Hashing It All Out at the Fuwa Cafe

The "Fuwa" of Fuwa Café refers to all those hard-to-articulate thoughts and feelings associated with gender and sexuality. Like when you feel that the term LGBT does not quite describe you. Or when you join in with "the LGBT community" but it just doesn't seem to be the place for you. Fuwa Café was born of my desire to create a space for sharing such doubts, anxieties, and feelings of loneliness that I had experienced myself but couldn't clearly articulate. Perhaps by sharing them I could come to understand and accept them. So the leaflets we distributed about the event avoided any rigid definitions of identity. Instead, we used phrases such as, "I'm not really interested in romantic relationships," and "I don't want my sexuality to be defined in any particular way," in order to welcome diverse forms of gender and sexuality. Moreover, our official mascot "Fuwarin," who was created by a former ICU undergraduate student, Marie Okubo, also highlights the more casual and relaxed nature of Fuwa Café compared to other CGS events.

We decided to hold the Fuwa Café after CGS business hours so that participants would feel more relaxed and comfortable. We appointed two coordinators and established several ground rules as follows: (1) What's said at the café stays at the café; (2) Remember that people are diverse: don't dismiss other people's opinions; (3) It's ok to just talk or just listen; and (4) Don't talk about anything you don't want to talk about; don't give up just because you couldn't talk about it today. In addition, we eventually decided to set a particular topic each time to help focus the discussion on gender and sexuality.

Although we weren't sure how many people would come, there have been about 5-20 participants at each meeting, including quite a few people who were new to CGS. We've had numerous joyful moments, like people telling us that the café had enabled them to talk about some things for the first time, or seeing others who'd started off just listening to the discussions gradually opening up and finding a way to articulate their vague, undefined thoughts and feelings.
As a coordinator, what I find most difficult is trying to avoid coercing people to talk about things they don't want to talk about, while at the same time trying to ensure that people can freely talk about things they do want to talk about. Especially at times when I've been personally invested in a topic, I admit that I voiced my opinions too loudly and was unable to secure an atmosphere in which others could openly share their own doubts and uncertainties. Finding effective ways to help capture and articulate what is vague and undefined remains an important challenge for me to tackle.

One highlight for us was the "Shucchō (Traveling) Fuwa Café @ Gaidai" at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS) in February 2014, which focused on the topic of "Job Hunting and Gender and Sexuality." It was a collaboration born of a casual discussion I had with Emiko Karakawa, who was a graduate student at TUFS at the time. She told me that her university didn't have a place like CGS where people could hang out and talk about gender and sexuality. At this Traveling Fuwa Café, some of the participants spoke nervously, selecting each word with great care, while others enthusiastically unleashed their burdens and frustrations. I felt that they had all come to participate with high hopes and expectations. We plan to continue and expand the Fuwa Café concept in future, discussing different topics and dashing out to hold more collaborative Traveling Fuwa Cafés outside ICU.