“A lot of kids see that every day and they think they can behave in the same way towards LGBT kids.”
“There are a lot of gay and trans people on TV shows in Japan, but they're often laughed at,” says Yakushi. Unfortunately, the portrayal of LGBT characters on Japanese TV isn’t positive and instead they’re often made figures of fun and derided.
This means that Japanese kids have to look elsewhere for queer role models. For young people, even if they find a site that doesn’t tell scare stories, it’s mostly the medical side of being LGBT that’s addressed rather than the daily challenges. “A lot of the information online said stuff like ‘you will die at the age of 30 if you take hormones’ or that I wouldn’t be able to live and work in Japan as a trans man,” he says. Yakushi explained that the degree of ambiguity and lack of information surrounding LGBT issues is extreme.
We spoke with Mika Yakushi, a trans man who runs the non-profit Tokyo-based LGBT support group ReBit, to talk about the situation for LGBT kids in Japan. To put it bluntly, neither Japanese schools nor the country’s wider society acknowledge LGBT issues, a silence that forces children to seek information from other sources. Bullying, isolation and misunderstanding are endemic in schools, leading to alarmingly high levels of self-harm and suicide amongst LGBT youth – around 30 percent of LGBT kids contemplate suicide. In Japanese schools, as in wider society, high levels of conformity are expected from young people and children who are different can be deemed ‘damaging’ to group harmony, in fact one of the HRW reports was called “ The Nail That Sticks Out Gets Hammered Down”. The value of LGBT characters in manga has been highlighted in a number of recent Human Rights Watch reports explaining how kids are having to turn to manga because they’ve been let down by the state and by schools, which haven’t really, until very recently, acknowledged the reality of LGBT kids in the classroom.
Both Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura, perhaps two of the most well-known and best-loved manga series ever feature gay individuals – in fact, Sailor Neptune and Sailor Moon are probably the most famous animated lesbian couple out there. Both manga and its animated version, anime, are places where transgressive behaviour is allowed or lauded and they’ve long been places where gay love stories are portrayed. Japanese youth can find themselves seriously lacking in accessible information on LGBT issues, so they turn to alternative, escapist, fantasy literature to enter a world where queer people exist openly. While it might sound crazy, for many young LGBT people in Japan the only images they have of people they identify with are the stylised ones they see staring back at them from the black and white pages of manga comics. Furthermore, some characters might slip from my mind since I watched some anime series/movies a long time ago or they are new and I haven’t yet put myself into the adventure of watching them.Imagine you’re flipping through a comic book when you suddenly come across a character you haven’t seen before and, for the first time in your life, you see yourself reflected openly in a public space. Because of that, this list is the product of my personal taste, opinion and preference. Also, Kagami usually wears a black suit and a tie that looks great on him! DISCLAIMER!Įven though I tried to take into a consideration average preference on top hot anime guys, I was still somewhat subjective while making this list. Some say he has dark blue eyes, while he has a gray color of eyes. Kogami is tall, muscular, and has short messy black hair. He is cool-headed, has sharp instincts, is very serious while working on the case while still having a sense of humor. He is a very skilled detective, a former Inspector, and an Enforcer of the Public Safety Bureau’s Division 1. Such an appearance, such an attitude, such a man! Truly my choice and my type! Shinya is the main character in the anime and manga “Psycho-Pass” season one. Shinya Kogami is a golden man, in my opinion. It is Shinya Kogami! Although I know most of you would put our second place character Gojo Satoru in the first place I had to stay true to myself. The first place, the gold one in this massive list of hot anime guys.