Rezubian

It’s a truism that the protagonists in typical yuri works are romantically and (in more mature works) sexually attracted to other women but don’t necessarily think of themselves as lesbians: “lesbian content without lesbian identity,” to quote Erica Friedman’s famous definition of yuri.¹ Fumi in Sweet Blue Flowers is no exception to this rule; the closest she comes to breaking it is telling her Matsuoka friends that she is indeed “that type of girl.” And yet, in volume 3, we find a girl who proudly and defiantly declares herself to be a lesbian (SBF, 3:257). What’s going on here, and how does it fit into the larger framework of Sweet Blue Flowers?

It’s noteworthy that this incident occurs in one of the “Little Women” side stories that Takako Shimura sprinkles throughout the various volumes of Sweet Blue Flowers. Shimura uses these to provide additional perspectives on the events of the main narrative. In some cases, they relate past events and provide background information on supporting characters, as in the stories featuring Hinako, Orie, and the Sugimoto sisters and their mother (SBF, 1:379–81, 2:2–3, 2:159–74, 2:176–77, 2:347–54, 3:165–72).

In other cases, the “Little Women” stories depict events that appear to be roughly contemporaneous with the main storyline but are not directly connected to its events or characters. Instead, these function as commentary on the manga’s themes (SBF, 3:353–56, 4:173–76).

The scene between self-proclaimed lesbian Maeda and her friend Nakajima is an example of the latter. Judging from their school uniforms, they appear to be students at Fujigaya Women’s Academy. So the first and simplest function of the story is to let us know that there are more students at Fujigaya who are attracted to other girls.

Indeed this is almost a mathematical certainty. Fujigaya probably has several hundred students in total, and the three high school grades likely have at least a couple of hundred, assuming two or three classes of students for each year and about twenty to thirty students per class.

In a 2019 Japanese government survey, 0.7 percent of those surveyed identified themselves as “lesbian, gay, or homosexual” (as compared to 3.3 percent of respondents identifying as one or more of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or asexual).² In another more recent survey (conducted by the Dentsu advertising agency), 1.33 percent of those surveyed identified themselves as lesbians (compared to 8.9 percent considering themselves members of a “sexual minority”).³

Given these figures, we can conclude that in all probability, at least a few Fujigaya high school students would be considered lesbians by any reasonable definition—perhaps more than one could count on the fingers of one hand. Thus Hinako and Orie were likely not alone in their class, nor Maeda in hers.

What other functions does Maeda’s story serve? Perhaps the most obvious is to contrast the fictional world of S relationships found in many modern yuri works to the real world as young Japanese lesbians might experience it. In the world of yuri fiction (in which Sweet Blue Flowers exists as both homage and critique), students in girls’ schools swoon over imagined pairings (as with Yasuko and Kawasaki in Wuthering Heights). Meanwhile, their parents react with indifference or even enthusiasm—recall Akira’s mother’s reaction after Akira’s first day at Fujigaya: “Soon you’ll bring home a girlfriend!” (SBF, 1:27).

But in Maeda’s world, she gets called a “lesbo” (the English version’s translation of rezu, a pejorative shortening of rezubian) and “ugly” (translating busu, which refers to an ugly woman specifically). Fortunately, she manages not to let it bother her, but this is a classic example of homophobic bullying.

One could quibble at Shimura juxtaposing Maeda’s treatment with the yuri-inflected goings-on elsewhere at Fujigaya. It seems tonally jarring and inconsistent that both could exist in the same school at the same time. But as I understand it, this is not so different from the situation in Japan before and during the time that Shimura was writing Sweet Blue Flowers, and to a large extent, this is still true today.

The distinction here is between lesbians in manga, anime, and other forms of entertainment and lesbians in real life. Lesbians are perfectly acceptable in the context of entertainment, a world in which the unusual and nonconforming are a source of titillation and intrigue. Such entertainment can encompass anything from pornography featuring lesbians to “pure yuri” tales of shy and innocent schoolgirls. (Indeed, Sweet Blue Flowers itself is an example of this—recall its publication in a magazine titled Manga Erotics F.)

But in Japan, the presence and acceptance of lesbians (or LGBTQ people in general) in entertainment did not carry over to acknowledging and accepting their presence in society. Western ideas of homosexuality as abnormal and depraved influenced Japan in the early twentieth century, but the root problem seems to be different. Lesbians (and LGBTQ individuals more generally) who choose to live as such do not conform to the template of the Japanese family that was institutionalized and propagandized beginning in the Meiji era, and still exerts great influence today.

In that template, the life history of a woman is to attend high school and perhaps university and possibly work full-time at a non-career track job for a few years. She will then leave employment to get married, have children, and devote her life to them. Once her children are grown, she will split her time between part-time work and caring for parents. It is a template for life entirely separate from that seen as the ideal for a man: He will attend school through university, get a corporate job after graduation, and at some point acquire a wife who will keep house and mind children. Meanwhile, he will devote his life to working and socializing within a predominantly male environment.

This rigid conception of women’s lives impacts lesbians in at least two ways. First, it limits their long-term employment prospects and therefore their ability to support themselves, much less a partner as well. “In small, medium or large companies there is the assumption that everyone participates in the same kind of kinship relations.” Thus lesbians are seen simply as unmarried women who have not yet found a man.⁴ They may be able to follow the employment path of heterosexual single women for a few years but not forever, as their status as lesbians renders them incompatible with Japanese corporate expectations for career employees.

Second, it means that there is no place for lesbians in the Japanese family as traditionally conceived. As one lesbian noted, “In Japan there is a father and a mother and children, and no one can see family in any other way. Anything else isn’t really family, but only a distortion, …”⁵

There are potential tweaks to this scenario: for example, the man may also have a mistress and have illegitimate children by her, or his wife’s family may have officially adopted him as a mukoyōshi to ensure a male heir. However, the basic template remains unchallenged and is provided official support via the koseki system of household registries (as discussed in a previous chapter).

In this scheme, a lesbian’s existence is inherently incompatible with the idea of “family.” As a woman, she cannot take on the role of household head traditionally reserved to men. As a woman who loves women, she cannot take on the role of wife to the (male) household head and bearer of her children.

So even though in theory, two lesbians could marry and have either or both of them give birth to children, many would not consider this a “family.” Moreover, as discussed above, such a not-family (from the Japanese perspective) would also be financially nonviable since the idea of a lesbian as a long-term breadwinner in support of her wife and children runs up against lesbians’ incompatibility with the conventional corporate employment narrative.

The approaches societies can take concerning those who don’t conform to societal norms can range from singling out and condemning them to simply ignoring them. Many people in Japan seem to have taken the latter path, rendering Japanese lesbians invisible through what appears to be a willful refusal to recognize their existence as lesbians.

For example, Saori Kamano relates her encounters with Japanese graduate students in 1987 and at the turn of the century. In both cases, they confidently proclaimed, “There are no lesbians in Japan.”⁶ An example in Sweet Blue Flowers itself is the experience of Hinako after she tells her mother about her relationship with Orie: her mother still works with Hinako’s aunt to try to arrange a meeting with a man (SBF, 4:209). Orie has a similar experience, with her parents refusing to discuss the issue (4:211).

Among other things, this imposed invisibility has in the past inhibited many Japanese lesbians from actually thinking of themselves as lesbians: it’s hard to conceive of oneself as a member of a distinct group if you don’t know of anyone else like you. In today’s world, that knowledge might be just an Internet search away. (In fact, that might be where Maeda and her persecutors learned about lesbians.)

However, Sweet Blue Flowers was created in a world where the Internet was not as ubiquitous as it is now. And, in any case, it’s more dramatically effective for Fumi to explore her identity in conversations with an actual adult lesbian, namely Hinako. The result is that although she doesn’t yet apply the term “rezubian” to herself, she can come out to her friends and acknowledge that she’s “that type of girl.”