When the Vatican "scandal" erupted, I happened to be reading Kumagusu Minakata's writings on homosexuality — to be exact, his writings as selected, with comments, by Taruho Inagaki. I was doing so because Inagaki (1900-1977) won Japan's literary "grand prize" for his book, "The Aesthetic of the Love of Boys," the year it was set up, in 1969, and he did so at the urging of one of the judges, Yukio Mishima.

Minakata (1867-1941), who worked for the British Museum from his 20s and early 30s, was mainly a naturalist. But his encyclopedic knowledge extended to a number of other fields and subjects. Male same-sex love, which he discussed at length in his letters to Jun'ichi Iwata (1900-1945), was one of them, the voluminous correspondence apparently prompted by an innocuous question Iwata asked in 1931. Iwata would later achieve fame for his work on the subject as it relates to Japan.

So, in one letter, Minakata began a paragraph touching on the Roman Catholic Church and sodomy by referring to the Confucian thinker Ogyu Sorai (1666-1728): "Sorai, who grew up to be an adult among monks, in Kazusa, simply states that monks always think about sexual acts, because they have to try to pretend to do otherwise."