Abstract

While the HIV infection rate is leveling off in countries such as the United States, it continues to rise in Japan – despite relatively high levels of education and access to socialized medical care. Statistics from the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare show that Japanese MSM (men who have sex with men) are the demographic most at risk for becoming infected with HIV. However, the public continues to focus on women as HIV vectors. Drawing from previous scholarship in anthropology, public health education and geography, I argue that the continued increase of HIV incidence in Japanese MSM is linked to perceptions about 1) sex education as a family building tool; 2) condoms as a method of birth control, rather than of disease prevention; and 3) the concept of women as “polluting.”