Class S in Context

As previously noted, Sweet Blue Flowers is generally considered to fall within the genre of “yuri,” that is, manga, anime, and related works with lesbian themes and content. Before yuri as we know it today were Class S works, an early twentieth-century literary genre featuring intense emotional relationships between adolescent girls—“passionate friendships,” to use Deborah Shamoon’s phrase.¹

Sweet Blue Flowers harks back to these earlier works, paying homage to, interrogating, and sometimes parodying their tropes. If we wish to understand the manga better, it helps to take a closer look at S relationships and literature and their genesis in the late Meiji and early Taishō eras (roughly 1900–20).

Erica Friedman has referred to yuri works as “lesbian content without lesbian identity.”² However, in the case of Class S works there are conflicting views on whether the content itself is even lesbian in nature, especially in the context of the time and how S relationships were treated by the girls who participated in them and by society at large.³

This is a controversy I leave to be debated by those more knowledgeable than I.⁴ Instead, I turn my attention to a different question, namely the social circumstances by which there came to be a Class S genre in the first place. Other people have investigated this topic in depth; besides Deborah Shamoon, see, for example, the work of Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase,⁵ Gregory Pflugfelder,⁶ and Michiko Suzuki.⁷

In this chapter, I focus on four aspects of Class S relevant to Sweet Blue Flowers, beginning with the origin of the all-girls schools that became a staple of Class S and (later) yuri works. These schools appear in Sweet Blue Flowers in the form of Matsuoka Girls’ High School (Fumi’s school) and (especially) Fujigaya Women’s Academy (which Akira attends).

After the restoration of imperial rule in 1868 that marked the beginning of the Meiji era, the leaders of the Japanese government began a frantic effort to modernize Japan. A critical element of that modernization was mass education, seen as the key to the success of the Western powers in creating industrialized societies rich and powerful enough to dominate the world, including Japan.

Thus as early as 1872 the government attempted to set out a national plan to create a new Japanese education system. Its goal was that “education … shall be so diffused that there may not be a village with an ignorant family, nor a family with an ignorant member.” Such an education was not to exclude women: “Learning … is to be equally the inheritance of nobles and gentry, farmers and artisans, males and females.” By the end of the 1870s almost a quarter of girls eligible for elementary school were attending school, compared to over half of eligible boys.⁸

This period also saw the establishment in Japan of “mission schools” (founded and run by Christian missionaries) that offered education through high school—especially important for girls since state-sponsored schools did not provide them any education past elementary school. In 1872, Catholic nuns established the first school for girls (and perhaps one of the inspirations for Fujigaya Women’s Academy) in Yokohama, less than twenty kilometers northwest of Kamakura, in which Sweet Blue Flowers is set.⁹

The mission schools proved very popular with Japan’s emerging upper-middle class and could command fees for tuition and board as high as sixty dollars a year.¹⁰ For comparison, a contemporary American visitor to Japan found that “three or four dollars will cover the cost of food for a month for one person, and women servants expect only a few dollars in wages for that time.”¹¹ Sending a girl to a mission school was thus about as expensive as feeding her or paying the salary of a family servant—no wonder it was seen as a luxury affordable mainly by affluent households.

In part because of the cost, the total number of girls educated in mission schools was relatively low. As of 1909, the total number of Japanese girls in Catholic mission schools was not quite six thousand, in twenty-six schools.¹² The number of girls in other Christian mission schools was even smaller: as of 1914, about four thousand high school girls in total, spread across fifty schools.¹³

Although the mission schools originally had a monopoly on girls’ education beyond elementary school, this was no longer true by the end of the Meiji era. In 1899 the Japanese government passed a new order extending girls’ education beyond the previously mandated six years of elementary school. This led to a rapid increase in the number of girls in high school, from less than ten thousand at the turn of the century to almost fifty-six thousand in 1910, including girls in mission schools and other private schools.¹⁴ By 1920 there were over one hundred twenty-five thousand women in higher girls’ schools.¹⁵

The number of girls graduating from high school remained a relatively small fraction of the overall population, around five percent of all girls near the turn of the century, rising only to twenty-five percent by the end of World War II. Nevertheless, they formed a large enough group to evolve a distinct culture of their own, a culture that reflected their middle- and upper-class background and predominantly urban environment. As an elite group within what was already a relatively elite population, the mission school girls, in particular, helped popularize Western notions of individuality and romantic love, Christian ideals of spiritual love, and the use of Christian symbols such as the white lily.¹⁶

This brings me to the second topic I want to discuss, one that is also relevant to Sweet Blue Flowers, namely marriage customs in general and arranged marriages in particular. In the Taishō era, four out of five marriages were arranged; in two out of five marriages, the couple had never even met before their wedding. Only three percent of marriages were considered to be “love marriages.”¹⁷

This contrast between Western and Christian ideals absorbed in school and traditional Japanese marriage arrangements was bound to be a source of conflict, as vividly described by Alice Mabel Bacon, an American observer writing in 1891:

Another difficulty, in fitting the new school system into the customs of the people, lies in the early age at which marriages are contracted. Before the girl has finished her school course, her parents begin to wonder whether there is not danger of her being left on their hands altogether, if they do not hand her over to the first eligible young man who presents himself. Sometimes the girl makes a brave fight, and remains in school until her course is finished; more often she succumbs and is married off, bids a weeping farewell to her teachers and schoolmates, and leaves the school, to become a wife at sixteen, a mother at eighteen, and an old woman at thirty.¹⁸

To me this offers a key to the prevalence of S relationships and the literature that popularized them: as Yukari Fujimoto claims, it’s possible that such relationships were attractive to girls in large part because they were relationships in which they could exercise almost entirely free choice in selecting their partners—perhaps the only opportunity in their lives to do so.¹⁹ (Where girls were free to exercise choice in their marriage partners to some extent, this presumably amounted only to being allowed to reject some candidates out of those presented to them by their family.)

This may explain the importance in both S relationships and literature of courtship rituals by which one girl approaches another girl as a potential partner and the other girl decides whether to accept her affections, for example, as portrayed in the 1937 novel Otome no minato (The Girls’ Harbor).²⁰ These rituals most notably include letters sent by one girl to another to propose an S relationship and an exchange of gifts to signify their entering into the relationship.

Unlike gifts like dowry and bride price in traditional marriage customs, which are predominantly exchanges between families, here gifts are exchanged between the girls themselves acting as free individuals. And while the practice of sending letters to prospective partners has deep roots in Japanese culture, here such letters are sent by girls to girls, taking the role that in traditional works like The Tale of Genji was performed by men.

The agency girls showed in pursuing their own choice of partners in an S relationship is mirrored in the agency they showed in writing their own stories about such relationships, a third aspect of Class S culture and literature relevant to Sweet Blue Flowers.

As noted above, in the early twentieth century, girls attending high school were predominantly from the middle and upper class. Their relative affluence combined with a high degree of literacy made them an attractive market for literary works targeted at the emerging demographic of adolescent girls (shōjo). These included foreign works translated and localized for a Japanese audience, most notably Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.²¹

However the more significant development was the establishment and growth of home-grown Japanese magazines featuring stories and articles of interest to girls. These magazines were edited by men and featured articles written by men, especially those of a didactic nature that sought to promote the ideal of girls’ education as preparation for marriage and motherhood. However, they also become forums to which girls themselves contributed, in the form of both readers’ comments and submitted stories, and training grounds for women writers.²²

Finally, let me return to the question with which I started, namely the extent to which S relationships could be considered lesbian in nature. Whatever position one might take on this matter in general, there can be no question that some of the girls in these relationships were, in fact, lesbians by any reasonable definition, whether they explicitly identified themselves as such or not (another point we’ll see echoed in Sweet Blue Flowers). As I discuss in the next chapter, one of those lesbians became the most famous author of Class S stories.