If you're reading this on a phone, please turn it to landscape view.
“Woman” is a loaded word now. Perhaps for me it's always been. I was assigned female at birth and have never objected to being female, but my gender, in and of itself, has never been central to my identity. If I were told the world would perceive me as a man from tomorrow, it would be jarring and inconvenient, but I wouldn't feel that anything inside me was threatened.
So I can't quite imagine what gender dysphoria feels like. But I remember reading The Frog Prince as a child. I didn't think being a frog sounded so bad myself, but I still knew how the prince felt: perpetually unrecognised, misunderstood and rejected. It wouldn't have surprised me to learn that there were little girls in a similar predicament, doomed by an evil spell to be seen as something they weren't. But I would have been surprised to learn that when the spell was broken and they assumed their true form as women, the rejection would continue.
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How did I know I was a girl, and then a woman? I suppose from the way people responded to me. From being shouted at from taking my shirt off as a small child. From realising as a teenager that my body was public property. From learning when I started work that if I was in a meeting with men, I shouldn't expect to finish a sentence.
When other women have been angry with me, whether it's for changing the station on the office radio or standing up for trans people, their chosen insult has always been that I'm “not a real woman.” By contrast, when I upset a man, his choice of words leaves no doubt of my womanhood.
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It sometimes looks to me as if the kanji 女 has her limbs folded in self-defence.
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Recently a fellow Fukuyama Masaharu fan wanted to talk about Fukuyama's being caught up in the Fuji TV scandal. I was very upset by this when it happened last year, and our conversation gave me a chance to revisit my thoughts now the dust has settled.
It's important to say that Fukuyama had nothing to do with the horrendous events at the heart of the scandal, which involved sexual assault of a female employee by one of the station's male stars. But this incident prompted a wider inquiry into the station, which revealed a deeply misogynistic working culture. Among other things, female presenters were expected to attend drinking parties (nomikai, considered an extension of the working day in Japan) for important male stars and business contacts, with the idea that they would serve as decoration. The final report revealed that Fukuyama (who starred in the station's hit series Galileo) attended some of these parties and exchanged dirty jokes with his hosts that made women uncomfortable.
When this came out, Fukuyama gave an interview to a women's magazine in which he said he'd thought drinking parties like this were simply how people did business, and hadn't questioned whether the women in the room actually wanted to be there. He said that in such quasi-social gatherings, he went into entertainer mode and began telling the dirty jokes that were once a feature of his late-night radio show (although I understand he's moved away from these in the past 10 years). He apologised to the women and said he'd been reflecting on what he'd learned from the report.
I've dealt with enough men to believe his explanation. And really, his response wasn't at all bad; he could have lashed out at the women, blamed “woke” culture, even made a secondary career out of being “cancelled.”
But his music had become very important to me during a difficult period in my life. However much we might claim to separate art from the artist, when a work of art speaks to you deeply, it's natural to think the artist is on your side. When I heard Fukuyama had attended these parties, I imagined myself there, being shown once again that the world was made for men like him, not women like me. I felt like 女 folding in on herself.
Now I feel easier about it. Partly because time has passed, partly because he's done all I could reasonably have expected, but also because I've realised art is always co-created by the audience. He makes his music as a man born in Showa-era Japan, with all that might imply. But it's how I hear it as a woman that truly makes it meaningful.
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Masha (as Fukuyama's known to his fans) has sometimes written from the perspective of a woman. He discusses it in this video, along with his thoughts on homoromantic manga (the video’s called “Is Fukuyama Masaharu a fudanshi?” and the answer seems to be “sort of”).
She Taught Me Serendipity, directed by Ōku Akiko, is the best film I've seen recently, and the most woman-centred film I know that doesn't pass the Bechdel test. It's a heterosexual romance with a male protagonist that's filmed as if the experiences and thoughts of women were equally important, and you don't realise how rare that is until you've seen it.
A bonus was discovering the band Spitz, whose song Hatsukoi Crazy plays a major role in the film.