In 2026, Yusaku Matsumoto delivered a touching adaptation of Ai Haruna’s autobiography Subarashiki, Kono Jinsei (2009) and Koji Wada’s autobiography Penis Cutter: Sei Doitsusei Shogai wo Sukutta Ishi no Monogatari (2019) with This Is I (2026). He offered audiences not only a glance at the positive effect of gender-affirming surgery, but also highlighted the grey zone in which Koji Wada operated.
Yet, Matsumoto’s narrative did little to clarify the reason why such surgery was deemed controversial within Japanese society. It is, in this sense, that one can consider Kasho Iizuka’s Blue Boy trail (2025) a prequel to Matsumoto’s narrative, as his narrative sketches out the event that, while not making such surgery illegal, made most surgeons very reluctant to accommodate such wishes by their patients.
The narrative of Blue Boy Trail commences in 1965. The police force has just undertaken a crackdown on prostitutes in accordance with the anti-prostitution law. Yet, despite the arrest, they hit a legal obstacle as some of the arrested prostitutes are legally male and can, following the letter of the law – a prostitute was defined as female (josho), not be prosecuted.
Due to this unforeseen loophole, Kanzaki (-) from Metro Police reaches out to prosecutor Tokita (Junpei Yasui) to ask him to find a solution – a way to prosecute them. Later that year, in the winter, police officers enter the clinic of Masao Akagi (Takashi Yamanaka) to arrest him on charges of narcotics abuse and the violation of the Eugenic Protection Law – a law centring on women – by performing sterilization without the consent of the approval of the Prefectural Eugenic Protection Council.
Not long thereafter, Kano (Ryo Nishikido) from Kano Law Office is asked by Goto to represent Masao Akagi. He takes the case on, knowing that he must undertake an impossible battle against the representatives of the conservative powers that rule the country.
As Blue Boy Trail is based on true event – an important court-case in the sixties regarding the legality of sex reassignment surgery, it is not surprising that, before the trail as such becomes the focus, Iizuka delivers a snapshot-like narrative structure, an introduction of all the narrative elements that will eventually culminate into the court case, and uses intertitles to help the spectator keep track of things, of the signifiers that count the most, and, later, to make the structure of the court-case explicit.
After establishing the initial context, Iizuka seeks to leverage the frame of the trail to offer a thoughtful exploration of subjectivity surrounded by and subjected to the conservative Other. The main focus lies, of course, on the subjectivity of Kano who, despite knowing that winning the case is near-impossible, takes on the task head-on. We follow him as he, tasked with Akagi’s defence, tries to find a way to prove the necessity of Akagi’s surgeries – a treatment to cure what is called “the illness of transsexualism”.
However, Blue Boy Trail, does not merely function as a court-room drama. By focusing on the relationship between Atsuhiko (Kou Maehara) and the not-yet-fully transitioned Sachi (Miyu Nakagawa), Iizuka does not only seek to charm the spectator with a bittersweet exchange of genuine romantic emotions, but also to expose the destructive effects of the conservative ideological framework the government seeks to protect by putting the letter of their own law coldly into effect – repress the sexual deviants, protect the biological and ideological division of the sexes and the heterosexual institution of marriage.
The arrest of Dr. Akagi and the subsequent attempts of Kano to convince her to testify, however, puts their relation under pressure. Kano wants Sachi to testify in defence of Dr. Akagi because she puts the ideological image of female ‘normality’ into practice; she has inscribed herself in the conservative discourse of the Other concerning womanhood. He needs her testimony to argue that the sex-change procedure is not a form of rebellion against the patriarchal Other, not a radical way to bypass the letter of the law to operate, like the two other transitioned men Mei (Ataru Nakamura) and Ohka (Izumi Sexy) do, in a legal grey-zone – subjects, inscribed as men within the symbolic, prostituting their ‘artificial’ female body.
Iizuka’s focus on Sachi also allows him to show how, within the court-proceedings, subjectivity is secondary to the elicitation of signifiers – signifier over subjectivity. Kano, to fabricate and strengthen his defence as the trail unfolds, utilize witnesses to elicit merely those signifiers that enable him to prove his point and counter-act the way the prosecution puts the law to use. To give his argumentative narrative its necessary substantiation and sway the interpretation of the judges into his favour, Kano does not shy away from verbally violating the transgenders on the witness stand.
However, is there no other way for him to substantiate his narrative of Akagi’s procedure’s necessity? Is it smart he align himself with the signifiers of the prosecution and erase his witnesses’ subjectivity to produce the signifiers in the narrative he aims to impose on them? Or should he take this opportunity to transform the witness stand into a radical place for the transgender subject to address her subjectivity to an Other that, due to its fixation on patriarchal discourses, refuses to listen? Irrespective of the approach, what will the societal consequences be for the transgender subject that takes place on the stand and expose the truth of his gender?
Iizuka opens Blue Boy Trail with an exquisitely paced sequence that does not merely sketches out the historical atmosphere of the narrative and introduces the main societal conflict that forms the focus of the film, but also pulls the spectator into its narrative by pleasing him with a thoughtful compositional play with pace, inviting colour-schemes, and infectious jazzy musical decorations.
Of course, after the stylish opening of Blue Boy Trail, things cool down stylistically – the compositional pace slows down and the colour-palette sheds its kitsch-like quality to give a balanced mix between colder and faded colours to frame the effects of bringing the law and its patriarchal discourses into operation and warmer colours to bring the place out of reach of the demeaning claws of the Other and its conservative discourses, the place where one can act in accordance with one’s gender, to life.
However, Kasho Iizuka still finds ways to concatenate static and dynamic shots appealingly together and use musical decorations to guide the audiences’ expectations (e.g. the threatening sound that accompanies the restrained zoom-in shot on Tokita implies that he will find a way to take them to court), to give certain speech-act their proper dramatic dimension, and to accentuate the gravity of the sketched-out situation – i.e. the government’s conservative patriarchal desire to excise sex-change surgery from its societal fabric.
Blue Boy Trail offers a touching and heartbreaking account of a trail that re-affirmed the taboo over gender-affirming surgery and sought to legally anchor its repression from the societal field. Iizuka delivers an effective cinematic statement, a filmic demand towards the spectator to go beyond the mere societal and ideological question of gender and consider the right of the subject to carve out his own singular space of ego-contentment.
Notes
General-note 1: Let us note that Blue Boy Trail, just like This is I (2026), introduces a difference between performing femineity for the Other and being a woman for the Other. These films imply that, whether the male subject has transitioned or not, that there are, at least, two modes of relating to the signifier woman and things are less clear-cut than they, at first glance, appear.