Being male in a female world: masculinity and gender in Okinawan shamanism

Abstract

This chapter employs the case of Akihiro, a transgendered boy who was initiated as a shaman as a 14-year-old, to expose a number of culturally specific factors that relate to shamanism, religion, mental health, and gender in Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost prefecture. I am particularly interested in how gender informs people’s choices about how to deal with their psychological or spiritual problems, and what the consequences of these choices are. In Akihiro’s case, a male can present as a female, and in the process become a more legitimate religious practitioner than had he attempted to follow his chosen path as a man, while still being held within the purview of the mental health system. The reasons for this are related to Okinawa’s history, its cultural exposure to shamanism, gender-specific religious knowledges, the open-minded and eclectic belief systems employed by Okinawans, and the interface between Okinawan religion and psychiatric practice. I raise this last issue because gender issues have an impact on psychiatric care in Okinawa. A topic that has generated considerable discussion in Japanese since the 1980s, the impact of shamanic healers’ practices on mental illness in the prefecture, is of particular relevance to this case. While schizophrenia rates are high in Okinawa, the skewed gender results are statistically anomalous: women are less likely to be institutionalized as schizophrenic than men (Ogura 1996).1 It could be argued that this is because more women than men choose to employ religious specialists to intervene in cases which could be diagnosed as schizophrenia. I examine this phenomenon in the context of the case of Akihiro.