The Yuri Tribe

The last chapter discussed how Class S literature declined to near extinction in the postwar period. That decline may have occurred because the social context that had given rise to S relationships had, for the most part, disappeared with the advent of coeducation, Western-influenced dating behaviors, and “love marriages” as an increasingly popular alternative to arranged marriages.

How then did things change so as to create an identifiable genre of works featuring relationships between women, what we now know as “yuri,” and a subgenre within the yuri genre of works like Sweet Blue Flowers that feature relationships between schoolgirls?

As before, I point readers to the histories of yuri in Friedman¹ and Maser² for a full treatment and discuss only the trends of most interest to me, starting with the rise of magazines featuring manga targeting the shōjo demographic of girls and young women.

The production of shōjo manga recapitulated the development of prewar magazines featuring Class S literature: Initially, men were featured prominently not only as shōjo magazine editors but also as creators of a substantial fraction of shōjo magazine content. However, over the 1960s, as a new generation of girls grew up reading shōjo manga, and some tried their hand at writing it, almost all shōjo manga came to be written by women.³

Eventually, the production of shōjo manga assumed its present form: edited primarily by older men—supplemented by a younger cadre of women editors not on the career track—and created almost exclusively by younger women.⁴ Magazines sought out these female artists for their supposed superior knowledge of what girls would be interested in and actively recruited them via “manga schools” sponsored by the magazines themselves.⁵

During the 1960s, the content of shōjo manga also changed, with the family dramas of the 1950s replaced with a broader range of stories, including romances: stories based on Hollywood romances, romances featuring boys and girls in America and other countries, and romances involving Japanese schoolgirls and boys—in other words, stories featuring relationships that might have arisen in the coeducational school environments that most Japanese girls of that time experienced.⁶

In the early 1970s a new group of manga artists, the so-called Year 24 group, took the styles and conventions established in 1960s shōjo manga and used them to produce innovative works that stretched genre boundaries and introduced new themes. Many of these themes directly or indirectly influenced the yuri genre.

The first was the revival of Class S themes of doomed love among adolescent students, as seen in Moto Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas.⁷ The twist was that instead of featuring girls, it featured boys, and instead of being set in Japan, the action took place in an imagined European setting.

In writing her earlier story “November Gymnasium,” a predecessor to The Heart of Thomas, Hagio did a draft of it as a story of love between girls. However, she found substituting boys for girls more in accord with the story she wanted to tell: “When I wrote it as a boys’ school story, everything fell into place smoothly. But when I wrote the girls’ school version it came out sort of giggly. … [That] sort of nastiness distinctive to girls worked its way into the story.”⁸

The Heart of Thomas was followed by other works in a similar vein, including Keiko Takemiya’s Kaze to ki no uta (which has never received an official English release). These eventually came to constitute a new genre, “boy’s love” or “BL,” which became popular among the adolescent girls who made up the core audience for shōjo manga.

Even before The Heart of Thomas Ryoko Yamagishi had published her manga Shiroi heya no futari (unreleased in English), also featuring doomed love in a European setting but between two girls. This is considered among the first, if not the first, yuri manga.⁹ However Shiroi heya no futari did not immediately lead to a flood of similar works, possibly due to what I’ve hypothesized: that the social context of traditional Class S works was no longer present in postwar Japan. From this point of view, most adolescent girls would likely have been more interested in reading stories featuring romances involving boys, including BL works, than stories featuring romances between girls.

This included reading stories about girls who appeared to be boys, or vice versa, which brings me to other major themes influencing the yuri genre: gender crossing, gender nonconformance, and transformations more generally. These themes have relatively deep roots in Japanese artistic culture—including the cross-dressing onnagata performers in all-male kabuki performances and (more recently) the otokoyaku of the all-female Takarazuka Revue—as well as in Japanese life—witness the chronicling by the popular postwar “perverse press” of the cross-dressing danshō sex workers or the effeminate gei bōi.¹⁰

Themes of gender crossing and gender nonconformance featured in such manga as Rose of Versailles (recently released in English)¹¹ and Dear Brother (adapted as an anime subsequently released in English),¹² both by Riyoko Ikeda, both featuring women presenting as male, and both containing at least hints of romances between women.

However, the more impactful embodiment of these themes, at least in the West, was Naoko Takeuchi’s popular 1990s manga Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon¹³ and its anime adaptations. Sailor Moon featured the “magical girl” transformations of Usagi Tsukino and her friends (the “guardians” of the title), multiple instances of gender-nonconforming or gender-ambiguous characters (for example, the Sailor Starlights), and—most relevant in this context—the relationship between Haruka Tenoh (Sailor Uranus) and her partner Michiru Kaioh (Sailor Neptune).

Sailor Moon was followed by other works combining magical girl plots with yuri elements, most notably Revolutionary Girl Utena, which featured the pairing of prince-like Utena Tenjou and her “Rose Bride” Anthy Himemiya.¹⁴ Revolutionary Girl Utena, directed by Sailor Moon veteran Kunihiko Ikuhara, was more explicitly feminist than its predecessor, featuring key themes I see echoed in Sweet Blue Flowers: a critique of dominance hierarchies arising from patriarchy and how they can warp relationships between women, and a search for alternative relationships grounded in equality.¹⁵

Moving beyond the realm of fiction and fantasy, the 1990s also saw a marked increase in the public visibility of lesbians in Japan, part of a “gay boom” of increased mainstream media coverage of gay culture.¹⁶ This increased visibility coincided with the publication of the first commercial magazines targeted at lesbians themselves and (in those magazines) the publication of manga by lesbians for lesbians, including Rica Takashima’s exploration of lesbian life in Tokyo.¹⁷

At the turn of the twenty-first century, these works and themes combined to form a recognized genre, a genre acquiring the name “yuri” (“lily”) by which we know it today.¹⁸ But for my purposes, the most significant work was one that revived Class S tropes of schoolgirl relationships at all-girls schools and without which Sweet Blue Flowers likely would not exist. That work, Maria Watches Over Us, deserves its own chapter.