"Much like the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, the normalization of homosexuality was widespread through Japanese history. Specifically, this was embodied in the form of pederastic love between older men, like monks and samurai and chigo and wakashu, who were boys, aged ten to nineteen. This became a tradition that lasted roughly a thousand years in Japan. This information comes from reviews of ancient literature by Watanabe and Iwata (1989) in their book The Love of the Samurai: A Thousand Years of Japanese Homosexuality. While Samurai played a large part in the construction of this tradition, their role only lasted a short time compared to the thousand years of tradtion."
