By the 1300s, Japanese samurai had started taking their proteges as lovers. Usually, this was an older man with a younger boy. It was so common that one samurai said, “A young man without a pledged, elder he-lover is likened to a young girl without a fiance.”
Same-age male love was normal, too. A pair of aging male lovers, they said, were like “two old cherry trees still in bloom.”
