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Paper short abstract

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.