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BLUE BOY TRIAL

By Kasho IIZUKA

NIKKATSU CORPORATION - as SALES All rights, World

Historical - Completed 2025

This is a story inspired by true events.

- Year of production
- 2025
- Genres
- Historical, Social issues, LGBT
- Countries
- JAPAN
- Languages
- JAPANESE
- Duration
- 106 mn
- Director(s)
- Kasho IIZUKA
- Cast
- Miyu NAKAGAWA, Ryo NISHIKIDO
- Synopsis
- In the 1960s, as Japan flourished amid rapid economic growth and the excitement of the Tokyo Olympics, a controversy broke out.
  While a wave of internationalization swept over the nation’s urban areas, the government put measures in place to purge lax public morals. An anti-prostitution law went into effect, and sex workers on the streets faced increasingly harsh crackdowns. However, as the law only applied to female prostitutes, it created a loophole for legally male prostitutes, referred to at the time as “blue boys.” Frustrated by this situation, police instead arrested the doctor responsible for carrying out sex changes for blue boys.
  In a time when even the concept of LGBT was yet to exist, the appearance of three transgender women in the doctor’s trial as witnesses drew sensational attention.
  What’s more, this trial contesting whether gender reassignment surgery was proper medical practice gradually transformed into an extensive debate over the true meaning of happiness.
  Ultimately, the surgery was deemed to be legal, but the so-called “Blue Boy Trial” conversely caused such operations to be viewed as taboo. For 29 years after the verdict was issued, no sex changes were carried out in Japan.
  Half a century has passed since the Blue Boy Trial, which continues to influence the lives of sexual minorities in Japan to this day, yet remains little-known in the obscured margins of history.