ようこそ !
Welcome to Gender Performance Japan
This website was created in order to present research conducted by three students and one professor from Union College in Schenectady, New York. We traveled to Japan in the summer of 2008 to investigate how the Japanese perform gender across various art forms. Please explore our four research topics (Noh theater, Nihonbuyo dance, Street Fashion, and Visual Kei music); we hope our site can inspire you to learn more about the subjects we researched. Yoroshiku onegaishimasu! よろしくお願いします!
How do Japanese pop culture and traditional culture reflect perceptions of gender?
Although Japanese culture has changed over the centuries, gender markers (public symbols of sexual orientation) have been passed on from ancient times to the present. The kinds of gender markers found in traditional art forms such as Noh theater and Nihonbuyo dance can be found in new ways of expressing gender, such as every day fashion statements and gender-bending rock music. Gender specific body language, clothing and forms of beauty observed in older art forms can also be observed today in Japanese youth and pop culture. This shows that ideas of gender and what it means to be on display as a man or a woman have also been passed on from traditional Japan to today.
Our four research projects investigated the public portrayal of gender. Do anatomical features of the body declare a person’s gender? Do cultural expectations of certain gender orientations shape an individual’s gender? Philosophical theories of gender and of the body vary from culture to culture; these theories are even debatable within a single culture. By examining how gender is displayed in Japan through various behaviors, clothing styles and art forms, our research aimed to discover how Japanese culture differs from our own American culture. After looking at gender performance in street fashion, rock music, Noh theatre, and Nihonbuyo dance, we realized that gender is performed in a wide variety of creative ways in Japanese culture, yet most Japanese people believe that gender is determined by anatomy. Questions about the body's role in gender performance are as perplexing in Japan as they are in the United States, and these questions are worth exploring further.
One interesting feature of gender performance in Japan is that beauty is not exclusively associated with femininity. Whereas in most western societies, the word "beautiful" is associated with the image of females but seldom with males, in Japanese society beauty is associated with both feminine and masculine images. Japanese men as well as women seek to be beautiful in both their outward appearance and inner self.
Japanese performing arts have always made gender a theme for artistic exploration. Noh and Kabuki performers and Nihonbuyo dancers may portray male or female gender in their art, regardless of their own gender. Gender is an artistic theme, not a categorization of the artist. This kind of exploration of gender in public performance occurs in Japanese pop culture, too. People may dress for the public eye in a way that exaggerates certain female or male gender traits, without necessarily exhibiting their own gender. In the public gender performances found in street fashion and certain underground rock movements such as Visual Kei, gender becomes another kind of clothing that can be worn or changed at will.