Loving Hierarchy

Maria Watches Over Us (Maria-sama ga miteru, or Marimite to its fans) looms like a colossus over the twenty-first-century yuri genre, including Sweet Blue Flowers in particular. Understanding what Sweet Blue Flowers might be saying thus requires our first understanding what kind of work Maria Watches Over Us is.

Beginning with a short story by Oyuki Konno in 1997, Maria Watches Over Us eventually grew into a multimedia franchise. It includes a series of over three dozen light novels by Konno (published from 1998 to 2012, overlapping serialization of Sweet Blue Flowers), a nine-volume manga adaptation, a four-season anime adaptation (the only version released in English translation),¹ a live-action film, audio CDs, and other products.²

At first glance, the existence of Maria Watches Over Us poses a problem for the thesis I advanced in an earlier chapter: that postwar changes in Japan, including in particular the introduction of coeducation and the decline in arranged marriages, removed the social context within which the Class S literature of the early twentieth century had flourished. Maria Watches Over Us also features “passionate friendships” between students at an all-girls Catholic school and thus seems to conform to the traditional Class S template pioneered by Nobuko Yoshiya and others. Why then is it so popular in twenty-first-century Japan?

To resolve this seeming paradox, we need to look more closely at Maria Watches Over Us and the differences between it and traditional Class S works. First, even though not all girls in early twentieth-century Japan attended high school, much less Catholic high schools, those who did attended all-girls schools. Thus the settings of typical Class S works were not too far removed from their own experiences.

However, in the early twenty-first-century timeframe of Maria Watches Over Us the upper-class all-girls Catholic school environment portrayed in the series would likely be foreign to almost all of its readers and viewers. Though depicting events in contemporary Japan, the exotic setting of Maria Watches Over Us makes it more akin to a work of fantasy.

Second, the life prospects of the characters in Maria Watches Over Us are not nearly as constrained as those of the girls in traditional Class S stories. In particular, with one exception (Sachiko Ogasawara), no girls are depicted as being compelled into an arranged marriage—and it appears that even Sachiko may escape that fate. Almost all of the characters are implied to have a fair amount of freedom in making their life choices after high school, even to take somewhat unusual paths (like pursuing a widowed man with a young child, as Eriko Torii does).

As I interpret it, the core theme of traditional Class S works is that a girl’s time at an all-girls school is a brief period during which she can exercise a measure of free choice in entering into a deep and fulfilling relationship with another girl, before she is called to fulfill her assigned duty as a “good wife and wise mother,” serving a husband chosen for her by others and a Japanese state that envisions no other role for her. At best, that fleeting period of happiness must end in permanent separation from the one she loves. At worst, it will end in death for her or her partner.

That theme is echoed in the “Forest of Briars” episode of Maria Watches Over Us, which features a novel initially thought to be written by Sei Satō about her relationship with her younger classmate Shiori Kubo.³ But, in fact, that novel was written by a woman who attended Lillian Girls’ Academy many years ago—a plot twist that serves to distance that Class S story from the very different tale told by Maria Watches Over Us.

So, if Maria Watches Over Us is not simply a traditional Class S story updated to modern Tokyo, what is it? I contend that Maria Watches Over Us is best thought of as a utopian fantasy featuring a benevolent hierarchically-ordered society sustained by kindness, empathy, and love—a fantasy rendered at least superficially plausible by the fact that the society’s members are all women. The central concerns of Maria Watches Over Us are how to find a suitable place for oneself in such a hierarchically-ordered society and, having done so, how best to perpetuate that society by bringing others into its embrace.

That hierarchical order is sustained through the sœur (“sister”) system, in which older girls enter into relationships of close friendship and affection with younger girls. Those younger girls then take on sœurs of their own, advancing up the ranks of the age-based hierarchy as their seniors graduate.

There are many attractive features of this hierarchically-ordered society. First, it is relatively inclusive, with girls able to find a place in it irrespective of their family wealth or social status. Thus, for example, the main protagonist, everygirl Yumi Fukuzawa, finds herself chosen as the “petite sœur” of Sachiko, the aristocratic scion of one of the wealthiest families of Japan.⁴

The sœur system also accommodates relationships between girls with very different personalities (for example, Yumi and Sachiko) and relationships of varying characters and degrees of intensity, like the superficially distant but actually deep relationship between Sei Satō and her petite sœur Shimako Tōdō.

The system is also flexible enough to survive occasional “problems of succession,” like Sei delaying her selection of a sœur and picking someone two grades below herself (instead of one grade, as is the usual practice) or Yoshino Shimazu picking as a petite sœur Nana Arima, a girl who hasn’t yet graduated from middle school into high school. Even choices of a successor made almost at random, like Sachiko’s selection of Yumi as her sœur or Yoshino’s selection of Nana, work out fine in the end, as if guided by the hand of the Virgin Mary herself.

Finally, and perhaps most important, the sœur system also offers the opportunity for positive personal growth. As a new petite sœur Yumi must learn what Sachiko needs from her, and what she must learn to properly be a grande sœur herself to Tōko Matsudaira, to grow “from an ‘average’ young woman to a commander among her peers, guiding with gentle pressure.”⁵ And through Yumi’s relationships with Sachiko and Tōko, they become better people as well.

Maria Watches Over Us thus embodies in contemporary fiction Nobuko Yoshiya’s contention that relationships between younger girls and older ones (or, for that matter, between girls and their teachers) are critical to their developing “a beautiful, moral, social, and non-self-centered character.”⁶

But no matter how benign it may be, the social order of Maria Watches Over Us is still one organized as a relatively rigid hierarchy based on age and seniority, one that in some respects is reminiscent of traditional Confucian teachings or the ideologies of imperial Japan. Like the hierarchies promoted by those, the society of Lillian Girls’ Academy is a hierarchy of hierarchies.

First, there are the groups of girls linked together by sœur relationships (a girl, her petite sœur, that girl’s petite sœur, and so on). These are analogous to the extended family unit of the traditional Japanese household (ie), with each generation deferring to those above it.

Then there are three groups of sœurs that are set apart from other girls as a sort of hereditary aristocracy, the so-called “Rose families.” The heads of these families, that is, the oldest girls within each of these three sets of sœurs, even have the equivalent of titles of nobility: Rosa Chinensis, Rosa Foetida, and Rosa Gigantea.

The student council of the school is supposedly chosen in democratic elections. In practice, the Roses control the council, just as the governments of Meiji-era Japan were dominated by the former samurai who became part of the newly-(re)constituted Japanese nobility. In Maria Watches Over Us there are two challengers who seek election to the council, but both are easily defeated and the system of hereditary succession preserved. (See also below.)

As student council members, the Roses are shown to be enlightened rulers. Unlike the student councils in many manga and anime, they do not lord it over the students, seek to shut down clubs, or attempt to restrict students’ behavior through petty regulations.

Instead, they seek to narrow the perceived distance between themselves and other students. For example, Sachiko’s grande sœur Yōko Mizuno shows concern that ordinary students are afraid to approach the Roses and expresses her desire to open up the Rose Mansion (the building that serves as their gathering place) to anyone who wishes to visit.

However, the scope of this benevolent order is limited in both space and time. First, these hierarchies are themselves embedded in the larger hierarchies of Japanese society. Erica Friedman claims that “fans [of Maria Watches Over Us] are treated to a world in which women are assumed to be able to lead and to command without question.”⁷ But that world ends at the gates of Lillian Girls’ Academy, the boundary beyond which the patriarchy reigns. The nuns who run the school are subject to the authority of the local (male) bishop, who is himself a mid-rank figure in the (male) church hierarchy presided over by the Pope.

Likewise, Sachiko, the epitome of aristocratic grace and ability, rules supreme within the school in concert with her fellow Roses. However, though she is the sole child of the family, she is apparently deemed unfit to lead the Ogasawara corporate empire as an adult. Her proposed marriage with Suguru Kashiwagi would lead to his taking over the companies. If that engagement ends, some other man would presumably be found to take his place, whether through marriage to Sachiko or adoption into the Ogasawara family.

For the most part, the hierarchical order of Maria Watches Over Us goes unquestioned by those who participate in it—and almost all of the girls do participate in it. There are at least four exceptions to this, two political and two personal, each illustrating various aspects of the social order and how it is preserved against potential threats.

The first political challenge is brought by Shizuka Kanina, also known as Rosa Canina—analogous to a usurper granting themselves a royal title.⁸ She runs for the student council essentially to get the attention of Sei. Having achieved that goal, she leaves school to study voice in Italy, exiling herself from Japan and (by implication) its social hierarchies.

The second challenger is Sachiko’s cousin Tōko. Insecure in her position in her family due to her having been adopted into it, Tōko’s story resembles the stories of bastard sons of the aristocracy, born of nobility but estranged from it by the circumstances of their birth, of the elite but at the same time not of it.

In some stories, this results in the bastard son leading a revolution against the class of which they are ostensibly a member. This finds echoes in Tōko’s student council run, in which she apparently seeks to overthrow the tradition of the Rose families running the council.⁹ However, Yumi’s kindness wins Tōko over, Yumi makes Tōko her petite sœur, and she becomes part of the Rosa Chinensis family, one day to assume the position of Rose that she had dreamed of as a child. Thus, like many past rebellious sons of nobility, she ends her story co-opted into the hierarchical order against which she had once inveighed.

As for personal challenges to the social order, the more significant is the relationship of Sei and Shiori, the intensity and passion of which reads as being lesbian in nature.¹⁰ However, they are not criticized for engaging in lesbian activity specifically.

Rather Sei and Shiori are criticized, explicitly by their elders and implicitly by the story framing, for letting their absorption in each other lead to their neglecting their roles in the two hierarchical orders to which they have respectively committed themselves: Sei to her sœurs and the sœur system, and Shiori to the Church that she intends to join as a nun. (Note that despite her affection for Shiori, Sei explicitly rejects making Shiori her sœur.) To put it another way, Sei and Shiori’s true sin is the sin of individualism, and their subplot is resolved by their repenting of it.

The other case of rejecting the hierarchical order is not a rejection at all. The “ace of the photography club,” Tsutako Takeshima, who loves to photograph others but hates to be photographed herself, exists outside of the sœur system, observing it closely but not participating in it herself. She is a fairly transparent stand-in for the author, and as such does not constitute a threat to the social order.

Given the above, why might Maria Watches Over Us be so popular, both with the teenaged girls for whom it was originally written and the older all-genders audience that makes up a significant part of Marimite fandom?

For teenaged girls, besides the emotional drama (tending to melodrama) for which shōjo manga, anime, and light novels are known and loved, Maria Watches Over Us offers a vision of a charmed school existence, in which bullying is seemingly nonexistent and almost all troubles are ultimately dissolved in a sea of mutual kindness and support.¹¹ I can see many a girl picturing herself in Yumi’s place, plucked from obscurity to become the valued companion and helpmeet to the elegant and cultured Sachiko, who seemingly has everything but desperately needs what only Yumi can provide.

This emotional identification can extend to other characters: Maria Watches Over Us features such a wide variety of personalities and relationships that almost any young reader or viewer can find some aspect of the story that speaks to them personally.

As for the older audience, it may be no accident that the popularity of Maria Watches Over Us grew as Japan was entering its second “lost decade” of economic stagnation. Maria Watches Over Us offers an appealing vision of an alternative Japan, of a Japan as some like to think of it. The world of Lillian Girls’ Academy is a hierarchical social order that works for all those who are part of it. Those on the lower rungs of the ladder are valued and cared for, not ignored or exploited—comfort food for “freeters” and others for whom the traditional Japanese promise of lifetime corporate employment (never extended to all of society, especially women) will remain forever unfulfilled.

The popularity of the Maria Watches Over Us franchise led to others creating works inspired by it. Independently-published dōjinshi, fan fiction, and other types of unofficial derivative works sought to extend the story, explore different pairings of the characters, or show favorite “ships” in more compromising positions. Among others, Strawberry Panic reused the Catholic girls’ school setting and other Marimite tropes to tell a story of schoolgirl affections more directed at the male gaze.¹²

And, of course, there’s Sweet Blue Flowers, which seems to have been something of a side project for Takako Shimura while she was creating Wandering Son. She began serialization of Sweet Blue Flowers in 2004, about a year and a half after serialization of Wandering Son began. She ended it in 2013, a month before Wandering Son ended, having published one chapter every other month instead of the monthly schedule for Wandering Son.

Thus Shimura had enough spare time to do a second manga (albeit on a less demanding schedule), an available outlet in Manga Erotics F (Wandering Son was being serialized in Comic Beam), an all-genders adult audience familiar with tales of love between schoolgirls, a story structure to echo and adapt, and presumably something she wanted to say.

What was that something? As noted previously, I think it was about presenting a model of loving relationships between women that does not conform to a hierarchical framework like that in Maria Watches Over Us, relationships in which two girls come to each other not as grande sœur and petite sœur, not as senpai and kōhai, not as superior and inferior, but rather as equal individuals.