‘People should know’: Blue Boy trial updates transgender history in Japan | film

TThe so-called “Blue Boy Trial” in 1965 was a landmark moment in transgender visibility in Japan. It is now a landmark film, directed by Kashu Iizuka, a transgender man and one of the very few openly gay filmmakers working in the Japanese commercial film industry.

The original legal case involved a doctor who was prosecuted for performing sex reassignment surgery on transgender women, amid law enforcement frustrations that transgender sex workers could not be prosecuted for their profession due to them being legally male. The doctor was found guilty of violating Japan’s eugenics laws, which prohibit surgeries resulting in sterilization if deemed unnecessary. “Blue boy” was a slang term for transgender individuals assigned male at birth, and the ruling effectively banned sex reassignment surgery in Japan until 1998. Despite this, the case raised the profile of transgender people domestically.

“The trial has become obscure in Japan, but I have known about it since I first learned my identity,” Iizuka says. “These days in Japan, you can hear the term LGBTQ in everyday conversations. In the 1960s, when such terms were not used, there were still people who lived bravely openly.” [queer] life. I felt that Japanese people nowadays should know that these people exist.

Iizuka made his feature film debut in 2011, but his stories about transgender people were mostly unsuccessful at first. Then later in the decade, films about transgender individuals became a trend, with films like Naoko Ogigami’s Close-Knit and Eiji Uchida’s Midnight Swan highlighting the issues facing transgender people. “There was a problem with that trend,” says Iizuka. “The tragedy of transgender people has been used as entertainment, and their existence has been portrayed in a one-dimensional and different way.” However, the success of these films meant that Blue Boy Trial was greenlit. Distributed by major studio Nikkatsu, it is a Japanese historical film series.

Unlike its local predecessors, which cast cisgender men in stereotypically feminine roles, Blue Boy Trial features trans actors — many of them non-professional — in trans roles, and seeks to represent a wide range of experiences. “The characters are equally inspired by present-day trans women and women in the 1960s,” says Iizuka. There was little archival material to consult, with Iizuka turning to magazines and weeklies to understand the cast of characters. “During my research, I found that trans women in the 1960s had similar attitudes toward their own identities. Some were open, others treated their trans identity as a secret.”

Iizuka says there are big differences in the way they interact with society. “Transgender women in Japan in the 1960s tended to over-express their femininity in order to be accepted as women,” he says. “But it was important for us to emphasize the commonalities between then and now.”

Iizuka and his co-writers grew equally concerned with opponents of transgender people, and their in-depth research pointed to Japan’s wartime experience as a possible cause of the backlash. “Men should be masculine and strong, they internalize those values,” says Iizuka. “I don’t think the blame lies with the individual, I think it was a broader problem.”

Iizuka hopes his film will inspire more change, and it is encouraging to see that Blue Boy’s trial may not be an isolated case in Japan. The biopic of transgender TV personality Ai Haruna, This Is I, is currently streaming on Netflix. Its director, Yusaku Matsumoto, is not transgender, but he consulted queer voices to ensure sensitivity and accuracy. “I think this is a wave,” says Iizuka. “I have received proposals for new projects that will include transgender actors. There is momentum.”

This cultural momentum is supported in large part by local progress in transgender rights. In 2023, the Japanese Supreme Court deemed mandatory sterilization of transgender individuals unconstitutional. “The 2023 rulings were a milestone for the transgender community, but we faced backlash,” says Iizuka. “There have been concerns about how to maintain the integrity of women’s spaces, and there are difficulties around changing gender markers in family records. We are in a transitional phase. Blue Boy Trial is my gesture as a transgender artist. I hope this film will help society change in a positive direction.”