TL;DR: Shinjuku Boys is an award-winning documentary about the lives of transmasculine and gender-nonconforming individuals working as hosts in Japan. Thirty years later, as the world sees a dramatic uptick in anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation and sentiment, co-director Kim Longinotto looks back on her behind-the-scenes joy shooting the film.
“Growing up I wanted to be a writer. Then I went to university to study literature and realised I wasn’t a writer… So I chose the next best thing: telling stories through the camera.”
Sitting on a video call with British-born documentary filmmaker Kim Longinotto, I have a perfect window into the office of her London flat, her flatmate’s guitar perched against a wall in the background. Longinotto is wearing a sweater against the morning chill, and I’ve got my heater cranked against a not-much-warmer Tokyo evening.
At 74, Longinotto boasts a career of over twenty-five documentary films and is currently sussing out her next project. Her documentaries often centre on resilient and rebellious women or gender-nonconforming individuals, and always use elements of cinéma vérité: minimal directorial invasion and interviewing, focusing instead on subjects’ conversations.
While many of Longinotto’s films have received awards and critical acclaim over the years, her and co-director Jano Williams’ 1995 documentary, Shinjuku Boys, is often considered one of the most groundbreaking in LGBTQIA+ cinema and queer studies, offering audiences a glimpse into the world of Japan’s transmasculine queer community of the late 20th century.
Together with Longinotto and Williams, countless viewers have experienced seven weeks in the lives of Gaish, Kazuki, and Tatsu.
The three identify as onabe hosts working at the New Marilyn Club. onabe is no considered an outdated term but it described a range of queer AFAB identities of that era, ranging from butch lesbians to transgender men. Hosting, meanwhile, is a ‘water trade’ industry wherein glamorous staff converse with, entertain, and date paying clientele.
Throughout the documentary, the three onabe show their working lives at the club, their relationships with patrons and girlfriends, and their friendships with one another. Some of the scenes are lively and fun. Others, like Gaish discussing their dysfunctional relationship with their parents or Kazuki reconnecting with his estranged mother over the phone, present shocking vulnerability.
“I would never convince anyone [to participate in a documentary],” Longinotto says. “I would never pressure anybody. It was just that Jano was so fabulous–we just went and stood and talked for a bit in the club… It was an intense moment, and I remember looking around at all these beautiful boys, just thinking ‘I hope someone says yes!’ And three of them came forward. They chose us.”
It was this unique intimacy and trust between subject and documentary filmmaker that lends Shinjuku Boys the empathetic quality that still impacts us today. QueerAF got the opportunity to sit down with Longinotto and learn more about the directorial ethics and practices she and Williams employed to make Shinjuku Boys a film that conveys not only the experiences of the marginalised, but their humanity.
Documentary Filmmaking in Japan
Longinotto first met Williams, her future collaborator, filming her first documentary project in Japan: Eat the Kimono, following artist, feminist, and rebel Hanayagi Genshu II who was imprisoned for stabbing a dance teacher as a protest.
“This was very early on when I’d just started making films,” Longinotto says. “I read this article about him… and I thought, ‘God, I’d love to make a film about Hanayagi Genshu.’”
Due to the taboos Genshu had committed and the social class hierarchy in Japan, however, Longinotto struggled to find Japanese interpreters and translators who would work with her, or who would not speak to Genshu in a condescending or belittling way.
“How I sorted that out was I went with people from the outside. It works in a lot of cases and not in others: you go with an outsider who’s not part of the system, so they won’t trigger these things.”
A mutual friend introduced Longinotto to Williams, who had lived in Japan since 1974 and was fluent in the language. The pair instantly connected and found they could work together wonderfully.
“She was a really fabulous person,” Longinotto says. “She had learned Japanese from her boyfriend so she spoke masculine Japanese, rough and casual… Genshu loved her.”
The pair ended up putting out a series of documentaries based on Japan: Eat the Kimono (1989), Dream Girls (1994), Shinjuku Boys (1995), and Gaea Girls (2000).
Shinjuku Boys
Shinjuku Boys grew directly out of their preceding film, Dream Girls, which explored the all-female Takarazuka theatre. Longinotto recalls that the main subject of Dream Girls was the dashing star Maya Miki, who always performed male roles. Perhaps noticing how Longinotto and Williams would blush every time she entered the room, Miki suggested they check out the New Marilyn Club and its onabe hosts for their next documentary.
“We called the woman who ran the New Marilyn Club, and she said, ‘Oh, you can come, but no one will let you film then,’” says Longinotto. “They’d all had horrible experiences with the media. But she said we could take the risk and come see, so that’s just what we did.”
It was true that the three hosts who would become the subjects of Shinjuku Boys had had terrible experiences with media coverage. Gaish, in particular, had been the subject of a humiliating Japanese TV program that had entered their apartment and filmed the contents of their underwear drawer. They had been deeply hurt.
But Williams was able to thaw the barrier, introducing the documentary team and telling the hosts about their own lives as well.
“I remember Gaish saying, ‘Well, Jano looked like us,’” Longinotto smiles. “Jano had very short hair, and was very tall and spindly. And I think they just thought, ‘We’ve had such bad experiences with being filmed, let’s just give it a go.”
The team had a limited budget and only seven and a half weeks to produce an hour’s worth of footage. Longinotto describes staying in tiny, cheap rooms and filming non-stop from the first day they arrived.
The two were up many nights with worry about whether they would get the material they needed in time. She also relates having to replace their two sound recording technicians, who were irritable about the “ramshackle” set-up of her small filmmaking operation and judgemental about the three hosts’ lifestyles and gender identities.
In spite of these pitfalls, she recalls Shinjuku Boys as one of the most pleasurable films she’s ever made. She particularly bonded with Gaish, with whom she felt she had a great deal in common such as being estranged from her parents at a young age. Particularly moving to her was the moment in the film when “Gaish started talking [on camera] about how they wanted their parents to see them and think ‘maybe they’re worth something.’ That had been their main reason to agree to the film all along.”
Over time, Gaish, Kazuki, and Tatsu began trusting Longinotto and Williams more, and began inviting them along on more activities: Tatsu at the barber, Gaish having spicy conversations with needy patrons, Kazuki introducing his transwoman partner and reconciling with his mother by phone. Gaish and Tatsu relate, in separate interviews, their relationships with sex, their bodies, and gender dysphoria. In one particularly vulnerable scene with a girlfriend, Gaish says, “Why am I like this, I wonder?”
“That’s why I love making films really, it’s such a privilege,” Longinotto tells me. “I remember Jano saying to me, ‘I love making this film because I’ve been living in Japan for thirteen years and I’ve never been that close to anybody besides my boyfriend’… It was really special the way these three boys just took us into their lives.”
Thirty Years Later
While Shinjuku Boys’s chunky business suits, massive cell phones, and bouffant hairstyles speak of a Tokyo long passed, audiences continue to be drawn to the work: studying the piece for ethnographic insight into Japanese onabe culture, connecting with the three subjects’ lives, or finding parts of themselves and their own questions about gender and identity.
Particularly as many places in the world such as the UK move backward with anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation and become increasingly unsafe for our most vulnerable, many find the voices of the three onabe and the precious, private lives they have carved out all the more moving.
It is also interesting to contrast the film’s legacy with that of other famous queer documentaries over the decades, such as the controversial 1990 Paris is Burning by Jennie Livingston–another celebrated piece, but one that many ballroom individuals have come to find voyeuristic. One of the great strengths of Longinotto’s career is the closeness and degree of collaboration and consent she secures with her subjects.
Outside the magic of film, time has marched onward. Longinotto’s career as a documentarian blossomed in the decades since Shinjuku Boys and took her all over the world. Williams moved back to the United Kingdom with her family, eventually moving to Wales to look after her mother. In 2024, Longinotto received news that Williams had passed away.
“It was so sudden, I still think of her as being alive,” she says. “I was so devastated when she died and felt so guilty I hadn’t gone to see her. We all get so tied up in our lives, and if someone lives far away…”
Longinotto also thinks about Gaish, Kazuki, and Tatsu with affection and hopes they are all happy; due to language barriers, she has not been able to keep in touch over the years.
Regardless, she credits the depth and relatability of their stories with the film’s staying power. As Harvey Milk once said, “Once they realise that we are indeed their children, that we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and all.” Longinotto expresses a similar sentiment: the hope that the impact of her films’ storytelling is to bring out the humanity of the people she works with and to open minds.
“I think people keep choosing the film because they like the people in it,” she says. “ I’m hoping you fall in love with them. That people from completely different backgrounds and places will make a link with the audience and open their minds. I think that’s the role of film.”
