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128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1929


While sex and love between men was widely accepted and even celebrated in pre-modern Japan, by the 1930s modern sexology and psychiatry had recast it as a pathology and a perversion. Hamao was one of the first writers to oppose this. In 1930 he published an essay in a women's magazine in which he argued that homosexuality was not an illness but an innate aspect of personality. [...]
With this letter, Hamao became one of Japan's first advocates for 'gay rights'. While in this sense Hamao was very much ahead of his time, it is worth noting that his attitude had as much to do with his access to a cultural memory of a less homophobic past as it did to his anticipation of a more liberated future.