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Paper short abstract

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 However, the fact that this was a privately written and unpublished account of a deeply traumatic event raises ethical questions.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.