On September 29, Rui Takahashi, a Japanese volleyball player for the Suntory Sunbirds (a team in Japan’s top professional league, the SV.League), announced on Instagram that he is “gay and a member of the sexual minority.“
Takahashi is the first member of a men’s team sport in Japan to come out, and one of only eight Japanese athletes to openly speak about his sexuality, making his coming out an event with repercussions all over the world.
Following Takahashi’s announcement, fellow SV.League player Reon Arao also posted to Instagram, stating that he felt more closely represented by the Q (queer) in LGTBQ both with regards to sexuality and to gender identity.
This would not have been an easy undertaking for either athlete; though the 2020s have seen an increase in conversation among male athletes about sexuality (Carl Nassib in the NFL, Josh Cavallo in the Australian A-League, and Luke Prokop in the NHL, for example) there still exists a culture of homophobia in sport.
Eric Anderson’s In the Game: Gay Athletes and the Cult of Masculinity theorizes that “sport…is one of the last bastions of cultural and institutional homophobia” with its dependence on a kind of “hypermasculinity” centred around violence and physical dominance.
Within that system, coming out is not just an announcement of identity but a challenge against prevailing assumptions that govern ideas of belonging in sports culture. The continued rarity of openly gay male athletes indicates that there still needs to be a significant change in male sporting culture.
Additionally, Takahashi’s coming out contends with Japan’s own socially conservative culture. Japan remains the only G7 country that does not fully recognise same-sex marriage or offer legal protection for LGBTQ couples and individuals. Takahashi’s visibility challenges this by making LGBTQ identities harder to ignore within a prominent national sporting context. His announcement cannot, by itself, resolve Japan’s legal and social inequalities, but is an important stepping stone toward changing attitudes surrounding LGBTQ identities in Japan.
One such attitude is the pressure for LGBTQ issues to remain private in order to preserve social harmony. As Masami Tamagawa notes, while there is an assumed culture of tolerance or ‘kanyō’ to sexual diversity in Japan, tolerance is not the same as acceptance. In her Coming Out of the Closet in Japan: An Exploratory Sociological Study’ the data indicates that an overwhelming majority of LGBTQ people prefer not to come out, due to a lack of knowledge surrounding LGBTQ issues.
If LGBTQ people feel compelled to conceal their identities, then tolerance amounts to little more than a demand for discretion. Takahashi’s coming out is in direct resistance of these expectations, asserting that LGBTQ should not have to choose between authenticity and social acceptance.
Takahashi’s announcement should be recognised as more than hopeful step towards progress: it is an outright indictment of the social conditions that have made such a step necessary. That a prominent male athlete coming out in Japan is so notable reveals just how indisputable heteronormative expectations are in men’s sport. The potential he demonstrates for wider LGBTQ representation, particularly in Japan, is precious, but it would be a mistake to treat individual courage as a sufficient solution to systemic discrimination.
In challenging the culture of silence surrounding queerness in Japan, Takahashi has made his play; the responsibility now lies with sporting organisations and policymakers to ensure that he is not an exception.
Photo by Tanushree Rao on Unsplash under the Unsplash license.
