kaedesan721:

The novels have always described Jiro with he and him pronouns in even the Japanese language, and honestly, I’ve never seen an okama character described with any other pronoun.

Now I should have done this when I first mentioned it and tried to explain the term. It’s just….very difficult. And I checked with someone else that knows about Japanese culture, and they had the exact same idea of how I perceive the term, but I also looked up how Japanese people have described it.

To begin with, okama is its own specific term for the Japanese which has quite a bit of history. During the Edo period, it was a term to describe male prostitutes, hence it
still does have a derogatory meaning. It can be really insulting to call a
transwoman an okama, for instance. In the 1970s and 1980s the term
started to be used as a slang term for describing effeminate gay men.

And it can still be used in that way.

However, the term okama also covers a male who dresses and behaves like a woman. I’ve seen dictionaries try to translate okama as gay man, effeminate man,
and male transvestite.The problem is, the term okama is much too broad and covers some people in the homosexual field and the transgender field, which makes it a little difficult to accurately portray to other cultures. Even if someone were to assume all okama are gay, not all male homosexuals can be called okama, and if you do, then the term is being used in a derogatory way again. I should mention that I’ve mainly seen Japanese sources mention that it’s both a term to describe effeminate gay men and males who use feminine words, but I’ve also seen some sources just coining the term as males who use feminine speech and/or dress femininely, the latter of which define the differences among transsexual, ‘gay’ (the English term), and a term called
nyuuhaafu (ニューハーフ), which refers to to a transvestite or drag queen performer.

While we as westerns have the stereotype of gay males acting femininely, being an okama is more than having the tone of a female when you speak like in English. The Japanese language is an extremely gender aware and gender biased language by its nature from the multitude of first person gender pronouns they have to the non-existent words in English that can only be used by one gender. This is so much so that it’s virtually impossible to be gender neutral in that language without sounding too proper and unnatural. I know this from experience. I have a gender as a Japanese speaker even though I identify as non-binary as an English speaker. Even if I want to use masculine pronouns and speech patterns, I would be corrected, not just because I’m a non-native speaker, but because there is that much of a bias of relating ones gender to your sex. I’m saying all this to really illustrate the idea of how hard it is to go against this norm even in just in terms of speaking on a day-to-day basis let alone behavior or how you dress yourself. Personally I think trying to live as a transgender person in Japan or in this case, an okama, is especially challenging and even harder to make the commitment to come out and stay true to yourself (though on that note, it has been getting better over the recent years).

Now since many okama are assumed to be gay, it’s still a high possibility Jiro is homosexual. However, I’ve seen instances of okama being bisexual too, for instance. And more importantly, the mention of Jiro’s lover was also set up in a way where it could go in either direction. While Saitou assumes Jiro is gay because he is an okama, it’s never confirmed what gender and/or sex Jiro’s lover was. There is room for Jiro to still be homosexual, and I’d say it’s leaning that way, but I can’t say that’s 100% confirmed until it’s either directly stated or we know anything about Jiro’s interests and past lovers. I don’t think Kisaki is afraid to mention if Jiro was gay, considering she already has a confirmed homosexual character. She’s only ever described Jiro as an okama, and Jiro has only referred to himself as one.

It’s because of the too broad of a description and usage of the term okama that I personally can’t recommend translating it as gay man, especially since you can’t always use it for all or even a portion of male homosexuals. Even though I understand why it would be translated that way given its origins, I also feel it’s inevitably misleading in a lot of ways. To me, it seems like being an okama is just a form of identity at the very least and not exclusively a term to refer to someone’s sexuality. I imagine it’s still going to be hard to grasp, but this is the best I can offer some insight on it from my knowledge on the subject.