Men, What Are They Good For?

Throughout the first three volumes of Sweet Blue Flowers, we encounter adult men and male university students, but not until we reach volume 4 do we meet a high-school boy. One of Fumi’s fellow cram-school students, Atsushi Tanaka, confesses to her (4:270–77).¹ His sudden appearance and swift rejection by Fumi form a parallel with her relationship with Akira (in a chapter titled “Unrequited Love”) and highlight the limited role men play in the manga and how it characterizes men in general.

If we look back to Maria Watches Over Us, the most likely immediate inspiration for Sweet Blue Flowers, we find male characters who, though peripheral to the main action at Lillian Girls’ Academy, nevertheless have some role in the story and exercise a fair degree of agency. There was even a ten-volume spinoff series of light novels featuring Yuki Fukuzawa, brother of the main character Yumi Fukuzawa, and his classmates at an all-boys school.

It’s hard to imagine any male character in Sweet Blue Flower meriting such treatment. Instead, the men of the manga are—with some key exceptions—generally portrayed as ineffectual and passive, acted upon rather than acting on their own. Atsushi Tanaka, Fumi’s would-be boyfriend, is a partial exception: he does muster up the courage to confess to her, something Fumi is not unmindful of. However, he hasn’t even bothered to learn her actual name (“It’s Makime! Or maybe not…”), much less tried to converse with her and strike up a friendship before confessing.

Ko is another exception, but only partially. He doggedly continues his pursuit of Kyoko, but how much of that is genuine initiative rather than just following a track laid down for both of them in childhood? Indeed, as a university student, he would have had plenty of opportunities to meet other women. His continued attachment to Kyoko seems at times as implausible and even off-putting as Mamoru’s to Usagi in Sailor Moon.

Our next two examples, Akira’s brother Shinobu and Mr. Kagami, can’t even muster that level of initiative, at least as portrayed in their stories. Like his fellow university student Ko, Shinobu seems to have no interest in or relationships with women his age. He acquires a girlfriend (and potential future wife) in Fumi’s friend Mogi only through a plot contrivance seemingly introduced only to close out the subplot involving his siscon tendencies.

Likewise, Mr. Kagami is pursued by three different Sugimoto sisters (with Kazusa winning out), even though his appeal to women remains mysterious: “We must have a genetic weakness for guys like you,” speculates Yasuko (SBF, 2:88). His work persona is no better: it’s a long-running joke that he can’t be bothered to attend meetings of the Fujigaya drama club of which he’s ostensibly the faculty advisor. The situation is so bad that Hinako has to step in to help the club decide on a production for Akira and Kyoko’s third year (4:165–66). As one of the drama club presidents tells him, “It doesn’t matter if you’re there or not” (1:111).

Mr. Kagami does have one accomplishment to his name, though, namely siring a child (SBF, 4:18–20). In this, he joins other fathers portrayed in the manga. Akira’s father seems to exist in a state of perpetual bewilderment, while Fumi’s father appears only briefly. Hinako’s father can’t be bothered to stop reading baseball news long enough to talk seriously about his daughter’s relationship with Orie (4:210).

Presumably, all these men work to support their families, although this topic never comes up in the manga. (Even Mr. Kagami is never shown in the classroom, let alone teaching.) The overall effect is that most men in Sweet Blue Flowers are portrayed as aliens in a world they don’t belong to.

As an outsider, I can’t speak from personal experience. Still, from my reading and general impressions, it seems as if within the middle- to upper-middle-class milieu in which Sweet Blue Flowers is set, the worlds of Japanese men and women are largely separate and intersect only in a few times and places.

The world of men is the world of work, the stereotypical salaryman and his corporate employer, long workdays followed by long nights socializing with coworkers, and business trips and remote assignments away from family. The world of women is the world of home, managing a household, and caring for children and aging parents.

Will these two worlds ever grow closer together? Beyond objective economic measures such as gender wage gaps and labor force participation, we can look to changes in culture, particularly those occurring in the postbubble timeframe (the 1990s to the present). Here two suggestive phenomena present themselves.

The first is a change in the language used by male protagonists in that most stereotypical masculine of media, anime adapted from manga published in the magazine Shōnen Jump and targeted at the shōnen demographic of teenaged boys. During the height of Japan’s postwar economic boom, shōnen heroes almost exclusively used the first-person pronoun ore, associated with “the ‘hot-blooded hero,’ an aggressive, no-nonsense character.” But since the middle of the 1990s, many shōnen protagonists have begun using boku instead, a more neutral pronoun. The hypothesis is that “expectations for protagonists in shōnen works changed as the power of masculinity structures that were dominant during the 1980s began to weaken.”²

Another example, which came into prominence while Shimura was writing Sweet Blue Flowers, is Japanese media obsession with so-called “herbivore men”: “young men who are heterosexual but are not assertive … in trying to pursue women,” and who engage in stereotypical feminine behaviors like using makeup and having an interest in fashion.³

The “herbivore men” were accused of violating traditional Japanese ideals of masculinity and contributing to the nation’s decline in fertility while at the same time being hailed as blurring gender boundaries and providing a potential new model for Japanese men.⁴

The reality is perhaps more prosaic. Displaying male vanity through an interest in makeup and fashion no more implies a revolution in male opinions regarding gender, much less a dismantling of patriarchal structures, than did the adoption of long hair and earrings by American men in the 1960s and 70s. Or, to express it in more academic language, “the mere reconfiguration of conventional hegemonic masculinity to ‘softer,’ seemingly more egalitarian forms does not necessarily result in equalizing the relationship between masculinity and femininity.”⁵

As for disinterest in sex and marriage, the economic explanation is more parsimonious: in Japanese government surveys, “those who reported no interest in heterosexual romantic relationships had lower income and educational levels and were more likely have no regular employment.” Japan’s relatively stagnant economy and the decline in traditional corporate employment meant that more men did not feel economically secure enough to enter into a marriage, especially given societal expectations that men will be the primary breadwinners for their families. And because Japanese norms discourage sexual activities outside marriage, such men had less interest in finding sexual partners.⁶

It’s worth noting that this feeling of financial insecurity appears not to apply to the two leading male characters of Sweet Blue Flowers, Ko and Shinobu. Although Ko does express some concern to Kyoko’s mother about finding a job (SBF, 4:70), he apparently feels financially secure enough to marry Kyoko. Shinobu is in the same situation: both Akira and Yassan expect that he’ll marry Mogi relatively soon, and Mogi appears to agree (4:95, 4:353). So for Ko and Shinobu, at least, the salaryman ideal is still alive and active as the “hegemonic masculinity.”

Finally, two men are not portrayed as passive and ineffectual: the father of the Sugimoto sisters, and Count Kageyama, the antagonist of Rokumeikan. Instead, they are men who exercise power over others: Sugimoto within his company and over his family, Kageyama within the Japanese state and over his wife, her lover, and her son. They appear only fleetingly—the first seen but not heard, the second only spoken to—presumably because their presence is incompatible with the feminine world that is the manga’s focus. However, we as readers cannot ignore their existence and that of the patriarchal society within which Sweet Blue Flowers is situated.