beyond Homosexuality" said of the Middle East and "Passions of the Cut Sleeve" said of China, this book posits that Japan didn't become homophobic until Westerners influenced them to do so. This book traces centuries of romantic dynamics between inter-generational male couples.

Half of this book is taken from someone else's publication forty years earlier, so it's practically just a reprint. This book has been translated from Japanese to French to English. Lingual purists may find holes in the translation if they know all three tongues. Most academic books are analysis-driven and anecdote-sparse; this book is the opposite. That may make some question the validity of the author's assertions.

In gay studies, there are debates about essentialism versus constructionism with the latter winning almost every time. Though this book suggests, "They had gays then and they do so now," this book can be seen as constructionist because the author differentiates between "wakashu" and "shudo." He differentiates between the love of samurai and the love of actors. Watanabe continually asks of the West and Japan, "When did loving group A go out of style or loving group B come into style?" This question is basically constructivist, because he doesn't assume that every culture and time period have individuals that love group A and individuals that love group B.

Like many articles on homosexuality in pre-modern East Asia, the photo and pictures are not obviously homoerotic. The heterosexist eye would assume he's looking at photos of men with women unless told so. The author must emphasize that if a female character is on stage being admired by a crowd of men, then that performer is a young male. We have to be told that any person without a shaved bald spot in these pictures is actually a male. This is no fault of the author's, but it makes the reader have to do his homework and not just breeze through the captions.