Musuta Kusaka's Everyday Journey with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Japan

It had been 25 years since I last visited the university. The campus was filled with the same pious atmosphere as before, and even the hot afternoon sun streaming in through the windows felt divine.

Meiji Gakuin University in Shirokane, Tokyo. I was in a large classroom on the day of the Rainbow Festival 2025, which was being held in June and where I heard that the film “Kumu Hina” would be screened as part of the festival.

The movie was so wonderful that it was worth taking the train to see it. The setting is Hawaii. It is a documentary that follows Hina, who inherits the culture to children as a mahu.

In Native Hawaiian culture, a mahu is someone who is between a woman and a man, or who has the strength of both sexes. They have been respected since ancient times, and although they do not necessarily match completely, in our culture, the closest thing may be transgender or non-binary.

The story unfolds along two axes: Hina’s difficult love and marriage, and her interactions with her fellow mahu student Honani.

The film also portrays multiple social issues, such as the history and culture of the Hawaiian people, the environment surrounding sexual minorities, and the disparity between urban and non-urban areas. Although it is a Hawaiian film, the audience will realize that “Japan has the same problems,” and be forced to think deeply. Also, you will want to lecture Hina’s husband Hema.

Apparently the English version is available on YouTube, but I was really lucky to be able to watch it at a screening. The beauty of Hawaii, Hina’s struggles, and the excitement of the dance all really hit home on a big screen.

After the screening, while I was feeling the heat of having seen a masterpiece, a female student came up to the podium. She must have been one of the Rainbow Festival’s staff. She announced to the audience on the microphone, “There will also be an after-talk.” Young people these days are not afraid to stand in front of people.

That cheerful demeanor reminded me of K-ko. 25 years ago, K-ko was my girlfriend and a student of Meiji Gakuin. It was also on that scorching summer day that I introduced her to S-kun.

“Can you lend me your car today?” I asked S-kun, who was crushed by the heat on the sofa.

S-kun was a manager at an apparel store and my mother’s boyfriend. He was a trans man who lived his life as a man, not the woman he was assigned at birth. We lived together as a family for about six or seven years.

So that day, I was about to borrow his car as casually as if I was borrowing it from my father. “I’m thinking of going to the beach now.” “Don’t get into an accident. Who are you with?” “My girlfriend. She’s coming over to here after this.” “Oh? Really?”

At the time, I was 20 years old, and S-kun was in his late 20s. I talked to him more than my mother. As for K-ko, I was casual, like I was introducing her to my older brother or a senior. Also, I borrowed his car on his day off. It was good manners for a family to at least let him know where we were going and who was going to be in the car.

The doorbell rang, and S-kun stood up before me. When I opened the front door, there was K-ko, with her upper arms exposed from her camisole.

“Nice to meet you. I’m K-ko. Musuta-san has taken care of me.” She bowed. A high-pitched voice echoed through the ceiling. “Oh. The pleasure is mine — thank you for taking care of Musuta.” “Would you like to come to the beach with us, too, S-san?” She quickly got close after meeting for the first time. That’s the kind of person K-ko was. Friendly and instinctive. A genius at getting close to people. She was so innocent that it was hard to tell whether she was thinking deeply or not. Even when I told her about S-kun in advance, she just said, “Oh, I see.”

On the other hand, S-kun seemed frank, but he had a tendency to judge people harshly. He could gauge the distance between him and the other person from just a few words on their first meeting. It was a skill for an apparel store manager. But more than that, it may have been a defense instinct for him to survive. At times, he would close the shutters of his heart with a sound. So I decided to end our meeting early and go out before any good or bad came out. But…

S-kun asks me with just his eyes. (Is it okay?) First of all, I’m glad that S-kun didn’t close the shutter. Secondly, his eyes are already ready to go. I can’t say that just the car is enough now. I nodded my head while hanging my head. “Shall we go together?” “Okay! I’ll pay for the gas.”

In exchange, I was the one driving. A Nissan Rasheen that smelled of smoke. Our destination was Enoshima. S-kun took out a cassette adapter from the dashboard and in a good mood pressed the button on the MD player.

– A road that runs on dreams. A journey to tomorrow. The colors of the towns that pass. Days of memories

In the end, the three of us played all day that day. And we talked a lot. It was like we went to the sea to laugh ourselves silly.

How did you know each other? How long have you been dating? What do you like about Musuta? A question and answer session between S-kun and K-ko. The three of us laughed at the answers.

The blue sky, the warm sand, the sound and smell of the waves, it was a weekday beach that seemed to be all reserved for us, so we had a lot of confidence. It was just the time when the phrase “to be honest” started to become popular on TV.

In the car on the way back, exhausted from the direct sunlight. As we entered Tokyo, S-kun turned to K-ko in the back seat. “Thank you so much for today. You see, I don’t have any friends. It was so much fun.” Now that he said that, I had never heard S-kun talk about his friends until then. He only went out to eat at year-end and New Year parties. What did he think about going back and forth between work and home every day? Or maybe he tried not to think about it. I realized that I had never thought about it.

He said that he hadn’t seen his classmates since leaving his hometown after graduating from junior high school.
“I don’t want my old friends to call me S-ko, do you?” He
lost touch with his friends from beauty school after S-kun changed jobs to the apparel industry. Now that he’s the manager, he’s surrounded by younger staff members. “You won’t be able to make friends anymore once you start working. You should treasure the friends you have now,”
S-kun said as he opened the driver’s map and searched for a route to K-chan’s house.

K-ko responded with a non-informational “Hmm,” and then stuck her head out from between the driver’s seat and the passenger seat, saying, “Let’s go out for a drink together sometime .” S-kun exaggeratedly got excited and said, “You told me so! You’ll definitely do it!” It was a summer promise between the three of us.

I wonder if summer promises can be fulfilled so quickly.
The next week, K-ko came to my house with beer and snacks in both hands. “Oh! Welcome!” “You can’t have summer without beer, right?” You drink beer even in winter, right? It seems that S-kun and K-ko had come to an agreement. Without telling me.

That night, K-ko was at her boyfriend’s parents’ house, a completely foreign place, and she put on a party that was representative of the Heisei era’s college students. What’s more, my mother, who had just come home from work, witnessed her drunken, and miraculously, she was impressed by her courage. This genius at winning people’s hearts was the type who got stronger the more she drank.
“I thought K-ko would fit in with the style of our family,”
said S-kun, who was also completely drunk.

For the next few years, S-kun called K-ko “daughter-in-law” and they continued to be friends. The three of them would often go back and forth drinking together. My mother told me that even when K-ko and I decided to break up, S-kun silently apologized to K-ko.

When I left the campus after the after-talk following the screening, the heat of a midsummer day lingered in the rain. When I met K-ko here, I never imagined that it would be a tropical night in June.

Speaking of unimaginable, that was back when I had barely heard or seen the term LGBTQ. I also never imagined that a future would come in which an awareness event about sexual diversity would be held at a Christian university. While we were lost in thought at the beach, someone was moving society forward.

Meiji Gakuin held a Rainbow Festival and I saw a wonderful movie. What would S-kun and K-ko say if I told them that? A student around our age were doing their best at the time.
K-ko would probably just say, “Hmm.”

Remembering the two people I will never see again, I decided to come to the screening next year.