Anime Explosion!

by Drazen, Patrick

  A close cousin to Piyale is Wakaba in Utena. She constantly declares her undying love for Utena, another girl. True, Utena’s a girl who constantly dresses like a boy, but still a girl. And yet there is no hint that Utena reciprocates Wakaba’s feelings, or that they are anything more than feelings. Neither is shown to be a practicing lesbian.5 The first episode, in fact, also has Wakaba sending a love letter to Saionji, one of several campus cads at Otori Academy, who promptly puts the letter up on a bulletin board to humiliate Wakaba. Utena’s first duel in the arena is against Saionji, to defend Wakaba’s honor. And that is literally as far as it goes. From beginning to end, they’re just friends and classmates. Wakaba’s love for Utena is a very pure thing.

  Of all the similar anime and manga to follow, one of the best, and definitely one of the funniest, was a comedy by shojo manga artist Bisco Hatori. She sounded these themes in Ouran High School Host Club. In its own way it continues the tradition of the Duklyon Academy in various CLAMP anime and manga, Otori Academy of Revolutionary Girl Utena, the Mahora Academy of Ken Akamatsu’s Negima! Magister Negi Magi!, and other closed campuses. The boys of Ouran seem to have lots of time on their hands. The title club claims to teach the boys how to entertain wealthy, well-born peers, but sometimes things get a bit crazy.

  Hitachiin Twins, in Ouran High School Host Club

  Hikaru and Kaoru Hitachiin6 are two of the eccentric students in a class by themselves. At first, they seem to be inspired by Fred and George, the identical Weasley twins in the Harry Potter saga. And, like the Weasleys, these two are practical jokers of the first order. However, Hatori has them take their stunts into areas J. K. Rowling would never have dared.

  The boys of the Host Club offer an adolescent parody of “hostess clubs,” which were, at best, inspired by Playboy Clubs and at worst were sleazy rip-off saloons. The boys of the club practice various themes, cosplay, and events (from appearing in Heian-era court dress to tropical island sarongs) to try to provide a romantic atmosphere for the high school girl clientele, giving both boys and girls a safe place to practice courtship without consequences. The twins, however, have a special act: twincest. They pretend under a variety of circumstances that they are carrying on a torrid affair. The girls find this fascinating; yaoi, after all, attracts a largely female following in Japan precisely because “the love that dare not speak its name” is so alien to their experience and carries a largely “forbidden” aspect.

  Just one thing: it’s literally all an act. The twins are playing to an audience, and even pose provocatively for photo albums that the club then sells to the girls. These two aren’t above using eye drops to get that soulful teary-eyed look. They are literally close, since they pretty much grew up on their own, but they aren’t that close. At first, this made them aloof from others, but the series’ main couple forced them to expand their horizons: club president Tamaki Suoh by constantly trying to tell them apart (and getting it wrong), and the cross-dressing Haruhi Fujioka by being able to tell them apart (correctly), apparently by virtue of her being a lower-class, therefore unpretentious and “genuine,” person.

  Incidentally, Haruhi is yet another example of transvestism in manga/anime that has been thoroughly desexualized. Haruhi was still finding her way around the Ouran campus (having qualified for a scholarship due to her brains and her poverty—her mother, a lawyer, being deceased, and her father being a cross-dressing bar hostess)7 when she entered the Host Club room and accidentally broke a very expensive vase. To work off the debt, she has to join the Host Club by participating in their romantic antics, which means dressing as a boy. In her case, this also means being liberated from the trap of gender expectations. Haruhi, in short, doesn’t dress like a boy to become a boy; she dresses like a boy in order to become Haruhi. (Not that there isn’t a traditional yuri aspect to Ouran High School Host Club; it’s there, but wildly caricatured and over-the-top, like everything else in Ouran [see the description of the girls of St. Lobelia Academy in part 1, chapter 7].)

  Here Is Greenwood (1991) brings us an oddball character as part of a group of oddballs in the boarding-school dormitory of the title. You can’t exactly call Shun Kisaragi a transvestite—he’s just a guy who likes to wear long hair and talks in a very high voice. The confusion is played strictly for laughs, and is even doubled later in the series by his “kid brother.”8 Unlike Here Is Greenwood, in which comic characters appear in a nominally serious situation, the entire OAV series known as Maho Tsukai Tai (1996) is comedic, and so is everyone in it.9 This includes high school senior and Magic Club member Ayanjo Aburatsubo. His willowy figure and flowing maroon hair make him appear at first glance to be a girl . . . as do his constant amorous advances on club president Takeo Takakura.

  Rumiko Takahashi has given us two cross-dressers in two highly successful series. In Urusei Yatsura we meet Ryunosuke Fujinami. It’s a very masculine name, attached to a very masculine-looking (and acting) girl. Her widowed father, owner of a seaside refreshment stand, wanted a son, and was determined to have one regardless of his child’s gender. The whole thing is played for laughs, with a frustrated Ryunosuke wanting to be feminine but not knowing how to act. She’s repulsed by boys who fawn over her and spends a lot of time in hand-to-hand combat with her father (not unlike Ranma Saotome and his father, for different reasons).

  Speaking of Ranma 1/2, that Rumiko Takahashi story inverts Ryunosuke into Tsubasa Kurenai, a guy who happens to look like a girl but is not effeminate. Years earlier, Tsubasa fell in love at first sight with Ukyo—the same Ukyo who was betrothed to Ranma as a child. Ukyo was attending a girls’ school, so he did the inevitable and dressed as a girl to be near Ukyo. Things just sort of kept on from there. . . .

  The cross-dressing heroine of Osamu Tezuka’s nineteenth-century political/romance manga Niji no Prelude (Rainbow Prelude) has a deadly serious reason: her brother had been accepted to study music at the Warsaw Conservatory, but he died before he could attend, so she assumed his identity and went in his place. While at the Conservatory, she meets the young Frederic Chopin, gets involved with a piano-maker who is working against the Russian occupation of Poland, and ultimately dies. Like the title characters of the movies Tootsie and Victor Victoria, she finds that being disguised as a member of the opposite sex creates a hurdle for one’s love life.

  One subtle but momentous example of non-sexual cross-dressing is on display in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the epic manga created by Hayao Miyazaki before the creation of Studio Ghibli. This feature-length anime begins in a dystopian future, with much of earth laid waste after a global war (possibly nuclear) by swarms of gigantic insects. There is a prophecy of a messiah who will walk among the clouds dressed all in blue, restoring the balance of nature. There’s even a tapestry illustrating the prophecy, with a bearded man healing the world. Of course, by the time the movie ends, the role of the messiah is fulfilled by a girl, the heroine of the title.

  Not of This Earth

  The relationship between Jinpachi Ogura and Issei Nishikiori in Please Save My Earth is not ambiguous at all: they’re both male high school freshmen. And that’s the problem. This non-linear shojo manga by Saki Hiwatari and its anime version take place in several realities, only one of which is our present-day Earth. The seven residents of Tokyo featured in the story are all reincarnations of beings from another planet. Thousands of years ago, they set up a research station on the moon to observe the evolution of life on Earth. Jinpachi and Issei were both there, as Gyokuran and Enju. Enju was a woman in love with Gyokuran. Issei remembers this all too well and, at one point, forgets himself/herself and kisses Jinpachi on the mouth. Of course, if you’ve been keeping score, you know that Issei is not gay. He had momentarily become Enju in love with Gyokuran, and knows that he stepped over the line in that moment. He cannot do it again because of social constraints, yet he also cannot alter Enju’s feelings. This makes him, in shojo manga terms at least, caught between public propriety and personal passion, and therefore a classicall
y tragic figure.

  Science fiction is a fairly natural home for anime and manga stories that want to get sexually creative. Characters of unconventional sexuality can be depicted as alien, both literally and figuratively. There’s the sexual ambiguity in Moto Hagio’s manga They Were Eleven, animated in 1986, wherein one character, Frol, is of such unstable genetic makeup that it is neither male nor female. However, cadet Tada is attracted to the androgynous Frol. He knows that if Frol fails this Academy final test, an elderly suitor is waiting to demand that Frol permanently become a woman and marry him. This may mean more than the success or failure of the mission.

  As part of her concert in Macross Plus (1994), idol singer Sharon Apple moves through the audience, suggestively stroking the faces of men and women alike. Does caressing both genders make her bisexual? The question is absurd. She’s a virtual idol, after all, an actualized computer program. It’s equally absurd to speak of the sexuality of the audience members—male and female—who thrill to her touch. Sharon Apple is, after all, a celebrity, and as such excites a level of emotion a mere mortal can barely contemplate.

  And then there’s Benten, the androgynous criminal in Cyber City Oedo 808. And there’s Mosh, the Zentraedi hairdresser in Macross II who claims to have a special “understanding” of both males and females. And there’s Berg Katse, henchperson of the villain Sosai X in the Gatchaman TV series. Created out of the DNA of a pair of male and female twins, Katse is able to change gender at will. And so on.

  Princess Knight

  This all started, in a sense, with Dr. Tezuka’s 1953 manga Ribon no Kishi (Princess Knight). It was the first action/adventure story written exclusively for the girls’ comic market, and, as both a popular manga and a Japanese television animation, it sent out shock waves that are still being felt.

  While the influence of Walt Disney is very clear in Dr. Tezuka’s work, a more important influence, in many respects, was his love of the all-girl Takarazuka theater troupe, whose aesthetic is on full display in Princess Knight:

  I was often taken by mother to the [Takarazuka] Operas, and though what they presented [was] not authentic, I got acquainted with the music and costume of the world through them. They were in turn a copy of a Broadway musical and that of a show at the Folies Bergère or the Moulin Rouge, but as I could not know the facts, I was impressed and believed they were the finest art in the world.10

  A girl, Sapphire, is born to the king and queen of Silverland; this is unfortunate, since by law a woman cannot succeed to the throne. Consequently, the girl is raised to be a prince. When she meets a handsome prince from a neighboring kingdom, her secret identity becomes a problem. Courtiers who want to “out” the princess so that a different family can control the throne compound the problem.

  But this story really started in Heaven. Babies waiting to be born on Earth are lined up for the shuttle. As they board, they are given hearts to swallow: pink for girls, blue for boys. Note, however, that this does not assign gender to the babies; they’re already male or female. Rather, the heart carries gender-specific behaviors.

  A less-than-competent cherub named Chink (or Tink, depending on which romanization system you favor) asks one babe whether it’s a boy or a girl; the child says it doesn’t know. Wanting to speed up the line, Chink feeds it a boy’s heart because “you look like a boy.” However, this baby is a girl, and will be born the princess of Silverland. A princess who’s a remarkable fencer, among other talents. Yet these talents are directly attributable to the blue heart, not to anything she’s done with her life as she grew up. We see this because, on occasion, the blue heart flies out of her body, and her fencing abilities immediately vanish.

  The androgyny in Princess Knight is deceptive, especially since it has less to do with sex than with gender, or specifically, gender-role expectations. This story is set in a medieval realm not unlike present-day Japan in its expectations: boys are supposed to be brave, girls are supposed to be graceful. Dr. Tezuka’s story violates those expectations, but not by promoting an abandonment of those gender role expectations. After all, Princess Sapphire marries her Prince Charming and lives happily ever after. Dr. Tezuka acknowledged what one writer has called “the inner conflict that derives from the clashing coexistence of two poles” of behavior, and created dramatic friction by rubbing the two gender poles together.11 The conflict becomes more than just an internal one when the lives of the royal family and even the fate of nations is involved.

  Princess Knight also addresses another classically Japanese pair of opposites: duty and desire. Sapphire has been raised to understand that she must dress as a boy in order to keep the throne of Silverland from falling into the wrong hands. She doesn’t resent her duty; at times, she revels in the horsemanship and swordplay, as Ranma would later have fun by playing his female incarnation to the hilt. Sapphire’s duty becomes more serious when, with her father dead and her mother imprisoned, she disguises herself as a masked swordsman to reclaim the throne. Only in private does she live out her feminine desires, especially after meeting her Prince Charming (whose name is Franz Charming!).

  It hadn’t happened before, but it definitely happened after: males and females in Japanese pop culture have had a much broader palette to choose from since Princess Knight. From scientist to chef, from athlete to actor, modern Japanese pop culture finds heroes and heroines in all walks of life. And some of these heroes/heroines are undeniably gay, such as the police detectives in Fake or Daily Wong, a police detective (a coincidence, this isn’t a pattern) in Bubblegum Crisis, or Iwao Garai, the homosexual Catholic priest who saves the world from a nerve-gas attack in Dr. Tezuka’s manga MW. Others are transvestites for non-sexual reasons, such as Oscar de Jarjayes, the French noblewoman posing as a swordsman to defend the French monarchy in Ryoko Ikeda’s Rose of Versailles, or Boss, bar owner and Yakumo’s next-door neighbor/surrogate parent in Yuzo Takada’s Sazan Eyes (3x3 Eyes).

  Some homosexuals aren’t even gay, as it turns out. Wataru Yoshizumi’s teen romance Marmalade Boy includes a pseudo-gay character: Bill Matheson. Yu, the hero and “marmalade boy”12 of the title, spends part of his high school days in New York, where Bill is his roommate. Bill is rumored to be gay, which Bill doesn’t mind: in fact, he started the rumor himself. He decided that so many boys were already pursuing the girl he really loved—the attractive blonde Jinny Golding—that he had to take a different approach. So he became Jinny’s gay friend. As such, he also had to watch in silence as Jinny was briefly attracted to Yu. Still, Yu has his own girlfriend/stepsister Miki waiting for him back in Japan, and ultimately Bill confronts Jinny and brings his heterosexuality out of the closet.

  Shonen Ai

  An entire subgenre of manga and anime is devoted to romanticized gay male relationships. It goes by several names; the polite one is shonen ai (boy love). The genre is also known by the borrowed English words “boy love” or as “June,” the name of a magazine that specializes in gay romance tales.

  A lot of Western fans have adopted another name: yaoi. This is sort of a shame, since yaoi is an acronym, and a rather insulting one at that. The word is derived from the phrase yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi. Literally it means “Without climax, without resolution, without meaning,”or, to put it another way, “no highs, no lows, no point.” This is not homophobic moralizing and is only partly an academic critique of a typical static plot-line—in this case, the underlying attitude is probably practical rather than moral or literary. In an earlier example we saw how a romanticized view of a girl’s first menstrual period is rooted in an agrarian society’s need to track cycles of fertility, and many other Japanese attitudes are still based on centuries spent close to the soil. Such a society would be impatient with a love that did not result in anything productive, much less reproductive. Odd as it may seem in the West, stories of gay love are often directed at an audience of pubescent Japanese girls.

  Which raises the question: why? Of the hundreds of books on dozens of topics that would inte
rest a teenage girl, why would teenage (and older) girls in Japan be drawn to stories of men with men?

  There are theories. Antonia Levi suggests that Japanese girls “are fascinated by the idea of equality and communication in romance. . . . Japan is a highly gendered society. Men and women lead very different lives. . . . These stories about gay love are simply a means by which the gender barrier can be temporarily removed to allow for a more general discussion about the meaning and nature of romantic love.”13

  It’s true that Japanese adolescence can be highly structured along gender lines. However, the structures themselves—e.g., the Valentine’s Day tradition of the girl giving homemade chocolate to a boy—are still serviceable forms of communication. In any event, “a more general discussion” based around shonen ai would be a rather limited one because, as we shall see, much gay love in Japanese pop culture is doomed.