“I would walk hand-in-hand with older students and people would just say, “Oh, how nice.” That’s why I never thought there was anything wrong with homosexuality.”
TRQ: Akihiro Miwa, Born May 15, 1935
Japanese artist, writer and drag queen Akihiro Miwa, visibly recognizable for her vibrant yellow hair, was born in Nagasaki. When the U.S. atomic bomb exploded near his home in 1945, Miwa was only ten years old.
As Miwa explained in an interview with Tokyo Journal,
“Of course it affected me. It was like seeing hell. I lost a lot of my friends and people I knew. I never got keloid scars, but I lost my hair and anemia made me dizzy. I suffered a long time from various side effects. And it changed the way I looked at things. Of course it was big, but for me the biggest experience was my childhood between the ages of one and ten. That’s what made me what I am and the bombing is part of that.”
Miwa learned to sing in elementary school, but dropped out of the Kunitachi College of Music to pursue a professional singing career.
When Miwa left Nagasaki for Tokyo a few years later, he began waiting tables, bartending, and pimping. By 17 he was singing professionally in a cabaret in the the Ginza district. In nightclubs he would sing favourites from Édith Piaf, Yvette Guilbert and Marie Dubas, dressed in an androgynous style that audiences found appealing. In 1957 he covered “Méqué Méqué” in Japanese, and it became a hit thanks in part to his sense of style and fashion. Miwa would go on to write and sing many of his own songs, including “Yoitmake’s Song.”
Before long he caught the attention of writers Yukio Mishima and Shuji Terayama. Mishima’s work deals with homoerotic themes, and he cast his “beauty of the heavenly world” Miwa for a film version of his play Black Lizard in 1968. Miwa plays a female character, a tradition in Kabuki theatre but controversial for films. The Kinji Fukasaku- directed production broke box office records. Miwa became known as one of the first openly gay celebrities in Japanese culture, and was frequently attacked on the streets.
In the 1970’s he started performing “Akihiro Miwa no Sekai” (The World of Akihiro Miwa) at Shibuya Jean-Jean, which continued on until 2000. During the 1980’s he toured frequently throughout France, Spain and Germany.
Miwa’s acting roles continued with voice work in Hayao Miyazaki’s anime films Princess Mononoke and Howl’s Moving Castle, and Takeshi Kitano’s Takeshis (2005). In 2007 he performed in Jean Cocteau’s L’aigle à Deux Têtesas Empress Sisi at the Parco Theatre in Shibuya. In 2009, he voiced the character Pokémon Arceus in Pokémon: Arceus and the Jewel of Life. Between 2005 and 2010 he cohosted the television show Ōra No Izumi (The Spring of Aura).
GQ Japan named Miwa Man of of the Year 2018, and received their Lifetime Achievement award. In 2019, Miwa directed Fur No Marie at the New National Chugoku Theatre in Tokyo, and he was awarded the honorary citizenship title from Tokyo as a way “to show power-war Japan a way of life that transcends gender.”
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