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. 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”. 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.
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. 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. Yakushi explained that the degree of ambiguity and lack of information surrounding LGBT issues is extreme.
In the pages of manga comics you can be anything you like – a superhero, a master villain, a supernatural being. It’s an imaginary world where gender and sexuality are often very fluid and so many LGBT kids are turning to the pages of comics books for a sympathetic portrayal of queer characters In an interview with the HRW, Aiko from Osaka describes how important coming across a trans character in a manga book at 17 was for coming to terms with being transgender herself. “Before reading that comic book, I thought that I was different and I tried to hide it,” she explains, “but once I read the comic book I started to think it’s OK to be different and it completely changed how I thought about myself”.
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