Gay Today: World

New Japanese Film
Shows Warriors Making Love

Compiled by GayToday

Tokyo, Japan--Nagisa Oshima's latest work on film, Gohatto (Taboo or 'Something Forbidden') promises to become hotly debated both in Japan and elsewhere, following its world-wide release.

It tells the stories of passionate Japanese male lovers bonding during 1865 in their warrior setting. Their jealousies and rivalries court death and destruction as their passions overcome their reasonableness.

The warriors are Shinsen-gumi, a group of samurai loyal to the shogun and who wage a hopeless fight against imperial forces that are reinstalling the emperor. They're described by Oshima as "an organization that represented an exclusive group of men who were intensely involved in the business of killing."

Reporters gathered at Tokyo's film premiere were told by Oshima that he thinks "it is in these very intense situations that love rises among members (of a group). Whether they may be among same sex or not seems to me entirely natural."

Oshima also explained that: ''On the question of strictures against gay lovers in Japanese society, I would say that historically it has been relatively lax. Within this relatively lax situation, it in fact flourished.''

Love-making among males was socially acceptable in pre-industrial times, during the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1867).

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Scholar Gary Leupp's Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan, points out that homosexual behavior was "indeed a salient feature of mainstream culture"

Oshima is recognized in Japan as a director who has explored the psychological dilemmas, injustices and sufferings visited on his society's ethnic Koreans, its economically deprived and its women.