By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga

By Erica Friedman

The Untold Story of Lesbian Love in Japanese Anime and Comics

This landmark work is an accessible, educational, and exciting collection of essays on the newest genre of Japanese anime and manga by the Western Hemisphere's foremost scholar on th

• Language: English
• Publisher: Journey Press
• Release date: May 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781951320218

Erica Friedman

Erica Friedman is the founder of Yuricon community, and was the first publisher of Yuri manga in English, with ALC Publishing. She holds a Masters Degree in Library Science and a B.A. in Comparative Literature, and is a full-time researcher for a Fortune 100 company. She has lectured at dozens of conventions and presented at film festivals, notably the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. She has participated in an academic lecture series at MIT, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Harvard University, Kanagawa University, and others. She has edited manga for JManga, Seven Seas and Udon Entertainment, most recently Riyoko Ikeda's epic historical classic, The Rose of Versailles. Erica has written about Yuri for Japanese literary journal Eureka, Animerica magazine, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, Dark Horse, and contributed to Forbes, Slate, Huffington Post, Hooded Utilitarian, The Mary Sue, Anime Herald, and Anime News Network online. She has written news and event reports, interviews Yuri creators and reviews Yuri anime, manga and related media on her blog Okazu since 2002 and is the author of By Your Side: The First 100 Year of Yuri Anime and Manga, coming out in June 2022 from Journey Press.

Book preview

By Your Side

The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga

Erica Friedman

Journey Press

Vista, California

Journey Press

Journey Press

P.O. Box 1932

Vista, CA 92085

© Erica Friedman, 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission from the publisher, except as allowed by fair use.

ART CREDITS

Cover art: Rica Takashima, 2022

Cover design: Christine Sandquist

First Printing June 2022

ISBN: 978-1-951320-21-8

Published in the United States of America

www.journeypress.com

Foreword

In this genuinely delightful collection of essays, Erica Friedman stays by your side, as she takes you on a masterful tour around the Yuri genre. While tracing its long, rich history, exploring many of its representative works (the good, the bad, and the so bad it’s good), and delving into tricky questions such as what Yuri actually is, Erica is right there with you, by your side, sharing her boundless love for a media genre emanating from Japan that, in her words, shows intense emotional connection, romantic love, or physical desire between women.

The fact that these essays have been written over a number of years for a wide variety of contexts and, as a result, overlap at times, provides us a sense of how Erica’s understanding of the genre has evolved over the past several decades, decades in which Yuri has become increasingly popular and increasingly global. (Erica’s own role in the development of the genre and its fandom is clear evidence that Yuri is, indeed, a global genre with a global fandom.) I hope you find great amusement in Erica’s sometimes different takes, written at different times, on certain Yuri works. As you read, you may find yourself wishing, as I did, that she later came to like a Yuri manga you enjoy that she herself found many faults with in her first discussion of it. While I was somewhat disappointed in one such case, I was pleasantly surprised in another. But whether or not you agree with her evaluation of specific Yuri works— and, I should be very clear, she never asks you to agree— I’m certain you’ll be able to sense the pleasure she gets from sharing her views about Yuri works, even works she didn’t take pleasure in reading.

As a cultural historian, I found myself most interested in the history of the development of Yuri fiction, manga, anime, and other media that Erica delves into in this volume. Much of the history she shares is a product of Erica’s years of researching and reading about Yuri in Japanese— a language she learned so she could read Yuri as it was originally written. Some of this history, however, entails first-hand accounts of having been there, bringing Yuri fans together over the decades, playing a central role in shaping the way fans and sometimes even publishers talk about Yuri. To me, that’s what makes this collection unique. While I’ve known Erica for a decade and a half and been friends with her and a fan of her fannish engagement with Yuri for around the same length of time and I’ve heard most of these stories before, having them all together in one collection is invaluable for historians— and for fans.

While By Your Side might be seen as one fan’s homage to a genre she has loved for decades, it might also be considered the first in-depth study of Yuri to be published in English. Fans created the field of manga and anime studies. It should thus come as no surprise and wholly appropriate that the first such book in English should be penned by Yuri’s preeminent fan.

—James Welker,

Professor of Cross-Cultural and Japanese Studies,

Kanagawa University

To Yoshiya Nobuko, who laid the stepping stones for the path we now walk.

Contents

1. Introduction

How to Read This Book

Prologue to Understanding Yuri

What Is Yuri

Who Writes Yuri? Who Is It For? Why Do I Need a Guide to Understand Yuri?

Where Do I Start if I’m Interested in Yuri?

A Couple of Important Words about Words

2. Understanding and Defining Yuri

Yuri: A Genre without Borders

On Defining Yuri

Why We Call It Yuri

3. S Is for… the Early 20th Century

Yaneura no Nishojo

Otome no Minato

4. Walking Side by Side: The Mid 20th century

Love on the Edge of Admiration and Desire—Proto-Yuri Manga: Sakura Namiki

Shiroi Heya No Futari

5. Creating the Yuri Landscape

Social and Political Activism Help Give Birth to Yuri Manga

How Fandom Made Queer Manga Possible

6. Foundations of Yuri

A Genre with Tropes, But No Name

40 Years of the Same Damn Story

The Evolution of the Girl Prince

Yuri Tropes of the 1990s

A Survey of Lesbianism and Mental Instability in Yuri

Uke and Seme, Tachi and Neko

21st-Century Tropes

Tropes of the Future

The Missing Trope

7. The Late 20th Century: Magical Girls and Fantasy Schools

Girl Gangs and the Yuri Underground

Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon

Retrospective of a Revolution—20 Years of Revolutionary Girl Utena

The Utena Movie at LGBTQ+ Film Festivals

8. The 2000s: The Turn of the Century And the Birth of Yuri

Yuri Magazines and Anthologies, Part 1

Breaking New Ground with ALC Publishing

Rica 'tte Kanji!?: The First Yuri Manga in English

WORKS

Yuri Monogatari Anthology Project

9. S for a New Century

Maria-sama ga Miteru: 20 Years of Watching Mary Watching Us

Beyond Lillian Academy: Other Descendants of S

Aoi Hana/Sweet Blue Flowers

Parting the Gauze Curtain: Strawberry Panic!

It’s a Woman’s World: Bodacious Space Pirates, Maria-sama ga Miteru and the Bechdel Test

10. 2010s: The Birth of Yuri

Yuri Magazines and Anthologies, Part 2

A Genre of One’s Own—Yuri Comes of Age

11. Evolution of a Fandom

Yuri Events, a Chronology

Love Online—Global Yuri Fandom Speaks for Itself

12. The Future of Yuri

The Little Series that Could: Asagao to Kase-san

Yuri Magazines and Anthologies, Part 3—Galette and the Oncoming Storm

Bookstores and Yuribus

Is Yuri Queer?

Nagata Kabi: Opening Doors at an Intersection

Focusing on Joy: Reading Yuri Manga into the 21st century

13. Recommended Reading: Where Should I Start if I’m Interested in Yuri?

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Notes

Glossary of Terms

Sources

Art Sources

About the Author

About the Artist

About the Cover

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

Introduction

Soba ni iru. By your side. Zutto issho ni. We’ll be together forever.

For decades these words were, for fans of same-sex relationships in manga and anime, the stand-ins for what we really wanted to hear. A character would say, I’ll be by your side or We’ll be together forever and we would understand implicitly that they meant I love you. Or, we hoped so, at any rate. We were willing to settle for that, but we wanted more.

I love you is what we wanted to hear and needed to hear and, until very recently, could never hear spoken by one female character to another in a positive, receptive environment. Oh, sure, mentally unbalanced or predatory lesbian characters were allowed to confess to a girl, but only because we knew they’d be rejected. Or maybe a best friend, who spent a series watching the protagonist with eyes full of longing, might get to have her moment. I love you, she’d say, and the protagonist, heedless of the damage she was about to do, would smile brightly and say, I love you too! We— both the friend and the readers— all knew she meant something else completely. Then the best friend, her fears confirmed, would think what we all understood. Our love was different. Not that kind of love at all.

It was around 1997 or so that I encountered the Japanese animated series known colloquially as Sailor Moon. My wife told me that she was watching a cartoon she thought I’d enjoy. One day I left work a little early and made it home in time to see the iconic Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon and her friends save the hapless denizens of Tokyo from having their energy sucked away by Jadeite, a general from the Dark Kingdom.

As I have repeated many times since that day, about halfway through the cartoon, I turned to my wife and remarked, We are watching two different cartoons. You’re watching a cartoon for prepubescent little girls, and I’m watching a cartoon with incredible lesbian subtext. And, so, my interest in Sailor Moon was born. What followed was a quest to see the famous lesbian couple, two of the older characters, in a later season. Back in the day, that quest involved buying blank VHS tapes and sending them, along with postage, to a near-anonymous online acquaintance with the hope of receiving a VHS tape with an nth-generation copy of an anime. The VHS tapes arrived, miraculously, and I was introduced to the third season of the anime, "Sailor Moon S." Sailors Uranus and Neptune were indeed a lovely lesbian couple and remain, to my mind, the Queens of Yuri.

Our next gateway anime, Revolutionary Girl Utena, hit fan communities at the end of the 20th century. By this time, I was extremely active on Usenet and had gathered around me a number of fans of lesbian-themed Japanese animation and comics. My interest in this niche-of-a-niche bore fruit as the centuries flipped, when I was hired to do some writing for the anime-focused magazine Animerica. By 2002, I had begun a blog, with an eye to doing an event around the content and characters with which I found myself obsessed. These works with lesbian content— and occasionally even lesbian characters— were a genre that was being referred to in some quarters as Yuri, in honor of gay magazine editor Itou Bungaku’s label for lesbians: Yurizoku, the Lily Tribe.

August 2022 will be the 20th anniversary of my blog, Okazu, and it seemed like long past time that I collected all the many thoughts I’ve had over the years about this genre; about the artists and characters, the plots, and the tropes that fill my days with entertainment (and admittedly, sometimes frustration). Here we are, more than two decades after my first encounter with Sailor Moon, and I’m still writing about it and still thinking about it, and still thinking about Yuri.

How to Read This Book

By Your Side is a collection of articles, essays, and lectures I have written over the last 20 years for my blog and for other publications both online and in print— and of course, new content written just for this book! Although the format is arranged in a loosely chronological order, there’s no concrete beginning or end point. Because each essay is meant to be read on its own— many of them were written for different media outlets and blogs other than mine— rather than as a continuing narrative, there will be some repetition of concepts and content. I wrote most of these articles to be approachable, in a conversational tone, but a few were written for academic journals or events. Importantly, because the articles were written for various outlets, over 20 years, capitalization and some spellings are inconsistent. As a former Comparative Literature student, I capitalize genres, most other disciplines do not. I have left these inconsistencies in, to remind us all that this is an ongoing journey that has had many side-trips, but no real destination, and many interpretations.

To introduce a number of terms you will encounter frequently in this book, there is a concise glossary in this section under A Couple of Important Words About Words. For a more comprehensive glossary, please check the Glossary of Terms at the end of the book.

Feel free to read the book out of order, pick and choose chapters that appeal to you, then come back to fill in gaps. While I see this book as a primer on Yuri, it’s not a strictly linear discussion, nor is it meant to be a class syllabus. These essays are a mix of historical notation, comparative literature, reviews, overviews, opinion pieces, and my personal relationships to the series we’ll be discussing. These are the kinds of stories told over and over around a dinner table, until everyone remembers the story whether they were there or not. Think of this book as an ongoing conversation, a chat we’ve been having for the last 20 years and will continue to have for some time. I hope you enjoy reading these essays as much as I have enjoyed writing them.

Please walk by my side as we ramble together through this garden of Lily Tribe stories and learn about our own history together.

Prologue to Understanding Yuri

Before we begin to talk about Yuri anime and manga, let’s talk about the word Yuri. Why do we use it? Where did it come from? This question is asked all the time, even now. I’ll address it in several different ways in this book. This essay is adapted from the Yuricon website, where I give a brief history of the word— and what I refer to as a broad definition. In the essay On Defining Yuri, I’ll take a more academic tack, so you may want to read this essay first, then take a look at the longer essay when you want a deeper dive.

What Is Yuri

Yuri (百合) pronounced yoo-ree, is Japanese for the lily flower. It was originally associated with lesbians by Itou Bungaku, when he was the editor of a Japanese gay men’s magazine, Barazoku. "Barazoku, in Japanese means rose tribe." Roses have been associated with gay male sexuality since the early 1960s[1] and, in the 1970s, Itou referred to lesbians as "Yurizoku, i.e., the Lily tribe, in a letter column, known as Yurizoku no heya (The Lily Tribe’s Room). Some years later, in the early 1980s the Shounenai" (see the Glossary at the end of the book) magazine Allan ran a letter section for lesbiennes called Yuri Tsushin (Yuri Communications[2]). In the interim, Japanese artists and writers had co-opted the use of the term Yuri and popular girls’ name variations, such as Yuriko and Yurika, for fan novels and comics starring lesbian characters.

Image of a young woman, considering her Ni-chome debut at a lesbian bar. She is surrounded by bubbles of her concerns.

Figure 1. Panel from Rica 'tte Kanji!? © Rica Takashima, ALC Publishing, 2003

By 1995, when Yuri manga artist Rica Takashima wrote Rica 'tte Kanji!? for the Japanese lesbian magazine Phryné, the lily was so common a stylistic trope that, as the eponymous character Rica looks forward to her debut in the LGBTQ+ section of Tokyo, she is surrounded by floating images of lilies, with an author’s note that reads Conventional flower imagery. It was meant to be amusing to lesbians whose media had already been filled with similar imagery since the 1970s.

As Yuri themes in manga and anime became more popular through the 1990s and into the first decade of the 2000s, the term became mainstreamed in anime and manga fan culture. Lesbian characters, lesbian romances, and lesbian storylines in Japanese animation and comics are now all referred to as Yuri.

When I started a fan organization in 2000 for fans of lesbian-themed Japanese animation and comics Yuri was already an existing element in nearly every genre of manga and anime. There were established examples of Yuri in series targeted at both male and female audiences. At that time, I wanted to create the most inclusive possible definition for Yuri. For the purposes of this book, we will define Yuri in this way:

Yuri can describe any anime or manga series (or other derivative media, i.e., fan fiction, film, etc.) that shows intense emotional connection, romantic love, or physical desire between women. Yuri is not a genre confined by the gender or age of the audience, but by the perception of the audience. In short, Yuri is any story with lesbian themes.

Who Writes Yuri? Who Is It For? Why Do I Need a Guide to Understand Yuri?

Anyone can be a Yuri creator. Creators of all genders and sexualities have been instrumental in laying out the literary and artistic pathways along which Yuri developed. Unlike other manga genres, Yuri is not dependent upon the target audience for definition. Yuri is, quite literally, different from every other genre in that the target audience is anyone who enjoys it.

Next chapter we’ll talk specifically about why, unlike every other genre of manga and anime, Yuri has a patchwork past, with influences from many different quarters. Time and fashion will affect all genres, but Yuri also has had other waves of influence, including trends in art and the socio-political landscape. New readers enter with expectations and desires that differ as society changes and, of course, both publishers and creators change what is seen— and how it is meant to be interpreted. Yuri is the youngest and most fluid genre of Japanese media. It only really began as a coherent set of expectations in 2003 and is still in a constant state of flux.

As a result, if you ask 10 different Yuri fans, you could easily receive 20 different definitions of Yuri. This book will help you to make sense of tropes from previous waves and understand where they came from, how they are perceived by different audiences, and why your friend nods knowingly when the substitute teacher rides up to the girls’ school on a motorcycle.

Where Do I Start if I’m Interested in Yuri?

This is a really complicated question, but it’s an important one, so I’m going to ask this again at the very end of the book, where I’ll list out a few recommended manga and anime titles available in English (and a few in Japanese) for you and explain why I suggest those. A great number of the references in this book are repeated over and over, since these essays have been written for so many different sources. If a series is not given bibliographical information in an essay or in an endnote, check Chapter 13: Recommended Reading. It’s probably there.

Because audiences have changed so much in even the last few years, if I start you with a strictly chronological list or the titles that influenced me, personally, you might be left wondering what Yuri has to offer you. And amazing new work is being published every day. Some titles that are now my go-to recommendations didn’t exist when I started writing and will have to be added as we go to publication. So, walk with me through this history and we’ll get there together.

A Couple of Important Words about Words

There is a certain amount of jargon and lingo involved in any niche interest; technical terms, fan slang, nicknames, cultural terms, etc. In the case of Yuri manga and anime, we also have rapidly changing Japanese fan terms that are absorbed into Western fandom and which evolve over time. Additionally, the last 20 years has seen a lot of change in how we address minority sexual and gender issues. So, expect linguistic drift in these essays. We’ve adjusted some of the language but not all. In some cases earlier terms are used to pin the essay in time.

My intention in these essays was always to be as inclusive as possible, but as we become more sophisticated in our thinking about gender and sexuality, the early essays here may seem less nuanced now than they did when they were written. I often use queer as a genre term, and intend the terms LGBTQ+ and woman to be the broadest and most inclusive possible umbrellas. I also recognize that same-sex as it was understood in the previous century isn’t applicable or valid now, or was even back then. Nowhere do I intend to exclude, but I apologize if I should, no matter my intent.

Throughout this book I have intentionally sacrificed rigorousness for readability. I’d rather you find out more about a series because it sounds interesting, than get bogged down in dates and places.

Short Glossary

I have tried to be as general and understanding of language fluidity as possible, but my own biases will surely be apparent. This glossary represents my understanding of these terms on this date. These terms are always subject to opinion, change, linguistic drift, and other factors, so terms that were current in 2002 may be hardly used now or be scorned or may have even changed in meaning. Terms I am using now as I write may fall out of fashion before you pick this book up. To make matters more complicated, some articles contain alternate spellings of similar words, as transliterations were, and often still are, subject to fashion. My choices for transliteration may be different than those you are most familiar with. Translation— and transliteration— is an art, not a science.

Japanese names appear in Japanese format— family name followed by given name— with one exception: Riyoko Ikeda’s name is always presented in Western format, as she does for all her works.

There is a full Glossary at the end of the book, but here are the key terms we’ll be using over and over and the way we’re defining them for the purpose of this conversation.

Anime: Pron. (ah-nee-may) A word used by the Japanese to describe animation of all kinds. US fans of Japanese animation often use anime to describe Japanese works only.

Boys’ Love: Current term, coined by Japanese publishers, for stories that feature male/male relationships. This term includes both sexual and romantic stories and is often shortened to BL.

Doujinshi: Pron. (dough-jin-shee) Small-press or self-published works. Doujinshi are sometimes parodies of existing anime, manga, novels, games, and even popular celebrities, but are also often original works. In Japan, there is a well-accepted undermarket of these works, which may violate copyright as it is understood in the West.

Josei: Pron. (joe-say) Animation and comics targeted to adult women. Josei series often include sexual relationships, sometimes explicit, and often are focused on work and home life.

LGBTQ+: Short for Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Transgender, Queer, inclusive LGBTQ+ is an acronym for sexual/gender minorities and topics of interest to them. Many other acronyms exist, as our understanding and acceptance grows. This is an acronym I use a lot; I also use Sexual and Gender Minorities as an inclusive phrase and Queer as a genre term, as in Queer Manga.

Manga: Pron. (mahn-gah) Japanese term for sketches, now commonly used to refer to Japanese comics and comic books.

Otaku: Pron. (oh-tah-koo) This is a derogatory term Japanese people use to refer to people who collect or are fans of something obsessively, and who are assumed to have poor social skills and personal hygiene. Many Japanese anime and manga fans use it to describe themselves, often as a self-deprecatory joke. In Western fandom, the word is used to describe anime and manga fans in general, and is used with pride.

Seinen: Pron. (say-nen) Animation and comics targeted to adult men. They often are sexually explicit, but also cover genres like Action, Crime, Historical Fiction, and Office and Home Life.

Shoujo: Pron. (show-joe) Also spelled shojo. Animation and comics targeted to girls. These can include romance stories, but also Action, Adventure, and Fantasy stories.

Shoujoai: Pron. (show-joe-eye) Also spelled Shoujo-Ai. This was an early term used by Yuri fandom to describe anime and manga with romantic stories between girls or women. You still see it today, along with Girls’ Love. The two spellings are used interchangeably through this book.

Story A: A term I coined to describe the basic schoolgirl Yuri story plot in which a girl meets a girl, they realize they like each other, the end.

Yuri: Pron. (yoo-ree) Japanese for lily. From the word Yurizoku, (lily tribe) coined in the 1970s to describe lesbians. Formerly used in the West to denote series with explicit female/female sexual relationships, but now more often used to refer to any work that contains a lesbian character or relationship, whether sexual or romantic.

Chapter 2

Understanding and Defining Yuri

We started with a brief history of the term Yuri in the Prologue, but before we get into talking about key stories and creators, I wanted to do a deeper look— and explain why we use this word; how it became the genre term, as opposed to other words used over the past 20 years, and why Yuri is so hard to define as a genre. If you are more interested in reading about Yuri series, skip ahead to later sections— this will be here when you want answers about the genre and the word itself.

This first essay was written for a Japanese literary magazine, Eureka, for a special Yuri issue in December, 2014. This was the first time a Japanese magazine outside the manga and anime industry used the word Yuri to describe the genre. The issue included personal stories from Yuri notables, including creators and researchers. I was able to give a global perspective to the magazine with this article and it serves as a short, but really dense version of the History of Yuri, since the readers are presumed to be already familiar with and interested in the genre. To preserve the readability of the article, the names of the various series were not translated. However, many of these series can be found listed in Chapter 13: Recommended Reading. This essay has been edited from the original for this book.

Yuri: A Genre without Borders

More than a decade ago— almost two decades ago now— when I first wrote the Yuricon definition, Yuri was already an existing element in nearly every genre of manga and anime. There were established examples of Yuri in series targeted at both male and female audiences.

If Yuri is to be considered as a genre in its own right, it needs to be understood as the one genre that breaks the unwritten rules of demographics and age.

Yuri in Shoujo/Josei— From S Novels to the L Word

Any study of Yuri as a genre has to begin in the early 20th century with S serials. Yoshiya Nobuko’s Yaneura no Nishojo (see Chapter 13: Recommended Reading) established many common tropes used in Japanese girls’ literature even today. It’s not at all surprising that these tropes were subsequently carried over to girls’ manga

Reviews for By Your Side

[Friedrich-Wilhelm Möller · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent work! Good over view, gives a neat introduction to japanese culture history of Yuri