Utena: Giri/Ninjo and the Triumph of Conservatism in Pop Culture

Sometimes it takes an upside-down school to point out how to do the right thing. One girl versus the End of the World, and class is about to begin.

At the risk of being a spoiler, I will defend revealing the outcome of the highly stylized, eccentrically symbolic 1997 TV series Shojo Kakumei Utena (Revolutionary Girl Utena) created by the team known as Be Papas.¹ My defense is to point to T. S. Eliot’s line: “In my beginning is my end.” Utena’s fate should come as no surprise—perhaps a shock but not a surprise. Her fate was foretold in the very opening of the first episode.

A Fateful Duel

The TV story (there’s also a manga story and a feature film, all somewhat different from each other) takes place at the Otori Private Academy.² It’s a vaguely European boarding school, with classes ranging from middle through high school. There’s a secret, though, tucked away in the back: a surreal-looking arena where fencing matches are held to determine the “engagement” of the Rose Bride, the dark-skinned and childlike Anthy Himemiya. The elaborate game is at the behest of whoever is sending dispatches signed “End of the World” to members of the Student Council; someone whom no one ever sees (echoes of Franz Kafka).

Utena Tenjo doesn’t enter this closed society; she’s already in it, although marginalized. She’s in the middle school, an aggressive athlete but an average student. Her one standout trait is wearing a modified boy’s school uniform (however, none of the boys seem to wear the red bicycle pants she favors). Her choice of apparel goes back to the time her parents died. A handsome prince (are there stories with princes who aren’t handsome?) praised her fortitude, then gave her a ring inscribed with a rose. She decided that the way to emulate and honor this prince was to dress and act like a prince. Years later, once she’s in Otori Academy, she notices that roses are the dominant motif.

While watching Anthy tend the roses in the academy gazebo, Utena takes a fateful step. As the story opens, Anthy is “engaged” to the school’s kendo champion, high-school student and Student Council vice-president Kyoichi Saionji. Saionji, however, is no gentleman, and Utena sees him slapping Anthy around. (We earlier saw the cad take a love letter sent to him by an admiring girl and post it on a bulletin board for him and his friends to mock.) Unable to hold back, Utena challenges him to a duel. She expects it will just be a little one-on-one in the kendo hall, but instead she is told to meet Saionji in the mysterious fencing arena.

This isn’t your usual duel. Saionji takes his weapon from Anthy, literally: she goes into a trance, and the handle of a saber pops out of her chest. Saionji draws the saber out of Anthy’s body without harming her. (At this point, one wonders why Anthy, who seems to possess supernatural powers, is so submissive. The answer must wait until later.) Utena would seem to be outclassed: Saionji is older and more experienced, while Utena is armed with a piece of wood. However, she not only wins the match, but the “hand” of Anthy.

The Coed Who Knew Too Little

Why was she allowed to battle for possession of Anthy? It was all a mistake. “End of the World” had warned the Student Council that a new duelist was coming to carry on the plan “to bring the world revolution.” Everyone presumed that Utena was the new challenger and ended up involving Utena in a game she didn’t even know she was playing. This sets the wheels of tragedy in motion.

In this respect, there’s a very clear Western model for what takes place in Utena: the classic films of Alfred Hitchcock. We have an outsider whose actions open the door to a parallel world, unguessed-at until then. This certainly describes Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, Vertigo, and the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much; Sean Connery in Marnie; Tippi Hedrin in The Birds; and especially Janet Leigh in Psycho. All of these characters take a small (and occasionally illegal, or at least unconventional) step off their accustomed paths, which leads them onto strange and even horrific new paths, often with disturbingly kinky sexual overtones. At the end of the path, someone is dead.³ A Japanese audience would have realized that something else was happening at this school: the constant head-on collision between giri and ninjo, between social obligation and personal desire. Personal desire seems to be winning, but also warping the student body.

The Confucian ideal underlying Japanese society, after all, is built on putting giri before ninjo. Deny one’s social obligations, putting ego first, and the foundations of civility start to crumble; neglect your obligations and you lose face. To the extent that pop culture is inherently conservative and ratifies the culture’s most common shared values rather than advocating anything avant-garde, the bottom line of this story will be that the students in the hothouse, “self-indulgent” (as one student describes it) atmosphere of Otori Academy ignore their responsibility and indulge their private passions at their own risk. They may meet the destined end of a phoenix and burn up, but may not be able to rise out of the ashes again.

In Utena’s case, the viewer gets a clue early on that she’s neglecting her destiny. From the beginning, we hear of her meeting the prince as a child and wishing to imitate him. However, what we hear is a child’s version of what happened; this is clear in the original Japanese dialogue, in which the tale is told with a child’s voice rather than that (in the English dub) of Utena the teenager. Yet Saionji recalls the encounter differently. He and Toga Kiryu, the Student Council president, were traveling together (we find out later that they were accompanied by Akio, the real villain of the piece) when they found a young girl hiding in a coffin. Toga eventually tempted her out.

Remember the Kojiki? The story of Amaterasu in the cave has just reappeared in a surprising guise. It reminds the viewer that Utena was never destined to be a prince. If anything, she should be a princess, if not a goddess. If she were more aware, she would follow her destiny rather than her personal wishes. Once again, we see someone who is headed for disaster because she doesn’t get it.

Student Bodies

Almost everyone at this school gets caught in this duty-versus-desire bind, and revealed in a light that’s not at all flattering. Miki, the youngest Student Council member and a talented pianist and mathematician, is so obsessed over having played piano duets with his sister (that’s all they did, but Miki’s obsession borders on the incestuous) that he doesn’t even recognize her lack of talent. His sister, meanwhile, seems to be one student among many being debauched by Toga Kiryu. For a time he’s “engaged” to Anthy, having beaten Utena in a duel to claim her, yet he flirts with other girls while his Rose Bride “fiancée” is in the same room. Kiryu seems to take his loss to Utena in their rematch in episode thirteen the hardest; he’s shown in the Student Council chambers, listening over and over to a recording of a message from “End of the World.” His sister, Nanami, is out primarily to make a name for herself, even at the expense of others. Juri Arisugawa, the best fencer at Otori, lost her yasashii spirit some time earlier when her friend Shiori stole the boy they both liked, making Juri the odd one out in a romantic triangle.⁴ And we’ve already seen Saionji in action.

Because “End of the World” has said that whoever is “engaged” to the Rose Bride must defeat all challengers in order to bring the world revolution, Utena fights all of the above before the series is a third over. The two duels against Kiryu are the most interesting. Utena loses the first duel because Kiryu plays the psychological card, suggesting to Utena that he was the prince who visited her as a child and gave her the ring with the rose crest. (In fact, he was, as Saionji’s recollection confirms.) Unable to defeat the person she wanted to emulate for so long in the arena, Utena loses her aggressive, princely personality and gives up trying to do much of anything in the academy, and even begins to wear a girl’s school uniform. Of all people, it took some tough love from Utena’s pesky friend Wakaba (the one who was always declaring her love for Utena), and the sight of Kiryu’s swinish behavior toward Anthy, to awaken Utena for a rematch.

At first it doesn’t seem like a good idea. Kiryu reveals another hidden power in the Rose Bride by telling Anthy to transfer the Power of Dios from herself to his sword. She does so by kneeling and kissing the blade in the closest simulation of fellatio possible on broadcast television. The glowing sword breaks Utena’s blade. Her resistance, however, actually extinguishes Kiryu’s blade, and she wins back possession of the Rose Bride.

The most interesting part of the duel is Anthy’s reaction to Utena’s rally. Anthy recalls to herself that this is like “that time”—and a tear falls down her cheek. Anthy continually gets slapped, shoved around, and humiliated, but there was no such provocation for this tear. It is a reaction to a past memory and a dread of the future. In Utena’s beginning is Utena’s end, and the Rose Bride knows it.

The Bride Who Knew Too Much

Of the two leading characters in this thirty-nine-episode series, Utena is probably the most straightforward. Her roots are clear: she’s a direct descendant of Princess Sapphire, the sword-wielding cross-dressing princess in Dr. Tezuka’s Princess Knight and of Oscar de Jarjayes, the sword-wielding cross-dressing noblewoman in Ryoko Ikeda’s Rose of Versailles. Both of them had clear missions: to rescue damsels in distress (even if Princess Sapphire’s main mission was to rescue herself and her mother).

On the other hand, Anthy Himemiya clearly fits the bill of a damsel in distress. She’s slapped by Saionji, mistreated by Toga Kiryu, taunted by Nanami Kiryu, and befriended by only one person: Utena, who blunders into the academy’s hidden world of secret duels and “End of the World.” Yet we also know that a mystical power of sorts resides within Anthy. You would think she could take care of herself.

At one point she could, but that was before she too succumbed to the Otori affliction of placing ninjo over giri. Like a number of others (Miki and his sister, Nanami and her brother), Anthy gave in to feelings toward her own brother that bordered on the incestuous. We don’t see this brother, Akio, until the thirteenth episode, and the information about him and Anthy comes in bits and pieces (often in symbolic pieces that need decoding) right up to the end, when we finally realize what has been going on. Anthy’s status as perpetual victim is not that of a good person misused by evil people; Anthy herself committed an unforgivable act, and was living out her punishment when Utena came along.

In the mixed-up world of Otori Academy, symbolized by a castle hanging upside-down above the dueling arena, princes are supposed to save princesses, but can’t. Akio, one such prince, has been prevented by his sister Anthy from rescuing any more princesses. Although her motives were at worst mixed (she was concerned for his health, but perhaps also demanded his attention), she ended up trapping only his yasashii spirit, leaving behind a manipulative, lascivious, and very powerful monster for a brother. For this she suffers, only to be rescued by Utena.

Akio tries to forestall the rescue, maneuvering people into duels to try to defeat Utena, or at one point hoping to replace Anthy as the Rose Bride. Akio even seduces Utena, trying to convince her through sex that she is a princess and not a prince. Utena, however, stays true to her desire to emulate the prince she met as a little girl. This means rescuing the princess named Anthy, even if doing so means paying the ultimate price.

And so it is that, in a story more outrageous than most in terms of gender confusion, we see that the old-line definition has been working all along. Plain and simple: a girl cannot be a prince. An old Japanese proverb puts it this way: “Otoko wa matsu, onna wa fuji” (Man is the pine tree, woman is the clinging vine [wisteria, actually]) If she tries to be what she’s not, there’ll be a price to pay.

And yet, by the end of the story, Anthy is indeed redeemed. She is freed from her imprisonment at Otori Academy. How does she use that freedom? By immediately leaving the campus to search for Utena. And this is one of those cases in which the original Japanese dialogue is critical. Throughout the series, Anthy has declared her subservience to Utena by referring to her with the honorific -sama. As she leaves in the final scene, Anthy lets us know simply that she’s looking for Utena. No more honorific, since Utena is no longer a prince.

But isn’t Utena dead? So it would seem, but Otori was, as I mentioned, a topsy-turvy version of the world, and maybe death wasn’t an ending (appropriately for a place named after the phoenix). Certainly someone as powerful as Anthy would know the truth of it, so her quest for Utena should be accepted as exactly that: not a quest for an ideal, like Miki’s search for his sister or Juri longing for the time before she was betrayed by her “friend” Shiori. Anthy goes off to search for a not-truly-dead Utena Tenjo. In Utena’s end is Utena’s beginning, and the Rose Bride knows that, too.

1. Primarily, animator Kunihiko Ikuhara and artist Chiho Saito.

2. Otori means “phoenix”; in the context of a story about people struggling against themselves and each other “to bring the world revolution,” it’s a very loaded name.

3. It may be a coincidence, but the central story-arc involves the breeding of a Black Rose with which to destroy the Rose Bride; it’s being bred in the basement of a building that looks suspiciously like the Bates house in Psycho.

4. For one of the better Juri pages on the web, see http://www.geocities.com/hollow_rose/main.html.