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The so-called “Blue Boy trial” in 1965 was a landmark moment for trans visibility in Japan. Now it has become a landmark film, directed by Kasho Iizuka, a transgender man and one of very few queer film-makers working in the commercial Japanese film industry.
The original legal case concerned a doctor who was prosecuted for performing gender reassignment surgery on transgender women, amid law enforcement frustrations that female-presenting transgender sex workers could not be prosecuted for their profession due to their being legally male. The doctor was found guilty of violating Japan’s eugenics laws, which prohibited surgeries resulting in sterilisation if they were deemed inessential. “Blue Boy”was a slang term for transgender individuals assigned male at birth, and the verdict effectively outlawed gender reassignment surgery in Japan until 1998. Despite this, the case raised the domestic profile of transgender people.
“The trial has slipped into obscurity in Japan, but I’ve known about it since I first became aware of my identity,” says Iizuka. “These days in Japan you can hear the term LGBTQ in everyday conversation. Back in the 60s, when no such terms were used, there were still people who bravely lived openly [queer] lives. I felt that present-day Japanese people ought to know that these people existed.”
Iizuka made his feature film debut in 2011, but his pitches of transgender stories were for the most part unsuccessful at first. Then later in the decade, films about transgender individuals became something of a trend, with films such as Naoko Ogigami’s Close-Knit and Eiji Uchida’s Midnight Swan shining a spotlight on issues facing trans people. “There was a problem with that trend,” says Iizuka. “Transgender tragedy was used as entertainment, and their existence was depicted in a one-dimensional, othered way.” Nonetheless, the success of these films meant that Blue Boy Trial was greenlit. Distributed by major studio Nikkatsu, it is a landmark Japanese film.
Unlike its domestic forebears, which cast cisgender men in archetypal transfeminine roles, Blue Boy Trial features trans actors – many non-professional – in trans roles, and seeks to represent a broad spectrum of experiences. “The characters are equally inspired by present-day transgender women and those of the 1960s,” says Iizuka. There was little archival material to consult, with Iizuka turning to weekly magazines and newspapers to understand the set of characters. “As I researched, I found that transgender women of the 1960s had similarly varied attitudes towards their own identities. Some were open; some treated their trans identity as a secret.”
Iizuka says there were significant differences in the way they dealt with society. “Transgender women in 1960s Japan tended to overexpress their femininity to be accepted as women,” he says. “But it was important to us to emphasise the commonality between then and now.”
Iizuka and his co-writers grew just as interested in those opposed to trans people, and their deeper research pointed to Japan’s wartime experience as a potential reason for the backlash. “Men should be men, and strong – they internalised these values,” says Iizuka. “I don’t think the blame lies with the individual, I think it was a wider problem.”
Iizuka hopes his film will inspire further change, and it’s heartening to see that Blue Boy Trial may not be an isolated case in Japan. A biopic of transgender TV personality Ai Haruna, This Is I, is currently showing on Netflix. Its director, Yusaku Matsumoto, is not transgender himself, but he consulted queer voices to ensure sensitivity and accuracy. “I do think this is a wave,” says Iizuka. “I’ve received proposals for new projects that would cast transgender actors. There’s momentum.”
This cultural momentum is aided greatly by domestic advances in trans rights. In 2023, mandatory sterilisation for trans-identifying individuals was deemed unconstitutional by the Japanese supreme court. “The 2023 rulings were milestones for the transgender community, but we’ve faced a backlash,” says Iizuka. “There have been fears around how we maintain safety for women’s spaces, and there are difficulties around changing gender markers on family registers. We’re 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.”
