Same-Sex Desire in Pre-Feudal and Feudal Japan
This writing examines forms of intimacy, erotic attachment, and emotional bonds between people of the same sex in pre-feudal and feudal Japan. Rather than projecting modern categories of sexual identity onto the past, these essays trace how desire was structured through age, rank, ritual, and social obligation. Drawing on court diaries, poetry, religious writing, and later warrior culture, the series explores how same-sex relations could be visible, tolerated, or strategically obscured without being named as identity. Together, these writings argue that queerness in pre-modern Japan was lived relationally—through practice and attention—long before it was understood as a category of self.
Buddhism, Confession, and Erotic Transgression
In Heian Japan, Buddhism did not erase erotic desire but absorbed it. This essay explores how confession, prayer, and ritual reframed intimacy and transgression as ordinary attachments shaped by impermanence, allowing desire—same-sex and otherwise—to persist without moral panic or identity labels.