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.

Thaliarchus (@thaliarchus) - 2023-09-03 10:26

Since it’s mostly implicit I might be wholly barking up the wrong tree here, but I think I’d sum that theory up as what we might call a ’strong social model’ of yuri content and theme, in which currents in Japanese society fundamentally drive what happens in yuri material and what that material thinks it is itself about.

I won’t say whether or not I think this is right, but it strikes me as at least useful, because fans (and not just fans of yuri) so often default to non-social ideas of a lineage of works which might influence each other but lack ties to their different historical moments.

I hesitate over the idea of genre maturity, which doesn’t map comfortably onto my sense of how such things work in some other areas, but I’m not nearly well-read enough to produce (say) S literature counterexamples that might trouble it.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-09-03 10:45

Thanks for stopping by to comment. To be honest, I was using the term “unified theory” very much tongue in cheek, as an ex-physics major it was irresistible. As you note, it’s really more a chronology, or I would argue, a description of yuri’s evolution (since a “chronology” could simply be “one d—-d thing after another”).

You are correct in that what I was really interested in was how the themes and core plots of yuri arise out of both Japanese society and previous works, what you call a “strong social model”. I set this against an account that focuses only on cataloging yuri tropes, or that focuses only on “texts” in isolation.’

And now that I think of it, if I were a biology major I would have called this “notes toward an evolutionary theory of yuri”, since what it really addresses is 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).

Still Enjoying Manga (@StillEnjoyingManga) - 2023-09-10 04:42

MariMite wasn’t inspired by S literature. Konno said in an interview with Eureka that she hadn’t heard of S until after she had created her series. She was inspired by BL LNs and real life.

To me, it’s wrong to use the label “class S” for series that focus on romance, such as StoPani and AnoKiss. While MariMite was very influential, what it mostly inspired was works catering to people who enjoyed the surface features but would have enjoyed it more if Yumi and Sachiko had become lovers. I’d go as far as to say there hasn’t been a series after MariMite that made a genuinely soeur-like relationship its focus. The close thing to the underlying substance of such a relationship is found in A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow.

Shakaijin yuri and also queer yuri was getting made before 2010. I’m not even sure it’s proportionally more common now. Love My Life started in 2000. Octave and Ohana Holoholo were among the earliest yuri manga to reach 6 volumes. Early Yuri-Hime was doing things like Conditions of Paradise and Apple Day Dream.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-09-10 10:01

Thank you for commenting! (I learn so much from these comments.)

“Maritime wasn’t inspired by S literature…” This confirms my theory that S literature went totally extinct post-war, and that the idea of same-gender relationships in a single-gender school setting was instead carried forward by BL. (But certainly S literature was rediscovered post-Marimite, e.g., we see Takako Shimura referencing Yoshiya and Hana monogatari in Aoi hana in the mid 2000s.)

“What [Marimite] mostly inspired …” The way I would put this is that the downstream influence was really from Marimite doujinshi rather than Marimite itself.

Regarding the term “Class S”, that’s a label that (Western) fans seem to apply to pretty much any work that features all-girls schools and lily-style imagery. I agree that it’s overused and misapplied, but I’m not sure the toothpaste can be put back in the tube.

“Shakaijin yuri and also queer yuri was getting made before 2010.” I was thinking of the recent trend of seeing such works get licensed English versions. But you’re absolutely correct that we see such works in the 2000s, really as far back as the 1990s (if I remember correctly).

Thanks again for stopping by!

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

Before I found Cohost, I posted a fair amount to a pseudonymous 2-follower account on Twitter; a lot of my Cohost posts started out there. Here’s another one of these: some brief thoughts on the final scene in Alice Wu’s film The Half of It, thoughts originally inspired by a thread by lourdeslasala on symbolism in the film.

My bringing it up now was due to seeing a post by @MayaGay mentioning The Half of It in passing, along with Wu’s earlier film Saving Face, which I hadn’t seen. I quickly remedied that lack (Saving Face is streaming on Prime Video), and then watched The Half of It again on Netflix, because I dearly love the film and wanted to write about it again.

NOTE: The following contains spoilers for The Half of It, and assumes that you know the overall plot and who the main characters are.

In the penultimate scene of The Half of It (above), Ellie and Aster face each other, separated by a double yellow line. As lourdeslasala notes, it symbolizes the boundaries between the two, with Ellie staying in her “comfort zone,” but then breaking out of it to cross the line, talk to Aster, and then kiss her.

The final scene is between Ellie and Paul. It starts with another shot with a similar perspective, but a key difference. In the previous scene Ellie and Aster were situated similarly to each other, in positions of relative equality within the shot itself, and also in a wider context: Ellie going off to Grinnell College, and Aster looking to leave Squahamish and go to art school.

But in this shot there’s no such equality. On one side is the train that will take Ellie away to Grinnell. On the other is the town in which Paul will remain, probably for the rest of his life, working in and then presumably inheriting the family business.

We next see Paul and Ellie’s parting conversation. Recall the earlier discussion between Paul and Ellie regarding “the look”: when you know someone wants to be kissed, and you should go ahead and kiss them—as indeed Ellie did to Aster in the previous scene. That was the third kiss in the film, and the only true one, the previous two having been given under false pretenses: Aster looking at Paul thinking that he was the person behind the letters Ellie wrote for him, and Ellie apparently looking at Paul but (it’s implied) looking past him at Aster.

But this scene is different. Here the look is not of two people who want to kiss, but two people who want to—need to—hug and be hugged. So why don’t they?

Because something is blocking them. That obstacle is literally a cooler, containing food prepared for Ellie’s journey. But as a metaphor it’s all the things that might act as barriers to Paul and Ellie’s friendship: interests and intellect, gender and sexuality, or even (as Alice Wu notes in an NPR interview) the jealousy of their partners, who might resent the level of intimacy Ellie and Paul have.

Or, at least, the intimacy they had. Here neither Ellie nor Paul can find the words they seem to want to say, and are blocked from the hugs they might want to give and receive. So, instead, Ellie resorts to sending Paul a text containing (only) emojis. It’s a harbinger of how their relationship may be in future: although they may meet again, they may never again experience the closeness they have right now, their future interactions mediated by distance and differing experiences, as it’s here mediated by technology.

But even in the face of all those barriers to their friendship, Paul can’t help chasing Ellie’s train, echoing a scene from the film Ek Villain that they had watched earlier—a scene that Ellie had scoffed at. Ellie again scoffs at the gesture, but she’s fighting back tears as she does. It’s a platonic parallel to the romantic moment between Ellie and Aster, and to my mind a perfect ending to a beautiful film. Or, as Ellie’s father would say as he pointed to his favorite movie scenes, “Best part.”

Ramona (@MayaGay) - 2023-06-09 18:50

Wonderful analysis!!

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-06-09 18:54

Thanks! I really liked Saving Face, but The Half of It holds a special place in my heart. I wish for more Alice Wu films…

Ramona (@MayaGay) - 2023-06-09 18:59

So do I, I think she is such a talent! Here is hoping she is given many more chances to show how much she can do.

I finished watching the final episode 12 of GAP: The Series a couple of days ago. Here are some final thoughts on the show. (WARNING: This includes spoilers for episode 12 in particular.)

There are others better placed than me to do a comprehensive review of GAP, so I’ll just say that I enjoyed the show and looked forward to watching it each week. I have to confess though: I see a lot of fans commenting as if GAP were the greatest yuri/GL/lesbian series ever. I don’t normally watch live-action LGBTQ+ series, so I really can’t do an intelligent comparison, but this seems more than a bit overblown. I mean, what are they comparing it to?

In any case, I see GAP as an interesting hybrid: on one level it’s a glossy romantic drama (with some comedy sprinkled in) that bears more than a bit of resemblance to soap operas, telenovelas, Kdramas, and (the Thai equivalent) lakorn. But it was also consciously designed to promote a political message, albeit in a low-key suitable-for-the-mainstream way. See in particular the very interesting comments by Saint and P’Chen of IdolFactory, the production company that created the series, in which Saint claims “Every time I create a series . . . I see it as building/improving the [LGBTQA+] community.”

GAP follows a playbook for promoting LGBTQ+ equality that’s familiar from the US marriage equality campaign, but with a Thai-specific twist. There is the act of coming out, and having pride in oneself and those one loves; as Sam says in episode 9 (after Mon frets about what others might think of a public display of affection), “I just want to hold my lover’s hand.”

There’s also the classic “love is love” message, delivered by Saint himself in the final episode, when as “Sir Phoom” he drops in to pay his regards to Sam’s grandmother after she tells Sam to live her life as she chooses: “Love will always find a way. It transcends gender and sexuality.”¹

And, finally, there is the impact of having someone who was previously in opposition—namely Sam’s grandmother, and to a lesser extent Kirk—change their mind and endorse what they previously condemned. (In a US context, see Barack Obama’s endorsement of marriage equality, which people have claimed helped win the Black vote in the 2012 referendum in Maryland, where I live.)

GAP’s political message is adapted to Thai sensibilities. I’ve seen some people online protest that Sam won her freedom only because others permitted it, i.e., through Kirk’s change of heart and his intervention with Sam’s grandmother. Where is the righteous rebellion against heteronormativity and those who enforce it (men like Kirk, but also women like Sam’s grandmother)? Well, that occurred at the end of episode 11, in the form of Neung’s epic rant. But though cathartic for the audience (and perhaps for Sam herself), it was not the key that freed Sam from her fate.

That instead came about because Sam was a dutiful and loving granddaughter and showed her filial piety in the most extreme way possible, choosing to bury forever her chances for happiness in deference to her grandmother’s wishes. Prompted by Kirk’s comments, her grandmother then behaved as an elder should behave in a hierarchical family system (but often does not), taking note not only of her granddaughter’s obedience but also her unhappiness, and deciding to release Sam from her familial obligation in order to promote her ultimate well-being.

The result is to my mind the most dramatic moment of episode 12 (even more dramatic than the wedding), as Sam drops to the floor and kowtows to her grandmother, then hugs her while on her knees before finally standing to face her. Her grandmother then reciprocates by attending Sam’s wedding to Mon, sitting in the front row to bear witness to their vows and—by her presence—publicly endorse their relationship.

Sam and Mon’s story is thus not a story of rebellion against society’s strictures, but of society recognizing the desires of some of its children and evolving its attitudes to acknowledge and accommodate them. This is reinforced by Sir Phoom’s conversation with Sam’s grandmother, in which he seeks to calm the concerns that Sam’s grandmother has, and in particular emphasizes that his own aristocratic parents know about Sam and Mon’s relationship and are happy to see them together.²

Is this the much-sneered-at “respectability politics”? Why, yes, that’s exactly what it is. It’s an approach that Saint and his colleagues presumably thought was most likely to be successful in the context of Thai society: to emphasize the loyalty of LGBTQ+ Thais to that society and its traditional norms of respect and deference, and to ask in turn for themselves to be recognized as full and equal members of society. And from Saint’s public comments it seems that GAP was created in large part to be a means to that end.

[This post originally appeared as a series of five articles on Cohost. I thought it was worth publishing it on my own site, and have combined the five articles into one.]

Happy New Year! Today’s topic is perhaps my favorite film by perhaps my favorite director, Early Summer, directed by Yasujirō Ozu. (I’ve seen all but one of the over thirty Ozu films that have survived to this day.)

I’m an old straight white cisgender man, so I wouldn’t know about these things, but Early Summer has always struck me as a pretty gosh-darned queer film. I’ve seen other people make remarks to this effect (one of which I’ll address in due time), but have never seen a complete case laid out. This is my own attempt; you may judge for yourself to what extent it is successful.

NOTE: This post contains spoilers for all of Early Summer.

A bit about Ozu: Today he’s a critic’s darling, renowned for the formalist perfection of his films and often spoken of in reverent terms. (Adam Mars-Jones skewers some of the most overly-pretentious examples of such criticism in his book Noriko Smiling,¹ which does for Ozu’s 1949 film Late Spring what I’ll attempt in a much smaller way to do for Early Summer.)

But from his own point of view Ozu was not making arthouse films; he was making “home dramas,” movies pitched at the growing post-war Japanese middle class, with an audience composed predominantly of women. His films are about topics of concern to that middle-class audience, for example, families growing apart in an increasingly urbanized Japan (Tokyo Story, 1953), or children rejecting arranged marriages for love marriages (Equinox Flower, 1955).

Early Summer (1951) is yet another home drama. It’s the middle film in Ozu’s “Noriko trilogy”—so called because all three films feature main characters named “Noriko”—and is relatively neglected compared to the other two. Late Spring, which preceded Early Summer, is generally considered the first great work of Ozu’s mature period; it’s ranked number 21 on the latest Sight and Sound critics’ list of the greatest films of all time, and number 62 on the accompanying directors’ list. Tokyo Story, which followed Early Summer, is almost universally regarded as Ozu’s masterpiece, and is ranked at number 4 on both of the Sight and Sound lists.

Early Summer does not appear on either of these lists. However, it’s probably my favorite of all Ozu’s films, in part because its melancholy is accompanied by a humor—and even a measure of optimism—that is largely missing in Late Spring and Tokyo Story, and in part because it’s interesting to look at it through the lens of queerness in cinema—as I hope to do in this series of posts.

On the surface Early Summer tells the story of 28-year-old unmarried Noriko (played by the great Setsuko Hara) and her family’s and her employer’s attempts to arrange a marriage for her.

Going one level down, Early Summer is about the difference between the married and the unmarried, how the married try to persuade or (worse) coerce the unmarried into getting married, and how maybe that isn’t always such a good idea. This theme is explicitly called out more than once in the film.

Early Summer further implies that there may be a good reason why some unmarried people, including Noriko (but not just Noriko), don’t want to marry: they may be “that type of person,” as the young lesbian Fumi described herself in Takako Shimura’s manga Aoi hana. This subtext rises briefly to the level of text at least once before being ambiguously dismissed.

Both Ozu and Hara remained unmarried until their deaths, and to my knowledge neither were ever credibly reported as having a romantic relationship with anyone. Per Donald Richie’s commentary on the Criterion release (referenced in the next section), Ozu was reported to become angry at any talk of his marrying. Meanwhile Hara, though termed “the eternal virgin” by a film producer for her film image, in real life had close friendships with many women, including a hair and makeup artist whose friendship with Hara began early on and continued after Hara retired into obscurity at the height of her career.

In modern terms we could therefore hypothesize Early Summer as a queer film subtly but firmly protesting compulsory heterosexuality, made by a (possibly) queer director and starring a (possibly) queer actor. What exact flavor of “queer” this might be we can leave undefined for now.

Does the film itself support this hypothesis? I’ll discuss this in more detail beginning in the following sections, as I walk through the various scenes and plot points of the film. However it’s generally agreed that very little in an Ozu film is accidental: interiors were constructed to his exact specifications, and actors’ gestures were meticulously rehearsed and multiple takes shot until he was satisfied. If something seems “queer” in Early Summer, there’s a good chance that Ozu intended it thus.

First, a note on sources: Since I don’t speak Japanese, I’m relying almost completely on the subtitles in the two English releases of Early Summer. The first is a Criterion release from 2004, currently available for streaming in the US on the Criterion Channel and Max. There is also a British Film Institute release from 2010, currently available for streaming in the UK on the BFI Player. (Those without access to these are free to try to hunt the film down on other sites devoted to hosting videos or archiving Internet content.)

In general I’ll be quoting the Criterion subtitles; as I discuss later, there are at least a couple of places where the BFI translation is substantially different, and another place where the Criterion subtitles contain a major error.

(Before I get into the film itself, note that the title in Japanese is Bakushū, or “Barley Harvest Time.” This doesn’t directly bear on my thesis, but it’s worth noting for completeness, and as we shall see it ties in with the conclusion of the film.)

Early Summer opens with three establishing shots: first a shot of a dog walking freely on the beach with the ocean in the background, then a shot of a single bird in a cage outside, and then a final shot of birds in cages inside a house. This is the house in the oceanside town of Kamakura in which Noriko (Setsuko Hara’s character) lives, along with her brother Kōichi (Chishū Ryū), his wife Fumiko (Kuniko Miyake), Noriko and Koichi’s father (Ichiro Sugai) and mother (Chieko Higashiyama), and Kōichi and Fumiko’s two young boys.

If we wish, we can interpret the first and third shots as showing a strong contrast between freedom in nature on the one hand, and the restrictions imposed by society and the Japanese family system on the other. In this interpretation the second shot represents Noriko, who has a degree of independence that her mother and Fumiko do not have, but is still constrained by the bonds of family and society.

In the following scenes Kōichi takes an early train to his job as a physician, while Noriko goes to the Kita-Kamakura station to catch a later one. There she meets Kenkichi, another physician who works with Kōichi and who (along with his mother) is the family’s next-door neighbor. Kenkichi tells her that he’s been reading a book, implied to have been recommended by Noriko. The Criterion release describes it only as “this book,” but the BFI release names it as Les Thibaults.

Les Thibaults (published in Japanese as Chibō-ka no hitobito, and apparently relatively popular in Japan at the time) is a multi-volume French novel that begins as one of its protagonists is discovered writing passionate messages to a fellow schoolboy—something Ozu himself was apparently falsely accused of—and is then separated from his friend. Later volumes describe their diverging paths in life. Why might have Noriko recommended this particular novel to Kenkichi? Hold that thought.

We then see Noriko at work, as a secretary and executive assistant to the head of a small firm (Shūji Sano). As she talks with her boss regarding café recommendations, her best friend Aya (Chikage Awashima) arrives, there to collect payment for the boss’s spending at the restaurant her mother owns. Noriko’s boss wonders when they’ll both get married, and refers to them as “old maids.”

(Before becoming a movie actress, Chikage Awashima was a musumeyaku top star in the Takarazuka Revue and occasionally played “pants roles,” i.e., as a female character dressing as a man for plot reasons. Osamu Tezuka was a fan of hers, and she supposedly inspired the main character Sapphire, “born . . . with a blue heart of a boy and a pink heart of a girl,” in his manga Princess Knight. Why might this be relevant to Early Summer? Again, hold that thought.)

After work, Noriko meets Kōichi and Fumiko for dinner. While they eat, Kōichi complains about post-war women (“[They’ve] become so forward.”) and Noriko corrects him: “We’ve just taken our natural place.” Kōichi then claims that’s why Noriko can’t get married, and she rebukes him: “It’s not that I can’t. I could in a minute if I wanted to.” (Note: a bit of foreshadowing here.)

Next occur the two key events that set the main plot in motion. First, Noriko’s great-uncle (Seiji Miyaguchi) arrives for a visit. He wonders why she isn’t married yet. “Some women don’t want to get married,” he tells her. “Are you one of them?” Noriko laughs and leaves the room, but the seed has been planted in the minds of her family.

Noriko’s boss also thinks it’s time for her to get married, and he has just the man for her: “He’s never been married. Not sure if he’s still a virgin.” Her boss has photographs to show her, and won’t leave her leave without taking them.

Meanwhile Noriko and Aya mercilessly tease one of their married friends, and after attending another friend’s wedding have dinner with that friend and another married friend, with a side dish of sexual innuendo. One of the married friends brags about how she spent a rained-out honeymoon playing with a “spinning top”: “My husband is very good at it.” Her friend cautions her: “You shouldn’t flaunt it in front of the single girls.”

However, Aya is not impressed with the implied amazingness of heterosexual intercourse: “Silly! We don’t play with tops, do we?” Noriko enthusiastically agrees with her: “That’s for children, isn’t it?” The debate between the married and the unmarried continues, after which Noriko goes home, where Kōichi and Fumiko are scheming regarding the marital candidate proposed by Noriko’s boss.

Kenkichi’s mother then visits Noriko’s mother, and tells her that a man from a detective agency has been asking about Noriko: “I realized it was about her marriage.” We also learn that Kenkichi’s wife died two years ago (leaving him with a young daughter), and that he’s not interested in remarrying: “All he does since his wife died is read books” (like Les Thibaults). Finally, we learn that Kenkichi’s best friend, Noriko’s brother Shoji, went missing in the war.

We now come to the climax of the first half of the movie. As Noriko’s nephews and their friends play with their model train set downstairs (one nephew asking if their father will buy them more train track), Aya visits Noriko and they talk in her room upstairs. Their married friends have made various excuses for why they couldn’t also visit; Noriko recalls how close they were at school and laments their drifting apart.

Throughout the first half of Early Summer Noriko and Aya are shown as mirroring each other’s gestures and speech. That mirroring continues in this scene (for example, they sit down next to each other at the exact same time and in the exact same manner), and then a very interesting thing happens. Ozu’s typical modus operandi is to continue a shot until someone stops speaking or moving, or even until they leave the room. But here he cuts immediately from Noriko and Aya simultaneously raising their glasses to drink, to Noriko’s father and mother simultaneously bringing food to their lips, as they relax sitting on a street curb in town.

If I were to speculate about what this juxtaposition might mean, if anything, I’d speculate as follows: that Ozu intended to show that, whatever Aya and Noriko might be to each other, they are as close, secure, and happy in their relationship as Noriko’s mother and father are in theirs—as much a couple as any other in the film, but not formally recognized as such.

Noriko’s father tells his wife, “This may be the happiest time for our family,” although he’s sad at the thought of Noriko leaving. They continue their conversation, and then are interrupted by the site of a balloon rising into the sky. “Some child must be crying,” Noriko’s father remarks. “Remember how Kōichi cried when he lost his balloon?” And on that somewhat ominous note the film enters its second half, during which conflicts over Noriko and her proposed marriage will rise to the surface.

We left Noriko and her best friend Aya enjoying a pleasant chat in Noriko’s room (their married friends having begged off with various excuses) and Noriko’s mother and father enjoying a day out without the rest of the family, rejoicing in the happiness they have, albeit a bit sad at the thought of Noriko leaving to marry.

The good times continue as Noriko brings home a cake to eat with her sister-in-law Fumiko, and their neighbor Kenkichi drops in unexpectedly and is invited to share it with them. The scene re-introduces Kenkichi and brings up the subject of his remarrying—something he doesn’t want, but his mother (played by Haruko Sugimura) does.

(I can’t resist adding that, in addition to appearing in all three films of the Noriko trilogy, as well as in several other Ozu films, Haruko Sugimura was a noted stage actress. Among other things, in 1956 she debuted the role of Asako in Yukio Mishima’s Rokumeikan, a play I discuss at great length in my book on Takako Shimura’s manga Aoi hana / Sweet Blue Flowers.)

The scene also shows the importance of Noriko’s income to the family finances: the price of the cake is JPY 900, equivalent to over JPY 6,000 today, at a time when Japan was a relatively poor country with an economy just emerging from wartime destruction. No wonder Fumiko protests the purchase, and Noriko downplays the expense to Kenkichi.

In the meantime Noriko’s brother Kōichi has been pursuing the idea of a marriage between Noriko and an unseen bachelor first suggested by Noriko’s boss, including asking his friends and associates for more information on the proposed groom. The results are “very promising”: “He’s in the social register, and seems to be a fine businessman.” “How nice,” replies his mother, but, “how old is he?”

The answer—“about 40”—dismays both Kōichi’s mother and his wife. He may think that the age gap is not an issue, but the women do, and you can see their disapproval in their downcast expressions. This marks the beginning of a family conflict as Kōichi—the nearest thing to a villain in Early Summer—tries to exert his patriarchal authority and refuses to give up on the idea of the marriage.

Meanwhile Kōichi’s bratty sons run away after he scolds them (they were mad because he brought home bread instead of more model train tracks), and Noriko recruits Kenkichi to (successfully) help find them. While this is happening, Koichi is away from home, playing Go with a friend—again a contrast between Kōichi as an overbearing would-be patriarch and Kenkichi as a more caring father figure. (In the next scene we also see Kenkichi showing affection to his own child, “my good little girl.”)

We then have another precipitating event: Kenkichi, who (recall) is a doctor in the same facility as Kōichi, gets recommended by Kōichi for a plum position as a department head in a hospital way out in rural Japan, and tells his mother that he wants to accept it. She despairs at the thought of leaving their home, but his enthusiasm carries the day.

Then Noriko’s boss asks a few questions that we’ve been asking ourselves. While Noriko is away from work, Aya stops by, and the boss questions Aya on whether Noriko will go through with the match or not: “I don’t understand her . . . . Is she interested in men?” Aya at first demurs: “What do you think?” Noriko’s boss has seen indications both ways, and presses the question: “Has she always been like that?” Aya responds in the affirmative. The questioning goes on. Aya tells him that Noriko’s apparently never been in love, “but she has an album of . . . Hepburn photos this thick,” holding her thumb and forefinger about 4 centimeters apart.

Here we have the first of two translation issues. Aya actually refers to “Hepburn” without mentioning a given name. The Criterion subtitles—by Donald Richie, who should have known better—make this a reference to Audrey Hepburn, who’d had only small roles by then. It’s almost certain that this is instead a reference to Katherine Hepburn, who was a major star by the time Noriko would have entered middle school. Was the teenaged Noriko besotted by the androgynous beauty of Katharine Hepburn (who would have made a stunning otokoyaku)? It sure looks like it.

The subtext now threatens to become text, as Noriko’s boss learns that “Hepburn” refers to an American actress, and asks the obvious follow-up question about Noriko. In the Criterion subtitles it’s translated as “So she goes for women?” The BFI translation puts it more bluntly: “Is she queer?” What is Noriko’s boss really asking? Japanese speakers can correct me here, but I believe his actual question uses the term “hentai.”

Western fans are used to thinking of “hentai” as referring to pornography. However, my understanding is that at the time of the film “hentai” in colloquial Japanese would have referred specifically to sexual behavior that was considered abnormal. So if Noriko’s boss did use the term, another possible translation might have been “Is she a pervert?” Both the Criterion and BFI translations soften the question; in particular BFI’s “is she queer?”, while defensible, risks projecting our current ideas about “queer” (including its positive connotations) onto a film created in a different time.

In any case, Aya is determined to shut down any discussion of Noriko’s proclivities. “No!” she firmly replies. Noriko’s boss is apparently unconvinced: “You can never know. She’s very strange, in any case.” His prurient instincts aroused, Noriko’s boss then envisions another solution to the problem of Noriko, and queries Aya about it: “Why don’t you teach her?” “About what?” “Everything.” “What do you mean, everything?” He pats her shoulder and admonishes her: “Don’t try to be coy,” as we viewers pause to consider the implications of what he’s asking her to do.

Aya rejects this line of inquiry as well: “Don’t talk to me like that! That was rude!” Noriko’s boss laughs, offers a half-hearted apology, and then (after telling Aya that Noriko won’t be back that day) invites her to lunch and quizzes her on her preferences in sushi: “Tuna” she says. He continues, “How about an open clam?” (which Donald Richie’s commentary helpfully informs us is a euphemism for the vagina). “Sure,” she replies. “And a nice long rice roll?” “No, thank you!” His final words are, “You’re strange too,” and again I think I hear the word “hentai” enter the conversation.

We now switch to a scene featuring Noriko and her next-door neighbor Kenkichi. Recall that Kenkichi decided to accept an offer as a department head in a hospital in Akita, several hundred kilometers north of Tokyo and on the opposite coast. Noriko meets him in a café before her brother Kōichi is to host him at a farewell dinner party, and they talk about Shoji, Noriko’s other brother who went missing in action during the war. Kenkichi recalls how he and Shoji were best friends in school, often eating at this café, indeed at this very table. Kenkichi tells Noriko that he still keeps a letter that Shoji sent him, with a stalk of wheat enclosed (probably indicating that Shoji was deployed in northern China). Noriko asks if she can have the letter, and Kenkichi agrees.

Afterward Noriko visits Kenkichi’s mother, while Kenkichi himself is still at his farewell party. Kenkichi’s mother tells Noriko her secret dream (“please don’t tell Kenkichi”): “I just wish Kenkichi had gotten remarried to someone like you.” She apologizes and asks Noriko not to be angry (“It’s just a wish in my heart”), but Noriko stares at her with an intense expression (her usual smile absent), and asks her, “Do you mean it? . . . Do you really feel that way about me?” Kenkichi’s mother apologizes again, but Noriko presses on: “You wouldn’t mind an old maid like me?” Then before Kenkichi’s mother can respond, Noriko speaks: “Then I accept.”

Kenkichi’s mother is incredulous. She asks Noriko several times to confirm what she’s saying, thanks Noriko effusively and weeps tears of joy at her good fortune, but continues to question Noriko about her decision even as Noriko leaves to go home. (Incidentally, this scene features a bravura performance by Haruko Sugimura.)

After she leaves the house, Noriko encounters Kenkichi, just returned from his farewell party. Noriko exchanges some small talk with him, but says absolutely nothing about what she just told his mother.

Noriko’s decision then plays out across multiple scenes:

At first Kenkichi doesn’t understand what his mother is trying to tell him (“She accepted.” “Accepted what?”). When he finally gets the message (“She agreed to marry you. To become your wife!” “My wife?” “Yes. Isn’t it wonderful?”), he looks absolutely gobsmacked. His mother breaks down in tears again telling him how happy she is, and how happy he should be. He tries to play along (glumly echoing, “Yes, I’m happy”), but he looks for all the world like a man who would sooner eat nails than enter into another marriage.

Kenkichi’s mother doesn’t understand why he’s not happy. She concludes, “What an odd boy you are.” The Japanese word here appears to be “hen,” which I understand to be a softer adjective than “hentai,” and not sexual in nature. But note that Kenkichi is now the third person after Noriko and Aya to be referred to as not normal in some way.

Meanwhile Noriko is interrogated about her decision by her family, especially by Kōichi, in a beautifully framed and shot scene—Noriko in white, her head bowed, her brother in black, barking questions like a prosecutor cross-examining a criminal. Noriko is unrepentant: “When his mother talked to me, I didn’t feel a moment’s hesitation. I suddenly felt I’d be happy with him.” Her parents retire upstairs to chew on their disappointment—Noriko walking silently past them on her way to her room—while Kōichi tells Fumiko, “What could we do now? She’s made up her mind. You know how she is.”

The next day, after Kenkichi boards the train to Akita, his mother visits Noriko at her office, and they tiptoe around the question of what others thought: “Did your parents approve?” “Yes.” “And your brother?” “Don’t worry.” and “What did Kenkichi think?” “. . . He’s overjoyed. He didn’t sleep last night.”

The next two shots echo the beginning of the film, a shot of a bird in a cage outside, and then Noriko’s father inside with the other cages, caring for the birds. Noriko’s mother laments that Noriko didn’t make a better match, Fumiko nods in agreement, and Noriko’s father goes for a walk to buy more birdseed, silently contemplating their life going forward, in one of those quiet scenes that Ozu does so well.

Meanwhile Noriko and Aya have their last scene together. It starts by echoing and completing the action at the end of their previous scene: then they raised their glasses together to drink, now they lower their glasses in a simultaneous gesture. Aya tells Noriko that she can’t believe Noriko would ever end up like this: she thought Noriko would be a modern woman living “Western-style, with a flower garden, listening to Chopin,” “wearing a white sweater, with a terrier in tow,” and greeting Aya in English—“Hello, how are you?”

Instead Aya now imagines Noriko wearing farmers clothes in rural Japan, speaking the local dialect. She playfully imitates country speech, and Noriko responds in kind: “Ya don’t look it, but ya talk like the locals.” “I figure to live in Akita when me and my man get hitched.” The subtext here I read as follows: Noriko knows how to pretend to be something she is not—a conventional heterosexual woman in a conventional heterosexual marriage—and she will accept doing so in her self-imposed exile from Tokyo, the price she must pay for avoiding what she considered to be a worse fate.

The tone then turns serious. Aya recalls meeting Kenkichi when they were in school, on a hiking trip with Noriko and her brother Shoji, and presses Noriko about her choice: “Did you already love him then?” “No, I had no particular feeling for him. . . . I never imagined myself marrying him.” Noriko evades Aya’s questions about how she came to love Kenkichi, refusing time after time to acknowledge her feelings for him as those of love. Instead she insists, “No, I just feel I could trust him with all my heart and be happy.”

But trust Kenkichi for what? we want to ask Noriko. To respect her for who and what she is? To not want a conventional relationship with her? To not press her for sex or for children (after all, he already has one)? To keep her secrets, as she might keep any secret of his?

After this last meeting with Aya, Noriko comes back to a cold house and a dinner alone. Her parents and Kōichi leave the room to avoid greeting her, and only Fumiko is there to welcome her.

In the next scene she and Fumiko walk to the beach for one last look at the ocean, Ozu showing them walking up a sand dune in a gorgeous crane shot—supposedly the only one he ever used. In the earliest scenes in the film Noriko was dressed in stylish Western clothes, contrasted with Fumiko’s traditional Japanese attire. Now, instead of mirroring Aya, she is a mirror of Fumiko in her plain housewife’s outfit—but still freer and looser in her appearance.

Noriko tries to reassure Fumiko that she’ll be OK: “Are you worried that I’m marrying a man with a child? . . . I love children” (as we’ve seen earlier in the film with both her nephews and Kenkichi’s daughter). “Frankly, I felt I couldn’t trust a man who was still unattached and drifting around at 40. I think a man with a child is more trustworthy.” (Note again Noriko’s emphasis on trust and not love.) After discussing how they’ll be competing to scrimp and save in managing their families’ finances, they take a last walk down the beach by the ocean.

Just as she saw Aya for the last time (at least until/unless Kenkichi can return to Tokyo), Noriko now takes formal leave of her boss. He idly wonders if he himself could have been the right man for her. She does not encourage him in this line of thought.

The family then gathers for one last commemorative photo. Without Noriko’s salary they can no longer afford the house in Kamakura, so they break up: the parents to live with the great-uncle; Noriko to Akita with Kenkichi, his mother, and his daughter; and Kōichi, Fumiko, and their sons to some other less-expensive dwelling (perhaps an apartment in the Tokyo suburbs).

The parents recall when they moved into the house: “It was spring and Noriko had just turned 12.” Kōichi remembers that time as well: “She used to wear a ribbon in her hair, and she was always singing.” But “children grow up so quickly,” her parents remark, and living together forever, “that’s impossible.”

Her usual smile nowhere in evidence, Noriko takes it all upon herself: “I’m sorry, I’ve broken up the family.” Despite reassurances from her father (“It’s not your fault. It was inevitable.”) she flees from the room, goes upstairs to her own room, and cries her heart out, distraught about the turn that her and their lives have taken.

The final scene shows Noriko’s parents at the great-uncle’s house, far from the sea. They glance at a wedding procession walking through the fields (“Look there. A bride is passing by. I wonder what sort of family she’s marrying into?”), think of Noriko, and resign themselves to the family’s fate: “We shouldn’t ask for too much.” “We’ve been really happy.” The film closes with a tracking shot of a field of grain—perhaps the barley of the Japanese title?

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, traditionally most mainstream critics writing about Ozu seem to have ignored or downplayed the potentially queer aspects of Early Summer. For example, they go unmentioned in the essays by David Bordwell and Jim Jarmusch included in the Criterion collection release, as well as in Bordwell’s book Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. As Yuka Kanno remarks, “The self-regulation of the ‘Ozu criticism’ industry has too long suppressed the possibility of new readings of his films,” preferring to focus on the “existing and limited interpretive frameworks of auteurism or of Ozu as an alternative modernist.”²

One exception is Robin Wood, who specifically references the scene between Noriko’s boss and Aya, and the lesbian implications of Noriko’s idolization of Katherine Hepburn.³ Another is Kanno, who discusses the Hepburn/Noriko connection at greater length.

I also found it interesting how upfront Early Summer is in raising the possibility of Noriko and (especially) Aya not having conventional heterosexual desires; in particular, I can’t imagine any mainstream American film of the time having an exchange like that between Aya and Noriko’s boss. Beyond general cultural differences between Japan and the US regarding discussions of sex, it’s worth noting that after the war Japan saw a reaction against restrictions imposed by the imperial Japanese government (and to a lesser extent by the American occupation authorities) and an explosion of interest in sexual practices, both conventional and less so.

In particular, see the late Mark McLelland’s discussion of the phenomenon of ryōki or “curiosity hunting”: seeking out the bizarre and unusual, including unusual sexual practices, both by reading about them and (for some) experiencing them firsthand.⁴ The more risqué elements of Early Summer—Ozu’s first film after the end of occupation censorship—can perhaps be seen as an attempt to provide a bit of ryōki in a mainstream film suitable for viewing by a middle-class audience.

Finally, what are we to make of Early Summer today, over 70 years after its release?

In my opinion, it’s not worth arguing about exactly how “queer” the film’s characters really are. Is Aya a lesbian? Is Noriko aromantic and asexual? Are Aya and Noriko a couple and, if so, in what sense? Is Kenkichi reluctant to remarry because he harbors no desire toward women, and is mourning a past love for Noriko’s brother Shoji? These are questions that can be debated one way or the other. The more important point is that all three of these characters behave in ways that are—to one degree or another—inconsistent with conventional heterosexual norms.

I suspect that the original audience for Ozu’s “home dramas” would have picked up on this. They likely knew someone, or knew of someone, who refused to marry or remarry—single women approaching their thirties, bachelors in their forties and fifties, widowers content to live alone—and would have had some inkling as to why this was. They would have seen in the fates of the characters in the film the possible fates of some of their friends, co-workers, even family members.

In Early Summer the characters accept their fates with resignation, sighs, and (occasionally) tears. But consider another possible resolution to the plot: Noriko is no longer pestered into marrying by her employer and her family. She continues to work, contribute to the household, and help care for her nephews. The household in Kamakura remains intact and harmonious, even as Noriko and Kōichi’s parents leave to spend their final years with the great-uncle. Aya and Noriko continue to enjoy a close relationship with each other, while Aya takes over the restaurant owned by her mother and remains unmarried and independent. Kenkichi enjoys life with his books, and after his stint in Akita returns with his mother and daughter to once again be a good neighbor and friend to Noriko and her family.

If Ozu intended for Early Summer to have a message, I think it would be this: here is a traditional multi-generational Japanese family broken apart not by modernity, or feminism, or Western culture, or any other of the usual suspects, but by a refusal to think outside the bounds of conventional heterosexual norms. It’s too much, I think, to expect a film made in 1951 for a mainstream audience to propose an alternative to this; highlighting the problem is achievement enough.

What then can I conclude regarding my original hypothesis? Here I can do no better than to “reverse the argument,” shamelessly steal the words with which Adam Mars-Jones ended his book about Ozu’s Late Spring, and adapt them to my own purpose:

If Yasujirō Ozu did decide to make a film about the experience of being queer in postwar Japan, within the limits of what the studio and his audience could accept, what would it look like? Wouldn’t it look like Early Summer? Very much like Early Summer.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

The genre we call “yuri” originated in Japan, but some of its most interesting manifestations are in other nations in East and Southeast Asia, where it is typically marketed as “GL.” One recent example is the live-action Thai television drama GAP, also known as GAP: The Series (to distinguish it from the novel on which it is based), Pink Theory, and other names.

GAP is currently being broadcast weekly on Thai TV Channel 3, and then afterward being made available on YouTube with English subtitles, starting with episode 1, part 1. It’s an example of what’s sometimes called “shakaijin yuri”: yuri stories featuring adults doing adult things. In the series, one of the two main characters, Mon, starts her first job at a small media company run by the other main character, Sam, an older woman whom Mon has idolized ever since she was a child. However, Sam does not remember ever meeting Mon (or at least doesn’t admit to it), and their relationship gets off to a rocky start before love starts to blossom.

It’s a pretty good series overall, and well worth watching if you’re a yuri fan. I’m not going to attempt a review; Erica Friedman already posted one on the Okazu blog, and I basically agree with her assessment. Instead I wanted to comment on some other aspects of the series and how it came to be. (Warning: This will contain some minor spoilers for the first two episodes.)

First, while for some time now Thailand has been cranking out live-action BL series, GAP is apparently the first yuri/GL series produced in the country. It was created by a relatively new production company, Idol Factory, headed by 24-year-old Suppapong Udomkaewkanjana (nicknamed “Saint”). Saint became famous starring in the 2018 Thai BL series Love by Chance, produced by GMMTV (the 800-pound gorilla of Thai BL production companies), and then went off on his own to found Idol Factory.

Idol Factory’s first production was the popular BL series Secret Crush on You. That series, set in a high school, featured a side couple played by Sarocha Chankimha (“Freen”) and Rebecca Patricia Armstrong (“Becky”). GAP features the two in the lead roles, with Freen playing Sam and Becky playing Mon, with other actors in the Idol Factory stable playing various supporting roles.

It’s a credit to Saint and Idol Factory that they followed up their first BL series by taking a chance with a yuri series. That bet has apparently paid off, at least with international viewers: the first two GAP episodes have each racked up between one and two million views on YouTube, comparable to the two to three million views for each of the episodes of Secret Crush on You (which has been out at least seven months now).

Second, it’s interesting to see the mix of yuri tropes and social commentary in the series. The setup is reminiscent of Maria Watches Over Us, albeit translated to an office setting: a younger and relatively naïve but spunky young woman (our Yumi equivalent) meets an elegant and seemingly emotionally cold older woman from a very wealthy family (species designation tsunderensis sachiko). Meanwhile the older woman’s family disregards her own desires and expects her to enter into an arranged marriage with a man who presumably will take over her firm.

In GAP the main antagonist is Sam’s grandmother, who has given Sam a deadline of one year to make her business successful or quit it in favor of marriage. The grandmother has already interfered with the lives of Sam’s two older sisters.

Sam’s fiance Kirk appears to be another antagonist. He is a co-owner of Sam’s firm, but does nothing except drop by occasionally to hand out snacks to the employees and curry their favor. He seems to be positioning himself to take over full control of Sam’s firm, but is going about it in a low-key way that suggests that this is just the natural order of things. (See also the scene in the second episode where Sam offers to drive Mon home, and Kirk ends up taking the wheel of Sam’s Porsche Carrera, relegating Sam to be a passenger in her own car.)

A side character worth noting is one of Sam’s friends, someone whom in the West we’d characterize as a butch lesbian. But I presume that in Thai terms she’s actually a “tom” (for “tomboy”); I mean, her nickname is even “Tee.” The relationship between toms and their partners (“dees,” for “lady”/“ladies”) doesn’t necessarily conform to the Western butch/femme stereotype; for a fascinating discussion of the differences, see the paper “The Romance of the Queer: The Sexual and Gender Norms of Tom and Dee in Thailand,” by Megan Sinnott, included in the book AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities.

The final thing worthy of note about GAP is how it applies to yuri/GL live-action series a common marketing strategy used in Thai BL productions, that of the khu jin, or “imagined couple.” The basic idea is that instead of fans shipping idols on their own initiative (with production companies then possibly responding to that), Thai production companies (in a strategy pioneered by GMMTV) create idol couples already “pre-shipped.” In other words, production companies encourage fans to think of the idols as couples on-screen and off- from the time that they debut. For a good introduction to this phenomenon see Thomas Baudinette’s talk “Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture” and his forthcoming book of the same title.

In the case of GAP the khu jin is Freen and Becky. They have very good chemistry on-screen and off-screen as well—although the point here is that there is no such thing as “off-screen,” since even seemingly unrehearsed interactions (many of which can be seen on YouTube by searching for “freenbecky”) have to be seen in the context of an Idol Factory marketing strategy to promote them as the company’s star GL couple. If GAP is successful (and it appears to be so far) then we can expect to see a lot more of Freen and Becky in future Idol Factory series.

Other Thai production companies are dipping their feet in the yuri ocean as well: GMMTV has a schoolgirl yuri series 23.5 debuting in 2023, starring Pansa Vosbein (”Milk”) and Pattranite Limpatiyakorn (”Love”); like Freen and Becky, they previously appeared as a side couple in BL productions before getting their own GL series. (You can find them on YouTube by searching for “milklove”).

There are other Thai GL series announced and on the way as well. It remains to be seen whether Thai production companies can create a “GL machine” to match the current “BL machine” (as Thomas Baudinette refers to it), but it will certainly be fun to watch them try.

Mightfo ([@Mightfo][]) - 2022-12-02 12:15

Fascinating! Also, I had no idea that Thailand made a lot of BL and yuri! Thanks for sharing this.

Frank Hecker ([@hecker][]) - 2022-12-02 12:19

You’re welcome! Thailand is actually the biggest producer of BL live-action series in all of East and Southeast Asia; Thomas Baudinette notes in his talk that in 2022 there were over a hundred Thai BL series produced, and that Thai BL series have now achieved widespread popularity in Japan, the country where BL was born.