Abstract

This article traces the changing meanings of “sister boy” as the term traveled from the United States to Japan in the 1950s. It examines the production and censorship of Tea and Sympathy (1956), MGM Japan’s publicity campaign, biographical accounts of Akihiro Maruyama, and contemporary magazine coverage. In the United States, “sister boy” functioned as a derogatory label for a boy who deviated from the norms of heterosexual masculinity. It also served as a language of the closet, indirectly invoking homosexuality under a regime that prohibited its explicit representation. In Japan, however, the term was detached from this original context and recast through the combination of film publicity and Maruyama’s androgynous stage persona. It came to signify an attractive and fashionable queer figure, while Maruyama’s success contributed to the expansion of gay bars and the growing visibility of “gay boys.” This transformation was made possible by Japan’s existing cultural traditions of gender nonconformity and by the commercial culture of the postwar period. Yet such visibility remained conditional: queer bodies and gender expressions were accepted primarily when packaged as entertainment. The journey of the “sister boy” thus reveals how queer culture in postwar Japan emerged through the simultaneous processes of visibility, marginalization, liberation, and commodification.