Four Weddings (No Funeral)

For a manga set in high school, Sweet Blue Flowers sure has a lot of weddings (and talk of more). Chizu’s marriage and Fumi’s anger at it help (re)start Fumi’s friendship with Akira. Kazusa’s wedding to Mr. Kagami (re)surfaces emotions that Yasuko had suppressed, which indirectly leads to her break-up with Fumi. As the story heads to its conclusion, Kyoko weds Ko and Hinako and Orie envision what their wedding might be like, should it ever be possible.

The earliest wedding depicted in Sweet Blue Flowers is that of Kayoko to Akihiko Ikumi (SBF, 4:62). Unlike the other wedding pictures, which show the couples in Western attire, theirs features them in traditional Japanese outfits. Or perhaps I should write “traditional” in quotes since what seems to be a time-honored style is in many ways a product of the modern era, “a ‘cultural product’ … invented in order to further the business interests of the purveyors of this product … [and] a purveyor of a sense of cultural identity.”¹

That “cultural identity” is a product of the Meiji-era project to forge Japan into a unified modern nation. That nation-building project touched all areas of Japanese life, including weddings. The state formalized Shinto as a set of rituals binding the Japanese with each other and with the emperor. Those rituals then became the heart of the wedding ceremony. Formerly held at home, weddings became a public display in 1900, when the future Taishō emperor married his bride in a Shinto ceremony held at a shrine. It was a reaction against the perceived dangers of Westernization, “a public statement about Japanese identity in contrast to others through the wedding ceremony.”²

In contrast to this state ceremony, weddings for the general populace continued to be held at home in the Taishō and early Shōwa periods, including weddings of those descended from the samurai class. The bride’s outfit was typically “a white under kimono (shiromuku) under a formal black adult’s kimono,” with “hair oiled and pulled up into a Japanese hair style (nihonga) which was not much more elaborate than the way most of them wore their hair on any given day.”³

However, bridal outfits became more elaborate over time, especially after World War II. Bombing had destroyed the large homes previously used for weddings, so new “wedding palaces” catered to postwar brides. (The palaces included their own Shinto shrines in which to hold ceremonies.) As the economy grew in the postwar period, this wedding industry (for such it was) made available to the broad Japanese middle class bridal clothing and accessories previously confined to the samurai class. Those items combined with a style of makeup otherwise associated with geisha and Kabuki theater to create the image of the “Japanese bride” we know today.⁴

That image is often paired with images of modernity—a bullet train, a computer chip, or the Tokyo skyline—to portray Japan as a nation racing into the future while remaining respectful of and rooted in the past. It is part and parcel of the process of “samuraization,” “the configuring of Japanese identity according to a perception of samurai lifestyle from the Tokugawa Period.”⁵

This process includes imagining modern Japanese men, especially salarymen, as torch-bearers of the samurai spirit. Akihiko Ikumi was presumably one such man. His marriage to Kayoko occurred at the high point of Japanese economic power and self-confidence, the late 1980s and the end of the Shōwa era. (In retrospect, it may also have marked the high point of the Japanese patriarchal system.)

However, Japan soon slid into its “lost decades” of economic stagnation and diminished prospects. All the other weddings depicted in Sweet Blue Flowers feature Western wedding gowns and other Western attire, a turning away from the (partly invented and imagined) Japanese marriage traditions.

This carries over to other aspects of Sweet Blue Flowers. Unlike other manga set in high schools, there are no visits to Shinto shrines or Buddhist temples. And when the students go on class trips in volume 4, they go not to Kyoto (a traditional destination for Japanese high-school classes), but England and Nagasaki, famous as the site where European goods and ideas first entered Japan.

Kazusa and Mr. Kagami’s wedding, the next one pictured in the chronology of Sweet Blue Flowers, is held in the Catholic chapel of Fujigaya Women’s Academy, complete with an organist, stained glass windows, and a cross on the building’s exterior (SBF, 2:93, 2:96). Its setting represents the other significant development of the Meiji era, the influx of Western ideas and, in particular, Western religion. That religion was influential not so much as a religion per se, but as a source of images (including the white lily) and traditions (such as the celebration of Christmas) divorced from their religious roots and incorporated into Japanese popular culture.

In Kyoko and Ko’s wedding, the religious symbolism is gone: although their wedding was presumably also held at Fujigaya (note the transition into the scene showing the woods surrounding the school), the exterior of the building in which they are married, and the interior rooms at the reception, betray no hint of Christianity (SBF, 4:335–37, 4:339–40, 4:348).

Unlike the wedding of Kazusa and Mr. Kagami, the symbols of the patriarchy are absent as well, as there is no sign of Kyoko’s father (or Ko’s). (We hear mention of Kyoko’s and Ko’s mothers only in the run-up to the event.) Instead, Kyoko and Ko walk down the aisle by themselves, surrounded by their friends (SBF, 4:332–33, 4:349).

The fourth and final wedding shown in Sweet Blue Flowers is imagined only, as Hinako and Orie respond to Haruka’s query, “Hina, do you and Orie want a wedding too?” They picture themselves in wedding gowns even more Western and “fashion-forward” than Kyoko’s and Kazusa’s (SBF, 4:350–51).

However, they have ambiguous feelings about marriage itself (“Actually, an official ceremony isn’t that important …”) and are passive regarding anything they might do to make such a wedding possible (“But if no one would mind…”) (SBF, 4:350). Like the characters in many other yuri manga who imagine weddings and wedding dresses for themselves, they do not (yet?) identify themselves as members of a community that has shared interests and can work to achieve shared political goals.

We find an unlikely exception to this omission in the manga Love Me for Who I Am, superficially a story notable mainly for fluffy art and moe characters. In volume 3, a lesbian joins her nonbinary friend and their co-worker, a trans girl, as they leave the community they’ve created with each other at “Café Question” and join the larger LGBTQ community at “Rainbow Festa.” As they wander among the people, events, and booths, her companions stop to sign a petition for marriage equality.⁶

It is at once the simplest and potentially most consequential of political acts. Their quickly-written signatures mark a personal crossing of the Rubicon, a transition from inner thoughts and private conversations to public support of a cause near to their hearts and those of their friends. As their futures unfold, they may progress from signing petitions to soliciting signatures for them, from watching parades to marching in them, perhaps even to organizing, leading, or inspiring them.

Who among the characters of Sweet Blue Flowers might one day make that journey? One candidate is Haruka: bold, outgoing, able to make friends easily, her concern for her sister might motivate her to become an activist—though she still seems to be coming to terms with Orie’s relationship with Hinako.

Another is Akira. Her presidency of the drama club shows she has a talent for organizing. Her behavior throughout the series shows fearlessness and a strong sense of justice, at least where other people are concerned. And now that she’s acknowledged her love for Fumi, who knows what actions that love might spur her to?

But I must put such speculation on hold, as I turn to the final scenes of Sweet Blue Flowers.