From sweaty techno parties to late-night drag showcases, Kat Joplin explores how the city’s growing LGBTQIA+ district is creating space for trans and non-binary communities.

WORDS BY KAT JOPLIN
HEADER DESIGN BY ANISA CLEAVER

The Shibuya club is small but packed with life. Rotating beams of coloured lights overhead, shivering curtains of blue and green hair on the dance floor. Stick-and-poke and abstract tattoos, heavy eyeliner, lipstick in shades of pink and turquoise. Loud conversations shouted over the techno: Japanese, Portuguese, English, and more. Barely visible in the flashing lights, the walls are hung with pride flags and hard leftist political posters reading: “Trans Rights Are Human Rights” and “There is no LGB without the T”. A red flag with the words “cisnormativity”, ”heterosexism”, and “colonialism” slashed out. 

In Tokyo, Japan, the seemingly quiet years of COVID-19 lockdown were more like a pressure cooker for the city’s bursting scene of LGBTQIA-focused and friendly club events. These days, queer folks looking to experience Tokyo nightlife can choose from a list ranging from alternative hotspots like Department H, femme-centred and artistic parties like Waifu, to packed, noisy, and sweaty techno raves like Slick and Switch. These events are political, queerness is always political. They are spaces that shout and scream messages of sex positivity, queer liberation, and women’s empowerment. In a city like Japan’s capital, with its long history of diverse subcultures, everyone can find their community.

A History of Nonconformity – Department H

An old three-tier theatre, faded floral carpets, a crowd full of scantily-clad weirdos watching as a man rolls in a pile of flowers across the stage to music: welcome to Department H. Tokyo’s largest and longest-running kink and fetish club, the KitKatClub-esque Department H is the best example of Tokyo’s long-standing track record of queer-inclusive subculture. Organised by cartoon illustrator and professional party host Gogh Imaizumi and head drag queen Maruyacco, Department H is an eclectic mob of the city’s strangest: latex fans, drag queens, and monster cosplayers. On stage, the event showcases a lineup of drag pageants, contortionists, and choreographed wrestling matches. Occasionally, one entertainer holds ‘fisting 101 workshops’.

Department H began during Japan’s recession period, in 1993,  following the collapse of the country’s economic bubble. As the prosperous decades of Japan leading the tech and business world ended, a generation of white-collar company employees were trapped in unsatisfying jobs without the promised security and promotions waiting for them. Department H was one party which succeeded as a secret escape for the people of this decade, a place to flee the drab normalcy of the office for the low-lit splendour of the fetish and queer circles.

“Department H is a meeting place, a safe space for people to express fetishes and dress up,” says French-born Maxim Lebosse, who occasionally works as a drag queen and DJ at H. “It’s a little like a freak show, with drag queens and an emcee, serving as security throughout the night. We protect people and preserve the harmony.”

Rather than being an exclusively LGBTQIA+ party, Department H is an event that has always organically brought Tokyo’s queer and alternative crowds together. In particular, Department H was one of the first major events where trans women, non-binary people, and others who defy categories could gather to freely explore their gender identities and expressions. Seemingly, the only rules for attending Department H are to buck social conformity and to respect one another. 

While it might look strange or off-putting from the outside, Department H parties are among the friendliest and most truly inclusive spaces I have ever known and are an important staple in the story of Tokyo’s queer-friendly nightlife. “Department H is important because it is a community whose foundations and welcomeness are unique,” says Lebosse. “It offered the concept of ‘safe spaces’ before those were even discussed as such.”

How Tokyo’s contemporary queer is growing

Launched in 2019, Waifu was the first of Tokyo’s new wave of politically queer club events: a self-proclaimed femme-led safe space for people of all genders and sexualities. It is currently operated by a team of five: Elin McCready, Midori Morita, Maiko Asami, Lauren Rose Kocher, and DJ Chloe Danslaville. Their goal was to carve a queer party scene beyond the Gay Town of Shinjuku Ni-chōme, where clubs and bars generally cater to gay men and exclusive body types within that community (such as bears). Many members of the genderqueer and trans community falling between specific genders, sexes, and types at times felt unwelcome in these old haunts.

Following a traumatic incident where founder McCready was denied entry to a lesbian bar for being trans, the team decided to begin their own event. “We needed our own space for us because Ni-chōme as it stands is not that space,” McCready says. “Like a lot of areas around the world, it’s classically a lot of cisgender gay men. If you don’t fit in these categories – if you’re trans – you’re an outlier and there isn’t a space where you feel comfortable.”

From the start, Waifu aimed to welcome sapphics and lesbians of all backgrounds, particularly trans women and non-binary identities. From being among the most invisible in Japan’s queer community, these groups now had a party founded to meet their needs. Waifu events are filled with colourful crowds: drag queens, college students, DJs, leftist agitators and artists of all backgrounds. A place where the odds and ends of society collect and network within the massive cityscape of Tokyo. 

 

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Recently, team members Maiko Asami and Midori Morita have spearheaded events such as a collaborative vigil and pro-Palestine fundraiser with Iwakan Magazine for the Trans Day of Remembrance. In conceptualising Waifu as a safer space, the team realised it was essential to lay down and enforce rules but to also share know-how with the attendees.

With that goal in mind, Waifu has held workshops on consent and respectful flirting, hosted speeches on trans rights, and even sold zines and books that promote queer and feminist topics. Far from being merely a party, Waifu feels like a micro-city of radical activism. Asami explains, “We aim to maintain Waifu’s queer femme-centricity by booking many female or queer femme DJs and performers. We want to reclaim the club scene as a minority space since discrimination and harassment have become so rampant in commercialised clubs today.”

We want to reclaim the club scene as a minority space since discrimination and harassment have become so rampant in commercialised clubs today

Waifu has formed something of a blueprint and inspiration for the LGBTQIA+ club events that have launched since, with Waifu team members going on to co-found other parties and raves and working closely with many other overlapping events. This has been instrumental in building the diverse range of LGBTQIA+ club events in Tokyo, notably welcoming the femme and trans community. Morita relates, “Our message is, ‘there is a place for you here even if you are outside of the social norm,’ and such actions have been contagious among other event organisers.”

Slick, Switch, and Radical Queer Raves

Messy, sweaty, dark, and dynamic, Slick’s raves offer something different, they’re freer and more. While the Waifu party had accomplished many of the team’s goals for politicising clubs and giving queer femmes a safer playground, its founders felt it lacked the edginess and vibrant sexuality that they had enjoyed in their own clubbing lives – those aspects which had made the counterculture of the clubs feel liberatory to begin with. 

“The ‘party’ aspect for Waifu started to fade a bit as time went on,” Morita says. “I’m a clubber, so I wanted to create a new event that was still for queers, but even more so ‘a place for clubbers.’ A place for outsiders who can only find their place in clubs.”

With that in mind, in 2020 Waifu founders McCready and Morita joined with Mari Sakurai and Nanae Shimazu (known professionally as 7e) to form Slick, a liberating outdoor rave for the queer community.  “Waifu is a space that’s about being safe from something – ‘safe from homophobia, transphobia, harassment,’” McCready explains. “Slick is more of a ‘safe to do’ space. Safe to do what you want: have sex, be messy, whatever you need, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else.”

 

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With its dark rooms and loud music, Slick brings partygoers, DJs flown in from Berlin, eccentric fashion, and a more sexual atmosphere. Later in 2021, DJs Matrix3k and Kali Masha founded the queer techno collective Switch with similar goals in mind. A “sweatbox with hard music” Switch is a party held both in Tokyo and in Matrix3k’s native Warsaw, Poland, and often brings a more old-school vibe through its music.

“During the COVID pandemic, the scene in Tokyo was pretty dead. We felt like there was something missing in the scene,” Matrix3k says. “We wanted to create a ‘space’ that was based on radical self-expression, where everyone could just be as they are. That’s also why we don’t allow photos during our parties.”

A place to be young, wild, and queer

Visiting a queer-inclusive club event in Tokyo is like stepping into an imagined future utopia: dismantled social conventions, reinvented gender, queer joy. Looking across the board at events like Department H, Waifu, Slick, and Switch, as well as smaller and artsier gatherings such as Sarau, Rio51, and QLove, one of the most exciting elements of Tokyo’s clubbing scene is its growing diversity: there is something for everyone, and everyone can play and discover themselves at their own speed.

Nadina Osmani, a representative of the Tokyo Queer Collective (TQC), reflected on how the queer club scene has become more inclusive in recent years. “Previously we felt the Tokyo scene in general lacked a sense of queerness. As much as we love getting to enjoy Asia’s largest gay quarter, to us Shinjuku Ni-chōme often feels catered to the cis-male gay experience specifically,” says Osmani. “There are a lot of gay venues and some lesbian venues, but not many queer venues. I think it’s as simple as queer people exist, and always have, there are plenty of us, and we deserve to be the primary audience somewhere.”

She and her fellow TQC members are fans, friends and regular attendees of Waifu and Slick, and have worked together with Asami and McCready at several pro-trans events – an important element at these parties and art collectives, where activists critique Western pinkwashing campaigns and draw parallels between the shared oppressed experiences of LGBTQIA+ people. 

Henry Tse, a trans activist based in Hong Kong, was moved by the strong focus on social justice and community in these queer parties, especially Waifu specifically. TQC co-founder Janay Baade, originally from Canada, spoke similarly of their experience at Slick, describing it as the first rave and queer event in Tokyo they’d ever attended.

I felt welcomed by the organisers, made lifelong friends, and genuinely felt safe.

“It was the first time I saw so many different kinds of bodies and people,” they say. “I felt welcomed by the organisers, made lifelong friends, and genuinely felt safe.” UK-born Maggie Duguid, who is deeply involved in Tokyo’s lesbian circles, similarly applauded the Waifu events she had attended in the past, describing the party as “very meaningful” as a “sapphic-led and focused space that is accessible to anyone” in a city where ‘queer’ is often limited to ‘gay male.’ 

She continues: “I think it’s especially important, with a large number of lesbian trans women, that they are vocally welcoming to the trans community, where we can celebrate our lesbian identities alongside allies.” Future attendees like Duguid hope for one where the separate factions of the LGBTQIA community can come together in more progressive and informed ways, where trans and cisgender lesbian women are embraced and celebrated on an equal level with their gay kin.

In the present day, when queer identity can so often be wrapped up with sadness, pain, and struggles for visibility, these spaces where LGBTQIA+ people can revel in nonconformity are incredibly precious. While the outside world can feel like a neverending reel of shocking headlines and sober reminders of how behind the world can be, these are the places where we can see a glimpse of the world we are working towards; a liberated, messy, and creative environment. These are the places where your queer community is close and tangible, surrounding you on all sides.

The post Tokyo’s queer club scene is sweaty, messy and surrounding you at all sides appeared first on GAY TIMES.

We explore the history behind Japan’s growing ballroom and voguing scene and how key voices have transformed this space into a new form of Japanese queer identity.

WORDS BY KAT JOPLIN
HEADER BY YOSEF PHELAN

“Welcome to Japan, come and see the rising sun. Welcome to Japan come and see the rising sun” — this is the start to the 2021 Mizrahi Japan theme song, written by international legendary mother Koppi Mizrahi and her son, Kinshasa. I always get a shudder of excitement when I hear it. The collision of Koppi’s Japanese voice and language (“Look at me, bitch, wakatteiru?”), Kinshasa’s English chant and the vogue crashes remind me of the freshness of watching Japan’s ballroom grow.

Koppi and Kinshasa are two instrumental players in Japan’s ballroom (or ‘house ball’) scene, bringing not only vogue and vogue chants, but holistic ballroom house culture to the country’s queer spaces. And these spaces are all too eager. Like club kids in the mid-2000s and drag queen culture since 2010, ballroom culture is another case of queer subculture exploding as a global phenomenon, attracting mainstream attention with documentary films like Paris is Burning (1990) and Kiki (2016); drama series Pose (2018); and finally the three season-long reality competition Legendary (2020). 

While there are ups and downs to such mainstreaming and popularisation, particularly given ballroom’s roots as a space to protect the LGBTQ+ community’s most marginalised, one benefit has been the flourishing kiki and major ball scene in more countries than ever before, including East and Southeast Asian countries like the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. Koppi and Kinshasa’s music, featuring a blend of English and Japanese slang and the quintessential cocky diva attitude, is representative of the new hybrid communities forming in Japan’s fresh ballroom scene.

Ballroom’s roots

In Harlem, New York, 1970s trailblazer Crystal LaBeija kickstarted the ballroom movement as a sanctuary for Black transgender women (fem queens) and gay men (butch queens) looking to compete in pageants and drag balls without racist white judges.

Through the following decade, ballroom became a rich subcultural space for Black and Latinx queer folk, who founded the first Latinx house, Xtravaganza, in 1982. Beyond beauty and runway walking pageants, ballroom included vogue battles (developed by Mother Paris Duprée around the same time Crystal LaBeija started organising balls), unique gender and sexuality systems that rejected mainstream heteronormative roles like “man” and “woman,” and a found-family system (the houses) for queer youth on New York’s streets.

LaBeija, Xtravaganza, Ninja, Mugler, and Revlon are all examples of ballroom houses that continue to this day. This moment became “expression of the house culture became the ballroom” as Ronald Murray, Father Ron ‘drama’ Xclusive Lanvin and one of the curators of Ohio’s House and ballroom culture, labelled it in his TEDx Talk on ballroom culture and history.

Through the decades in which ballroom existed as an invisible, underground, mise en abyme type of world, participants could escape from a wider society in which they were marginalised to a private society where they were mothers, fathers, victors, and trophy winners. These were precious spaces that returned queer people of colour their dignity and sense of belonging.

As the HIV/AIDS pandemic began, they also became places where queer youth could receive sex education, condoms, and testing. With these elements in mind, as well as the popularity of the different waves of vogue itself, it is unsurprising that ballroom quickly expanded across the cities of the United States and, by the late 80s and 90s, had developed a small but flourishing presence in Europe.

Since then, terms from the queer lexicon  – popularised by western LGBTQ+ media such as RuPaul’s Drag Race –  like ‘shade’, ‘werk’, ‘kiki’, as well as dance techniques such as hands performance and ‘death drops’ (referred to as dips in vogue) have been absorbed from ballroom dialect and often with some controversy. Given ballroom’s history, the new era of media interest and commercialisation feels invasive and appropriative to many, who are concerned the general public are only interested in the superficial aspects of ballroom or, worse, are weighing into the scene’s debates on gender and sexuality without understanding its history and socio-political importance first.

As time has passed, ballroom has found itself in dialogue with modern radical queer theory. The category of ‘realness’, for example, is one of the oldest in ballroom, and originated as a way to celebrate trans women’s ability to pass and survive outside in the wider world. Today’s queer community looks more critically at ‘passing privilege’. Similarly, ballroom’s gender-restricted categories such as Male Figure (masculine presenting), Female Figure (feminine presenting), Butch Queen (gay male), and Fem Queen (trans woman) can seem conservative and unfriendly to nonconforming and nonbinary individuals. Many longtime participants and leaders of ballroom resent the lack of history and context critics bring to these conversations.

On the other hand, the popularisation of ballroom has brought fame and financial gain to some of the best voguers and commentators (the MC’s who provide rap-like chants and songs during battles). Additionally, the documentaries, drama series, and reality TV shows showcasing ballroom, together with the work of international house leaders, has helped to continue spreading the dance and culture to even more distant countries. Many new participants stepping into a ball for the first time have a frame of reference and general history thanks to consuming these shows, connecting them to global queer history and heritage as a whole.

Welcome to Japan—1990 to 2011

While Harlem’s original ballroom culture grew from the bottom up (organically arising from the needs of New York’s queer community), ballroom in Japan has developed from the top down. Vogue became popular purely as a dance in 1990 with the release of Madonna’s hit song of the same name. This community-capturing song continued to flourish with the work of the first Japanese voguer, Fumi Xtravaganza, and voguing teams like Electro Musique Fusion in Fukuoka prefecture. However, this first boom largely faded by the turn of the century.

By 2005, we saw the debut of a Tokyo-based dance team called ASIENCE, who performed several hit vogue numbers on Japanese national television. This dance team did not spawn the new emergence of Japanese ballroom in and of itself, but the national broadcast did usher in several key figures who would: future House of Oricci father, Showtime Showta, in Hokkaido and future House of Mizrahi mother, Koppi, in Tokyo both saw the ASIENCE performance and became fascinated with their dance style.

Koppi already had a background in other dance styles like hip-hop and popping. Intrigued by vogue, she began teaching herself techniques using YouTube videos of vogue battles. Koppi eventually joined House of Mizrahi, inspired by pioneering dancers and choreographers Andre Mizrahi and Leiomy Amazon, and dedicated her career to nurturing vogue and ballroom culture in Japan by teaching queer history, house systems, terminology, and ball etiquette. 

Today, labelled as the Overall Legendary Mother of Mizrahi, Koppi is one of the highest-ranked ballroom participants in Japan, and is the teacher and mentor of many of Japan’s other top voguers and leaders. “I fell in love with voguing because it gave me a whole new persona,” she says. “I felt like I could be fully confident—like I’d never felt in my life before I started. I love the attitude [voguers] have, the atmosphere they create.” 

As an ally, she began working with queer colleagues Showta Oricci and her son Kinshasa Mizrahi to connect Japan’s vogue with its LGBTQIA+ community, including performing. By 2010, Japan’s voguers mainly consisted of professional dancers and dance teams with no connection to ballroom or queerness. Texas native Kinshasa, a voguer and commentator who first joined ballroom in the United States, described their early attempts at holding balls in Japan. “Most of the people there were straight women. They didn’t know they could yell and shout when someone dipped. It was so quiet in those first balls. It was uphill work for me and Koppi in the early days,” Kinshasa tells us.

Ballroom etiquette – which is often argumentative and fiery – is also, somewhat, at odds with traditional Japanese social culture, which encourages people to maintain a polite and cool facade. Differences in subcultural expectations and attitudes has led to numerous culture clashes throughout the expansion of Japanese ballroom culture.

The ball boom: from 2011 to now

From 2011, when Koppi and Kinshasa first began holding balls, until 2022, interest in ballrooms gradually grew in Japan’s cities—particularly Tokyo, where Koppi, Kinshasa, and Legendary star Chise Ninja were based, and Osaka where voguers like Showta Oricci and Ku Marciano held events. Outside of teaching and organising balls, Koppi frequently performed in Shinjuku Ni-chōme (Tokyo’s Gay Town) at drag shows and other queer events, hoping to bring more and more queer people to her class. “Actually, I always wanted to have a ball in Ni-chōme, because it’s the centre of gay culture in Tokyo. But I didn’t really have connections with them, so I was struggling to increase the guests and contestants from the gay culture,” she tells GAY TIMES.

By the end of 2021, when I started taking classes with Koppi and attended my first ball (the “Anime Ball,” organised by Chise Ninja), Japan’s ballroom had grown to a healthy, lively crowd with chants, trophies, and overseas guest judges—a far cry from the early balls described by Kinshasa.

The greatest breakthrough for Japan’s ballroom came in 2022, when wonder kid Hiha Babylon (a son of Koppi’s through her kiki house, Pinklady), began organising the monthly Kiki Lounge (a kiki ball) in Ni-chōme’s most popular gay bars. The impact on the ballroom scene was instantaneous. Hiha’s Kiki Lounge brought cheek-to-jowl crowds that crammed around the runway like a mosh pit. Popular categories like OTA Runway and Female Figure Face attracted dozens of contestants, often spontaneous walk-ons. Voguing classes and workshops held by Hiha, Koppi, Chise, and Greek-born Elena 007 are regularly filled with fresh students.

Into the future of ballroom

In December 2022, Koppi organised the Discovery Ball in Shibuya aka the highest-level ballroom competition in Japan. It was also my debut as a member of the House of Mizrahi. I remember pacing and clutching my phone in the changing room, grinning from ear to ear.

The venue was packed full of people. Familiar faces from the Kiki Lounge, but also voguers and house leaders from all over Japan who had travelled to Tokyo to judge or compete. Koppi was almost brought to tears as she addressed the crowd, thanking them for coming.

Japan’s ballroom, still young, is in a period of rapid growth and evolution. In just a few short years, I have seen it gather strength and velocity. In particular, I’ve been impressed by how the scene has adapted itself to be relevant to its local queer community, such as including drag queens like myself more heavily in its major and kiki houses and holding Drags Face categories in which we can compete. It is also a scene still open to innovate and welcome more diverse crowds of participants, taking cues from New York City icon Symba McQueen by implementing Gender Nonconforming (GNC) Face and Realness categories for nonbinary and nontraditional contenders, as well as spearheading a Lesbian Realness category to welcome more queer Assigned Female at Birth participants.

As one might expect for a subculture with a long and deep history, Japan’s ballroom leaders must balance respecting long-standing categories within the US ballroom system and experimenting with their own—a delicate process our leaders have excelled in. Japanese ballroom had a slow start in its early years, in terms of its existence as a queer space. But, it is exciting to see how the last ten years have transformed and accelerated its growth.

Today, entering a monthly kiki ball is like being hit with a wall of sound: chanting, cheering, and screaming. The crowd is full of familiar faces. The judges – stone-faced and terrifying – are my friends and my colleagues. It’s hard to chart the trajectory of Japan’s legendary new scene in the coming years, but the thriving scene fashioned here is unparalleled. And, in a matter of years, Japan’s ballroom community will be like any other. 

The post How Japan is raising its own legendary ballroom scene appeared first on GAY TIMES.

It’s all about the drag, so what’s happening elsewhere in the world? Tokyo-based drag queen and journalist Kat Joplin takes a closer look at Japan’s growing drag scene.

WORDS BY KAT JOPLIN
PHOTOS COURTESY OF SONY

The mood backstage of Opulence is frantic, fluorescent and a friendly frenzy. I’m slithering about the common dressing room the local queens and backup dancers share, trying to keep out of everyone’s way. I have my press pass in my purse, though since I’m in drag no security guards question my presence. 

Out in the hall, I can see the doors labelled “Raja,” “Pangina,” “Denali.” I lock eyes with friends in the dressing room mirror, and we exchange nervous grins. I’m anxious because I’ll be interviewing the Ru girls soon. They’re anxious because they’ll be performing in front of a room of 1500. “I have terrible news, everyone,” says Philippine-born co-organiser and performer Vera Strondh. She smiles. “We have one hour til doors.”

In the past year, Japan’s drag community seems to have grown in leaps and bounds. Every week I hear of new drag shows, new hostess bars, new drag go-go events. After the country’s long period of curfews and closed borders during the COVID pandemic, the return of these lively nights in Shinjuku Ni-chōme (Tokyo’s largest Gay Town) is a joy and a relief. 

May’s Opulence event, the international drag show spearheaded by Strondh and her colleague, UK-born Tom Hall (also known as drag queen Gyoza Tonin-Anang), in collaboration with Sony, heralds a new era for Tokyo drag: bigger shows, bigger budgets, and celebrity guest performers. Last week’s Opulence Vol. 2 saw Strondh and four other local queens eagerly take to the stage alongside RuPaul’s Drag Race stars Raja Gemini, Pangina Heals, and Denali Foxx. It was the country’s largest locally-organised international drag show to date.

The increased global attention on the drag scene of Tokyo (and beyond it, Japan) brings with it both excitement and anxiety among the local queens. Will there be a Drag Race Japan spinoff show, much rumoured? Will there be space for weird and avant-garde drag in the new, pop media-dominated world? And perhaps most importantly, what will it mean for those queens who do ‘make it big’ on the international stage, and find themselves asked to represent a country’s entire queer community?

As an active Tokyo drag queen myself for the last four years, I reached out to my friends and colleagues from across the community to discuss the recent changes in the scene, and their hopes and fears for the future.

Japan’s Drag History

Japan has a long, rich history of cross-gender performance and private cross-dressing, predating both drag and, indeed, the concept of queer or gay identities. One of the earliest examples of what might be considered proto-drag dates to the middle Edo Period, where tekomai (drag king-like female festival dancers) would perform throughout the city and pump the crowd during religious holidays.

As covered extensively in the works of Mark McLelland and Katsuhiko Suganuma, modern Japanese drag developed chronologically following the eras of danshō (female-presenting sex workers of the post-war decade) and the gei bōi movement of the 1950s onward. Gei bōis were an umbrella subculture referring, generally, to effeminate queer men involved in Japan’s LGBTQ+ nightlife as lounge singers, cabaret performers, and hosts/hostesses. In actuality, these popular and stylish entertainers might, from today’s standpoint, range from gay men, to third gender, to transgender women. 

Many of Japan’s earliest generations of drag queens, such as Akihiro Miwa who debuted as a nightclub singer in 1952, can trace their origins to the gei bōi subculture.

The word “drag queen” entered the Japanese lexicon around the early 1980s, and with it came the first self-described drag queens of Japan, including celebrated Simone Fukayuki, co-founder and current organiser of the long-running Kyoto drag show, Diamonds Are Forever. The next three decades saw a great deal of diversity and experimentation among the successive waves of drag queens, many of whom were influenced by the Club Kids of New York and by counter-cultural films such as ‘Rocky Horror’, ‘Priscilla, Queen of the Desert’, and ‘Hedwig’. 

As Tokyo-native and Opulence cast member Sasha B. Savannah points out, different regions such as Nagoya, Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo have distinct cultures of drag. In addition to this, one of my own observations has been that earlier waves of Japanese drag queens tend to focus more on camp, comedy, and bar hostessing—indeed, much of the brick-and-mortar community of Shinjuku Ni-chōme has been built thanks to the drag mamas and the bars they protect.

Growing Pains A.D.R.

Major drag icon Durian Lollobrigida once joked we were living in the era A.D.R. — ‘After Drag Race’ – a term my friends and I have used ever since.

This is the year 13 A.D.R., roughly thirteen years after RuPaul’s Drag Race took off as a global phenomenon and brought a major shift to the world’s drag communities. Japan was similarly impacted, in ways both good and bad. One major shift was how the broader queer community saw drag queens; suddenly it was cool and trendy in one’s femme side.

Australian-born Belgium Solanas is perhaps the longest-performing foreign drag queen in Japan, after debuting in 2009 in Osaka and continuing to perform across Kansai, Nagoya, and Tokyo.

Reminiscing on her career in avant-garde artistry, Solanas explains: “I don’t know how many [younger queens] realise how different it was before [Drag Race] gradually gave everyone permission to do drag as a form of expression without the negativity and even danger it used to be associated with. Drag queens were social pariahs, and gender roles were much more rigid. That’s partly why people were so confused and interested in my work. Obviously, we had a lot of love and support early on too.”

Tokyo queen Savannah, who has performed her Beyonce impersonations for thirteen years now, agrees. “It’s much less common now,” she says, “but in the past, there were times when people were verbally abusive or wouldn’t talk to you in the first place. There are still times when straight men try to forcibly kiss you just for an amusing story, or call you slurs like ‘okama.’”

One benefit of the popularisation of drag in mainstream culture is that some of these dangers and prejudices have eased, at least within Japan’s queer community. Younger drag queens and drag experimenters are often welcomed with open arms within Ni-chōme these days. On the flip side, artists like Solanas sometimes feel squeezed out by the trendier dancing queens, and feel most Drag Race fans forget that there are many types of drag beyond what they see on reality television. In addition, Solanas feels alienated by the intense and rapid commercialization of the art.

Kyoto queen Fukayuki expresses a similar reservation, urging drag participants and viewers to find and appreciate the countercultural and underground drag cultures of Japan as well. 

Other growing pains the drag scene has experienced involve tensions between different generations and ethnic backgrounds, as one might expect from a community spanning a diverse crowd of ages, ethnicities, and nationalities. Japanese-Brazilian drag queen Labianna Joroe, who served as MC at May’s instalment of Opulence, notes that even with her successful drag career, she has heard other queens make discriminatory jokes about race, and has felt both tokenized in some cases and passed over for bookings in others.

French-born Laotian drag queen Kosmic Sans, who performed at the first Opulence, further attested to the discrimination Joroe experienced. “Some old-school queens tend to target the new wave / new generation of drag, describing it as a foreign pandemic or invasion,” she says, referring to the Drag Race influence. She further adds that dialogue with the older Japanese queens is sometimes difficult. “There also was this trend of ‘African beauty makeup’ that was basically black face. Some of those queens refused to face the conversation. Luckily the whole scene is not that closed-minded.” 

In spite of these tensions, the vast majority of the community that I’ve experienced is positive and tight-knit, if sometimes guarded against newcomers. These past four years, I’ve been especially pleased to see the Japanese and foreign queens forming stronger ties and organising more mixed drag shows.

OPULENCE VOLUME2
本日（4/7）10:00～一般販売開始！
一番人気のミーグリ付きも多少ございます！

e-plushttps://t.co/mjT3Mryhww

Zaiko(English support and ticket sales)https://t.co/uzsLYL2BJT pic.twitter.com/MtXK6ZEUrp

— DRAGMANIA/OPULENCE (@dragmaniajp) April 6, 2023

A Working Queen

One of the greatest benefits many queens look forward to as Japan’s drag scene grows is the potential for more bookings and more stable careers. Indeed, as I ask my colleagues whether they found drag in Japan profitable, we suppress snickers. “If you’re not working for a straight-owned company or television, no!” Joroe exclaims. “The performance art is very under-appreciated in Japan if it’s not a huge production… most queens have a day job or work at bars as hostesses to guarantee their check.”

“Even big gigs won’t cover the cost of your outfit and makeup—and I’m not even including preparation time, dancers, help, and studio space,” Sans adds. Savannah is one of the rare queens who managed to transition to a full-time career as a showgirl roughly five years ago. “Until then, it was hard to make a steady income and I didn’t have regular opportunities,” she says. “In the last few years, some clubs and bars have opened up that hire drag queens every day. The demand has increased.”

While the hyper-commercialization of any art through franchising is a leery topic, most agree that a larger and more lively scene will lead to improvements in their lives. Many hope that steadily building their name recognition and social media stardom will provide them with the booking fees they need to devote themselves to drag. For a few, competing in one of the Drag Race shows may be one means to achieve that pull.

The Future of the Queens

Contemplating the future of Japan’s drag scene, I feel much like the queens backstage of Opulence that evening — a great deal of excitement mixed with nervousness. I worry, of course, like Solanas, that an alternative and AFAB (assigned female at birth) queen like myself will be pushed out if drag veers too far into the mainstream.

But I’m also looking forward to a post-COVID Japan where I can have many more days like this one to come. More rushing around backstage, more interviews with drag queen legends I could never have dreamt of meeting before, more chaos and last-minute disasters and repairs. For me, drag has always been about belonging to a circle and to a found family more than occupying the spotlight. Slinking into the large, shared dressing room and getting a faceful of glitter from one of the backup dancers gives me that feeling. Walking through Pride and stepping on a friend every three metres gives me that feeling. And of course, free drink tickets always make me feel welcome.

Most of all though, I want more chances to see my friends and fellow drag queens here in Japan thrive, those talented and ambitious people who can set a room of 1500 on fire with a glance. A world where they’re on top is a world I want to be in, and I can’t wait to see what’s coming next.

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