‘In Ohio, Men Do Not Turn Into Young Girls’: Queer Exiles and Utopian Imaginaries in Occupation Japan

During the U.S.-led occupation from 1945 to 1952, Japan was a legal and cultural refuge for queer men and women such as Donald Richie and Earle Ernst. Simultaneously in the United States, a “lavender scare” prompted a broad crackdown on suspected homosexuals in government and public life, while in Japan there was relative freedom and social acceptance. This article uses writings of the time and archival sources in Japan and the United States to examine the lives of key sexual exiles. Their cultural encounters led them to become influential scholars of Japanese literature, theater, and film; their erotic encounters led them to accept their queer sexuality; and their emotional encounters led them to envision a queer utopic future. Yet these encounters also triggered pushback and reflected inequalities of racial, political, and cultural power that existed in postwar Japan.