Japanese speakers tend to avoid using “pronouns” in their speech at all. If the subject is understood, it is often left out. The reason I put “pronouns” in quotes is that Japanese doesn’t really have pronouns. There are nouns that function a bit like pronouns but aren’t quite pronouns. This sometimes leads to weird situations. Once, when I was listening in on a conversation at a neighboring table in a restaurant, I heard one guy ask his friend “Wait, who are you talking about?” They’d actually forgotten the subject of their conversation.
Many words that could be translated as “you” are subtly or overtly rude in Japanese so they are often avoided completely. Kimi is gender neutral and is neutrally polite. Anata, also gender neutral, is used only between intimates. Using it with someone you don’t know is kind of rude, with a feeling like saying “dearest darling” in a sarcastic tone in English. Kisama, omae, and anta are a few more words that could be “you” but are insulting in various degrees.
The differences between Japanese used by men and women include self-referential words that show the level of respect show to the listener by the speaker as well as having some gender loading. For example atashi (casual, friendly) is a very female version of “I” and boku (neutral to friendly/casual) or ore (very casual to crude) are used only by men. The gender neutral words watashi and watakushi are polite and sound a bit distant when used in casual circumstances.
There are a lot more differences between women’s Japanese and men’s Japanese, some of which are used to emphasize the maleness or femaleness of the person in a particular situation. The differences are pronounced enough that a line of printed dialogue, if casual enough, can be taken out of context and will often still provide enough information to tell whether the speaker is a man or woman. If a guy starts a sentence with atashi and ends it with the particle wa it’s a pretty good bet that he’s either gay or making fun of okama-chan (effeminate gay men).
Related to this subject, yuu-hafu (New Half) are well-known and surprisingly widespread in Japan. I’ve even run into a couple in the bar district of my smallish town in the country. This word is used for trans-gender or transvestite physical males who present as female. New Half sometimes work in specialty hostess bars catering to men (and sometimes women) who have a kink for them. Cross-dressing is a relatively common phenomenon in Japan and has been for centuries. There were celebrated cross-dressing male oiran (high-class prostitutes) who were written about in the Edo Era, and they may be mentioned even earlier. I don’t know as much about Japanese history as I’d like.
Around the same time an edict prohibited women from performing in kabuki for basically the same reasons women were banned from the stage in England. This began the tradition of males performing female roles in kabuki that persists to this day. I can’t remember the source, but a kabuki affectionado is said to have stated that a woman could not play a woman’s role as convincingly as a man could.
A fairly recent takeoff on that idea is takarazuka, where women play all the roles in a Broadway musical style production. The groupies for these shows are almost entirely female, and they can be extremely rabid fans of the genre.
