University of Wollongong Research Online Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive) Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities December 2004 From Sailor-Suits to Sadists: Lesbos Love as Reflected in Japan's Postwar "Perverse Press" Mark J. McLelland University of Wollongong,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation McLelland, Mark J., From Sailor-Suits to Sadists: Lesbos Love as Reflected in Japan's Postwar "Perverse Press" 2004. https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/146 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library:
[email protected] From sailor-suits to sadists: "Lesbos love" as reflected in Japan's postwar "perverse press" Mark McLelland Introduction "Women's same-sex love" ( joshi dôseiai ) was a topic frequently discussed in the Japanese press from the early decades of the twentieth century. These discussions often concerned the "spiritual" love relationships which were considered to be developing between older and younger women in Japan's new school and factory dormitories as well as the more shocking topic of the dual suicide of female couples.1 While such discussion was muted during the war years, Japan's postwar press saw an explosion of interest in "perverse sexuality" ( hentai seiyoku ), both female and male, hetero- and homosexual. During the 1950s, at least five "perverse magazines"