Old School, New School

As I mentioned earlier, Sweet Blue Flowers pays homage to and (to some extent) subverts traditional Class S and yuri tropes. One of the first ways that shows up is in the contrast drawn between Fujigaya Women’s Academy and Matsuoka Girls’ High School, the schools attended by Akira Okudaira and Fumi Manjome, respectively.

Fujigaya is the type of all-girls school made famous in works like Maria Watches Over Us: separated from the normal world by a tunnel at the end of a long uphill path (SBF, 1:20), a Catholic-flavored hothouse in which (according to the trope) the students engage in never-ending rounds of crushes and potential crushes. As Akira’s mother tells her, “Soon you’ll bring home a girlfriend!” (1:27).

(The call-out to Maria Watches Over Us is even more explicit in the Digital Manga translation, in which Akira’s brother asks her, “So does everyone say ‘good day to you’?,” a common English translation of the formal expression “gokigenyō” made famous by Maria.)

However, despite the association with S relationships, Fujigaya is better thought of as an institution whose primary purpose is promoting and propagating traditional values around marriage and class. Michi Kawai, who ran a Christian school in Tokyo in the 1930s and 1940s, wrote: “There is an increasing tendency for well-to-do Protestant families in Japan to send their children, especially girls, to Catholic institutions. … Is it the policy of Catholics to gather the children of the wealthy and those of high station in life?”¹

Kawai’s conclusion: “The families who are socially ambitious wish to send their children to exclusive schools so that after graduation their daughters may be married into families of social standing. This is a natural desire for any parent, and Catholic educationists were clever enough to diagnose the need and the church rich enough to start one or two very exclusive schools in large cities with lovely big campuses and many consecrated Sisters of different orders, working together with efficient Japanese staffs.”²

Kawai also noted the recent founding of the Catholic-sponsored Nogi Girls’ High School near Kamakura: “Very soon the school will be overflowing with pupils because it again meets the demand of the people who have the money and the leisure to live all the year round in that exclusive neighborhood.”³

Nogi Girls’ High School was subsequently renamed Shonan Shirayuri Gakuen High School, and under that name exists to this day, its junior and senior high school campus located only a short distance inland from Enoshima.⁴ It also has an affiliated kindergarten and elementary school. Although the history of Shonan Shirayuri Gakuen High School dates back only to just before World War II, its setting, mission, and target demographic make it the closest real-life equivalent to Fujigaya Women’s Academy.⁵

The most notable difference is that as a more recent institution Shonan Shirayuri Gakuen has more modern architecture. As Shimura mentions in the afterwords to parts 1 and 2 of volume 1, she used the Kamakura Museum of Literature as the model for the physical appearance of Fujigaya (SBF, 1:193, 1:378). The museum grounds even feature a tunnel like the one Akira walks through on her first day of school (1:20).⁶

In contrast to Fujigaya, Matsuoka appears to be a typical nondenominational single-sex high school. Akira’s mother sees it as particularly academically rigorous (SBF, 1:36), but it’s otherwise indistinguishable from other modern educational institutions. Based on evidence in other volumes (2:309, 3:311–12), Matsuoka appears to be located near the Kamakurakōkō-Mae station on the Enoden railway, near the site of the real-life Kamakura Senior High School, a coeducational public high school.

Unlike Fujigaya, which names its classrooms after flowers (Akira is in the Wisteria class),⁷ Matsuoka uses a more prosaic naming scheme (Fumi starting in class 1-A). To further enhance the contrast, Matsuoka students wear dark jumpers with blouse, tie, and (optional) jacket—a handsome but severe uniform that’s a far cry from the (often fetishized) sailor-style uniforms worn at Fujigaya and countless other schools in anime and manga.⁸

When schools like Fujigaya were first established during the Meiji era, I’m sure that the first generation of students saw them as excitingly modern. However, in the twenty-first-century timeframe of Sweet Blue Flowers the manga’s characters perceive Fujigaya as a bastion of traditional values. When Fumi and her friends from Matsuoka visit Fujugaya, they admire it for its refined atmosphere and elegant trappings: tea parties! a chapel! bay windows in the library! (SBF, 1:85–86). If Sweet Blue Flowers were a traditional yuri work, I’m sure that the story would never stray beyond its ivied walls.

But although Sweet Blue Flowers pays homage to traditional yuri, the trajectory of this first volume points beyond it. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that its most modern character, Fumi Manjome, is a student at Matsuoka and not at Fujigaya, or that her first kiss with Yasuko Sugimoto takes place among the austere steel shelves of Matsuoka’s library, not the stylish wooden shelves of Fujigaya’s (SBF, 1:114–16).