“A Very Pure Thing”: Gay and Pseudo-Gay Themes in Anime
Homosexuality is shown more prominently in Japanese pop culture than in the West. Yet sometimes a relationship that seems gay really isn’t, and what may be accepted in some stories is subtly discouraged in others.
In an early episode of the manga Ghost Sweeper Mikami by Takashi Shiina, Mikami’s lecherous assistant Yokoshima is sent back in time, encountering his voluptuous exorcist boss-lady when she was still a high-school student. When he sees another student, Chiho, fawning and falling all over Mikami, he accuses Chiho of being a lesbian. Chiho’s response is blunt: “Lesbian? How rude! The love that Mikami and I have is a very pure thing.”
That is the point of departure—and point of confusion—for Western fans of Japanese pop culture. There is conduct and language in anime and manga that would seem homoerotic, even though its practitioners maintain that it is not.
Western pop culture recognizes homosexuality through a set of stereotypes, most of them negative. Homosexual chracters are often portrayed as either “butch” or “flaming queens,” displaying exaggerated, parodied traits of the opposite sex. Another stereotype—that of the homosexual afraid to admit to his or her preference—is often characterized by an extreme timidity and indecisiveness in other aspects of daily life. Then there is the myth of the gay predator, based on the assumption that a “normal” person would have to be seduced or forced into homosexuality. Randy Shilts gives this particular stereotype the B-movie title it deserves: “Lesbian Vampires of Bavaria.”1 Even in more sympathetic portrayals, though, gay characters are often presented as just that: gay first, then characters.
Japanese pop culture takes a very different approach. Often a character will be introduced, placed into the context of the story; and only later (if ever) will the sexuality of the character become an issue (for example, the character of Chihaya the observing angel in Earthian). Sometimes the character is played for laughs and sometimes for tragedy, but seldom are characters condemned for their sexuality. In fact, sometimes characters are presented with only a vague suggestion of homosexuality, never made explicit. This is where Westerners tend to lose track.
Sometimes characters act gay but aren’t. In many old legends, for example, Buddhist monks were described as using boy acolytes for sex, but that did not necessarily make the monks homosexuals; they simply slept with whatever partners were available. (In one folk tale we’ve already encountered, the monk finds his acolyte is actually a girl dressed as a boy. He had approached the acolyte assuming he would be having sex with a boy, discovered the truth, and proceeded to get the acolyte pregnant.)2 Of course, if characters are unabashedly gay, the reader or viewer knows it, whether the comics and videos have hard or soft cores. Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, and other well-known writers have contributed to the use of gay themes in higher-brow Japanese literature, but it’s the ambiguous relationships in Japan’s pop culture that bear observation here.
Gay or Not? Not (Probably)
There are three such relationships in Sailor Moon alone. Two of Queen Beryl’s minions, Zoicite and Kunzite, are males whom Western cartoon dubbers at the DIC Studio felt obliged to turn into a male and a female. Zoicite is, admittedly, a very effeminate-looking male, of the type known as bishonen (beautiful boy).3 Two of the Outer Senshi, Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune, have an odd relationship: Uranus is decidedly “butch,” affecting short hair and slacks (when not fighting evil in a short skirt and middy blouse) and mistaken for a male on several occasions, while Neptune is undeniably feminine. They are, if not a couple, certainly partners. And then there is the appearance late in the story of the pop group the Three Lites, a male trio who transform into a trio of female superheroes (of course their male selves were already fairly androgynous).4 In Shiriusu no Densetsu (The Legend of Sirius, a 1981 feature film released in English as The Sea Prince and the Fire Child), the princess of the Fire Kingdom, Malta, has a friend named Piyale who seems unusually friendly, spending practically all her time rubbing against Malta like a cat starved for affection. At first angered and upset by Malta’s falling in love with Prince Sirius of the Water Kingdom (after trying to kill him, we see Piyale go off alone to cry her eyes out), Piyale later tries to protect Malta at the cost of her own life.
A close cousin to Piyale is Wakaba in Utena. She constantly declares her undying love for Utena, another girl. True, Utena’s a girl who constantly dresses like a boy, but still a girl. And yet there is no hint that Utena reciprocates Wakaba’s feelings, or that they are anything more than feelings. Neither is shown to be a practicing lesbian.5 The first episode, in fact, also has Wakaba sending a love letter to Saionji, one of several campus cads at Otori Academy, who promptly puts the letter up on a bulletin board to humiliate Wakaba. Utena’s first duel in the arena is against Saionji, to defend Wakaba’s honor. And that is literally as far as it goes. From beginning to end, they’re just friends and classmates. Wakaba’s love for Utena is a very pure thing.
Of all the similar anime and manga to follow, one of the best, and definitely one of the funniest, was a comedy by shojo manga artist Bisco Hatori. She sounded these themes in Ouran High School Host Club. In its own way it continues the tradition of the Duklyon Academy in various CLAMP anime and manga, Otori Academy of Revolutionary Girl Utena, the Mahora Academy of Ken Akamatsu’s Negima! Magister Negi Magi!, and other closed campuses. The boys of Ouran seem to have lots of time on their hands. The title club claims to teach the boys how to entertain wealthy, well-born peers, but sometimes things get a bit crazy.
Hitachiin Twins, in Ouran High School Host Club
Hikaru and Kaoru Hitachiin6 are two of the eccentric students in a class by themselves. At first, they seem to be inspired by Fred and George, the identical Weasley twins in the Harry Potter saga. And, like the Weasleys, these two are practical jokers of the first order. However, Hatori has them take their stunts into areas J. K. Rowling would never have dared.
The boys of the Host Club offer an adolescent parody of “hostess clubs,” which were, at best, inspired by Playboy Clubs and at worst were sleazy rip-off saloons. The boys of the club practice various themes, cosplay, and events (from appearing in Heian-era court dress to tropical island sarongs) to try to provide a romantic atmosphere for the high school girl clientele, giving both boys and girls a safe place to practice courtship without consequences. The twins, however, have a special act: twincest. They pretend under a variety of circumstances that they are carrying on a torrid affair. The girls find this fascinating; yaoi, after all, attracts a largely female following in Japan precisely because “the love that dare not speak its name” is so alien to their experience and carries a largely “forbidden” aspect.
Just one thing: it’s literally all an act. The twins are playing to an audience, and even pose provocatively for photo albums that the club then sells to the girls. These two aren’t above using eye drops to get that soulful teary-eyed look. They are literally close, since they pretty much grew up on their own, but they aren’t that close. At first, this made them aloof from others, but the series’ main couple forced them to expand their horizons: club president Tamaki Suoh by constantly trying to tell them apart (and getting it wrong), and the cross-dressing Haruhi Fujioka by being able to tell them apart (correctly), apparently by virtue of her being a lower-class, therefore unpretentious and “genuine,” person.
Incidentally, Haruhi is yet another example of transvestism in manga/anime that has been thoroughly desexualized. Haruhi was still finding her way around the Ouran campus (having qualified for a scholarship due to her brains and her poverty—her mother, a lawyer, being deceased, and her father being a cross-dressing bar hostess)7 when she entered the Host Club room and accidentally broke a very expensive vase. To work off the debt, she has to join the Host Club by participating in their romantic antics, which means dressing as a boy. In her case, this also means being liberated from the trap of gender expectations. Haruhi, in short, doesn’t dress like a boy to become a boy; she dresses like a boy in order to become Haruhi. (Not that there isn’t a traditional yuri aspect to Ouran High School Host Club; it’s there, but wildly caricatured and over-the-top, like everything else in Ouran [see the description of the girls of St. Lobelia Academy in part 1, chapter 7].)
Here Is Greenwood (1991) brings us an oddball character as part of a group of oddballs in the boarding-school dormitory of the title. You can’t exactly call Shun Kisaragi a transvestite—he’s just a guy who likes to wear long hair and talks in a very high voice. The confusion is played strictly for laughs, and is even doubled later in the series by his “kid brother.”8 Unlike Here Is Greenwood, in which comic characters appear in a nominally serious situation, the entire OAV series known as Maho Tsukai Tai (1996) is comedic, and so is everyone in it.9 This includes high school senior and Magic Club member Ayanjo Aburatsubo. His willowy figure and flowing maroon hair make him appear at first glance to be a girl . . . as do his constant amorous advances on club president Takeo Takakura.
Rumiko Takahashi has given us two cross-dressers in two highly successful series. In Urusei Yatsura we meet Ryunosuke Fujinami. It’s a very masculine name, attached to a very masculine-looking (and acting) girl. Her widowed father, owner of a seaside refreshment stand, wanted a son, and was determined to have one regardless of his child’s gender. The whole thing is played for laughs, with a frustrated Ryunosuke wanting to be feminine but not knowing how to act. She’s repulsed by boys who fawn over her and spends a lot of time in hand-to-hand combat with her father (not unlike Ranma Saotome and his father, for different reasons).
Speaking of Ranma 1/2, that Rumiko Takahashi story inverts Ryunosuke into Tsubasa Kurenai, a guy who happens to look like a girl but is not effeminate. Years earlier, Tsubasa fell in love at first sight with Ukyo—the same Ukyo who was betrothed to Ranma as a child. Ukyo was attending a girls’ school, so he did the inevitable and dressed as a girl to be near Ukyo. Things just sort of kept on from there. . . .
The cross-dressing heroine of Osamu Tezuka’s nineteenth-century political/romance manga Niji no Prelude (Rainbow Prelude) has a deadly serious reason: her brother had been accepted to study music at the Warsaw Conservatory, but he died before he could attend, so she assumed his identity and went in his place. While at the Conservatory, she meets the young Frederic Chopin, gets involved with a piano-maker who is working against the Russian occupation of Poland, and ultimately dies. Like the title characters of the movies Tootsie and Victor Victoria, she finds that being disguised as a member of the opposite sex creates a hurdle for one’s love life.
One subtle but momentous example of non-sexual cross-dressing is on display in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the epic manga created by Hayao Miyazaki before the creation of Studio Ghibli. This feature-length anime begins in a dystopian future, with much of earth laid waste after a global war (possibly nuclear) by swarms of gigantic insects. There is a prophecy of a messiah who will walk among the clouds dressed all in blue, restoring the balance of nature. There’s even a tapestry illustrating the prophecy, with a bearded man healing the world. Of course, by the time the movie ends, the role of the messiah is fulfilled by a girl, the heroine of the title.
Not of This Earth
The relationship between Jinpachi Ogura and Issei Nishikiori in Please Save My Earth is not ambiguous at all: they’re both male high school freshmen. And that’s the problem. This non-linear shojo manga by Saki Hiwatari and its anime version take place in several realities, only one of which is our present-day Earth. The seven residents of Tokyo featured in the story are all reincarnations of beings from another planet. Thousands of years ago, they set up a research station on the moon to observe the evolution of life on Earth. Jinpachi and Issei were both there, as Gyokuran and Enju. Enju was a woman in love with Gyokuran. Issei remembers this all too well and, at one point, forgets himself/herself and kisses Jinpachi on the mouth. Of course, if you’ve been keeping score, you know that Issei is not gay. He had momentarily become Enju in love with Gyokuran, and knows that he stepped over the line in that moment. He cannot do it again because of social constraints, yet he also cannot alter Enju’s feelings. This makes him, in shojo manga terms at least, caught between public propriety and personal passion, and therefore a classically tragic figure.
Science fiction is a fairly natural home for anime and manga stories that want to get sexually creative. Characters of unconventional sexuality can be depicted as alien, both literally and figuratively. There’s the sexual ambiguity in Moto Hagio’s manga They Were Eleven, animated in 1986, wherein one character, Frol, is of such unstable genetic makeup that it is neither male nor female. However, cadet Tada is attracted to the androgynous Frol. He knows that if Frol fails this Academy final test, an elderly suitor is waiting to demand that Frol permanently become a woman and marry him. This may mean more than the success or failure of the mission.
As part of her concert in Macross Plus (1994), idol singer Sharon Apple moves through the audience, suggestively stroking the faces of men and women alike. Does caressing both genders make her bisexual? The question is absurd. She’s a virtual idol, after all, an actualized computer program. It’s equally absurd to speak of the sexuality of the audience members—male and female—who thrill to her touch. Sharon Apple is, after all, a celebrity, and as such excites a level of emotion a mere mortal can barely contemplate.
And then there’s Benten, the androgynous criminal in Cyber City Oedo 808. And there’s Mosh, the Zentraedi hairdresser in Macross II who claims to have a special “understanding” of both males and females. And there’s Berg Katse, henchperson of the villain Sosai X in the Gatchaman TV series. Created out of the DNA of a pair of male and female twins, Katse is able to change gender at will. And so on.
Princess Knight
This all started, in a sense, with Dr. Tezuka’s 1953 manga Ribon no Kishi (Princess Knight). It was the first action/adventure story written exclusively for the girls’ comic market, and, as both a popular manga and a Japanese television animation, it sent out shock waves that are still being felt.
While the influence of Walt Disney is very clear in Dr. Tezuka’s work, a more important influence, in many respects, was his love of the all-girl Takarazuka theater troupe, whose aesthetic is on full display in Princess Knight:
I was often taken by mother to the [Takarazuka] Operas, and though what they presented [was] not authentic, I got acquainted with the music and costume of the world through them. They were in turn a copy of a Broadway musical and that of a show at the Folies Bergère or the Moulin Rouge, but as I could not know the facts, I was impressed and believed they were the finest art in the world.10
A girl, Sapphire, is born to the king and queen of Silverland; this is unfortunate, since by law a woman cannot succeed to the throne. Consequently, the girl is raised to be a prince. When she meets a handsome prince from a neighboring kingdom, her secret identity becomes a problem. Courtiers who want to “out” the princess so that a different family can control the throne compound the problem.
But this story really started in Heaven. Babies waiting to be born on Earth are lined up for the shuttle. As they board, they are given hearts to swallow: pink for girls, blue for boys. Note, however, that this does not assign gender to the babies; they’re already male or female. Rather, the heart carries gender-specific behaviors.
A less-than-competent cherub named Chink (or Tink, depending on which romanization system you favor) asks one babe whether it’s a boy or a girl; the child says it doesn’t know. Wanting to speed up the line, Chink feeds it a boy’s heart because “you look like a boy.” However, this baby is a girl, and will be born the princess of Silverland. A princess who’s a remarkable fencer, among other talents. Yet these talents are directly attributable to the blue heart, not to anything she’s done with her life as she grew up. We see this because, on occasion, the blue heart flies out of her body, and her fencing abilities immediately vanish.
The androgyny in Princess Knight is deceptive, especially since it has less to do with sex than with gender, or specifically, gender-role expectations. This story is set in a medieval realm not unlike present-day Japan in its expectations: boys are supposed to be brave, girls are supposed to be graceful. Dr. Tezuka’s story violates those expectations, but not by promoting an abandonment of those gender role expectations. After all, Princess Sapphire marries her Prince Charming and lives happily ever after. Dr. Tezuka acknowledged what one writer has called “the inner conflict that derives from the clashing coexistence of two poles” of behavior, and created dramatic friction by rubbing the two gender poles together.11 The conflict becomes more than just an internal one when the lives of the royal family and even the fate of nations is involved.
Princess Knight also addresses another classically Japanese pair of opposites: duty and desire. Sapphire has been raised to understand that she must dress as a boy in order to keep the throne of Silverland from falling into the wrong hands. She doesn’t resent her duty; at times, she revels in the horsemanship and swordplay, as Ranma would later have fun by playing his female incarnation to the hilt. Sapphire’s duty becomes more serious when, with her father dead and her mother imprisoned, she disguises herself as a masked swordsman to reclaim the throne. Only in private does she live out her feminine desires, especially after meeting her Prince Charming (whose name is Franz Charming!).
It hadn’t happened before, but it definitely happened after: males and females in Japanese pop culture have had a much broader palette to choose from since Princess Knight. From scientist to chef, from athlete to actor, modern Japanese pop culture finds heroes and heroines in all walks of life. And some of these heroes/heroines are undeniably gay, such as the police detectives in Fake or Daily Wong, a police detective (a coincidence, this isn’t a pattern) in Bubblegum Crisis, or Iwao Garai, the homosexual Catholic priest who saves the world from a nerve-gas attack in Dr. Tezuka’s manga MW. Others are transvestites for non-sexual reasons, such as Oscar de Jarjayes, the French noblewoman posing as a swordsman to defend the French monarchy in Ryoko Ikeda’s Rose of Versailles, or Boss, bar owner and Yakumo’s next-door neighbor/surrogate parent in Yuzo Takada’s Sazan Eyes (3x3 Eyes).
Some homosexuals aren’t even gay, as it turns out. Wataru Yoshizumi’s teen romance Marmalade Boy includes a pseudo-gay character: Bill Matheson. Yu, the hero and “marmalade boy”12 of the title, spends part of his high school days in New York, where Bill is his roommate. Bill is rumored to be gay, which Bill doesn’t mind: in fact, he started the rumor himself. He decided that so many boys were already pursuing the girl he really loved—the attractive blonde Jinny Golding—that he had to take a different approach. So he became Jinny’s gay friend. As such, he also had to watch in silence as Jinny was briefly attracted to Yu. Still, Yu has his own girlfriend/stepsister Miki waiting for him back in Japan, and ultimately Bill confronts Jinny and brings his heterosexuality out of the closet.
Shonen Ai
An entire subgenre of manga and anime is devoted to romanticized gay male relationships. It goes by several names; the polite one is shonen ai (boy love). The genre is also known by the borrowed English words “boy love” or as “June,” the name of a magazine that specializes in gay romance tales.
A lot of Western fans have adopted another name: yaoi. This is sort of a shame, since yaoi is an acronym, and a rather insulting one at that. The word is derived from the phrase yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi. Literally it means “Without climax, without resolution, without meaning,”or, to put it another way, “no highs, no lows, no point.” This is not homophobic moralizing and is only partly an academic critique of a typical static plot-line—in this case, the underlying attitude is probably practical rather than moral or literary. In an earlier example we saw how a romanticized view of a girl’s first menstrual period is rooted in an agrarian society’s need to track cycles of fertility, and many other Japanese attitudes are still based on centuries spent close to the soil. Such a society would be impatient with a love that did not result in anything productive, much less reproductive. Odd as it may seem in the West, stories of gay love are often directed at an audience of pubescent Japanese girls.
Which raises the question: why? Of the hundreds of books on dozens of topics that would interest a teenage girl, why would teenage (and older) girls in Japan be drawn to stories of men with men?
There are theories. Antonia Levi suggests that Japanese girls “are fascinated by the idea of equality and communication in romance. . . . Japan is a highly gendered society. Men and women lead very different lives. . . . These stories about gay love are simply a means by which the gender barrier can be temporarily removed to allow for a more general discussion about the meaning and nature of romantic love.”13
It’s true that Japanese adolescence can be highly structured along gender lines. However, the structures themselves—e.g., the Valentine’s Day tradition of the girl giving homemade chocolate to a boy—are still serviceable forms of communication. In any event, “a more general discussion” based around shonen ai would be a rather limited one because, as we shall see, much gay love in Japanese pop culture is doomed.
Rose of Versailles
It is impossible to overestimate the impact of the manga Rose of Versailles by Ryoko Ikeda. Since its publication in 1972 as a serialized story in Margaret magazine it has enjoyed subsequent life as an animated series, in live film versions, and—of course—Takarazuka Opera productions. This descendant of Dr. Tezuka’s Princess Knight has deeply influenced the current generation of anime and manga artists, most obviously in stories of female swashbucklers, including The Sword of Paros and Utena (both discussed in detail elsewhere in this book).
Unlike its successors, though, Rose of Versailles is based on (mostly) real people, although Ikeda does some creative things with them. The series is mostly about Marie Antoinette (1755–93), starting back in her girlhood days, when she was sister of Austrian Archduke Joseph. (If you’ve seen the movie Amadeus, you may recall Joseph—played by Jeffrey Jones as a savvy twit—saying that his sister was worried about her own people. With good reason.) She may end up married to France’s Louis XVI, but in the manga she’s also close to Swedish diplomat Axel von Fersen (1755–1810) and to the dashing swords(wo)man Oscar de Jarjayes. (There really was a General de Jarjayes, whose wife was a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, but he did not have a cross-dressing daughter.)
In any case, Oscar’s swordsmanship places her in the category of beautiful-but-doomed warriors exemplified by Yoshitsune.
Beyond that, Oscar is another protagonist who constantly has to choose between duty and desire (giri/ninjo), in her case times two. Her mother was a courtier, her father an aristocrat, and thus her loyalties clearly lie with the monarchy. Yet, in the manga, Oscar cannot ignore the misery of the common people. Nor can she ignore her own gender. Like any proper yasashii heroine, she longs for the love that her masquerade prevents (mostly). This combination of exotic history, complex characters, and thwarted passions helped makethe manga a major success.
Rose of Versailles keeps reappearing in some surprising disguises in contemporary anime. The cast of Rumiko Takahashi’s Ranma 1/2 includes Azusa, an obnoxious little rich girl who thinks that all she has to do is name something—anything—and it’s hers. When she takes a liking to Ranma’s father, Genma (in panda mode), she takes him home, calls him Oscar, and dresses him up as Oscar de Jarjayes. And there’s a hilarious sequence in the first season of Pokémon in which Team Rocket transform into Oscar and Marie Antoinette. (Of course, since Oscar is a girl who is pretending to be a boy, Musashi/Jessie puts on Oscar’s uniform, while her male companion has to wear the gown. . . .)
To Ian Buruma, this is precisely the point. He quotes Hagakure, an eighteenth-century text on samurai ethics, saying that “love attains its highest and noblest form when one carries its secret into the grave.” Failing that, the idealized relationship presents two males finding happiness together; then, rather than growing old or confronting social disapproval, they look to death for a final fulfillment.14 This makes the fans of shonen ai sound at best like a bunch of morbid Gothics. However, the point is not to dwell on the relationship as doomed, but to celebrate it for what it is. Of the few commentators who have examined shonen ai, Sandra Buckley may have come closest to the mark. Buckley says that the focus of these manga and anime is “not the transformation or naturalization of difference but the valorization of the imagined potentialities of alternative differentiations.”15 The key words here are “imagined potentialities.” Shonen ai comics and animation build very elaborate structures of romance between their male protagonists that have hardly any resemblance to real life. These potential structures may exist only in the universe of the characters, but they serve the need of illustrating an ideal of emotion.
Physically, bishonen—the “beautiful boys” of Japanese pop culture—may seem even more identical and interchangeable than their bishojo (beautiful girl) counterparts. For years, the pattern was set by Keiko Takemiya’s Kaze to Ki no Uta (Song of Wind and Trees), in which the nineteenth-century French boarding-school boys were sometimes more effeminate-looking than the girls. Since then, however, the bishonen has taken on a more masculine look. The sleepy eyes, the tousled hair, the angular cut to the face: the image is as consistent and stylized as Kabuki makeup.16 Though there is theatrical convention in shonen ai comics and animation, there’s also history. Regardless of their personalities, nationalities, or the era in which their stories are set, these bishonen characters often embodysome of the qualities of two historical figures. Understanding the place of these figures in Japanese history will take us a long way toward understanding why Japanese pop culture makes room for homoeroticism, especially as a diversion for teenaged girls.
Two Legendary Beautiful Boys
First is Yoshitsune, boy wonder of the twelfth-century Minamoto clan. He was younger brother to Yoritomo; they and a third brother (Yoritomo was the oldest, age twelve at the time, while Yoshitsune was a newborn) were almost executed in 1159 when their father Yoshitomo was involved in an abortive coup attempt against the retired emperor Go-Shirakawa (who was, despite his nominal retirement, de facto ruler of Japan). The three boys—Yoshitomo’s sons by a concubine—were spared on the recommendation of a powerful courtier of the Taira clan named Kiyomori. There was a condition, of course; the boys’ mother had to become Kiyomori’s mistress. The boys were exiled rather than killed.
Time passed; Kiyomori’s influence grew until he was the major power behind Go-Shirakawa. But he hadn’t reckoned on the three exiled brothers. By 1180, Yoritomo had married Masako of the Hojo clan; this gave him access to the manpower he needed to rebel against Kiyomori. Some of the Minamoto’s greatest successes in battle, however, were credited to Yoshitsune, who was already commanding an army at the age of twenty-four. Kiyomori died in 1181, but it took about five years for Yoritomo to seize and consolidate power. One way he consolidated that power was to have his brother Yoshitsune executed in 1189. Even though he was only thirty, and Yoritomo’s own brother, his military genius was already legendary, and Yoritomo perceived that as a potential threat.17 So much for the historical Yoshitsune. Rather like Robin Hood, legend quickly grew around the facts, and the distinction between the two started to blur. In spite of being, according to one account, a “small, pale youth with crooked teeth and bulging eyes,” the Yoshitsune of legend became a delicate youth whose effeminate exterior hid a prodigious swordfighter. Kabuki plays about Yoshitsune specified that he be played by an onnagata—a specialist in playing females in the all-male Kabuki world.18 The result is a real-life inversion of the gender confusion of the movie Victor Victoria: a man playing a woman playing a man. It’s also a complement to the girls-playing-boys of the Takarazuka operas.
Another bishonen warrior—this time a Christian—showed up in the early Tokugawa period. The Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–38 started as a tax revolt against Matsukura, the daimyo (feudal lord) of Shimabara, who was installed in 1633 and proceeded to levy extreme taxes—as high as eighty percent of the harvest—and torturing those who could not pay by wrapping them in straw and setting the straw on fire. Shimabara, on the western coast of Kyushu, was one of the few Japanese regions where Christianity gained a strong foothold in the sixteenth century, and even though by the time of the uprising Christianity was officially banned by the Tokugawa shogunate, some adherents decided to keep the faith while also keeping a low profile.
The initial target of the revolt was the daimyo of Shimabara, but raiding parties soon started moving from village to village in western Kyushu, shouting the names of Jesus, Mary, and Santiago during their raids. When the movement spread to the nearby island of Amakusa, the Christian rebels chose as their leader a sixteen-year-old boy named Shiro Amakusa.19 He could offer the rebels little practical military advice, but this was supplied by a number of ronin who joined the rebellion. His role was that of the charismatic leader. Eventually, the rebels were driven off the island of Amakusa by the Tokugawa forces and retreated to Shimabara. The rebel force, numbering about thirty-seven thousand, including women and children, were besieged in a castle for three months. Before the rebels surrendered and were massacred, thirteen thousand of the hundred thousand warriors of the shogunate had died.20 Here again we have a good-looking young boy as a military leader: if you believe the legends, a gender-bender Joan of Arc, recognized for his piety. Unlike Yoshitsune, Shiro Amakusa was purely a figurehead, relying on sympathetic ronin for the real brains and muscle. However, in the end he had as much chance resisting the Tokugawa as Yoshitsune had of resisting his brother. Just as Yoshitsune killed his wife and child before killing himself, Shiro Amakusa did not survive the siege.
I suggest that this history and its subsequent romanticization, rather than the historicity of medieval samurai having male lovers, underlies shonen ai stories in which the lovers are doomed. If gay love were plausible to its audience, it would lose much of its appeal. Remember that we’re dealing with “imagined potentialities.” The tendency of these loves to be doomed to failure, despite their potential for flowering beauty, is precisely what takes them out of the realm of reality and into that of romance and aesthetics. As the kamikaze pilot was glorified for knowingly flying to his death, the doomed boys of shonen ai become beautiful because of their doom.
Unfortunately, most Japanese pop culture in this area is still commercially unavailable in the West. Whether it’s because of moral objection to the contents or uncertainty as to how to go about marketing this stuff, true Japanese boy-love material—original stories told with original characters—is hard to come by.21
The Internet, however, is another story. Because websites are often produced by fans sharing a favorite work rather than commercial interests trying to sell a product, sites featuring true shonen ai can be found, although they’re in the minority. What we tend to find instead is a subset of the genre: fan art and fan fiction putting anime and manga characters in gay relationships (some hardcore, some more romantic) whether the original work warranted it or not. The five pilots of the TV series called Gundam Wing (1995) have female counterparts, yet a lot of fan sites are produced as if these girls never existed. In the case of Shinji’s encounter with Kaoru in Evangelion, there has been a lot of controversy as to whether homosexuality was involved or not, and the yaoi sites explore this one facet of the story in depth. (As will be seen in the chapter discussing that series, I believe that this was another pseudo-gay relationship.)
Gateways to Gayness
When the first edition of this book appeared, there was very little translated yaoi/yuri available in the West, and the few examples included were hardcore, thus limiting their availability. Yet, soon after, some anime appeared in both genres that served as gateways to the West. They found a broader than expected fan base, and made same-sex romances more acceptable to more fans. Interestingly, the two titles couldn’t be less alike: one was based on a manga, the other on a series of novels; one is set in the limited and exotic environment of a Catholic girls’ school, the other in the crazed and noisy world of rock music; one anime was originally broadcast on the TV Tokyo network, the other on the WOWOW cable channel. The only thing they have in common is that both were created by and for Japanese women.
Boy Love: Gravitation
Maki Murakami’s manga Gravitation started life as Help!, a dojinshi comic that laid the groundwork for what was to come. Gravitation was originally serialized from 1996 to 2002 in Genzo magazine, and the thirteen-episode anime series (along with two OAVs) appeared between 1999 and 2001.
The story of Gravitation uses two traditional manga devices (a student [a] seeking advice from an older superior, with [b] the relationship escalating to First Love) and plays both out (with a large dose of humor) in the world of rock music. High school student Shuichi Shindo has started a band, Bad Luck. They haven’t broken through yet, however, and Shuichi thinks it’s because his songs need to be better. As luck or destiny would have it, Shuichi is working on a new song when the wind blows the paper into the park. When he catches up, he finds an older man reading the lyrics: he turns out to be Eiri Yuki, a successful writer of romance novels. He returns the song to Shuichi, but not before tearing the song to shreds. This classic “cute meet” is, of course, the beginning of a beautiful friendship; actually more Boy Crush than Boy Love.
Eiri has his own problems; otherwise, his relationship with Shuichi would be one-sided and the plot couldn’t progress. Eiri may know how to grab a woman reader’s heartstrings, but Eiri in life is nothing like his novelist persona. Cold, bitter, and cynical, Yuki, meaning “snow,” is an apt pen name. Predictably, the very different personality of Shuichi, with his puppy-like affection, helps Eiri cope with the traumatic events in his past that have stifled his heart.
Thematically predictable, perhaps, but stylistically the manga itself isn’t a conventional romance, and neither is the anime. In the first episode, when Shuichi is late to a band meeting in a coffee shop, at one point he suddenly morphs into a 500-year-old man—a joke comparing him to Urashima the fisherman (see the chapter on Windaria). At first hating Eiri for disrespecting his songs, Shuichi almost literally stumbles into love with his mentor. The story has Shuichi declaring his love for Eiri in loud, and occasionally bizarre, ways; when Eiri goes to New York, for example, Shuichi decides that the cheapest way to follow him is to get in a box and mail himself to America.
The main point about this story is its return to same-sex love as “a very pure thing,” mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. At one point, Eiri talks to Shuichi about his impulsive nature, telling him it is admirable that “you can fall in love with somebody and not worry about sexuality.”22 If Shuichi were gay, Eiri is saying, he would have first run Eiri through a “male/female” filter to see if Eiri was his “type.” In this case, the fact that they’re both males is irrelevant, or at least unimportant.
Even after the manga series was finished, Murakami continued creating episodes that appeared online and were published in Genzo, under the name Gravitation EX. She also produced two dojinshi series: Remix (under the corporate name Crocodile Ave.) and MegaMix. These latter series are much more sexually explicit than the original.
Yuri: Maria-sama ga Miteru
When a short story appeared in a 1997 issue of Cobalt, a magazine aimed at a women audience, there was no indication that it would spawn a pop culture franchise that would last for decades and reach around the world. Oyuki Konno had written the first part of the series that would come to be known as Maria-sama ga Miteru (Maria Watches Over Us). The thirty-fifth novel in the series had appeared by the end of 2008, as did the most recent in a series of drama disks, and a live action film of the story was released in 2010.
Maria Watches Over Us started as pure prose with illustration by Reine Hibiki; the first manga, with art by Satoru Nagasawa, didn’t appear until 2002. Between 2004 and 2009 four seasons of anime were also produced, as well as audio dramas on CD.
If Gravitation was a rowdy blast of electric guitars, Maria Watches Over Us is a quiet, contemplative walk in a garden. Yet, perhaps because of the secluded atmosphere of the Lillian Girls’ Academy, a Catholic school in Tokyo in a nation where maybe one percent of the population is Christian, this location quietly gives rise to intense emotion. This is not merely a hothouse atmosphere as with Otori Academy (see the chapter on Revolutionary Girl Utena), but a world about which almost nothing is known and where, therefore, “anything goes” (almost) in literary terms.
There’s one other element to this story, since even a locale about which the reader knows nothing needs some sense of order. For this, Konno created the sœur system. Named for the French word for “sister,” the conventions of the system would seem familiar to an audience accus. tomed to thinking of schoolmates as either sempai (senior class members) or kohai (junior class members). Invented by Konno for her books, the sœur system lets a second- or third-year student choose a kohai as a “sister.” The relationship is even symbolized by a piece of jewelry; in this case, a rosary. Since this is a shojo story, it’s also heavy with flower imagery: the school’s student council is called the Yamayurikai (Mountain Lily Group), the principal officers are named for three breeds of roses, and the kohai are referred to as “buds” during their first year. At that time the “bud” is expected to clean the Rose Mansion (where the council meets), prepare tea and snacks, and otherwise serve the older “sisters.” The story then develops along predictable lines: the sempai/kohai relationship changes to friendship, and—in the case of some couples—into something more than friendship.
The roughly two-dozen principal characters—major and minor—in this series revolve around one student: Yumi Fukuzawa. New to the school, quiet and bashful, she crosses paths with a sempai, Sachiko Ogasawara. She’s an altogether different personality: elegant, reclusive, emotional yet tending to keep her emotions buried. Engaged to her cousin Suguru, who is gay, she is also upset that her father and grandfather, although married, keep mistresses on the side. The relationship between these two students is the core of the series. It’s a series with sufficient variety and potential for shifting emotions and alliances. Very few of the relationships are explicitly yuri, but the intensity of the affection, the “very pure thing” mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, is always there.
There is also the likelihood for parody, including futanari dojinshi (in which one or both girls are hermaphrodites) with names like Rosa Gigantea Special Milk23 and Maria-sama ga P-wo Miteru (Maria Watches Over the Penis).
Kannazuki no Miko
The title of this 2004 manga, animated that same year by Rondo Robe Studio and whose two creators share the pen name Kaishaku, means “Miko of the Godless Month.” The tenth month of the lunar calendar (roughly October 20 to November 20) is the “godless” month, perhaps because the gods are believed to assemble during that month at the Izumo Shrine in Shimane Prefecture.
The events of the anime series, shown in English under the title Destiny of the Shrine Maiden, are supposed to take place in Mahoroba, a mythicland of pastoral peace mentioned in the Kojiki. The two miko Himeko and Chikane, both born on October 1 and representing the Sun and the Moon, respectively, must do battle against the eight-headed Yamata no Orochi of folklore. Chikane, the miko of the Moon, also practices kyudo (Shinto archery).
This description makes the story sound like a straightforward mythology, but this is not the case. Mahoroba seems to be a mix of the old and the new: both miko are high school students, Himeko is a photographer, and the eight Yamata no Orochi are personified as, among other things, a pop idol, a manga artist, and a Buddhist nun.
The story is unapologetically yuri: the two miko are very much in love with each other, yet must prove this love through self-sacrificial acts—a common motif in same-sex anime/manga. However, to reward their love, they are reborn and meet each other time and time again.
The student of such pop culture would have to search diligently to find genuine shonen ai manga such as Ludwig II by Yo Higuri, Boys Next Door by Yuki Kaori, and Kori no Mamono no Monogatari (Legend of the Ice Demon) by Shiho Sugiura, or anime such as Zetsuai (Desperate Love) or its sequel, Bronze, both by Minami Ozaki. If this genre has a magnum opus, in a story with homosexuality as a major force, the winner would be Ai no Kusabi (Ties of Love), which was turned into a two-part OAV.24
Ai no Kusabi
Ai no Kusabi (1992) based on a novel by Reiko Yoshihara serialized in the magazine June, is set in a dystopian future that resembles not only the stratified society of Fritz Lang’s classic film Metropolis but also its many anime counterparts, including the feature films Grey and Apple-seed. The future city of Tanagara, capital of the planet Amoi, is run by a giant computer named Jupiter. Jupiter controls all aspects of life, but one wonders about its blueprint for an orderly society. For one thing, females make up only about fifteen percent of the population, mostly in the lower class. Sex has become procreation for the poor and recreation for the rich males, who don’t do anything themselves but watch handsome young males have sex with other males. Since the elite are sterile, heterosexuality for them would be pointless.
One more interesting detail: one’s social status is determined not by skin color, but by hair color. Black hair is at the bottom of the ladder, and at the top are (no surprise, really) the Blondies. Ai no Kusabi is the story of Jason Mink, a Blondie who goes slumming for a sexual “pet” and sets the wheels of tragedy in motion.
The anime version begins with Riki, whose black hair marks him as a member of the lowest class, looking to steal a car. He’s set upon by vigilantes, but rescued by Jason, who tells him he is to be Jason’s “pet.” The relationship is sealed when Jason puts a ”collar” around the base of Riki’s penis.
The scene jumps three years ahead. Riki is still with Jason, although pets are usually discarded after one year. But Riki’s old life intrudes when Riki meets with Guy, his former lover and the leader of the Bisons motorcycle gang. The Bisons sneak into a pet auction but Riki tells them to leave when Jason appears. Killie, a young member of the Bisons, approaches Jason with a business proposition. Killie turns into a major drug runner, but sets up the other Bisons to be arrested or shot. Riki is arrested as well, but is released because he’s listed as a pet.
Jason has fallen in love with Riki. Guy, however, isn’t about to leave things as they are. He kidnaps Riki and removes the pet collar the only possible way: by castrating Riki. He then summons Jason to a deserted building. They fight, but Guy had wired the building with explosives and sets them off. Riki tries to rescue Jason and Guy from the fire caused by the explosion, but Jason’s legs get caught in an automatic door and are cut in half (a symbolic parallel to Riki’s castration). Jason is now doomed to die in the fire, so Riki goes back to him. They light up two “black moons” (poisoned cigarettes) and wait for the end. At the moment of Jason’s death, Jupiter the computer makes a sound: a moan that is almost human.
Shojo Ai
Anime and manga showing lesbian activity (referred to as yuri)25 are much more common than those showing shonen ai, if only because they are often done to pander to male tastes.
One example is the 1990 historical anime released in English as Sword for Truth. In the middle of a story about a ronin rescuing a kidnapped princess, we see a totally unrelated lesbian sex scene. At least there’s a hint of context: the seduction is an attempt to recruit an assassin for an attack that comes later in this installment (apparently the first in an unfinished series). The lesbian sex also takes place under the influence of opium, which adds another layer of meaning to the act in a culture where recreational drug use is much more harshly denounced and penalized than in the U.S.
Of course, nobody expects a context or a plot in H-anime, but sometimes one appears anyway. The Angel of Darkness series presents lesbians as both heroes and villains, and the larger story, and not just the fact of their sexuality, determines where the audience’s sympathies lie. In the first installment, the dark secret under the chapel is discovered by a pair of lesbian students, one of whom is possessed by the spirits of the forest to combat what they find. The third installment is less a cautionary tale against violating traditional gender roles than a Frankenstein-style warning “not to tamper in God’s domain” (a message that to an extent underlies the entire series). A coed at another academy, scorned and slighted by her classmates, abandons any attempts to befriend them and joins forces with the underground evil to torture and torment them; because this is an H-movie, the torture is usually sexual in nature. She even tries to control the evil herself, treating the monster as a servant carrying out her personal vendetta, but ultimately she runs up against the limit of her power and suffers the consequences. She isn’t punished for being a lesbian, but for being brutal.
A true lesbian romance—with love underlying the activity—is much harder to come by, because it threatens both female and male traditional gender roles. The threat to the female role is in the socially transgressive nature of the relationship; the threat to the male is that the male gets marginalized for a change. No matter how many dragons he slays, he cannot claim the princess.
St. Lobelia
First of all, there was no Saint Lobelia; lobelia is an herb-bearing plant, with some 400 species. However, three other flowers are involved with three students at St. Lobelia’s Academy, a girls’ school that is sort of a competitor with the coed Ouran High School.
Several anime set in schools (even coed schools) have lesbian romances among the student body. The Lilian Girls Academy in Maria Watches Over Us is a clear example, as is Otori Academy in Revolutionary Girl Utena. St. Lobelia, however, is yuri run comically amok.
One major focus of life at that school is The Zuka Club. The name derives from the all-girl Takarazuka theater troupe, and, as in the real theater company, elaborate romantic musicals are staged, with girls dressed as boys to take all of the parts. The tension of two girls (one in male disguise) acting out a love scene provides at least a shadow of the forbidden relationship parodied by the Hitachiin twins.
The president of the Zuka Club is Benio Amakusa, “The Lady of the Red Rose.” She has such a fan following at St. Lobelia’s that the Guardian Club was instituted for her protection. Like most things in the Ouran universe, the level of fan adulation is over the top, with club members performing crowd control just so Benio can get to her classes. She’s tall and thin, with short hair; she resembles a somewhat older Haruhi. And, despite her rose nickname, her scenes are always highlighted by lilies.
When the trio from St. Lobelia—Benio, Chizuru Maihara, and Hinako Tsuwabuki—try to convince Haruhi to switch schools, Tamaki convinces the rest of the Host Club to fight to keep her, dressing them all in drag—formal ball gowns, elaborate wigs, and overdone makeup. Haruhi decides to stay; she laughs so hard at the Host Club maniacs that they all know she isn’t going anywhere.
The Sword of Paros
One interesting yuri treatment is the 1986 manga Paros no Ken (The Sword of Paros). This manga, with artwork by Yumiko Igarashi and a story by Kaoru Kurimoto, is one of the few to take the precedent of Dr. Tezuka’s Princess Knight to its logical conclusion, and yet is structured so as to preserve the status quo while still presenting a “happily ever after” ending.
Paros, a vaguely European principality much like Silverland, is ruled by the blond and beautiful princess Erminia, who dresses in male attire and can handle a sword as well as, if not better than, any knight in the kingdom.
One day while riding, accompanied by Yurius, a skilled swordsman and Erminia’s faithful friend and bodyguard, Erminia saves a peasant girl named Fiona from a wild horse. It is love at first sight for Erminia.
It could be the beginning of a romance for the two girls, yet Erminia is the king’s only child and thus heir to the throne of Paros, and as such her duty is to provide the kingdom with an heir to follow her. Her father has arranged a marriage but Erminia refuses to bow to his demands. As an alternative, Erminia is allowed to participate in a tournament; she will marry any swordsman who defeats her. Her heart, however, belongs to the peasant girl Fiona. In the tournament that is to decide her future, Erminia has to face a mysterious masked knight. The duel is fierce and at one point the masked knight manages to disarm the princess. A minister named Alfonso throws another sword to Erminia. It happens to be the mythical Sword of Paros. Just as Erminia is about to rally against her opponent, the King clutches his chest and dies. Alfonso stops the duel and announces that this is an omen that Erminia isn’t fit to inherit the throne since her father died the very moment she raised the Sword of Paros. However, the truth is that Alfonso poisoned the king’s wine. Alfonso announces that the duel is over and the mysterious knight has won by default: Erminia is to marry him. At that moment soldiers from the neighboring kingdom of Kauros invade the castle and take over control under orders of the mysterious knight (who is actually the prince of Kauros).
Erminia, meanwhile, is a prisoner in her own castle. One night the prince of Kauros attempts to rape her but she manages to hold him at bay. The prince reminds her that soon they will be married and she will have no choice.
Fiona cuts her hair and gets work as the princess’s personal page. The two are happy to see each other once more but time is running out. Fiona explains that the people are planning an uprising against the invaders, and in order to give Erminia the chance to lead it she trades place with her (using a blond wig). Erminia leaves, promising to come back for her the day of the scheduled wedding.
On the day of the wedding, Erminia, Yurius, and their followers ambush the carriage carrying Fiona (disguised as Erminia) on her way to the chapel. Yurius bids Erminia goodbye and Erminia heads off with Fiona on horseback. The last scene shows the two riding off into the sunset. . . .
I sometimes wonder if, after traveling the world, Erminia and Fiona settled down in a chateau in the south of France next to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. This is not to say that this manga set out to be a gender-bender allegory on the star-crossed romance of England’s Edward VIII, but the results were the same. Under the circumstances, Erminia could never have continued to hold power in Paros. Even if the people were open-minded enough to overlook the class difference in their queen having a commoner consort (of whatever gender), there remained one minorproblem: neither Erminia nor her consort could ever produce a legal successor to the throne.
Shojo Love: Doomed to Conformity
This message that Sword of Paros communicates to an audience of Japanese adolescent girls is far from revolutionary. It is a traditional reminder that their destiny is tied to their biology. Romance may be all well and good, but you have to pay the price. That price is usually power, and for centuries the power of Japanese women resided in their wombs.
Director Mamoru Oshii has stated what he considers to be this crucial gender difference this way:
[W]omen aren’t indecisive about themselves. Becoming a different type of person, or diving off a cliff. Not knowing what’s on the other side, but just doing it. I think men wouldn’t be able to do it. And I think that a woman would. Women would take such actions first. I think men would follow after. That’s because women give birth. A complete person comes out of their own bodies. That’s something that men cannot even imagine.”26
It isn’t just a matter of the individual. In Japanese culture, the self has been less important than the ie, or clan, and as sociologist Joy Hendry reminds us, “. . . continuity is an essential feature of the ie. The individual members of a particular house, who need not necessarily always be resident, occupy the roles of the living members of that particular ie. The total membership includes all those who went before: the ancestors, now forgotten as individuals, the recently dead who are remembered; and the descendants as yet unborn.”27 This is exactly the pattern that appears, explicitly or implicitly, in the shonen ai (“boy love”) and shojo ai (“girl love”) genres, and romances of any kind: romance for its own sake is self-indulgent and necessarily doomed. It’s a theme that is sounded in soap operas and Kabuki as well as age-old folktales: satisfaction of personal desire without considering the consequences leads to trouble. There may be happiness in the short term, but at the very least one will come to the end of life without descendants. With no one to perform memorial rites, no one to inherit the ie, one risks not becoming an ancestor. Which also means that one’s own ancestors will have lived in vain. The message is clear: rather than upset a process that has lasted for dozens of generations over hundreds of years, personal gratification is best delayed, if not abandoned altogether, and replaced by a relationship consistent with one’s duties to the ie and to society.
So Japan, in pop culture as in real life, is hardly a kingdom of cross-dressers or a haven for homosexuals. Far from it; many Japanese gays still stay very deep in the closet. The appeal of homosexual relationships in pop culture, especially as heavily romanticized in girls’ comics, is precisely because it is so exotic to its readers. But there’s also another reason.
This chapter’s title speaks of pseudo-gay themes, and that’s exactly what appeals to so many female fans of these genres. There is a tolerance in the Japanese culture for intense same-sex attachments that do not threaten social roles, as long as they stop short of the romantic. Popular culture, which serves in part as a corrective measure, a guide to steer social conduct and attitude, takes depiction of same-sex romances in Japanese media (a) in the context of the overall story, which sometimes provides a rationale, and (b) with a grain of salt, knowing that a comic book or an animated film is artistic, idealized, and not reflective for the most part of reality. These portrayals are also permitted (c) because the truly gay couple in question usually does not live happily ever after, while the pseudo-gay couple does. Pop culture, you’ll recall, doesn’t get out ahead of the audience at large.
This last point hardly needs to be stressed. Of course there is no accursed Chinese spring that will bring about gender (or species) changes. One junior high school student will never have to be responsible for saving the planet from invaders from another galaxy. The fantasy nature of the media themselves allows a certain distance to be kept. The Japanese would be the first to say that they can tell the difference between fantasy and reality. But this raises the question: why don’t we see more same-sex friendships in American pop culture? If we, like the Japanese, approach comic books and cartoons assuming the fantasy component, why don’t we see Betty and Veronica holding hands over a malted in the Archie comics?
Because our culture feels more threatened by depiction of intense same-sex friendships than does Japanese culture. We seem too easily to jump to the conclusion that there can be no such thing as “just friends.” In art or in life, we expect—and sometimes seem to demand—that the involved parties “go all the way.” Ironically, given our Puritan ancestry, we seem to be more obsessed with sex than the Japanese; at least, if one were to go by the popular culture. The reason is that American pop culture often limits its options to “sex” and “not-sex.”28
Japanese culture makes room for a much wider range of relationships, recognizing that one can incur duty (on) under a variety of circumstances, and the responsibility for honoring that obligation depends on one’s social standing relative to the other party. Even in this very personal realm—perhaps especially in this realm—one’s personal desires (ninjo) count for less in the long run than does group consensus. In spite of its higher visibility (if one counts phenomena such as nudity on late-night television and pornography sold in vending machines) in Japan, “sex is granted a much lower priority in the order of social activity than in the West. . . . Sex, belonging to the soft world of ninjo and part of the sphere of mere human feelings as it is, is not very important.”29
In short, dividing up the world into “sex partners” and “not-sex partners” may work for some Americans, but most Japanese (and I daresay most Americans) would find it to be extremely unrealistic. In any event, one can never act solely on the basis of one’s feelings in Japan; the tightly woven social web traps one in a host of expectations and obligations. Japan may have entered the twenty-first century with America, but Japan still has the custom of omiai—engagement meetings in which marital prospects are interviewed and surveyed as if they were being recruited for a corporation—and for some Japanese, Western-style romance is still a luxury.
1. Randy Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U. S. Military (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 411.
2. See “The Boy Who Laid the Golden Stone” in Royall Tyler, Japanese Tales (New York: Pantheon, 1987), 221.
3. In the third season, Chibi-Usa, on a visit from the twenty-fifth century, meets a precocious young teamaster, a boy who is drawn so prettily that the Western dubbers decided to make him a girl. Presumably they did this because the young teamaster, to honor the heroics of the Sailor Senshi, trades in his kimono at the end for a short skirt and middie blouse. Not that they didn’t get the joke, but the Western crew seemed to forget that the word “travesty” (a parody or comic version) has the same roots as the word “transvestite.”
4. In a Q&A session at the 1998 International Comics Convention in San Diego, Sailor Moon cartoonist Naoko Takeuchi insisted that the Three Lites were always female, which doesn’t explain their masculine attire when not fighting the bad guys. At the same conference, she confirmed that Sailors Uranus and Neptune were “a couple,” but joked that they only got together because “they had lots of time on their hands.” See http://www.black-kat.com/blackmoon/take2.html
5. Utena dresses like a boy in order to be heroic; she knows that princes are heroic but princesses are not. As will be seen later, this belief costs her dearly.
6. Relative age is so important in Japanese social relationships that twins are declared either older or younger than each other, if only by minutes.
7. Haruhi’s father Ryoji (his professional name is Ranka) is generally comic but also has his poignant moments. He says that, although he was previously bisexual, the death of his wife convinced him that he could never love another woman again; hence his job in a drag bar. Paradoxically, he was so happy when he was straight that, when he became a widower, he turned gay. He’s rather impulsive and impractical, unlike his daughter, whom he wants to see return to her female identity. Ryoji, as a drag queen, is what Japanese slang calls an okama, literally a cooking pot; the word is vernacular for a womb.
8. This is a case in which the manga and anime versions diverge. In the anime, the dorm’s senpai (upper-classmen) room together and sometimes act gay to play mind-games with the hapless hero of the series. In the manga by Yukie Nasu, however, two freshmen roommates actually begin a homosexual love affair; this isn’t mentioned in the anime.
9. This is another title whose meaning is layered. It could be taken as either Magic User’s Club or the exclamation “We wanna do magic!”
10. Catalogue of the Osamu Tezuka Exhibition (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbun, 1990), 142.
11. Atsushi Tanaka, trans. Keiko Katsuya, Catalogue of the Osamu Tezuka Exhibition.
12. This name was hung on him by his girlfriend/stepsister Miki, who said that, like marmalade, he may seem sweet but there’s something bitter deep inside. Yu’s comeback was to call Miki “mustard girl,” suggesting that she was nothing but bitterness.
13. Antonia Levi, Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 135.
14. Ian Buruma, Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters, and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes (New York: Meridian, 1984), 128–29..
15. Sandra Buckley, “Penguin in Bondage: A Graphic Tale of Japanese Comic Books,” cited in Susan Napier, Anime: From Akira to Princess Mononoke (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 266, note 28.
16. The look of shonen ai characters can also be based on celebrities, including Western pop singers Boy George and Terence Trent D’Arby.
17. Mikiso Hane, Japan: A Historical Survey (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), 73–76.
18. Buruma, Behind the Mask, 132–35.
19. Note that this figure was evoked in the television series Rurouni Kenshin in the character of Shogo Amakusa, also from the island of Kyushu and also a Christian.
20. Hane, Japan, 148–49.
21. For that matter, the romance expressed in shonen ai manga covers a wide range, from the platonic to the sexually explicit. This adds another layer of complexity to a genre that’s already difficult enough to study.
22. Maki Murakami, Gravitation, trans. Ray Yoshimoto (Los Angeles: TOKYOPOP Manga, 2003), 2:70
23. In a somewhat confusing convention, pornographic manga sometimes refer to semen as “milk.”
24. Here again we have a title that’s a pun. The title is written with the kanji that could also be read The Wedge in the Gap. However, as both “gap” and “love” are pronounced ai the title could also mean “the Wedge of Love,” the symbolic meaning of which I’ll leave to the reader to imagine.
25. As explained at the website http://www.yuricon.org/whatisyuri.htm, there’s no clear single source for this name. The first theory is that characters in early girl/girl romances were often named Yuri or Yuriko; the name became a cliché and then a label. Others say that Japanese lesbians were known in the ’70s as “the lily tribe” (the Japanese word for the lily is yuri). One theory even suggests that the name comes from one of the Dirty Pair, two comically destructive intergalactic policewomen. However, both Dirty Pair members Kei and Yuri are straight, and show an interest in each other only in H- manga.
26. “Animerica Interview: Mamoru Oshii,” trans. Andy Nakatani, Animerica 9 (5): 13.
27. Joy Hendry, Understanding Japanese Society (London: Routledge, 1989), 23; emphasis added.
28. Stop and think: does modern American popular culture include anything at all for the romantic? Not on television, which has become the home post-9/11 of counterterrorism wars, action-heavy police dramas, angst-ridden medical soap operas, and glib crime stories. Hollywood movies will occasionally cast Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock or Hugh Grant in something resembling romance, but the examples are few and getting fewer. Anime, in contrast, offers romance, realistic and fantastic and just about every flavor in between, for most ages (although youths seem to be the main target, with older women preferring the written word) and all sexual combinations.
29. Nicholas Bornoff, Pink Samurai: Love, Marriage, and Sex in Contemporary Japan (New York: Pocket Books, 1991), 299.