Love in the Time of Media: LGBTQ+ Representation and the Japanese Pop Culture Scene

(Note: this is going to be long. Like, 3000 words long. This is a full and unedited script of a paper I wrote over summer for a module on Japanese pop culture while at Waseda Summer Sessions, June-July 2015, so it's complete with MLA citations. Read on at your peril. Also, due to being written in July, some of my contemporary examples [e.g. Rui in Gatchaman Crowds] may have become somewhat redundant, alongside the same-sex marriage now legal in specific cities not being mentioned due to it not having happened at that point in time.

Please contact me in the unlikely chance you wish to quote this paper or use it in an academic source. There's a bibliography included at the bottom for further reference. I am uploading this as, while it was credited within the Summer Sessions, I received no further academic use for it and it has no impact on my actual degree classification. Enjoy!)

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Same-sex relationships have been legal in Japan since 1880, long before the West decriminalised them, but the repressed national character of the country has led to a rather paradoxical treatment of LGBTQ+ characters in media. For this essay, LGBTQ+ will refer to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other non-cisgender or not-heterosexual identities, which may be shortened to “queer” where appropriate. My thesis is that the anime, comics and games industry is both more accepting of same-sex relationships and non-cisgender characters than its Western counterpart, but also suffers from a lack of progress in its representation over the last two decades and “has yet to grow beyond […] motifs” (The Artifice). In contrast, while Western companies initially erased queer characters in its localisations, social progress has led to society becoming more accepting of these themes, to the point where LGBTQ+ characters are now arguably better represented in Western pop culture than in Japanese media; Japan has merely had “a gradual softening of traditional prejudice toward gays in Japan” (Osaki) rather than the sharp turning point Western countries have experienced. Mostly focusing on anime but with some games case studies, I will begin by exploring the main features of queer representation in Japanese media as I perceive them, which are: an acceptance of queer relationships even in media marketed to children; deliberately portraying a relationship between two same-sex characters in an ambiguous manner (often known as “ship-teasing” or “ship-baiting”); characters who do not easily conform to ideas of the gender binary; and instances of problematic representation. I will then consider these within a globalised framework and look at how localisation can cause issues for representation, and conclude that the progressive attitude to queer people in Japan has stagnated.

To begin, I would like to consider some representation of same-sex pairings in mainstream media. (I am deliberately not talking about the yaoi or yuri sub-genres of ACG here, due to space constraints.) Firstly we have the case of Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune in the popular franchise Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, or Sailor Moon. Sailor Moon started as a manga series in 1992, spawned a TV show that lasted for 200 episodes, and has most recently been revived as Sailor Moon Crystal. Since they were first introduced, Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune have been a lesbian couple who happen to also be part of the Sailor Scout team. This encountered no problems, and the Japanese manga and anime series have all depicted their relationship as a couple. Another example of same-sex attraction comes from Cardcaptor Sakura, known in the West as Cardcaptors and another seminal example of a Magical Girl publication. It is created by CLAMP who are well known for their sympathetic portrayal of gay characters in mainstream media, and Cardcaptors features the canon gay pairing of Yukito and Touya, as well as Tomoyo’s precocious lesbian crush on Sakura which mirrors her mother’s unreciprocated crush on Sakura’s mother. The reason these two properties are important is due to how localisations treated them, which I will come on to in the second part of this essay: namely, they were picked up to be localised and shown in the West as children’s television shows. Also from the 1990s, Revolutionary Girl Utena (Shoujo Kakumei Utena) was released as a manga in 1996 with the anime first broadcast in 1997 and spanning three seasons. In the anime, Utena is a ‘princely’ character, wearing a male uniform to be more like her idolised prince, and saving Anthy the Rose Bride from various evildoers, and their relationship is made explicitly romantic in the 1999 movie Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie (known in Japan as Shoujo Kakumei Utena Aderesensu Mokushiroku) which received a fairly faithful localisation in English-speaking countries in 2001.

In more recent years, same-sex couples have been canonically included in a variety of media. Ryuko and Mako from Kill La Kill are implied to have romantic feelings towards each other through the whole series and go on a “date” (deeto) in the final episode, described using the same word as typically heterosexual dates to cement the romantic nature of it, as well as sharing a kiss before the last battle. Strike Witches is a mixed-media project encompassing animated series, manga, light novels and a movie, and features a same-sex pairing of Sanya and Elia (complete with their own song, “Sweet Duet”). Finally in Puella Magi Madoka Magica, the driving force of the plot is Homura’s intense love for and need to save Madoka, to the point where it becomes possessive and toxic: Madoka solves with by rewriting the laws of the universe and transcending into a divine existence. The third film, Rebellion, features Homura fighting to free Madoka from her meta-existence, eventually sacrificing her own humanity in order to do so. Despite this, especially for same-sex couples, it is very rarely explicitly stated that characters are in love, leading to a lot of debate over the canonical status of their relationships. For lesbian relationships specifically, many people try argue that these are really just examples of close female friendships, a phenomenon which exists to erase female sexuality by effectively denying it could exist with a man to be the object of it.

Besides characters who obviously experience same-sex attraction, queer representation in ACG often involves characters who do not conform to a specific gender. Haruhi in Ouran High School Host Club becomes involved with an all-male club called the “Host Club” and thus has to cross-dress in order to maintain her façade. Here, the trope exists to deconstruct clichés in romance manga, but Haruhi herself states: “I don’t really care if you guys recognize me as a boy or a girl. In my opinion it’s more important for a person to be recognized for who they are, rather than what sex they are” (Episode 1), leading many to debate whether or not Haruhi identifies as female. This is somewhat ruined in the manga, as the distant epilogue shows Haruhi in traditionally feminine attire with long hair, but the anime follows a slightly different canon and so could be read as portraying her as gender-fluid, non-binary or as having no gender. Another character with unclear gender identity is Rui from Gatchaman Crowds, who was male assigned at birth but frequently wears female clothing and wigs. It is ambiguous in the first season whether this is a disguise, cross-dressing or an expression of a variable gender identity, but the acceptance of the other characters leads the audience to also accept Rui as they are, without questioning their gender presentation.

Next, I want to examine the phenomenon of “ship-teasing” whereby two characters are written in such a way to deliberately invoke discussions regarding the nature of their relationship. While many fans will create non-canon pairings for fan-fiction or fan-art, ship-teasing encourages this through making relationships vague enough to be interpreted however fans desire while offering no canonical comment on the veracity of it. This is very common in all-male or all-female properties, such as the swimming anime Free! featuring only boys, or the musical animes K-On! (Keion!) which features no male characters, and Sound! Euphonium (Hibike! Euphonium) whose male characters are secondary. The homoeroticism often varies by episode; for example, Episode 8 of Sound! Euphonium features the main character Kumiko and her friend Reina hiking up a shrine, calling each other “attractive” and essentially having a date, while Episode 10 reveals that Reina is in love with the male music teacher. Many fans see this as ship-teasing, due to such factors as the close proximity in which Reina and Kumiko are often drawn, the deliberately romantic language they use to describe each other (like “attractive” or “hot”), and the ending credits featuring Reina and Kumiko tied together by a red string of fate like that thought to connect lovers in Chinese traditional media. Ship-teasing is very prevalent in ACG as it allows companies to provide titillation and speculation without having to include canon homosexuality; however, it is also a very damaging and dated practise as it implies same-sex relationships exist purely to excite or amuse fans, and are not as valid as heterosexual couplings. It re-iterates the idea of heterosexuality as a compulsory norm, while same-sex attractions are played for laughs, brushed aside entirely or explained away as stereotypically gendered behaviour.

This fascination with gender stereotyping and interactions leads to many franchises where “sex-changing” becomes a core mechanic. As the main character’s consciousness remains the same while their bodies change, these gender-flipped characters are arguably representations of transgender people, albeit presented comically and in order to examine gendered behavior rather than to explore the plight of transgender people. Mahou Shoujo Ore features a protagonist whose Magical Girl transformation sequence entails becoming a muscular man, while Ore to Hero to Mahou Shoujo is the other side of the coin, featuring a grown man becoming a teenage magical girl. Ore, Twintail Ni Narimasu also heavily relies on the perceived comedy value of a teenage boy transforming into a girl, but these representations are often problematic because of the way male-to-female characters are presented. Laughing at the awkwardness of a male-bodied person in a dress can be a variety of transmisogyny, or the belief that transgender women are not really female. This is very pervasive and thus very damaging, as it normalizes the idea that certain people can be mocked for their gender identity.

As I have been noting, many of these portrayals of queer characters are problematic. The relationship between Sanya and Elia in Strike Witches suffers from the male gaze whereby they wear minimal clothing and interact romantically in part to titillate a male audience. A recent interaction from the new Fire Emblem If game, which has yet to be officially translated into English, also displays this intolerance towards lesbianism, as Soleil’s romance conversations with the protagonist involve her being ‘cured’ of her same-sex attraction, thereby making lesbians seem like an acceptable target for heterosexual male attention as they can be made to like men. Besides same-sex relationships being written to excite fans, sometimes Japanese media instead uses negative stereotypes. An all-girl high school in Ouran High School Host Club called Lobelia Academy features a lesbian trio who are distinctly antagonistic, including kidnapping Haruhi to “steal” (Episode 19) her first kiss, perpetuating ideas of lesbianism as unnatural or evil – which is especially out of place in the show, considering its cheerful acceptance of male homosexuality and Haruhi’s father’s bisexuality and current job as a transvestite host.

As well as these instances of same-sex relationships, the depiction of transgender characters comes up against many obstacles. In Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4, one of the datable characters is a female assigned at birth but male-presenting character, Naoto. While this has the potential to be very progressive, the game treats Naoto’s gender identity as an obstacle to be cleared, making “no distinction between gender and sex” (Brice); indeed, when romancing Naoto, the player’s choices completely determine his gender, and “the gameplay mechanics encourage the player to nudge Naoto towards becoming a woman.” This implies transgender identities are the result of choice rather than an internal facet of being, and – even worse – should change themselves to fit into their partner’s sexuality, denying their own individuality. This combines transphobia with homophobia, as potentially encouraging Naoto to present as male could make players (probably straight, probably male) feel uncomfortable with their sexuality. Transgender characters are rare enough in media, but for their potential to be wasted with damaging tropes is reflective of larger cultural problems.

These issues are also present in the globalisation of media, due to the way the West is also wary of gender and sexual minority representation. Some of this can be explained by different cultural stances towards LGBTQ+ relationships, and how acceptance in the West has progressed while it has remained fairly static in Japan. In the 1990s, television was wary to show queer relationships in anime as they were often aired as children’s cartoons, so many relationships were erased. To return to some of my earlier examples, Sailor Moon’s Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune had their relationship changing into “cousins” in the dubbed localisation. However, as the scene composition of many shots was not changed, this led to the unfortunate subtext that the two women were cousins who were dating, which is presumably less appropriate than merely a same-sex relationship. Additionally, the eponymous character often had her lines complimenting the other Sailors edited out in localisation: despite being in a canonically heterosexual relationship, any hints that Sailor Moon may be bisexual or even bi-romantic were removed.

The fifth and final season of the Sailor Moon anime was broadcast from 1996 to 1997, but did not receive an official foreign dub till Viz Media announced that they were redubbing the whole series in 2014, 18 years later. Part of the reason for the fifth season’s lack of export was that it featured the Sailor Starlights, magical girls who usually appeared as male idol singers, and one of whom developed romantic feelings for the titular Sailor Moon. Another property to have undergone this queer erasure is Cardcaptor Sakura: Tomoyo’s crush on Sakura is completely edited out, and as a result Tomoyo’s character is very two-dimensional. The relationship between Touya and Yukito is also left out of the original dub, which aired in 2000 in the West. This lack of localisation now seems strange, when animes such as Lesbian Bear Storm (Yurikuma Arashi) are receiving official dubs, which goes to show how much attitudes in the West have changed while remaining relatively static in Japan. These delayed accurate localisations also demonstrate something of a perception shift in the West: anime has gone from being serialised on children’s television to instead being marketed to older audiences, like teenagers and young adults, meaning that there are fewer problems with showing queer characters

However, retaining original features can be impossible due to different age rating systems in Japan and in the West. The franchise Harvest Moon is a very popular farming simulation game which features a large dating simulation section, where you are able to romance villagers and eventually marry them. In the 2005 release Harvest Moon DS Cute, you play as a female character who can romance a number of different bachelors, as she is the opposite-gender counterpart of the original Harvest Moon DS game. However, four female villagers who were available to marry in the original game were able to be wooed in Cute, which could eventually result in “best friend” status and a female moving into the player’s house; the two women could even find and raise a child together. However, this feature was removed in the Western localisations of this game, probably due to the different age rating boards: same-sex content would have pushed the game out of its family friendly ‘E for Everyone’ rating. Despite the fact this game came out 10 years ago, none of the subsequent releases have tried to reinstall same-sex relationships – and this is also regardless of the fact that Japan has no legal recognition of same-sex relationships, while between 2005 and 2015 many countries in the EU and North America have legalised same-sex marriage of partnerships. Also regarding age ratings, the fairly inoffensive Ouran High School Host Club was released on DVD in the UK with a 15 age rating, presumably due to the numerous homosexual references as well as the central premise of cross-dressing: however, the show did not contain any sexual situations, violence even strong language as would be expected in Western releases with a 15 age rating, demonstrating a bias towards romantic behaviour viewed as different from the norm.

With that said, there have been other franchises which have made some form of progress in queer representation without fear of age ratings. The Fire Emblem games, which are story-driven turn-based tactical role-playing games, always feature a large cast of diverse and obtainable characters. Previously, the only overtly queer character was Heather, a minor thief from Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn (released in 2007) who, while having a line about joining for all the “pretty girls” removed from localisation, still compliments every female character she interacts with, even in the English language versions of the game. Unfortunately Heather is not a plot-relevant character and unlike many of the important characters, who have the option of heterosexual paired endings which often detail their successful marriages, Heather cannot have a paired ending. However in Fire Emblem If, released in 2015, same-sex support conversations have become part of the dialogue for both male and female protagonists. There are serious flaws with this: for example, there is one available same-sex marriage option each for the male and female protagonist, and each of these only appears in one of the game’s two main storylines, as well as the aforementioned attempt to cure Soleil’s lesbianism. While for many this seems like tokenism, especially given that the highest level for same-sex relationships is “A+” rather than the “S” for heterosexual couples, it still represents a step forward by Ninetendo, a notoriously family-friendly company. Seeing what survives the localisation will be interesting, but given that the announcement of same-sex support conversations seemed to generate a lot of positive media attention, it is unlikely to be entirely erased even for the sake of a lower age rating.

Other times, localisations can be affected by the power of the fan community. For example, Love Live! School Idol Festival is a smartphone game which features minor homoeroticism in the original Japanese text. One female character has had her dialogue changed from the original Japanese, “I like looking at cute girls,” to, “I like looking at cute things.” Another character had her line “I don’t mind, even if we’re both girls,” changed to, “I don’t think it’s scandalous for a boy and a girl to hang out,” (Reyna, Nerdspan) which implicitly changes the gender of the featureless player character. However, the fan backlash against the changes was so strong that in June 2015 the developer, KLab, changed the text to restore the original light lesbianism. These minor acts of erasure count as micro-aggressions towards to the LGBTQ+ community by tacitly denying their existence: the support of the fans in this case shows how pressure from consumers, combined with the cultural move towards celebrating queer relationships (especially in the wake of the American Supreme Court legalising same-sex marriage) manifests itself in company policy.

In closing, then, we can consider the presence of same-sex relationships and queer or gender non-conforming characters has been a part of Japanese popular culture for a long time, being accepted in Japan long before it was portrayed with similar sympathy in the West. However, globalisation has made the world smaller, so while Japanese properties are being sent to the West, American and European media are also proliferating in Japan. From these many case studies, I hope to have demonstrated that the West’s treatment of queer characters has become more progressive, while Japan’s has stagnated and remained static. Unless major steps are taken in raising the profile of same-sex relationships and gender variant individuals within Japan and removing the stigma surrounding them, mainstream Japanese anime, comics and games are unlikely to become more ground-breaking and may soon be overtaken by their Western counterparts.

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Gender trouble.

(Oh look, a "sneaky" allusion to the famous Judith Butler book of the same name! How many people would have got this reference without me pointing it out? It's too late now, your time to shine is over, yes my blog post is using the name of a book published four years before I was born. Think of it as inter-textuality. So post-modern!)

Gender sucks. This is an opinion but also kind of a fact. As my non-binary squeeze asked me a few days ago, "what is gender?" And I kind of floundered and offered a few responses - it's a set of social behaviours, it's to do with human conditioning, it's innate, it's learned, it's a spectrum, it's all performative actions - but none of them seemed to really work in the face of their gaze, their cool almond-shaped eyes looking up at me, ringed with delicate eyelashes and deep thought.

I have to have some notion of gender, right? It's something we all have, but not something that gets critically considered unless you or someone you know isn't cisgender - that is, having your gender identity and your physical sex match up. I am not cisgender. I am a demi-girl, which is one of those "tumblr genders" that people seem to think doesn't exist. But also being pansexual, I'm used to erasure.

Being a demi-girl, to me, means I have some level of detachment from being feminine or female. As much as I am female, I am also not-female. This element of not-female isn't male, either: it's just not really anything, maybe agender or genderqueer (i.e. having no gender, or being somewhere in the middle of the indiscrete mass of gender identities) but not specific. Being a demi-girl, for me, means some kind of disconnect between my XX-chromosone, supposedly 'female' body and the expectations placed upon me for being a girl.

For all my behaviours - my empathy, my need to please but also challenge authority figures, my rebellious streak, my wanderlust, the Maths papers I bailed on - I worry whether they were truly my choices or made by the environment I grew up in, which necessarily includes the patriarchy. I am good at remembering names, but is that because of the burden of femaleness impacting my thought processes and others' expectations of me since I was a kid to the extent that it's become part of my personality?

I have too many unanswered questions about this, so identifying as not-a-cis-girl helps me with it. Being demi- helps me feel more secure in my skin, helps me challenge notions, helps remind me that acting typically feminine does not make me a stereotype, that girly is not synonymous with weak, that internalised misogyny is not my fault but that of the system I was born into. (It's like one of my agender friends commenting how accepting her gender identity as agender helped her be more comfortable wearing dresses and skirts: to paraphrase, once she accepted she had no gender and thus nothing to lose from not being 'feminine enough', the act wearing feminine clothing didn't carry the same problems and was liberating.) I have no problems with the undeniable womanly curves of my body, as a binder would probably damage me too much without doing anything to sort out my hip-to-waist ratio that proves I endured female puberty - but being unhappy in your body is not a prerequisite of any gender identity whatsoever. Dysphoria is not essential to the trans or non-binary experience.

You may feel this exact way and yet still identify as cisgender, but guess what? That's your prerogative. Like not every person who is attracted to people of more than one gender has to identify as anything other than how they feel, nobody's going to try and make you have a gender that's not what you identify as. (Shout-out to all the straight guys in the back I've slept with! Guess what? You've fucked a non-binary person! If that makes you feel uncomfortable then that's your problem.) At the same time, there are options.

Gender isn't a fixed construct. We get to make up our minds ourselves. There are more words than there used to be, but there's also much more awareness and discussion of feeling like this. Feeling confused over my gender isn't a new phenomenon for humanity, and not for me - I've been a conflicted tomboy all my life, stealing my brother's girls but pretending not to like pink to keep my brand consistent - but I have the language now to express it. Technically I am trans, in that I am not-cis, but I don't see myself in that umbrella. Rather I am in the non-binary camp, of people whose gender is not either girl or boy, yes or no, pink or blue. How is increased language and awareness a bad thing?

And because of all this, and because of understanding gender as a spectrum before I even worked out where I was on it, I define as pansexual. I am attracted to people, and their gender is irrelevant. Call me bisexual and prepare for a long discussion about this.

I still don't know what gender is. For my enbie beauty (whose non-binary label they wear as a hesitant badge of pride), it's freedom to dress as they feel on any given day without giving a fuck. It's not worrying about not being served in Betty's for wearing a skirt and not having their identity questioned on the days they wear combats. It's something that makes them happy in a world full of insecurity and uncertainty: the knowledge that they are not boy or girl, and that it's okay and really most people don't care other than to compliment them on their banging Hello Kitty dress.

Dating my enbie (non-binary person) brings its own string of challenges: it's made me aware of how I use language so much more, the arbitrariness of gendered clothing, the constant weighing up of whether to confront catcallers or not, and the total shittiness of men in women's clothing being a "joke", like femininity is funny and shameful.

Wearing female clothing brings you into a female space regardless of biology, and on the streets that can mean harassment and danger as others feel entitled to look at you and make comments. My enbie happens to be 6'2" and wear stubble with their flowing red and brown locks, which raises even more confusion from passers-by. There's not been much actual street harassment, but there's so much whispering and confusion, comments to friends, wolf-whistling. I ignore it, burning to confront harassers and educate them about gender; I can't imagine how it makes my other half feel.

Neither of us are out to our parents, and there's something depressing about that. If we can't be who we really are round our families for fear of them not understanding - or worse, laughing about it, or reacting badly, or cutting us off - then living authentically gets that much harder,

Maybe we all have gender trouble. But if you learn anything from this, it's that your cheap laugh at the expense of a muscled dude in a red dress in the Fallout 4 E3 previews is a bullet shot to the hearts and souls of gender non-conformers around the world. Laughing at a man wearing a dress says you think women's clothing is embarrassing, and any feminist worth their salt can see why that's problematic. So, I will fight tooth and nail to keep my non-binary friends and kin safe, even if that sometimes means the best way to fight is through stony glares and silence as we walk on in our swishy blue skirts.

Be happy, go think about your ex.

In continuation of my perfectly contradictory way of being, the happier my relationship is, the more I think about my exes. For possibly the first time ever, everything is functional. There's no communication issues, no co-dependence, no unequal states of affection or distance that tests commitment. What this proves to me is that my sadness over past loves is unrelated to my current relationship. It's not that I am "not over" my exes: it's that I will always be sad about the way things ended.

I think part of the reason we can become so bitter to our exes is that, for a time, they were so important to us. The gap remains between what they were and what they are now. Once, they were close to us. They slept next to us, spoke to us over every little thing, held our hands and occupied our heads. But after you break up, they can become strangers.

While I've never had a shouting-till-dawn break-up, there's been a mix. The ones where you stop responding, the ones where you promise to stay friends, the ones that distance tempers into being not quite so harsh. My exes are all on my Facebook, but I wonder if they remember. When we pass by without making contact, do we both think back to the days we said we were happy? Were we really?

None of this can be verified against another's experience and we are all different. Even though it happened more than two years ago, I can still get sad about being broken up with over dessert after going to London aquarium together. I feel guilty for dumping a long-distance girlfriend over text when I was 16, and it makes me sad we don't talk any more. Clinging to the past is toxic, but there's a melancholy in realising these people that were so close once are now nothing.

Losing touch scares me, How easily we can be forgotten, If we are nothing but the sum of the relationships we make, what does it say when they can be forged and broken so quickly? We are all fragile. And I guess that goes for friends, too: the people I know who are graduating used to be so close to me, and are now gone. Yes, when we became friends they were sweet, and perhaps they became less so the better we knew each other, but that doesn't stop them from being close.

We forget too many people. Getting left behind is awful. This is all stuff we know, but don't want to consider. Maybe that's why I think so much about the people I had so much almost-happiness with. Things aren't meant to last: all things end. But it's not really so bad to think about the relationships that did. They had meaning too, and their status as passed doesn't negate the value they had at the time. That is not to say I react healthily: I bottled up my angst at someone who hurt me which ended in wanting to punch them. How are you meant to respond to that, when you also know their own ex had physically abused them? I compete with others on arbitrary scales to measure happiness, and I am aware of my bizarre jealousy over who moves on first and how easily exes seem to get over things. My best friend is technically my ex: he has moved on, and I think I'm losing him now to a girl the year below me. That hurts more than anything, as our friendship survived my multitude of inadvisable relationships and torrid flings: it's upsetting that one person can decide to curtail things and they just end.

Whatever. I think and write about this well-trodden ground far too much. Go stroke a puppy or something.

Wearing my loves.

I have a soft spot for stolen clothes from my loves. That's lovers in all senses - familial and romantic and friends. They can give me things all they like, but I am terrible at returning loaned things. Possession is temporary: nothing is really ours after all, is it? So I keep things, magpie-like, pieces of people I don't want to forget and reminders of things I need to remember. I used to steal my brother's pyjamas when we were kids; now, I borrow my father's tailcoat to go to a ball. It's wearing pieces of history, bringing the past into the present, taking on old

Sometimes in my head I get an image of me wearing the things I've received from the people who mattered most to me at the time, all at once. I'm barefoot, because my feet are too small to steal socks or shoes; I am in boxers I stole from the dancer I had a mostly-physical relationship with and wearing the oversized t-shirt of a boy I loved, but was not in love with. There's a long necklace from the first girl I ever dated, which hangs low and bronze almost to my navel. And I am wearing the hoodie of the one I am in love with, while circumstances are getting in the way.

When I am sad I wear other people's clothes. It makes me feel connected, reminds me that others exist even when I am alone and lonely. Today I am in my mother's cardigan and my friend's big, blue coat. They are keeping me warm in the cold, keeping the rain away from my face and holding me together when I feel like falling apart.

I know I should give these things back, but things are only things. Material possessions matter less than memories to me. Moment and experiences are transient and can give you the warmth or sadness that clothes cannot. I have always been a physical person, and the proximity and affection of touch is what I seem to perpetually crave. It is getting hard for me to sleep alone. The quiet of my room is no match for the tumult of my brain. And I have always been fine by myself, but that doesn't mean I am not lonely.

My mother's feet are smaller than mine and she still wears my old trainers that I have grown out of. I wonder if she feels fond of me when she wears them. I would. Or does she just see them as trainers, utilitarian things to keep her feet dry?

I don't know what is going on with my life, but I will give back this cerulean blue hoodie if my love asks me to. It's the colour of a clear sky, the highlights in my hair, my eyes in a storm. (His eyes are more green.) If love is putting someone else first then my selfish heart can do that, even if it means martyring myself. I will give back the hoodie that after two months still smells of him. But if he does not, then I will keep it. It reminds me of affection, of being held, warm hands on my cold arms. I am holding myself together as best I can, in other's clothes, to keep me whole when I want to unravel.

I suppose I have always been one to wear my heart on my sleeve.

Summer is ending.

Some days, when I think about how vast and hopeless the world is, I get stuck. Stuck in my own brain, as I consider the huge expanse of people trembling in fear and madness. Stuck in the horrors that permeate people's psyches, lurking just below the surface in day to day life. Stuck considering the multitude of ways life conspires to fuck people over based on no sound reasoning whatsoever.

It's been a long summer, where an early spike of heat has faded away into rain and grey cloud and cool breezes on days when it's already a little cold.

It's been a summer full of death. At the individual level, celebrities seem to be dying like never before (possibly a side-effect of our aging global population and the ability of the internet to extend stars' lifespans beyond their decade of fame; funny how we only remember people when they die). We've seen James Foley executed in front of the whole world, who watched his beheading through their fingers on computer screens and smartphones. He was trying to elucidate us about the dark corners of the world; the darkness got to him.

On a larger level, we've learned so much more about the hundreds of violations going on around the world. The Gaza strip has seen fighting that's killed 2000 civilians - and over what? Two groups of people, locked up safe in boardrooms, disputing who owns some land without sparing any thoughts for the people who live there and call it their home.

We've seen spates of cops abusing the black community in the USA, from Ferguson to New York and even further. I get so angry about it - but I am white, I am privileged, I am English. I am not on the streets holding candlelit vigils for Michael Brown, and being tear-gassed for my efforts. But I wasn't there either in London, when Mark Duggan was shot in 2011. Then, the country turned on itself as anger flared up all over the nation, and we rioted across the country. In Ferguson, there are no riots. There are peaceful protests, misreported by the white media wrongly representing something calm as violent - due to the cops' reaction, which wasn't even precipitated by anything.

One and a half thousand children were sexually abused in Rotheram in an industrial, organised fashion over the course of decades, and the authorities did nothing. Too concerned with protecting themselves than the children they were supposed to be caring for.

This is the state of the world, right now. Ebola ravages Africa but we only care when a British citizen is infected. There's so much bleakness and suffering that we have to depersonalise, only view a few select groups as people and the rest as merely faceless masses - because, if we really truly considered every person who was hurting, and empathised that fiercely with every sore soul, I think our hearts would burst.

I get stuck thinking about all this - and I feel bad, because I'm happy. There's nothing I can do to help, and my impotent thoughts of action wither and die into indolence and satisfaction with my own personal status quo.

My job pays me £117 each week for three days of my time, where I mainly dick around and waste time by writing cloying, overwrought blog posts like this. My friends see me most days, a dancer cooks me dinner on a semi-regular basis, and I've managed to avoid dumping a bucket of water over my head. I've gained weight but the media's insistence that I should now experience crushing body dysmorphia hasn't materialised. My body is still my body. I'm happy.

Just like other people having it worse doesn't invalidate your own sadness - and other people having it better doesn't invalidate your own happiness - the suffering of the world doesn't seem to have much impact on my own feelings. Not today.

Summer is ending. The pain is still everywhere I look, except in my own personal bubble. Maybe this is the only way we can combat the blackness though. Maybe happiness is the most subversive thing we can project. The world is made up of awful moments of anguish and crying when nobody can hear you, but it's also beautiful. Life is harsh, but it's sharpest when in relief. Among the brutality are shining shards of joy: laughing until you collapse, cycling through hayfevery fields, hot showers and Netflix marathons and singing karaoke with strangers. Hold them close.

One day, I'll be struggling with my own demons, be they personal or systematically oppressive. I'll be holding onto past days of happiness then: in a world where death is random and impersonal, it'll come for me eventually. Be joyous. Dare to be happy. We have to find some frivolous way to beat the severity of real life.

The transience of photographs.

I haven't written for a while and I already fear that my brain is not what it used to be. This post was not light and whimsical to write: it was mucilaginous, viscous, the words forced from my fingers rather than flowing. It's also piecemeal and bitty, strung together from patchwork thoughts I've had over the week rather than a narrative stream-of-consciousness which I am using to hash out my ideas.

I want to talk about photographs. I don't even know what I want to say about them. I just want to say something.

The problem with photographs is that they take something as fleeting, as transient as a moment, and attempt to immortalise it forever. In the past, you had to live in the second: you reminisced with your mental faculties, not your Facebook app, and everything happened once and only once.

But cameras appeared in the world, and photographs had to be staged, stock-still, for hours on end in order to create an image to last forever. Victorian women decked up in finery clutched their babies in chokeholds, staring sternly at modern technology, and the resulting sepia prints were monuments to their patience and wealth.

Those days have passed too, and now I take Snapchats of my laptop to let friends know I'm at work (and hardly working). Stay gold, pony boy, even though nothing gold can stay.

In Physics, it is an accepted fact that by observing something you change it. The Observer Effect, as it is appropriately called, says that the very act of measuring something will alter it. This is true of photographs. Taking a photograph of something changes it, because it no longer exists in its unobserved state. By viewing it - by giving it the audience of a lens - it is changed. You are not taking photos of things as you see them; you are taking photos of things as your camera sees them. Do the subject of photos even really exist outside of your aperture?

I digress.

Transience. I am a big fan of transience.

I have a tattoo on my hip of cherry blossom, which is traditionally associated with transience in Japanese culture, and the need not to fight time - instead, you let it pass, flow over you like a river you cannot change the course of. (I think of photos as leaves, floating on this river: they are buoyed along, in the same inexorable forward motion, separate from the water but carried by it.) There is a permanent reminder on my skin that nothing is permanent. I am a big fan of this irony, too.

Nothing can last forever, and few things last beyond their own moment. Photographs take that moment, distill it, capture it in proverbial amber and preserve it. A moment, cut forever from its contexts of movement and chronology: a moment, caught forever with less-than-flattering lighting and slightly wonky framing.

But photographs create another situation whereby, divorced from their context, they become irrelevant to their time. I know people who still fancy Heath Ledger, despite the fact he is dead. He is dead, and buried, and rotting - and yet we have photographs and films that depict him as young and attractive and as the hero in teen films, so fancying him doesn't seem weird. This also explains why we are still struck by photos of beauty from our previous millennium. It is not because beauty is timeless. The people in photographs, who were beauties at 21 in 1955, are probably no longer beautiful now. It is because we can make that moment timeless. Photographs turn us into time travellers, showing us things as we could never experience them because the world simply is not like that. They're lying to us. They are self-demonstrative proof that the world used to be like that, and yet the only proof is that image itself. Photographs are duplicitous.

(This is true of any static rendering of a sense, I suppose - so sound recordings are privy to this too; but I think there's something so much more intense about photographs. An image gnaws at my nerves far more viscerally than a sound.)

All this thinking was prompted by something a while ago. A friend of mine sent me a photograph of himself as a teenager, in order to prove he had once had hair. The photo was a candid shot, of a Welsh 16-year-old holding a cat, looking slightly surprised by the proceedings. His hair was blond, and as New Romantic as any Spandau Ballet tribute act. I have only ever known my friend as an adult: he is, to my young eyes, old and wise and sensible (and almost certainly reading this). To think he was once my age - that he was younger - is inconceivable. He was 26 when I was born, and I'm closer his age in this photo from 1984 than I am to him now.

But in that photo, there isn't much to mark it as being defiantly 80's fare. The clothes are rather generic. It could have been taken in 2011, when I was 16 and had rainbow hair. The boy in the photo could have gone to the same Cardiff Uni open day as me, passed me on a crowded train, smiled at my chronic clumsiness.

What a shame he stopped existing the moment after the shutter clicked.

Bullshit Bell 5: Timekeeping.

I had a plan for a blog post today. I was going to write a beautiful, gentle, whimsical thing about photographs and how they distort our sense of history, making the past forever present through a frozen image which refuses to change no matter how the world around it does. I was mulling it over in my head last night. It was going to be achingly well-written. A musing on transience and time.

But no.

Instead, I am calling bullshit on the corporate world in one more small, petty way that has proved I cannot deal with offices where everyone wears pencil skirts: timekeeping is bullshit.

I say this as an admittedly unpunctual person. I turn up on time to events when you're expected to be late. I'll get to lectures either five minutes early or five minutes late, and rarely in the sweet spot in between. I've been trained by my mother to turn up to doctors' appointments ten minutes early, when in reality I don't think my GP's ever been less than twenty minutes behind schedule.

In my mind, punctuality is pretty flexible. Being assigned to work 37 hours a week means I will work 37 hours a week. If I am 5 minutes late turning up to work, I'll religiously work an extra 5 minutes. I may be 5 minutes late to work fairly often, but sometimes I'm early to work. Because that's how humans work. We have days when we wake up early and days when we can't get out of bed and sometimes we have days where traffic is slow or the lights won't turn on or we have to spend ten minutes looking at ourselves in the mirror to psyche ourselves up to face the day.

And yes sometimes I am late to work. What of it?

Has anything interesting and vital ever happened in those 5 minutes between when my contract starts and when I arrive?

My manager is apparently the only person who cares about this, because he is the one who chews me out. He's not even my boss. Because my boss is in Turkey for four weeks, and working from home. He has also threatened me with termination of my contract if I am late again.

How does that work, exactly?

If 5 minutes past 9 counts as so truly horribly heinously late that the very existence of space-time warps and number start turning backwards, then yes I will accept that I was late and this was a mistake that could have been avoided.

What about 1 minute past 9? Couldn't that just be down to our watches not being synchronised?

Or thirty seconds past 9? Or 1 second past 9?

If I am 1 second late on Monday, am I going to get fired?

Personally I'm still a little bitter about the extra 3 hours I worked to finish some important copy, only to be told that I hadn't cleared the hours in advance so they didn't count. In my head, I'm stilled owed 3 hours, which I can chip away at by being 5 minutes late every day for 36 days, and still have worked 37 hours a week.

In a fast-paced working environment, yes, I can possibly see the relevance. In journalism, where new stories can break at literally any time, I suppose it's important to be at your desk at exactly 9am, because heaven knows how you could receive communication on your smartphone while commuting. In an office where the most productive thing I've done with week is write 400 words of newsletter copy and be told the photos I selected for it were wrong, it's pretty hard to care.

So, there we go. Timekeeping is bullshit. Punctuality is bullshit. I can keep track of my own hours. I know that when they deign to give me work to do, I do it on time and well. So why should it matter if I want to have breakfast in the morning rather than arrive, starving, at 8.55?

I don't even have anything funny and witty to say. I'm just angry. And if someone wants to give me a job where the quality of my work counts for more than my timekeeping, that'd be great. I would walk out now were it not for the money. Truly, I have sold myself to The Man.

"Who wants to look old?"

That was the question posed by someone vain on the paper-thin documentary I'm watching at the moment instead of writing an essay.

The person who came out with the offending line was some teenager's dad, who'd spent £14k on plastic surgery and hair transplants and teeth whitening. He looked like he was made of wax - but young wax. Freshly moulded wax, that had not yet been left out in the sun to melt. Who wants to look old, indeed?

I kind of can't wait to be old. I'll probably panic in middle age when everything sags, but it's not like I've got a tiny size 6 booty to lose. A bit of a complacent spread, bingo wings and dimpled thighs don't really bother me - I've sort of got those going on already. Whatever, I like food.

And I'm fairly ambivalent about my face too. Selfies irritate me and I wear make-up like warpaint, as an extra layer of protection if I need help to face the day. I remember wearing blood-red lipstick to my University Challenge heat, which I messed up - but it made me feel brave, a little separated from myself. Fearless. Hashtag fierce.


So, once the minor fear of aging has passed, I shall dance gleeful into my 50s. I shall wear purple, with a red hat that doesn't go, and definitely is not a reference to a poem. I will be as mad as possible, speak frankly about sex and drugs, and scare the kids into order.

I am far more worried about being successful than I am about being pretty. Who wants to look young forever? I'd rather look lived-in, experienced, with a face that can tell a hundred stories for every laugh line on it.

Why don't we want to look old, though? This is what worries me. And I think it comes down to the inevitable: death.

If you're busy looking good for yourself rather than for potential partners, it's not really about sex any more. And, if sex is not the driving force behind your actions, it's death. While I am aware my psychology here is generalising at best, and woefully incorrect at worst, hear me out.

We know so much these days. We know we might live to a hundred and ten, but we also know we can't live past hundred and twenty. Fifty is a mid-life crisis. After that, your best years are all gone, aren't they? Or, if not the best years - well, the bulk of them. Your body falls apart, bit by bit. And if you admit to looking old, to having had a life that's left its marks on your face, then you're haggard and tired, stressed and careless. Not taking care of yourself.

I think we run away from the simple fact of our aging because it's a reminder of the simple fact of our inevitable deaths.

Why bother with tans? With straight teeth and perfect eyebrows? If all we're doing is running away from our own mortality, making ourselves look instagram-ready isn't going to help us do anything. Life is short. So we'd better spend it doing useful things rather than preening and primping.

And that's why I can't wait to be old, really; because, I think, by the time I get there, I'll have done stuff worth talking about. Being old will be proof I've made it through this turbulent, tumultuous journey called youth. I'll have all the best stories to tell, and an old face will be an invitation for you to hear them.

Anecdotally... 3: I hated school.

I can hear my mother on the phone at the moment, talking to my cousin. My cousin is ten years older than me, married with children, forever involved in the dramas that come of growing up in a middle-class world and suddenly finding yourself shut out from it.

My mother is talking about my cousin's kids, and what they'll be like when they grow up. She recommends waiting for something until her oldest is 12.

"By the time he's 12, he'll be out playing with friends," she said.

That assumes that, at 12, you have friends.

Friends probably come from school, when you're that age. At 12, in my first year of secondary school, I hated it. And I'm not saying that in the way that everyone hates school at 12 years old, when they resent the idea of being kept indoors on sunny days and having to give up Mondays in order to learn long division.

I hated school in a real, visceral way, that manifested itself in aches and pains and dizzying headaches. I hated the institution, the stuck-up natures of the people there, the unsympathetic teachers and the boring, banal homework we were given every evening. I hated the cliques, the childishness of everyone trying to act grown up, the forgotten invites to parties and the over-reactions to harmless remarks.

School is not a place for the strange. School, at 12, is not a place for the make-up shunning sports-failing sarcasm-dripping misfit. I excelled academically, hated every minute of it, and was too wrapped up in my own misery to try and reach out and make friends. Self-pity enveloped me. I hated school then, but looking back, I hate Past Me just as much. She should have tried harder.

I would go so far as to say I hate most of my past selves, and everything from 12 to 16 should be destroyed, erased from my past. I cringe when people bring those years up. Then, I lived for music, and gigs: they were a driving passion which obliterated all other thoughts from my mind. I fiercely defended friends I made through them, but now we've drifted so far apart I can barely remember their names. Some have changed so much that I wonder why I liked them in the first place, and conclude it was the mutual sense of not fitting in. Society had abandoned us, so we in turn cast out the conventions we were meant to adhere to.

School is the best days of your life, according to my mother.

I have no doubt that was true for her, affable and small and pleasant and good at tennis. An in-between sort of girl, not too cool or too clever but just enough of everything to be generally likable. She had part-time jobs and friends and a place on a nursing course before she even sat her A-levels.

I think adults misrepresent school. We're fed this bullshit from such a young age - that it is the best time of your life - that I felt guilty for not liking it. I felt like I was wasting a valuable chance, spunking away a childhood of youth and freedom on things that did not matter. Even now, I get jealous when people talk fondly about their early teenage years: I hated everything up till 17, when I shook off the loner victim mentality and proclaimed introversion to be too emo.

We can't put youth on a pedestal just because we retroactively yearn for it. Sure, sometimes I miss school, but only as an abstract notion. I miss the concept of playgrounds and half-terms and being with your friends five days a week. I don't miss the reality of backstabbing bitchiness and chronic sick-days due to my total, actual inability to face the world some days.

University was what kept me going. The prospect of it, golden and radiant, and predicating a good school education to get there. I got there. The institution of secondary school was worth it, and I am truly genuinely happy now (or, at least, working on it). I only hope to get happier.

I hope my cousin's son is happier at 12 than I was. I hope I am never that miserable again. But I take issue with all blanket proclamations that school years are the best years of your life. You can't spend life assuming your best days are behind you: all of my best days are to come, and will still be to come, for as long as I live. What's life without something to look forward to?

The first existential crisis of exam season.

Ah, if only I had the same focus in revision as I do in writing rambling blog posts.

There are many problems with the exam culture that has permeated education, and the most pernicious issue we face is that they are nothing like the real world. Yes, in keeping with the idea that young people know nothing about the real world, exams are structured in a manner that has no realistic semblance of anything which occurs beyond education.

Exams are like machines. You put the Right Thing in, and Good Marks come out. You are obedient and compliant and you spend your days sat in front of books and computers instead of going out getting high on life and other noxious substances - because that is the Right Thing To Do. And we all know if you do the Right Thing, you get Good Marks.

It's not right. It is so not right. Admittedly I am writing this as a form of procrastination, but right now I'm finding it hard to visualise what use literary theories will have in the rest of my life, unless I devote myself to the pursuit of academia. Post-modernism itself is dull as dishwater: it is only useful when considered as part of a grand narrative (which it, itself, so scrupulously rejects). Is our world postmodern or post-post-modern? Can we actually tell? And, most pressingly: does it matter?

I think that's what all exam questions should boil down to. X: Does It Matter?

Examples:

The Feinmann Diagram: Does It Matter?

Freud's Theory of Dreams: Does It Matter?

What Caused World War 2: Does It Matter?

You can argue - yes or no, or maybe or somewhat - but it shouldn't matter, so long as you can back up our arguments with opinions and evidence and feeling. You can relate it to the wider world, and talk about the importance or lack thereof. Ideas that followed from it, ideas it influenced, ideas it completely destroyed. In the grand scheme of things, maybe it doesn't matter much how to do a basic titration experiment - but you could argue its technique can be applied to times when it does matter, or that it is a waste of time invented to keep children busy at GCSE.

Education should be about teaching people to think, not to fall into line with what is expected. I want university to tell me to rail against the system. Examine the questions we are asked, and ask why it's important. Ask what is important. Have passion and conviction.

A lot of the time, I feel like I have no conviction left. It has been sucked out of me. I know how to pass my English exam, but I don't particularly want to: I would rather be out agitating for fairer wages and having torrid flings with widely unsuitable people, because that's really how we learn. By making mistakes and having experiences, not writing set things within an allotted space of time.

Maybe this should all be boiled down to Exams: Do They Matter?

Yes, I suppose they do. They are why I am at university, fundamentally - to get that piece of paper which says I passed exams and know what I am doing well enough to be considered for jobs. But it seems like a terrible waste of youth, to spend it revising.

Once exams are over, my real education of dancing till dawn in strange cities will resume.

And now for something completely different... Haiku.

If you expected my normal brand of snarky self-depreciative musings today, then you're in for a shock. Instead, I went and got creative. I was having fun with my Japanese revision, so... I decided to write some haiku!

You know what a haiku is, right? Or, at least, you know a vague approximation of what counts as a haiku. See, upon deciding to write some haiku in Japanese, I realised there was a load of practices and concepts I didn't actually know about. This only took a cursory Wikipedia search to pull up, and yet we all consider haiku to be a cool, hip poetry form while knowing nothing of its origins and original rules. There are a few main things I found out...

1. In Japanese poetry, haiku are counted in on - which are not quite the same as syllables. So, while the 5-7-5 pattern is how they operate, a Japanese 7-on line may not be a 7-syllable line. For instance:

それがかわいいです
sore ga kawaii desu 
(That is cute.)

In English, you'd say that "so-ray ga ka-wa-i des", so it appears to fit as a middle line of haiku.
But in Japanese - even though you'd say it the same way - it contains 9 on. Conveniently, on seem to correspond pretty well to hiragana characters.

2. Traditionally, Japanese haiku have a kigo - a seasonal reference. There are long lists of motifs which are shorthand for various seasons in ways which may not immediately make sense to Westerners. Frogs mean spring, the moon means autumn, and these aren't used nearly as often in modern works apparently. Still, it's interesting to think about.

3. Kiru, or "cutting". This is the essence of haiku, often brought about through use of a kireji (cutting word). It sort of relies on juxtaposition with a word in between them to act as a verbal punctuation mark and indicate some sort of relation. I'll admit, I didn't manage to use many kireji in my compositions as I'm still too concerned with getting Japanese grammar passably correct, but maybe if I write more I'll work on it.

TL;DR: There are seasonal references, a cutting word, and 14 on in a 5-7-5 configuration. Here's some stuff I wrote, complete with syllable-accurate translations (that took a few liberties with my original Japanese). Knock yourself out.

-

多い 人
の 世界 です や
君 に あった 。

Ooi hito
no sekai desu ya
kimi ni atta.

There are so many
People in the world - and yet
I (somehow) met you.

-

この 言葉

をかきます。けど

見る かしら。

kono kotoba

o kakimasu, kedo

miru kashira.

I write these words now

But I still wonder whether

You ever see them.

-

花びらを

落ちる。あなたも

失うか。

hanabira o

ochiru. anata mo

ushinau ka?

The cherry blossoms

All fall to the ground. Do I

Have to lose you too?

-

こっちと一緒

に月に多分

飛びますか。

kocchi to issho

ni tsuki ni tabun

tobimasu ka?

Eventually

Will you come and fly away

To the moon with me?