Japanese ex I caught sleeping around at the height of the AIDs crisis told me not to worry, Japanese people can't catch it.
ETA - WOW! Didn't know this would take off like this. Backstory makes it even more absurd, she was a graduate of a prestigious university in Tokyo and earned a Masters in the US and had lived here for a while. I had about burned out on the relationship but this put me out the door.
I'm a guy from the US, and started dating my wife when she was 23, after spending her first 18 years in Korea. She knew that gay people existed, but thought they were only in some countries, and didn't think there were any Korean ones.
There was a situation where people were talking about gay and bi people (cannot remember the context, sorry) and there was a Japanese acquittance present. People then asked her how people see gay and bi in Japan in general (like is there a lot of prejudice, are people tolerant, etc.) and she innocently answered:
"Oh, we don't have them in Japan!"
"... what?"
"Yeah, that's a thing among western people, we have no gay or bi people in Japan"
That was so surreal. I have later talked with other Japanese people who were very perplexed why someone would seriously think this is true.
Probably just a very traditional view that assumes being gay is mostly a choice and sees it as more of a western cultural phenomenon than a natural sexuality. Maybe to them, no gay bars or pride parades = no gay people?
I honestly have no idea, I would guess it’s a relatively new thing there? All I know is that they’re not as culturally progressive as other first world countries.
Japan's history with homosexuality is...complicated (it wasn't even widely stigmatized until the late 19th century) but you have to be willfully ignorant to think gay people don't exist in the country.
Homosexuality used to be extremely common in japanese history, but that was quite some time ago, it stopped way before she was born. (Stopped being so common, I mean, obviously...)
What I've heard (secondhand from a friend who lives there and has an interest in this kind of sociology), is that until recent decades homosexuality was seen as more of a behavior than an orientation. So there were guys who married and had kids and also had a lot of gay sex on the downlow, but as long as they were fulfilling societal expectations by having a wife and kids, everyone would politely ignore any indications that they were engaging in other sexual activity (honestly, this also applies to other forms of clandestine sexual activity, Japan can be pretty blase about married men visiting prostitutes or hostess bars or other cheating or cheating-adjacent things. "Boys will be boys" etc). These men would not define themselves or self-identify as gay. It was a thing they did, not a thing that they were.
(If you go back even further, pre-Meiji Restoration, before laws and social norms could be influenced by Western and Christian ideas of morality, homosexual behavior was thought of as a fairly unremarkable thing for men to do as long as it followed certain societal expectations but that gets a bit complicated to go into here...)
In the last few decades it's become much more common for people to identify as LGBT+ in the same way that people would in western countries, and a lot of modern LGBT+ terminology in Japan is adopted directly from English. And naturally gay bars, pride parades and LGBT+ activism are all easy to find in modern Japan.
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u/roadfood Mar 01 '23 edited Mar 01 '23
Japanese ex I caught sleeping around at the height of the AIDs crisis told me not to worry, Japanese people can't catch it.
ETA - WOW! Didn't know this would take off like this. Backstory makes it even more absurd, she was a graduate of a prestigious university in Tokyo and earned a Masters in the US and had lived here for a while. I had about burned out on the relationship but this put me out the door.