Editor's Note: I actually interviewed Persona 4 director Katsura Hashino and art director Shigenori Soejima for a 1UP Afterthoughts feature late last year, and I found it interesting that the one question they declined to comment on was a query relating to Kanji Tatsumi's sexuality. I took that to mean that it's pretty much up to the player to determine where Kanji's coming from, and that if players want to interpret him as a gay character, they can. (Much more after the jump.) -Fitch
Warning: this post contains minor spoilers.
While I’m fairly late to the party, it took me a while to finally finish Persona 4 and develop a better understanding of the various issues surrounding Kanji Tatsumi and his inability to reconcile the various aspects of his identity.
The article that has sparked the most talk on the subject is Samantha Xu’s Opinion: Sexuality and Homophobia in Persona 4. Xu’s article posits that the ambiguity of Kanji’s sexuality is due, at least in part, to the fluidity of sexual definition in Japanese society:
In Kanji's case, remaining ambiguous and undeclared about his sexuality is not necessarily a rejection of its existence or the developers displaying homophobia, but rather as a comment on homosexuality in a greater Japanese social context.
In an American context, Kanji falls into the “he doth protest too much” cliché of the man who asserts his heterosexuality in order to hide his homosexual desires or tendencies -- and perhaps it’s easy to see how this would work as a comment on Japanese society as well.
