Being gay is simply not a Gender Identity Disorder (GID), as I so would love to believe. Being one is beyond the bound of natural or supernatural hypothesis. Being one is not chosen. You know you are gay when you feel like one.
“If you do not contribute to the army, you are not a man” I was shocked to hear this from my Korean friend’s mother. I had been in South Korea last year as an exchange student to Ewha Womans University. Ewha is a woman’s school as it can be seen by the name, but men can also study if they use exchange program. A few months had passed since I arrived at Korea and I was beginning to realize many similarities between Korea and Japan, so I felt a feeling of discomfort. For example, in terms of language, word order is the same, and particle such as wa, ga, wo, mo are used the same. The concept of “man” however, is quite different in Korea and Japan. Then, why is “man” perceived different?
The official announcement made in July, 2004, reported that the average number of times a woman give birth during her lifetime fell to a new record low of 1.29. As far as I remember, the term “1.53 shock” was all over the newspapers in the beginning of 1990’s, and the intellectuals were literally very shocked that they could not even hide their disappointment:“now the declination of Japanese population is undoubted.” It is to my surprise that almost nothing had done by taking advantage of “useful women’s opinion” against such serious social problem of human reproduction in more than a decade since then. Certainly, it is a matter of congratulation that making choice of not to have any children has been becoming approvable in society. However, here I dear to focus on the circumstance that makes women who are “interested in having one or more children” feel “they cannot” in spite of their thoughts.