The notion that premodern Japan’s warrior class lived by an austere, heterosexual code is a modern fantasy. Historians such as Gary P. Leupp and Gregory Pflugfelder have spent decades reminding us that 男色 (nanshoku, male-male love) and 衆道 (shudō, “the way of youths”) were not hidden vices but openly acknowledged strands of samurai life. In the centuries before the Meiji state imported Victorian morality, samurai culture contained a surprisingly formal, even ritualized, system of homoerotic bonds. These relationships, though structured and celebrated, looked nothing like today’s categories of sexual orientation; they belonged instead to a world where masculinity, loyalty, beauty, and mentorship intertwined in ways that seem startlingly unfamiliar now.
The core of this tradition was the bond between an older warrior, known as the 念者 (nenja, admirer/mentor), and a youth called a 若衆 (wakashū, adolescent boy). Before his 元服 (genpuku, coming-of-age ceremony), the wakashū occupied a socially distinct category: neither child nor adult, recognizable by a particular hairstyle and clothing. He was widely considered an object of beauty and desire, celebrated in literature and art. As Paul Gordon Schalow notes in his translation of Ihara Saikaku’s Nanshoku Ōkagami (The Great Mirror of Male Love), “the adolescent was imagined as the ideal vessel for loyalty, tenderness, and erotic refinement.” Many of Saikaku’s 1687 stories revolve around passionate samurai–wakashū relationships framed as tests of courage and moral fiber.
These bonds were far from casual. Leupp describes them as “contracts of affection and loyalty,” complete with vows of exclusivity, ethical expectations, and social recognition. A nenja often courted a youth with letters, poems, and gifts—tokens meant to demonstrate sincerity and discipline. If the youth accepted, the relationship could include sex, but sex was not the defining component. The real emphasis lay on 義理 (giri, duty), 忠義 (chūgi, loyalty), and the notion that a beloved companion could inspire bravery on the battlefield. Many chronicles portray warriors declaring that they fought more fiercely in the presence—or memory—of their wakashū lovers. In a society where devotion to one’s lord was the highest virtue, shudō bonds were often imagined as emotional training for fealty.
The tradition also drew on monastic precedents. Buddhist temples had long practiced forms of institutionalized male-male relationships between monks and their youthful acolytes, called 稚児 (chigo), and many samurai boys received their early education in temples. Pflugfelder argues that the samurai version of shudō was “both a continuation and a domestication” of monastic practices, reworked into a warrior ethos that linked beauty to valor. By the early Edo period, the cultural system was so well-established that urban commoners imitated it, especially in the pleasure quarters and kabuki theatre. Beautiful male actors, dressed as wakashū, became erotic icons, and male-male love stories circulated as widely as heterosexual ones.
What made these bonds “ritualized” was their structure. A relationship typically ended once the youth underwent genpuku and adopted the adult 髷 (mage, topknot). After that, he could himself become a nenja to a younger boy. Manuals and moral treatises advised both partners to behave with dignity, to avoid jealousy, to maintain secrecy when required, and above all to fulfill obligations. The idea of a modern “gay identity” simply did not exist; many nenja were married men with children, and society saw no contradiction. As Leupp puts it, Tokugawa Japan “did not divide men into heterosexual and homosexual but recognized a wide range of possible desires.”
The Meiji Restoration abruptly changed this landscape. Western sexology, Christianity, and new criminal codes reframed nanshoku as deviant, and public acceptance faded. But the historical record remains thick with letters, visual art, theatre plays, and literary accounts that document an entire world of romantic and erotic practices woven into samurai ethics. Today, scholars regard shudō as one of the most richly documented homoerotic traditions in world history—a reminder that sexuality, like culture itself, has never been static.
Spicy Auntie steps onto this little historical stage with a sigh shaped like a folding fan. Because, my dears, history is a vast attic: open the wrong trunk and you’ll find skeletons with unfiled grievances; open another and you’ll find silk—unexpected softness, surprising beauty. The story of 衆道 (shudō), of samurai male–male love, is exactly that layered attic. Scholars like Gary Leupp and Gregory Pflugfelder have done the archaeological heavy lifting, brushing away the dust of nationalist myth, Victorian prudery, and modern online nonsense to reveal something complex, elegant, and startlingly human. Bless them. Without such scholars, we’d still be staring at a cartoonish Japan: cherry blossoms, stoic warriors, and zero nuance.
And yet—because your Auntie is constitutionally incapable of giving you the fairy-tale version—there is a cautionary bell that must be rung. Let’s not romanticize these men too much. Yes, their emotional and erotic bonds were richer than the modern stereotype allows. Yes, the written oaths, the poems, the ethical codes of loyalty and tenderness reveal a society capable of holding beauty in one hand while wielding a sword in the other. But the same warrior class that treated tender male desire as a refining art also treated women as domestic furniture. A wakashū could be adored as a blossoming ideal; a wife could be discarded, confined, or entirely excluded from the emotional life of her husband. That’s not a footnote—it’s the shadow cast by the entire edifice of samurai masculinity.
Because let’s be honest: toxic masculinity is an equal-opportunity oppressor. It can suffocate queer possibilities and simultaneously exploit them. It can elevate male–male love into poetry while denying women legal rights, bodily autonomy, and social standing. Auntie says this with affection but also with heat: do not let the beauty of shudō distract you from the patriarchal machinery humming underneath. Those warriors were capable of great passion, but also great cruelty—especially toward the women who cooked their meals, bore their children, and had little recourse when neglected or mistreated.
Still, knowing this doesn’t invalidate the historical truth that Japan once held a far more pluralistic understanding of love and desire than its later modernizers could tolerate. It simply reminds us that liberation is always uneven. Queer men may have found moments of sanctuary within samurai culture, but Japanese women were still pressed into tight boxes labeled “obedience,” “silence,” and “duty.” And, as your Auntie often says, a society can’t call itself evolved until all its daughters—and sons and everyone in between—are free to love without fear and to live without hierarchy.
So study the beauty, admire the poetry—but keep your feminist lens polished, sweetlings. History is gorgeous only when you shine light into every corner.