[I originally published this post on Cohost under the title “Notes toward a unified theory of yuri.” I’ve retitled it here to better reflect what it actually is, and have integrated some additional material from a follow-up post.]

Following up on some off-the-cuff comments I made on the Okazu discord about Yuri Is My Job, here are some half-baked and incomplete thoughts trying to tie together the various strains of yuri (mainly manga, with some anime mixed in) in a semi-coherent way.

My aim is not to do a TV Tropes/“database animal”-style collection of common yuri tropes, but rather to try to account for the historical evolution of yuri in its various incarnations, and relate them to the Japanese social, cultural, economic, and political contexts in which yuri works were created. (I omit discussion of yuri outside of Japan, although it’s very interesting to see how non-Japanese yuri and “GL” content is both influenced by and differs from Japanese yuri.)

That is, it attempts to address why particular forms of yuri arose in particular environments and became popular, how they can be grouped into larger categories (e.g., how magical girl, isekai, and SF yuri like Otherside Picnic can be considered “species” within a higher-level “genus”), and how they underwent “descent with modification” and even occasionally went extinct in response to changing environments (like S literature post WW2).

I think this can help us understand what elements are essential in the evolution of particular forms of yuri and which are “accidental,” as it were. Thus, for example, one can imagine something like S literature without Christian iconography (lilies, crosses, etc.). However I don’t think one can imagine it arising or thriving without the combination of ideals of romantic love, all-girl schools, and universal early arranged marriage.

I think this also leads to interesting questions for further research. Here are two I can think of off the top of my head, to which I have only partial or fuzzy answers:

  • What factors in past and present Japanese society account for the historical popularity of tales involving transformation, including transformations involving gender nonconformity?

  • What factors in contemporary Japanese society account for the particular forms, plots, themes, etc., of shakaijin yuri?

“Moar reseach needed!” as they say.

Anyway, please consider this an opportunity to poke holes in my arguments and highlight important factors I totally missed. And with that, let’s get to it . . .

The five ages of yuri

I see the historical progression of yuri and its various forms as proceeding roughly as discussed below, with four major creative eras and associated literary forms, and one interregnum after World War 2:

  • S literature (1900s—1930s).
  • Post-war fallow period, with only isolated proto-yuri works (1950s through 1980s).
  • Magical girl yuri and (later) isekai and SF yuri (1990s on).
  • Class S yuri and schoolgirl yuri (2000s on), bookended by
    • Class S revival / revision: Maria Watches Over Us (circa 2000);
    • Deconstructed Class S yuri: Yuri Is My Job (2010s–2020s).
  • Shakaijin yuri and queer yuri (2010s on).

Note that the three later eras are still ongoing, with works in all three categories continuing to be published.

Also note that I use the term “S literature” to refer to early 20th-century works like Hana monogatari and reserve the term “Class S” for later—and in my opinion entirely different—works like Maria Watches Over Us and its successors.

S literature

The creation of what we can consider to be proto-yuri works.

Timeframe: Early 20th century (late Meiji / Taishō / early Shōwa eras).

Key work: Nobuko Yoshiya’s Hana monogatari (with Yoshiya’s Yaneura no nishojo being a special case, escaping the bounds of typical S literature).

Central theme: Young Japanese women have deep and emotionally rewarding, but time-limited, relationships with (female) partners whom they freely choose, relationships ended by separation due to arranged marriages or death (sometimes by suicide).

Cultural influences: Christian iconography and ideals, Western ideals of romantic love.

Background context:

  • Education of girls becoming an explicitly-stated part of Meiji modernization, with young middle-class women educated in mission-run girls’ schools and (later) similar state-run schools.
  • Young women being near-universally compelled into arranged marriages at relatively early ages.
  • Growth of a publishing industry catering to girls and young women and featuring their submitted contributions.
  • Export-driven economic growth of Japan based on mass employment of working-class girls and young women in the textile industry.
  • Education of middle-class girls and young women and employment of working-class girls and young women both made possible by relatively low cultural preference for female seclusion (in contrast, for example, to India and the Middle East).

Additional comments: Unlike many later “Class S” works, S literature was rooted in the lived experiences of Japanese schoolgirls, many of whom participated in S relationships at school and some of whom (including Yoshiya) wrote stories about S relationships.

The post-war fallow period

The post-WW2 decline of S literature and the rise of shōjo manga.

Timeframe: 1950s through 1970s and 1980s (mid to late Shōwa era).

Background context:

  • Introduction of coeducation and promotion of romantic love by the American occupation authorities.
  • Decline of arranged marriage throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
  • Increasing popularity of manga and (later) anime.
  • A still-entrenched patriarchical system despite occupation-sponsored measures to promote gender equality through legal and other measures.

Additional comments: In the postwar period, S literature was first replaced entirely by shōjo manga, and then shōjo manga were revolutionized by the first generation of mangaka who had grown up reading them. S works featuring relationships between girls and young women were succeeded by BL works, with early proto-BL works (e.g., The Heart of Thomas) featuring similar themes of doomed love within a restricted school environment. Works in this period thought of as yuri or proto-yuri are either similar to S and proto-BL works in their themes of doomed love (e.g., Shiroi Heya no Futari), feature themes of gender nonconformity and transformation that look forward to the next group of works (Rose of Versailles), or both (Dear Brother, Claudine).

Magical girl, isekai, and SF yuri

I treat all these as related due to the similarity of the central themes.

Timeframe: 1990s and beyond (Heisei and Reiwa eras), down to the present day.

Example works:

  • Sailor Moon, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Puella Magi Madoka Magica (magical girl).
  • I’m in Love with the Villainess, The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady, The Executioner and Her Way of Life (isekai).
  • Otherside Picnic (SF).

Central theme(s): Girls and young women are transformed into new forms (magical girl yuri) or translated into another world/time/dimension (isekai and SF yuri) and thereby gain new powers, form homosocial and sometimes romantic relationships with other girls and young women, and fight various enemies.

Cultural influences: Takarazuka Revue, Princess Knight, Rose of Versailles, shōjo manga in general, tokusatsu series.

Related themes in manga and anime: cross-dressing, genderswapping.

Background context:

  • Increased empowerment of girls and women in the cultural sphere but a still-entrenched patriarchal system.
  • Rigidity of gender roles both in school (e.g., mandated uniforms) and afterward.

Class S and schoolgirl yuri

I consider these to be related due to the similarity of their central themes, with two sui generis works bookending the beginning of this genre and the present day.

Class S inspiration: Maria Watches Over Us

In the Heisei era new tropes arise that echo (but are only indirectly influenced by) tropes of Meiji/Taishō-era S literature.

Timeframe: Circa 2000 (Heisei era).

Central theme: A young woman-centered age-ordered hierarchy that through love and kindness supports and nurtures disparate personalities and prepares them for life.

Cultural touchstones (not necessarily direct influences): Catholic girls’ schools, S literature, Yoshiya’s comments on relationships between younger and older girls being critical to developing “a beautiful, moral, social, and non-self-centered character.”

Background context:

  • Continuation of private Catholic girls’ schools as middle- and upper-class institutions.
  • Japan’s “lost decade” of economic stagnation.
  • Exposure of the emptiness of the promise of lifetime employment and “corporation as family” for anyone other than a minority of men.
  • Increased employment and empowerment of women, but a still-entrenched patriarchal system.

Additional comments: A commenter on the original post claimed that Maria Watches Over Us was not directly influenced by S literature, but rather by the author’s experiences in an all-girl school. However, that school environment arguably was greatly influenced by the environments of the original girls’ mission schools of the Meiji and Taishō eras.

In line with the comment noted above, Maria Watches Over Us is distinguished from S literature by having a different central theme and a setting much more removed from its typical audience than S literature was from its. It is also distinguished from the works it inspired by their ignoring the moral and didactic aspects of relationships between girls and focusing much more on the emotionally affective, entertaining, and (at times) prurient aspects.

Post-Marimite Class S and schoolgirl yuri

The popularity of Maria Watches Over Us leads to the creation of a flood of works reusing and reworking its tropes to various different ends.

Timeframe: 2000s on (Heisei and Reiwa eras), down to the present day.

Example works:

  • Strawberry Panic, Kiss and White Lily for My Dearest Girl, many others (Class S yuri).
  • Whispered Words, Girl Friends, Kase-san series, many others (schoolgirl yuri).

Central themes:

  • Schoolgirls enter into relationships with each other that can range from “passionate friendship” to actual sexual relations but are not explicitly lesbian (schoolgirl yuri), sometimes in a hermetically-sealed all-girl Catholic-tinged environment from which men are entirely absent and excluded (Class S yuri).

Cultural influences: Maria Watches Over Us, shōjo manga in general.

Background context:

  • Increased visibility of lesbians, but primarily considered as objects for entertainment.
  • Appeal of moe characters.
  • Kawaii aesthetic.
  • Rigidity of Japanese gender roles and social limits to accepted male behavior possibly driving male interest in yuri.
  • Creation of Comic Yuri Hime and other magazines dedicated to yuri manga and related works, serving an all-genders audience.

Additional comments: I see Sweet Blue Flowers and Bloom Into You as being edge cases here: they both can be considered “schoolgirl yuri” (with Sweet Blue Flowers also reusing Class S tropes), but both prominently feature girls who are explicitly characterized as being obligate lesbians (Fumi and Sayaka respectively) and both feature adult lesbians who serve as role models and advisors to the younger girls.

Deconstructed Class S yuri: Yuri Is My Job

Yuri interrogates itself.

Timeframe: 2010s on (late Heisei and Reiwa eras), down to the present day.

Central theme: Young women explore themselves and their emotional and potentially romantic relationships with other young women via the performance of Class S tropes.

Cultural influences: Maria Watches Over Us, Class S yuri in general, academic and fan works of yuri criticism, maid/butler cafes, cosplay, and related phenomena.

Background context:

  • Yuri as a genre mature enough (in both senses) to interrogate itself and its audience.
  • Lesbians acknowledged to exist but not fully accepted into society, still excluded from marriage and other socializing institutions.
  • Cosplay as identity construction.
  • VNs, otome games, maid/butler cafes, etc., as structured training in social interaction for people ill-equipped by nature or experience for unscripted real-life interactions.

Shakaijin and queer yuri

Yuri grows up as an adult medium.

Timeframe: 2010s on (late Heisei and Reiwa eras), down to the present day.

Example works:

  • I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up, Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon, Catch These Hands (shakaijin yuri).
  • Even Though We’re Adults, How Do We Relationship (queer yuri).

Central theme(s): Women enter into romantic and (sometimes) sexual relationships with each other at university or in the workplace, often explicitly identifying as lesbian and sometimes entering into marriage-like arrangements (or actual marriages in an imagined alternative/future Japan).

Cultural influences: Western and home-grown LGBTQ+ fiction and activism.

Background context:

  • Increased LGBTQ+ visibility and political activism.
  • Prefectural initiatives toward marriage equality thwarted by LDP intransigence at the national level.
  • Increasing postponement of (heterosexual) marriage, including a substantial fraction of women experiencing “unplanned drifting into singlehood” due to ambivalence about marrying.
  • Persistence of gender pay gap, driven by restriction of life-time employment to male workers as an corporate incentive to ensure their continued loyalty and hard work.
  • Housing market oriented toward traditional heterosexual couples and their children, with housing for singles often of lower quality, and with some emerging options for alternative living arrangements (e.g., shared houses).
  • Aging population, with an increasing number of people who will never marry.

Related themes in manga and anime: nonbinary/X-gender, asexual, transgender, and other GNC identities.

Additional comments: Like S literature, shakaijin yuri and queer yuri often reflect the lived experiences of many of their readers. Relationships sometimes seem to reflect a desire for companionship more than explicit romantic attraction, at least on the part of one of the parties, but it is common for the parties to move into together and enter into marriage-like arrangements.

Sources and further reading

Almost all of the following references are from the bibliography to my book, but I‘ve added a few new ones.

  • Bacon, Alice Mabel. Japanese Girls and Women. Rev. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919. https://​archive​.org​/details​/japanese​girls​wom​00​baco​_2. Status of girls and women in the Meiji era.
  • Dollase, Hiromi Tsuchiya. Age of Shōjo: The Emergence, Evolution, and Power of Japanese Girls’ Magazine Fiction. Albany: SUNY Press, 2019. S literature and the emergence of a distinct shōjo culture in the early 20th century.
  • Evans, Alice. “How Did East Asia Overtake South Asia?” The Great Gender Divergence (blog). March 13, 2021. https://​www​.draliceevans​.com​/post​/how​-did​-east​-asia​-overtake​-south​-asia. Low preference for female seclusion as driver of Japanese economic growth.
  • ———. “Why are Gender Pay Gaps so Large in Japan and South Korea?” The Great Gender Divergence (blog). August 25, 2023. https://​draliceevans​.substack​.com​/p​/why​-are​-gender​-pay​-gaps​-so​-large. Gender pay gaps as a result of corporate incentives to male workers.
  • Frederick, Sarah. Translator’s introduction to Yellow Rose, by Nokuko Yoshiya. Background to and discussion of one of Yoshiya’s stories from Hana monogatari.
  • Friedman, Erica. By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Manga and Anime. Vista, CA: Journey Press, 2022. General history of yuri.
  • Fujimoto, Yukari. “Where Is My Place in the World? Early Shōjo Manga Portrayals of Lesbianism.” Translated by Lucy Frazier. Mechademia 9 (2014), 25-42. https://​doi​.org​/10​.5749​/mech​.9​.2014​.0025. Replacement of S literature by shōjo manga.
  • McLelland, Mark. Love, Sex, and Democracy in Japan during the American Occupation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Promotion of romantic love and discouragement of arranged marriages by the American occupation authorities.
  • Maser, Verena. “Beautiful and Innocent: Female Same-Sex Intimacy in the Japanese Yuri Genre.” PhD diss., Universität Trier, 2015. https://​ubt​.opus​.hbz​-nrw​.de​/frontdoor​/index​/index​/docId​/695. Academic discussion of yuri and its history and themes.
  • National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. “Marriage Process and Fertility of Japanese Married Couples / Attitudes toward Marriage and Family among Japanese Singles: Highlights of the Survey Results on Married Couples/Singles.” Tokyo: National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 2017. https://​www​.ipss​.go​.jp​/ps​-doukou​/e​/doukou15​/Nfs15R​_points​_eng​.pdf. Post-war decline of arranged marriage.
  • Pflugfelder, Gregory M. “‘S’ Is for Sister: School Girl Intimacy and ‘Same-Sex Love’ in Early Twentieth-Century Japan.” In Gendering Modern Japanese History, edited by Barbara Monoly and Kathleen Uno, 133-90. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005. https://​doi​.org​/10​.1163​/9781684174171​_006. S relationships.
  • Raymo, James M., Fumiya Uchikoshi, and Shohei Yoda. “Marriage intentions, desires, and pathways to later and less marriage in Japan.” Demographic Research 44 (January 12, 2021), 67–98. https://​doi​.org​/10​.4054​/demres​.2021​.44​.3. “Unplanned drift into singlehood.”
  • Robertson, Jennifer. “The Politics of Androgyny in Japan: Sexuality and Subversion in the Theater and Beyond.” American Ethnologist 19, no. 3 (August 1992), 419-42. https://​doi​.org​/10​.1525​/ae​.1992​.19​.3​.02a00010. Takarazuka Revue and its influence.
  • Ronald, Richard, and Lynne Nakano. “Single women and housing choices in urban Japan.” Gender, Place and Culture 20, no. 4 (2013), 451-469. http://​dx​.doi​.org​/10​.1080​/0966369X​.2012​.694357. Housing options for single women.
  • Shamoon, Deborah. Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012. S literature and relationships.
  • Suzuki, Michiko. Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature and Culture. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009. S literature and relationships.
  • ———. “The Translation of Edward Carpenter’s Intermediate Sex in Early Twentieth-Century Japan.” In Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World, edited by Heike Bauer, 197-215. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015. Nobuko Yoshiya’s promotion of relationships between older and younger girls.
  • Tsurumi, E. Patricia. Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Working-class girls and young women as drivers of Japanese economic growth.
  • Welker, James. “From Women’s Liberation to Lesbian Feminism in Japan: Rezubian Feminizumu within and beyond the Ūman Ribu Movement in the 1970s and 1980s.” In Rethinking Japanese Feminisms, edited by Julia C. Bullock, Ayako Kano, and James Welker, 50-67. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018. Origins of lesbian activism in Japan.