What do musical theater, crossdressing, the Tokugawa shogunate, and yuri manga and anime have in widespread? Nicely, nearly every thing. The lily bloom of contemporary yuri has its roots in many alternative ponds – from the homosexual journal Barazoku the place lesbians had their very own column, to the basic novels of “Class S” literature which appear so tame to our fashionable expectations. However above all different issues, you possibly can draw a line as sharp and straight as Utena Tenjou’s dueling foil between yuri and the all-female musical theater troupe often known as the Takarazuka Revue.
The Takarazuka Revue and Its Affect
Based in 1913 in response to the surge of recognition loved by Western musicals and impressed by the all-female mannequin of onna-kabuki – which had been banned in 1629 by the shogunate for having an ostensibly deleterious impact on public morals– the Takarazuka Revue continues to be going robust and the results it has had not solely on yuri manga and anime, however on real-world LGBT tradition in Japan is simple.
As with most issues theatrical, the true stars of the lavish, Broadway-style Takarazuka musical performances (which vary from iterations on classics like Faust to their delightfully foolish however heartfelt adaptation of Phoenix Wright: Ace Lawyer) are, effectively, the celebrities themselves, the performers. Throughout their time on the Takarazuka Academy, which boasts an acceptance price decrease than Tokyo College, the ladies finally settle into both changing into musumeyaku or otokoyaku, akin to feminine and male roles respectively. The adherence to those strictly marked gender roles goes past the stage – each courses of performers dwell and embody their assigned gender elsewhere, whether or not or not it’s on the academy itself, TV appearances or just going out for groceries. Swapping from one position to a different sooner or later in your profession isn’t not possible, however is uncommon sufficient that it’d as effectively not exist as a chance.
The Takarazuka Revue being carefully associated to LGBT tradition in Japan all through the many years shouldn’t be mistaken for the Takarazuka Revue being truly queer. Whereas queerness is unavoidable by its very nature, and lesbians are overrepresented as a share of the overall inhabitants in each the followers and the performers themselves, the homeowners of the Revue (which is itself a subsidiary of the Hankyu Railway Firm) shouldn’t be mistaken for progressive individuals. The corporate, like modern-day J-pop idol businesses, requires the performers to stay virgins and never date whereas being employed by the Revue, which in fact hasn’t stopped lots of them from pursuing lesbian relationships and even changing into LGBT activists, such because the well-known case of former otokoyaku Koyuki Higashi, who held a same-sex marriage ceremony ceremony on the Tokyo Disney Resort after a lot back-and-forth with the resort’s authorities.
Removed from supporting the performers and guaranteeing their well-being, the homeowners of the Revue encourage strict adherence to harsh, generally unreasonable guidelines. As an illustration, college students on the Revue Academy are prohibited from carrying any colours apart from navy, black, white, and brown even exterior of college premises. Underclassmen should get up hours earlier than their upperclassmen to scrub the varied rooms, props and musical devices, the thoroughness of which should be verified by their upperclassmen. Dorm life is equally strict: the actresses are forbidden from speaking within the hallways and even letting the microwave bell ring, and it’s widespread follow to maintain alarm clocks underneath the pillow and never allow them to ring greater than as soon as, lest one other scholar be awoken by the sound.
Along with this, the scholars and actresses are basically drafted into the extremely exploitative and much-criticized competitors for the High Star and High Musumeyaku titles, respectively held by an otokoyaku and musumeyaku from every of the Revue’s 5 troupes, which assure them the main position in each manufacturing. This cutthroat competitors forces the performers into mutual hostilities and promotes unhealthy ranges of effort and dedication in the direction of reaching the much-coveted and prestigious title, one thing the anime Revue Starlight makes an incredible effort to criticize.
Whereas each otokoyaku and musumeyaku are basic members of stage productions, it’s simple that the true head-turning, headline-grabbing stars are the otokoyaku. These spectacular ladies not solely play male roles on the stage – they carry out masculinity off stage as effectively. From carrying their hair quick to dropping their voice, carrying males’s clothes and even adopting male speech mannerisms (such because the masculine boku private pronoun), the otokoyaku give us a glimpse into masculinity by means of a unique lens. They’re immensely widespread with ladies as a result of though they’re aping manly attitudes, they’re understood to be the head of each masculinity and femininity, concurrently. Like drag kings, they painting an idealized, fantastical masculinity whereas delighting in subverting gender expectations.
Lady Princes In Anime and Manga
Princess Knight
Nowhere is that this brash masculinity suffused with tender femininity typical of otokoyaku extra evident than once we see a Lady Prince on display screen or on the pages of a manga. Osamu Tezuka, usually known as the “God of Manga,” was an enormous fan of the Takarazuka Revue, having accompanied his mom to see a number of performances as a toddler rising up within the eponymous city of Takarazuka.
It’s no shock, then, that he created the character of Sapphire from Princess Knight, a “woman” who possesses each the blue coronary heart of a boy and the pink coronary heart of a lady. Sapphire, who balances her dually gendered nature by being each a heroic swordswoman in addition to an object of want for girls, is sort of actually the blueprint for all future Lady Princes. As Erica Friedman places it in her wonderful historical past of yuri, By Your Aspect, “Sapphire is the hero many little ladies wish to be earlier than the tales clarify that they’re merely meant to be the reward for the Prince. What ladies need, once we watch otokoyaku, is to be wooed by a “man” who understands us (as a result of he’s a girl). After we have a look at the Lady Prince, we merely wish to be her”.
The Rose of Versailles and Pricey Brother
Any dialogue of the Takarazuka Revue could be woefully incomplete and not using a point out of The Rose of Versailles. Whereas Princess Knight takes the feeling of watching an otokoyaku painting a prince, The Rose of Versailles’ lifts the Takarazuka aesthetic wholesale in a way more brazen means, and to nice impact.
In 1973, the venerable Riyoko Ikeda printed The Rose of Versailles in Margaret journal. In Versailles, Girl Oscar is raised as a boy within the tumultuous years main as much as the French Revolution. We see ladies fawning on her, adoring her lovely, gender-defying visage though her actual love is the good-looking Andre. Versailles shines by not having the protagonist grapple along with her interior gender id – Oscar lives her otokoyakulife totally and day by day, like an actual otokoyakuwould. The battle in her romance with Andre comes not from her gender however from the distinction in standing and, most significantly, army rank, as Oscar outranks Andre. Oscar represents the best of the Lady Prince but in addition a standard pitfall: upright, noble, simply, and honor-bound, however finally giving her coronary heart to a person and solely a person.
Contrasting with Oscar barely, Ikeda’s different Lady Prince, the perpetually tragic Asaka Rei, our Saint-Juste of the Flowers, from Pricey Brother (Oniisama E…) establishes an intense and deep romantic relationship with the everygirl Misonoo Nanako. Whereas the ending of Pricey Brother had totally different plans for our poor Rei, the seed was planted. Lady Princes may fall in love with ladies and pursue relationships with them, and they might be solid in what we’d name a “butch” position in stated relationships.
Sailor Moon
Different Lady Princes, butches, otokoyaku-type characters and the like have made their mark on manga, particularly shojo manga, all through the years however it will be foolish to say that the primary touchdown get together of this trope on western shores was something apart from – you noticed this coming –Sailor Moon’s personal Sailor Uranus, or Tenou Haruka, a personality for which Takeuchi Naoko channeled the very essence of the Lady Prince as otokoyaku, whereas additionally very clearly inspiring her design and persona on Japanese host membership workers, whose solicitous demeanor and manly attractiveness make them archetypal beauties and objects of want for his or her feminine clientele.
Haruka all the time appears to be like trendy and gorgeous in completely tailor-made males’s fits and we’re continually reminded “she” is each a person and a girl (you could have seen the “everybody thinks I’m sizzling which suggests everyone seems to be homosexual” meme). Although she generally struggles with this twin nature, her relationship with Michiru, who was infamously portrayed as her cousin moderately than romantic accomplice in Cloverway’s English dub, has her all the time coming round to accepting and embracing her distinctive gender position inside the magical woman style, which traditionally had been and continues to be extraordinarily “girly”.
Revolutionary Lady Utena
As one final instance of historic significance and in an effort to lastly let my manga and anime touchstones strategy the present century, I can’t not point out the character who’s, to me, the Lady Prince. The one to Prince all of them: Tenjou Utena from the legendary Revolutionary Lady Utena. Utena’s backstory mirrors what I’ve talked about earlier about desirous to be the Lady Prince, because it entails her being saved by a prince and thus searching for to grow to be a prince herself in flip. She makes an enormous splash on her first day in school by displaying up within the males’s uniform, an especially Girl Oscar-ish French-style army uniform. Utena made express what had beforehand been implicit – it gave yuri followers first-episode affirmation of the form of factor we beforehand needed to parse subtext for.
The place different Lady Princes grapple with what it means to be a person as an alternative of a girl, Utena cares about what it means to be a prince, a paragon of noble beliefs and a savior to these in want, versus a princess. Via a gauntlet of surreal, allegorical sword duels suffused with rose motifs – the rose traditionally being the flower related to male homosexuality in Japan – we accompany Utena on a journey to find what being a Prince even means.
As an viewers, we’re spoiled for selection, because the anime, the manga, the film, and the manga for the film all have totally different takes and approaches on the topic. Utena additionally pays homage to the early twentieth century Class-S literature that informs almost all fashionable yuri, from the secluded college modeled after a Catholic mission college (as famously seen on Maria Watches Over Us or Strawberry Panic), to the primary lesbian couple residing collectively in an attic away from their fellow college students, to an ending involving a visit to Europe, a standard trope in Class S literature which frequently had their characters transfer to the West, presumably to pursue lesbian relationships in additional open, forward-thinking societies.
The Affect of Lady Princes on Trendy Yuri
Whereas the character archetype of the otokoyaku doesn’t function as overtly in fashionable yuri, their presence continues to be felt deeply – from Taishou Baseball Ladies’ oblivious however lovable Tomoe Tsukubae to actually every thing about Revue Starlight, an anime that’s equal elements a love letter to the Takarazuka Revue in addition to a harsh indictment and criticism of the High Star system talked about earlier. For higher or worse, RevStar wears its inspirations on its sleeve: it’s a touch of Madoka Magica, a pinch of Utena and an enormous dollop of the Takarazuka Revue. On this setting very straight impressed by the Takarazuka Academy, our resident otokoyaku is Futaba, who rides a bike, a standard shorthand visible indication {that a} character is a lesbian. This bike lesbian trope may be seen in all types of media, similar to Sailor Uranus’ badass bike, the symbol-of-rebellion bike Priss rides in Bubblegum Disaster or, my favourite instance, Saber from Destiny/Zero, who rides a bike to point to savvy audiences that she’s not merely Irisviel’s bodyguard but in addition an intimate accomplice. Trendy yuri audiences might not be conscious of this very 90s trope, however Urobuchi Gen actually is.
Revue Starlight’s Futaba isn’t the one lesbian within the present, not by an extended shot – actually, RevStar is fairly distinctive so far as yuri goes in that it makes pairings evident and canonical very early on, each “duel” between the women simply learn as both a declaration of affection or as divorce papers, along with representing the aforementioned dog-eat-dog competitors for the title of High Star. The relationships being so evident works in its favor, letting it set up excessive emotional stakes and intense romantic tensions that come to a head within the iconic duels, equally literal and allegorical sword fights, the winner of which inches nearer to changing into the High Star and having their want granted. That is exactly why the lead characters within the fictional Starlight stage play central to the present search to “grasp a star collectively”, as two, in distinction with the duels’ orchestrator’s demand that just one woman could ever grow to be the highest star. By embodying the beliefs of yuri and romantic love, the protagonists concurrently undermine and overthrow the system that seeks to put them in direct competitors with one another.
In a single episode, the otokoyaku-coded Tendou Maya loses a duel, inflicting her musumeyaku counterpart Claudine to interrupt down, declaring herself the loser, because the Maya she idolizes as a performer and as a girl may by no means presumably lose. Like virtually every thing in Revue Starlight, that is no coincidence: opposite to conventional gender roles establishing the “man” of the connection as protector and stoic savior, a musumeyaku covers for her otokoyaku. The otokoyaku, being the extra “gender-deviant” of the 2, the extra high-profile one, has a lot extra to lose and her habits is extra carefully scrutinized and judged, therefore Claudine deflecting from Maya’s failure and taking all of it upon herself – maybe in the identical means the Rose Bride in Utena takes on the ache of so many ladies, or how Madoka takes on the ache of each hopeless woman on the earth.
Tendou Maya being defeated is an enormous turning level within the present – because the main star of previous Starlight productions, she is the Revue Starlight world’s equal of a Takarazuka High Star, seemingly a beneficiary of the system however in actuality yet one more sufferer of it, being crushed by the strain and expectations positioned upon her. In each duel she’s in, she makes use of the weather of the stage to her benefit; as the highest star, she is in her component when she’s on stage. Most notable amongst these is her use of the staircase, an iconic prop of Takarazuka productions, rolled into stage for the grandiose, lavish last quantity. Maya stands on the prime of the staircase to achieve the benefit, to face other than her opponents, and in so doing completely embodies not simply the position of the High Star, however Takarazuka itself: to defeat Maya is to land a blow towards the system, even because it breaks your coronary heart to take action.
Conclusion
Whereas the predominantly male homeowners and showrunners of the Takarazuka Revue in addition to the boys operating the manga publishing trade could search to downplay, bury, and even deny lesbian relationships, ladies’ love, and any notion of gender being challenged, it’s each our proper and our obligation as followers – if not of yuri, then of anime and manga on the whole – to reveal these histories and elevate them up. We should attempt to know the centuries-old traditions which inform the fashionable yuri we learn, to acknowledge how the previous resonates deeply by means of the media we love.
I hope the subsequent time you choose up a yuri manga or rewatch Revue Starlight or resolve to strive studying the Maria-sama novels you might be additionally capable of finding nuggets of earlier inspirations and look at yuri as far more than the substanceless, queerbaiting high-school-themed fluff we’re so usually anticipated to be content material with, and as an alternative see in it the lengthy historical past of a style whose works are in fixed dialog with one another, and which has traditionally defied not solely the in any other case set-in-stone four-quadrant demographics of manga publishing, but in addition a society and trade which generally seeks to flatten yuri into one thing lower than what it actually is.
