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When studying the history of women’s pro wrestling, I discovered erotic reports in the 1950s about my informant, a former wrestler now in her nineties. She denies the reports' accuracy. Drawing on this case, my paper explores the relationships among archives, oral history, and historians’ ethics.

Paper long abstract

Seventeen years ago in Tokyo, I made friends with Ms. Igari Sadako (b. 1932), the first Japanese female pro wrestler active from 1948 to 1959. Having been trained by her older brother, vaudevillian Pan Igari (1923-1986), she told me a lot about her experience as a pro wrestler, which began as the “comic boxing and wrestling” show at clubs on US military bases and shifted to sports entertainment at strip theaters and then arenas for a Japanese audience. Shortly after, I began researching the history of women’s pro wrestling more extensively for my book project. While collecting relevant primary materials, however, I encountered two problematic reports. One is a 1950 news article with a picture of her, half-naked, posing as a boxer next to her brother, a referee. In 2024, when I showed this to Ms. Igari, age ninety-two, she jokingly wondered why she was not wearing a bra in the photo, but when I did this again later, in the presence of other male friends, she claimed it was not her. Another is a 1954 sports news article saying that one wrestler’s breast was exposed during a match. When I asked her if that had really happened, she immediately denied it. Later, however, I found an interview in a 1955 magazine in which she and her fellow wrestlers proudly talk about that accident as proof of their seriousness and enthusiasm.

Though I excluded these cases from my book, they led me to reconsider the relationship among archival materials, informants’ testimony, and historians' ethical responsibility. When informants were involved with erotic labor as young women, to what extent can historians make what these women were doing open to the public? Had they been more socially accepted, would the informants have reacted differently? If we manage to persuade the informants that their actions were respectable, aren't we essentially altering our research results according to our preferences? This paper will expand and complicate these questions by drawing on scholars across different fields, including Miyamoto Tsuneichi, Yang Hyunah, Hokari Minoru, and Jack Halberstam.

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This paper analyses different archival materials and personal narratives that discuss HIV, AIDS and Japan. In doing so, I discuss the historian's obligations to the dead, and the living, while exploring questions of ethics, privacy, accountability and historical method.

Paper long abstract

On 2 November 1994, a young gay man in Seattle died of AIDS-related illness. Largely estranged from his religious family, his life may have been largely lost to history like many others of his generation, but for the actions of an aunt who retrieved and deposited some of his scrapbooks and ephemera in an archive. Stephan D. Michael had grown up in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s, the son of American missionaries, and the archive of his last years features random handwritten Japanese words and phrases and ever more elaborate Japan-themed drawings as his health declined. Not knowing what to do with this material on first encountering it several years ago, I set it aside until I began to more directly research the early years of HIV and AIDS and Japan.

That same year, the first person to come out publicly in Japan as somebody who had contracted HIV sexually, also died, after a couple of years of public prominence, including appearing in a Kore-eda Hirokazu documentary, publishing a memoir under the name Hirata Yutaka and featuring in a photo book by Uchiyama Hideaki. As part of my research, I have read many such early Japanese language accounts of people living with HIV and AIDS, whose identities are somewhat obscured. Several appear only in unnamed stories told by others, while some published their own pseudonymised accounts, like Hirata. Archival sources are rarer, or at least less accessible or organised in institutional accounts than elsewhere. By contrast, I have found several examples in archives outside of Japan of people living with HIV who had relationships with Japan and whose lives are more easily traceable.

In this paper, I bring these different HIV and AIDS accounts into dialogue with each other to explore the historian’s obligations to the dead, and the living, in writing a history of Japan’s relationship to this very global epidemic. In doing so, I also discuss questions of ethics, privacy, accountability and historical method.

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How do we balance rigorous historical research with respect for the personal privacy of our research subjects and their descendants? Based on a fascinating set of letters detailing the end of a Japanese-German romantic relationship in 1936, this presentation interrogates the ethics of microhistory.

Paper long abstract

In the early summer of 1936, a Japanese woman called Tsuki received a letter that shattered her world: a break-up note from her German lover, G. A. Voss. Their relationship, already strained by the distance, collapsed under the weight of the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, which defined and codified racial boundaries and made it impossible for Voss to continue working for his Jewish employer in Tokyo. He framed his decision to remain in Germany as one of duty toward his family and his country, but for Tsuki, this was devastating. She chronicled her heartbreak, her efforts to reconnect with Voss, and her eventual decision to leave Japan for the United States in a series of letters to their mutual friend Aoyama Tadakazu. It was in a folder of Aoyama’s private correspondence that I stumbled upon Tsuki’s story in the archive.

As a historical resource, Tsuki’s letters are invaluable. They allow the historian a rare glimpse into the life and inner world of a marginalised historical actor – an ordinary Japanese woman. Tsuki’s experiences illuminate broader global connections and disconnections in the 1930s, providing a fascinating lens into the entangled forces of race, gender, and empire that shaped the world on the brink of the Second World War. But in the process of digging through the deeply personal details of Tsuki’s lovelife and family history in the name of scholarship, I found myself increasingly confronted by uncomfortable questions regarding the ethical stakes of narrating her story: How do we balance rigorous historical analysis with respect for the personal privacy of our research subjects and their descendants? What responsibilities do we take on when writing about the intimate relationships of someone who likely never intended for their private correspondence to enter an archive or be made public? And need historians even care about these ethical considerations? Drawing on scholars such as Michel Foucault and Saidiya Hartman, and taking insights from disciplines such as archival studies, this presentation will make a start at grappling with these questions, thereby reconsidering both the possibilities and limits of writing history from the margins.

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In tracing the lives of closeted gay Japanologists after World War II, how should private, hidden accounts of violence and trauma be approached? Drawing on research in the archives of three such individuals, this presentation examines how private archives should be understood by queer historians.

Paper long abstract

In 2023, while conducting research in the archives of the Japanese film scholar Donald Richie, I came across a typewritten account of a homophobic assault he experienced in Tokyo in the early 1960s. Richie was one of many gay American men who first came to Japan after World War II and remained there after the end of the Occupation, becoming prominent scholars and translators of Japanese. Many of these individuals found a more tolerant environment in Japan, where they were both privileged and stigmatized as a result of their unique position in postwar Japanese society.

Richie’s account of his assault, initiated by working class Japanese youths in Tokyo, illuminates the complex dynamics of race, class, and sexuality that he and other members of his cohort had to navigate. However, the fact that this was a privately written and unpublished account of a deeply traumatic event raises ethical questions. In attempting to trace obscured and hidden queer histories, how should private accounts of violence, loss, and trauma be used, approached, and understood? And in asking questions about the sexualities of closeted individuals, where does the historian draw the line between scholarly inquiry and voyeurism?

This paper attempts to examine these questions as they relate to research on gay Japanologists after World War II. Focusing on my efforts to trace the lives of three such men – Donald Richie, Meredith Weatherby, and Earle Ernst – it examines the ethics of privacy, intimacy, and accountability in the writing of queer history. It will argue that these scholars and their works cannot be understood outside the larger context of how they navigated through the world as closeted queer subjects.