Nanjo Masami (194? - ) nightclub owner, performer.

Nanjo Masami worked as a gei boi (transgender performer) in Osaka clubs in the early 1960s, and became the manager of two clubs while still in her early 20s.

However after an affair with a man who could not accept her penis, she self-castrated herself with a Japanese sword, and almost died.

In the late 1960s, after recovering from this, she moved to the small town of Tendō in Japan’s north-east. She opened a club, Blue Night, which became a tourist attraction in the 1970s. She, and her younger male lover, became well-known in the town, and she became a member of the organizing committee for the town’s annual Cherry Festival, and the star of its associated dramatic performances.

*Not the agricultural scientist.

• Mark McLelland. Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age. Lanham Md & Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield 2005: 196-7