When only two people are in a room, who reaches out first and who lowers their eyes to receive: the division of sexual roles is settled wordlessly between them over time. Japanese has an old slang term for one side of this position. Neko (猫, “cat”) is the Japanese slang for the partner who takes the receptive role, the feminine-coded position, the one who is caressed, in same-sex relationships and especially lesbian ones. It pairs with tachi, the active side.

There are several proposed origins. The most current likens the posture to a cat lying low on a roof, the receptive position. A second holds that in the Edo-period kagema-teahouse culture (teahouses keeping male prostitutes), the receptive young men were called neko, with examples said to survive in early-modern texts. A third proposes that the Meiji- and Taisho-era lesbian subculture developed the slang independently and re-established it after the war. In any case, the neko/tachi contrast for sexual active-and-receptive roles circulated widely within Japan’s sexual-minority culture through the later twentieth century.

Use in the lesbian context

In contemporary Japanese lesbian communities, neko and tachi have been transmitted with generational variation. In women’s same-sex magazines of the 1970s-1990s, such as Phryné and Carmilla, the role division by neko and tachi appeared as everyday vocabulary in reader letters and personal accounts. The breakdown is often summarised thus: tachi presents in masculine or androgynous dress, leads in the relationship, and is active in sex; neko presents femininely, is receptive in the relationship, and is caressed in sex. Intermediate positions, “reversible” (switching by context) and “neko-tachi” (neither), were also lexicalised from the late twentieth century.

These roles are understood not as fixed or essential but as a cultural construct switched fluidly by relationship, mood, and partner. With the spread of queer studies from the 2000s, debate reconsidering the neko/tachi binary has proceeded in parallel with the Anglophone butch/femme discussion.

Relation to male same-sex culture

The terms are sometimes said to originate in male same-sex culture such as the kagema teahouses. Among contemporary gay men, however, the terms more commonly used for sexual roles are tachi, uke (receptive), and riba (reversible), with the English-derived “top”, “bottom”, and “versatile” circulating alongside. Neko survives among gay men chiefly through cases of re-import via lesbian subculture, or in the context of BL and yaoi women’s fan creation, where uke is the standard term and neko appears only rarely, with an old-fashioned nuance.

Use in subculture and adult media

In lesbian AV and yuri adult works, the neko/tachi division is frequently referenced in package and promotional text, signalling the role relation between performers to buyers in phrases such as “a real tachi attacks a beautiful neko”. Commercial AV is not necessarily faithful to the reality of gender and sexuality, however, and “lesbian-themed” works staged for heterosexual male viewers do not reproduce real neko/tachi roles directly. In yuri commercial manga and fiction, the terms are stated explicitly less often; instead, neko/tachi roles are implicitly distributed within character design, with readers reading from fashion, speech, and manner which side leans active or receptive.

Reconsideration from gender theory

The neko/tachi binary has been noted to project a gender binary onto same-sex relationships, a point made continuously within the framework of queer theory after Judith Butler. The external gaze that tries to understand lesbian relationships through a heterosexual model, and an internal self-understanding, both sustain this usage. Against this, younger lesbian communities since the 2000s show a tendency not to use the terms, or to relativise them as a joke, while others hold that they remain useful for identity expression, partner matching, and communicative shorthand within the community.

See also

• Tachi (the active role paired with neko)
• Rezu (Lesbian)
• BL
• Yaoi
• Yuri