This is the complete version of an article printed in the Boston-based gay magazine, The Guide, November, 2003. Japanese names are given with the family name last. A list of sources accompanies this article, together with a sidebar (below) on the illustrator Kashō Takabatake. And check out the online yaoi survey by Portland State University Professor Antonia Levi.
Yaoi: Redrawing Male Love
Some of today's edgiest male homosexual images and stories are being composed by women and girls-- for their own pleasure. Because it's (mostly) young women who've thronged to the burgeoning yaoi underground. What's yaoi? It's homegrown fan fiction based on Japanese cartoon characters. But it's not just Made-in-Japan anymore. Mark McHarry looks at the growing world of yaoi-- and Japan's centuries-old tradition of same-sex love that nourishes its roots. Around the world, millions of girls are conjuring tales of boys in love with each other. What's up with sex and gender in the 21st century?
by Mark McHarry
Heero Yuy -- Artist: Brian Mitchell www.gaynimation.com
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[Modern-day Tokyo]
An image flashed into his mind as he moved towards the curb, of himself stepping up, a young boy lurching into him, blond hair screening his face, lean little body pressing to his for an instant. Violet eyes meeting his.
Crawford stepped onto the curb and reached out, catching the boy by his thin arms as he stumbled. It was a perfect catch and the boy shook fine sandy-blond hair out of his eyes, pools of violet lifting up and brimming with surprise. And something else....
The boy blinked. "I wasn't going to pick your pocket, or anything like that, o-jii-san." He drew out the insult to Crawford's age with relish, remarkable eyes glimmering up at him. Daring him....
Crawford looked into the boy's face.... He wasn't going anywhere. It was amazing. Not even five minutes into their acquaintance, he knew the boy had bumped into him after sizing him up--with sex on the mind.
Some days he *loved* Japan.
--Pet Project, Part One: The Violet-Eyed Imp
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Bradley Crawford, member of the criminal organization Schwarz, invites the 13-year-old Touma for lunch. What happens next can be read in the stories of Talya Firedancer, a young woman from Oregon. (1)
What she and probably more than a million other women, along with some men, are doing is called yaoi. (2) They are appropriating male characters from anime (cartoon animations) and manga (comics) produced for young people and putting them in homoerotic situations. In the West, most yaoi takes the form of stories; some of it is illustrations. Its content parallels that of the fan-created manga Japanese women have published since the late 1970s. Both are similar to the stories Western women have written about male characters from tv programs and movies. (3) Often these works are sexually explicit. Almost invariably their theme is the characters overcoming obstacles, usually substantial, to connect and bond.
Crawford crosses a curb to catch Touma. Yaoi crosses boundaries, societal ones. Besides same-sex desire, these can include relationships between a teenage minor and an older partner, between siblings, or among multiple partners. (4) The sex may be non-consensual, violent, or carried out in public spaces. The boundaries are felt acutely, portrayed as they are within the characters' personalities. The authors negotiate these boundaries in ways that defy stereotypes. Yaoi is a sardonic acronym from the Japanese words "no climax, no point, no meaning." The content of most Western yaoi stories is anything but. The authors use the risk and tension involved in transgressing boundaries to explore issues central to sex and love. They portray the resolution as beautiful and noble, and the struggle for it worthwhile.
In Japan, yaoi is a major cultural activity. Attendance at Comiket, a twice-yearly Tokyo market for fan created manga called dōjinshi, (5) is almost half a million people, about 80 percent there for yaoi. (6) Commercial "boys' love" manga (the Japanese use the English words) is one of the largest niche markets in Japanese publishing. (7)
Impelled by the Web, yaoi has spread well beyond Japan's borders. Western yaoi fans publish their stories online in several languages. A Google search on 16 November 2003 returned some 770,000 yaoi Web pages, up from 135,000 a year-and-a-half ago. Google searches for an anime title plus a neutral word such as "description" may return yaoi pages in the first ten results. In the last ten months the number of fan-written stories based on anime and manga at the archive FanFiction.net grew by more than four times to nearly 200,000 works; yaoi stories appeared on the first page of results for fandoms searched. (8) Publishers are marketing translations of Japanese commercial boys' love manga, such as Akimi Yoshida's Banana Fish and Sanami Matoh's FAKE. (9) As in Japan, yaoi in the West has evolved into a genuine art form, with its own canons of excellence and skill.
The larger culture is taking notice. Two years ago, a North American boy e-mailed a yaoi site asking if it were true his favorite character, the Gundam Wing pilot Duo, is gay, as his schoolmates had claimed upon coming across yaoi illustrations. Universities have added yaoi to their curricula. A talk about yaoi was slated for Mexico City's well-known gay bar, El Taller, in April. Last December, National Public Radio's ethicist opined (10) on slash (fan fiction that puts male characters in sexual relationships) for the network's millions of listeners. He saw no problem publishing accounts of Harry Potter "in a passionate embrace with one of...or even all of the Weasley brothers" as long as it was not done for profit.
Yaoi is remarkable.
That fiction in different media in cultures as diverse as Japan and the United States, Latin America and Europe resonates similarly in so many people may reflect something deep in our imaginations.
Some readers of yaoi and boys' love manga say it has changed their lives, helping them better understand themselves and the world. Matt Thorn, a cultural anthropologist, has written eloquently about his reaction on reading Moto Hagio's boys' love manga Tōma no shinzō (The Heart of Thomas); others have published similar accounts. (11)
Not least, yaoi marks an evolution in young people's expression. Women of all ages create yaoi, but many are in their teens. They are taking the adult-created characters of their childhood, redefining them to express their desires, and publishing these for the world. Never before have young people been able to do this. Free of editorial constraint and parental control, their voices are authentic. Reading their stories, one sees that their thoughts about sex are as deeply felt and complex as those of adults.
As yaoi consumers provide feedback about stories and artwork--via comments in Websites' guest books and in reviews on fan fiction sites--and creators react, a discourse among young people and adults is taking place around these views, another unprecedented development. Many times creators respond by saying they are encouraged to do more; reading these comments probably motivates others to start.
What effect might this have on how our society views sex? For this, we must consider how yaoi came to prominence in the West, and first we need to understand some of the cultural factors which may have helped give rise to it in Japan.
Artist: P.L. Nunn
Japan homoeroticism: deep roots
Although a famous literary work, Genji Monogatari (Tale of Genji), was written by Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting at the Heian court in 1004 C.E., women's expression was so restricted that literary historians such as Rebecca Copeland refer to their putative "centuries of silence" (2000:7). When Japan opened to the West in the mid-1800s, women were allowed only limited public expression, denied the right to attend political meetings or vote. (12) But they began publishing. Copeland looked at Shizuko Wakamatsu's translation of Little Lord Fauntleroy (Shōkōshi, The Little Lord, 1892). In back-translating Wakamatsu's Japanese into English, Copeland found she "could explore other realms--realms she could not reach in her own voice. She could write of seafaring men and golden-haired boys. More important, she could dare to be inventive" (2000:157).
Women founded a feminist journal, Seitō, in 1911, a dangerous activity at a time when the government censored the nascent democracy's dissident voices (Rodd 1991:176). The police murdered a former Seitō editor, the anarchist-feminist Noe Itō, as well as her comrade, the anarchist and free-love proponent Sakae Ōsugi, and a small nephew. (13)
One of those attending Seitō meetings, Nobuko Yoshiya, wrote the best-selling lesbian story Yaneura no nishojo (Two Virgins in the Attic, 1920). Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase calls it "an adolescent girls' bildungsroman as well as Yoshiya's own coming-of-age story" (2001:157). (14)
Yoshiya drew on a popular phenomenon, the Relationship of S, in which girls in the liminal space of adolescence formed romantic relationships with one another. S is from the English word sister. Dollase says S was widespread: one study claims eight out of ten girls experienced it (1999), and that "a love relationship between two schoolgirls was...socially regarded as normal" (2001:160). (15) Yoshiya and others emphasized the spiritual aspects of S in subverting a phallocentric view of eroticism. Yaneura expresses the couple's physical contact symbolically, but physical contact within real-life S couples was not nonexistent.
Yoshiya went on to write many other popular stories and novels. Her work helped give rise to the new genre of shōjo (girls) popular literature--novels then; after the war, also manga and anime. Some of the most popular shōjo novels suggested lesbian relationships.
About the time Yoshiya began publishing, the artist Kashō Takabatake (see sidebar below) portrayed bishōnen (beautiful boys) in boys' magazines. The adventure stories he illustrated showed them bonding by rescuing one another or sharing the same sleeping bag for warmth. Thorn says his works "reflected idealized relationships among boys in a time when boys and girls lived in separate worlds, and it was common for...young people to have romantic feelings for and even sexual involvement with the same sex...." A collection of Kashō's works, Bishōnen zukan (Illustrated Compendium of Beautiful Boys), was published two years ago. It includes an essay by the well-known boys' love manga artist Keiko Takemiya. (16)
The longest and most public expression of same-sex affection was nanshoku (male color--color connoting sexual pleasure). (17) This meant eroticism between male adolescents and men. Nanshoku was a sexual style or role adopted by an adult male to describe his conduct, not an identity based on a preference for a same-sex partner.
Nanshoku was prevalent in Buddhist monasteries--attributed to the eighth-century monk said to have introduced Buddhism to Japan, Kūkai--as well as among the samurai (noble) class, crafts and trades people, and in the emerging cities, such as Kyoto and Edo (Tokyo), where it was based in part around the kabuki theater. (18) It flourished for at least 1,000 years until the early 19th century. It was so widespread and long-lived that scholars like Gregory Pflugfelder document a broad and publicly supportive discourse which produced one of the richest caches of written material on male-male sexuality anywhere in the world before the present (1999:44-45).
Although Pflugfelder writes about the period after 1600, there were many earlier works treating nanshoku--novels, paintings, stories, poetry, plays, guidebooks and instructional texts. An anthology compiled in the late 1600s, Kigin Kitamura's Iwatsutsuji (Wild Azaleas), is named for a poem written in 905 about a priest's unexpressed love for a youth:
omoi izuru
tokiwa no yama no
iwatsutsuji
iwaneba koso are
koishiki mono o
Memories of love revive,
like wild azaleas
bursting into bloom
on mountains of evergreen;
my stony silence only shows
how much I love you. (19)
Paul Gordon Schalow says Kitamura intended his work as "morally inspirational depictions of male love" and selected material reflecting a romanticized tradition of idealized relations between youths and men (1993:8). Iwatsutsuji was popular throughout the Tokugawa period (1603-1868). During this time some of nanshoku's most notable expression came in the work of Saikaku Ihara, Japan's greatest novelist then, and the playwright Monzaemon Chikamatsu. Saikaku's collection of stories, Nanshoku ōkagami, was a best seller on its publication in 1687 and remains entertaining today. (20)
Writing between 1680-1724, Chikamatsu is as influential as Shakespeare in English-speaking cultures. Chikamatsu's dramas helped determine the Japanese discourse on loyalty and heroic virtue. Many portrayed current events: his play about the 47 rōnin premiered a few years after they avenged their lord's death in 1703, an act that captured the nation's attention. He introduced human realism into Japanese theater, using the struggles of common people to illuminate the tension between romantic passion and obligation as a member of society. One of his characters is Hanbei, a samurai turned merchant. He must decide which of several men is worthy of the love of his younger brother, the novice samurai Koshichirō. Hanbei sets the condition that Koshichirō's lover be as a brother to him, to the point of committing seppuku (suicide) with Koshichirō if necessary. Hanbei spurns the entreaties of several young noblemen. He turns instead to the commoner Koichibei because his heart is the most sincere. This was a powerful lesson in Japan's rigidly class-stratified society. Plays like this not only documented daily life, says Japanese Studies Professor Andrew Gerstle, they were "far more widely and deeply influential on popular morality" than philosophical works. (21)
Probably one of the reasons nanshoku continued to be practiced for such a long time was that Japan resisted attempts at colonization by the European powers, notably Spain. In 1550, about 30 years after the Spanish subjugated the indigenous civilizations of Mexico, destroying almost all their cultural records, a Spanish Jesuit missionary landed at the domain of Satsuma on Japan's southwest periphery. He was Francisco Xavier, who is credited with introducing Christianity to Japan. Xavier wasted no time in beginning his work, telling the daimyō (domain lord) in Yamaguchi that the practice of nanshoku was worse than the conduct of pigs, and in Fukuoka upbraiding the superior and monks of a monastery for their odious crimes with the acolytes. Although angered, the daimyō took no action; the monks merely laughed or kept a polite silence (Tsuneo Watanabe and Jun'ichi Iwata 1989:19-21).
Xavier made an impression, and not just among the children and adults whom he complained followed him through the streets, "ridiculing us and saying, 'these are the ones who prohibit the sin of sodomy'...". (22) Christianity was outlawed in 1614, and by 1640, villagers in Japan were stamping on Christian images in the annual rite of e-fumi (picture treading), overseen by the Kirishitan shūmon aratame yaku (Central Authority for the Supervision of the Prohibition of Christianity). The conduct of Xavier and his colleagues--which included plotting to overthrow the government and an affair with a high ranking noble woman--was in large part responsible for Japan closing its doors to the West in the 1600s. (23)
Nanshoku faded away with the Japan's adoption of the Germanic psychosexual theories at the dawn of the 20th century, part of the nation's rush toward industrialization after the U.S. pressured it into signing diplomatic and commercial treaties in the 1850s. As Western ideas permeated the country, newspapers problematized nanshoku. In the coming decades, the lurid press stories would be complemented by the new disciplines of mental-health practitioners and sexologists, some of whom wrote about same-sex relations. Stripped of an ethical context, they were portrayed only in terms of danger and delinquency. Given that nanshoku survived, albeit in altered form, almost up to the modern era of boys' love manga, it is worth looking at how it ended. (24)
During the second half of the 19th century, nanshoku evolved into an activity among middle and high school students in urban cities, including Tokyo. Makoto Furukawa says many students in Tokyo came from Satsuma, which had a long tradition of nanshoku (1994:102). In 1886, one Japanese newspaper acknowledged that "for men from Satsuma, the emotion of loving men is in no way different from that of loving women"; in 1899, another described male-male erotic practices as "Satsujin tsūyū no seiheki" or a common quirk of Satsuma men (Pflugfelder 1999:210).
One early indication of nanshoku's evolution was in sensationalistic news stories in the Tokyo newspapers. These told of the young men from Satsuma going "bishōnen hunting, literally accosting boys on the street, sometimes raping them, and intimidating them into joining their groups" (Thorn, personal communication).
Research Fellow Mark McLelland quotes the well-known writer Ōgai Mori recalling his school days about 1889 in which the koha (hard liner) students from Satsuma "were more masculine in their attire [than other students] and preferred to read stories glorifying nanshoku." They looked at the younger Mori as a "prospective 'receptive homosexual partner'" (2000a:24). Historian Gary Leupp cites a 1901 guidebook to Tokyo schools warning students "to be wary of those offering help in study in exchange for nanshoku" (1995:203).
But the news stories went well beyond reflecting reality. Pflugfelder describes a moral panic from about 1895 to 1904 as newspapers ran story after story which exaggerated student misbehavior in amount and kind, linked unrelated student groups into a growing conspiracy, and claimed nanshoku was endangering the nation's well being (1999:218-220). Furukawa says the stories "filled the newspapers" during the turn of the century, with accounts of "bishōnen disturbances" and "chigo [acolyte] battles." (25)
The newspaper articles played into the state's increased control of sexual behavior leading up to the Pacific war in the 1930s. Sabine Frühstück recounts how much of this control focused on young people's sexuality, especially masturbation, whose practice led to a "decadence of public morals" threatening the nation's stability. In the waning of the 19th century, physicians used the new legislation establishing a Division of School Hygiene as a means to gain unhindered access to the bodies of children and adolescents and "sexologists pushed for instruction...on masturbation, homosexuality, and other sexual practices that were defined as 'deviant'"(2000:335-336). (26) "Scientific knowledge had to be clearly cut off from religious customs and social traditions," observes Frühstück (2000:340).
The influence of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's classic text Psychopathia Sexualis, translated into Japanese in 1894 (eight years after its European publication), was emblematic of how quickly the new ways of thinking about sex displaced the old. Krafft-Ebing described sex in a taxonomical system, a categorization heretofore alien to the Japanese. He also pathologized non-heterosexual sex. (27)
The principal Japanese sexological work, Hentai seiyokuron (The Theory of Perverted Sexual Desire, 1915), focused on same-sex eroticism. Its authors, says Donald Roden, "seemed obsessed by the destructive threat that 'unnatural desires'...posed for the Japanese social order." Featuring an introduction by a Tokyo police chief, the book was reprinted 18 times in the next ten years. Japan's ministries of Education and Internal Affairs, school principals and college heads, and other educational groups waged a vociferous campaign against homosexuality, recreational sex and the blurring of gender lines.(28) By the late 1930s, the mental-health practitioners had been silenced--along with feminists advocating for the availability of birth control and abortion--by the militarized government, which maintained that their work corrupted public morals. (29)
There was resistance to nanshoku's repression, albeit at the margins. In Satsuma, now the Kagoshima prefecture, erotic ties between males were openly valued up to the 20th century. On the first day of each year, schools prescribed the reading of a tale recounting the love between a pair of 16th century warriors, one a youth, the other a man. (30) At one school's athletic day, older and younger male students ran as a couple, holding hands, before a cheering faculty. Kagoshima's reputation for shiki (warrior morale) spread as far as Germany, where Benedict Friedländer, a member of Magnus Hirschfeld's Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee), claimed it as a proof of his thesis that male-male sexuality and military prowess were closely linked (Pflugfelder 1999:208-209, 250).
Echoes of nanshoku persisted in Japan's military into the 20th century. A Japanese journalist averred in 1899 that the navy's nickname was the "buggery fleet" (keikan kaigun) because its Satsuma-born minister, Gonnohyoe Yamamoto, awarded top posts to his bishōnen schoolmates from the naval academy (Pflugfelder 1999:211,227n).
In the armed forces, being a bishōnen could connote bravery as much as it did, for older males, erotic attraction. "[T]he newcomer may smile to behold two or three soldiers strolling along hand in hand," observed a British resident in 1905, "[but] there is no effeminacy here" (McLelland 2000a:25). Much like under the samurai, male youth could be considered exemplars of a Japanese martial spirit. Writing in 1912, less than 30 years before Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, essayist Kendo Yokoyama proposed that,
Those Europeans and Americans who want to know the "charm of the bishōnen" of Japan should visit the training ships of the Japanese navy. Each year the Japanese navy sends a training ship fully laden with young cadets to Europe and America. The Japanese navy does not employ those who are not good-looking. Those cadets who are employed are disciplined to be loyal and brave. And so I recommend the bishōnen of the navy as representative of Japan. (31)
Given the extent and depth of nanshoku's practice and its expression in cultural texts, the idea of male adult-adolescent eroticism may have lingered in Japan's popular imagination to a greater degree than in any other modern society. Even today, writes McLelland, same-sex desire does not necessarily mean a person would be categorized as Anglo-North Americans would a homosexual: "The traditional understanding of homosexuality as a particular style or 'Way' of enjoying sex is still faintly discernible in certain media texts which speak of homosexuality as a 'hobby' [shumi] or a kind of 'play' [asobi / purei]" (2000c).
Another cultural aspect which may have played into yaoi's creation is an openness toward depicting the body, including those of children, and a frank depiction of violence. These are staple themes in manga, which account for almost 40 percent of all printed media in Japan and are widely read by children.
Some Westerners find today's manga content as troubling as Xavier did nanshoku. Manga authority Frederik Schodt cites Tatsuhiko Yamagami's Gaki Deka (Kid Cop, 1974), whose protagonist is an elementary school boy who entertains onlookers with tricks he performs with his testicles. Gaki Deka's popularity boosted sales of the children's manga Shōnen Champion by more than a million copies (1997:123). A contemporary example is the popular manga and television anime Crayon Shin-chan. In one sequence, the kindergarten-age Shin-chan drops his pants and underwear to moon a video camera in a consumer electronics store. His parents, looking for the tyke, try to puzzle out the tight close-up displayed on the store's monitor before realizing what it is and to whom it belongs (Lee 2000:201). Perper and Cornog quote a North American businesswoman: "After glancing at a boys' manga on the train to Shibuya and seeing an illustration of a girl with a gun's nozzle stuck up her vagina, I never looked at one again." The story they found with this scene, like most of its type, subsequently shows the victim exacting a bloody revenge. (32)
Gender-variant themes in shōjo manga are another cultural element that probably helped pave the way for yaoi. Flexible, non-stable depictions of gender have been common in shōjo manga since World War II. But they were present in literature well before that, from the Heian period (794-1185) forward. Leupp cites a widely read 12th-century work, Torikaebaya (The Changelings) as an example of how society defined the concepts of male and female on social, not sexual, bases.
Pflugfelder shows that Torikaebaya's treatment of gender roles and their relation to biological sex and sexuality is far removed from contemporary Western beliefs. Torikaebaya's story is of two siblings, a boy and a girl, who grow up in the persona opposite their biological sex. They later trade their social identities. It portrays gender not only as malleable, but as grounded in individual desire. "The free-floating nature of genders as cultural scripts [in Torikaebaya]," he writes, "is also implicit at the semantic level. Words designating 'man' or 'woman' often appear with verbs that imply the mutability or superficiality of that very status...." (33)
Torikaebaya de-essentializes gender, following Buddhist thought in which gender is, like all else, impermanent. Hitomi Tonomura says the Mahayana Buddhism of Japan teaches flexibility in the meaning of gender categories. It emphasizes there is "no...immutable essence or traits anywhere, no inherent qualities in any being or thing. One only appears to be female or male." (34) Contrast this to Judeo-Christian thought, which Pflugfelder says stigmatizes incongruous gender behavior as an essential and dangerous otherness, in keeping with these religions' driving an ontological wedge between "good" and "evil." (35)
The idea of androgyny "as perhaps the ideal gender" has long been part of Japanese tradition, according to McLelland. He mentions the daijosai enthronement ceremony "where the emperor becomes an incarnation of the goddess Amaterasu, along with the long history of gender reversal in the Japanese entertainment world" (2000a:77). Leupp observes that in both samurai and commoner society, a sexual interest in androgyny persisted throughout the Tokugawa period. He cites the popularity of sexually ambiguous performers, visual erotica depicting gender anomalous situations and young male prostitutes who adopted a feminine persona. (36) Donald Roden provides additional examples for the Taishō period (1912-1926).
Sexual ambiguity in performance is still visible today. One sees it in product advertising, the popular all-female theater troupe Takarazuka Revue and in J-pop bands whose male members dress (but don't necessarily perform) as female on and off stage (personal observation; Robertson 1999, 1992; McLelland 2000c). "[T]o the untrained eye," says McLelland, "some Japanese boy-band members display the same kind of androgyny which makes it difficult to ascribe gender to many of the bishōnen heroes" (2000a:77).
An early post-war manga, Shosuke Kuragane's popular Ammitsu-hime (Princess Ammitsu, 1949) features a tomboy. Osamu Tezuka's hugely successful Ribon no kishi (Princess Knight, 1953) (37) tells the story of a girl who blends attributes of both genders, a theme present in today's anime seen by children, such as Chiho Saito's brilliant Utena: Adolescence Mokushiroku. (38) Maia Tsurumi says that the attributes of male and female characters in the popular contemporary shōjo manga Yūkan Club are not limited to narrow models of masculinity or femininity (2000:185).
Female manga artists became more prominent in the late 1950s as manga sales increased sharply. Major publishers such as Kodansha introduced the weekly several-hundred-page format common today and manga sales began their climb to the 2.3 billion copies/year level they attained by 1995 (Schodt 1997:preface, 67).
In the early 1970s, with the emergence of influential women artists such as Moto Hagio and Keiko Takemiya, shōjo manga took a male homoerotic direction. (39) Hagio's Tōma no shinzō (1974) and Takemiya's Kaze to ki no uta (The Song of the Wind and the Trees, 1976) told the stories of adolescent boys in sexual relationships. They were, says Kazuko Suzuki, "influential masterpiece[s]...one of the first attempts [in manga] to depict true bonding or ideal relationships through pure male homosexual love" (1999:251). They were also runaway hits among their mostly female readers, schoolgirls to older women.
Their stories are not simplistic. Even as Kaze to ki no uta's opening scene shows Gilbert Cocteau, a young-looking adolescent, having sex with a classmate, one of many such trysts, the plot lays out complex reasons for his promiscuity. In its explicit portrayal of physical love between boys, Takemiya's story encourages its readers to think about themes such as isolation and fate. (40) Tōma no shinzō opens with the suicide of 14-year-old Thomas, whose love for an older boy, Juli, was unrequited:
To Juli, one last time
This is my love
This is the sound of my heart
Surely you must understand. (41)
It presents a powerful yet subtle resolution, one drawn from Buddhist tradition (Thorn 1993). These works were also carefully researched. A book about the anime version of Kaze to ki no uta shows the painstaking detail that went into depicting the boys' milieu, a school set in 19th century France, down to the contents of its apothecary chest. Their creators were influenced in part by European works. Hagio's stories were inspired by Jean Delannoy's film Les Amitiés particulieres (This Special Friendship, 1964), which portrays a boarding school romance between two boys. (42)
Today commercial boys' love flourishes. Titles such as BeBoy and BeBoy Gold consist of several hundred pages and sell 250,000 copies a month between them, about 10 percent bought by men and boys. (43)
A discourse has arisen as male readers react to female representations of male-male eroticism. McLelland (2000a:249-250) discusses letters boys write to BeBoy. He reports on their ambivalence:
One high-school boy says that "It's not that I'm gay".... He goes on to say that he and a group of two or three girls buy these magazines and share them. The girls ask him "Ma-kun [his name], how about turning gay (homo ni nachaeba?)", to which he replies "they say such irresponsible things but, basically, if it's beautiful than either is OK," a statement which is followed by the character warai, signifying laughter (presumably the speaker is suggesting an ironic stance to his last statement).
Males who read such fiction, he observes,
do so in a context which brings them into proximity with women (as in the reading circle described above). These men are exposed to very different constructions of masculinity than those they would find in a reading circle comprised of other men. Moreover, the images of masculinity present in shōnen'ai fiction are obviously attractive to many women, so a man who is sexually attracted to women, may, either consciously or unconsciously, seek to cultivate them.
Some males have not been ambivalent. A debate broke out in the Japanese feminist magazine Choisir after a gay-identified man, Masaki Sato, complained that yaoi's characters had nothing to do with "real gay men." Dubbed the yaoi ronsō (controversy), it lasted from 1992 to 1997. For Sato, says Keith Vincent (2002), "yaoi and its readers were violently co-opting the reality of gay men and transforming it into their own masturbatory fantasy." Sato claimed that
The more confused images of gay men circulate among the general public the harder it is for gay men to reconcile these images with their own lives and the more extreme their oppression becomes.... When you're spying on gay sex, girls, take a look at yourself in the mirror. Just look at the expression on your faces! [You look just like those dirty old men salivating over images of lesbian sex.] You can all go to hell for all I care.
Of Sato's critics, reports Vincent, Yukari Fujimoto argued that yaoi functions as a means of overcoming and critiquing heterosexist gender norms. Hisako Takamatsu saw yaoi as a refuge from a misogynist culture. She said her sexuality centered exclusively on fantasies of boy love and emphasized there is no reason why one's biological gender should predetermine the gendering of either the subject or object of one's desire. (44) Vincent observes that Takamatsu's position agrees with the critique of identity offered by queer theory, which emphasizes the processes of identification through which identities are formed, rather than identity as an ontological given. (45)
"Yaoi" was coined by a group of amateurs who titled their 1979 dōjinshi Rappori Yaoi Tokushū Gou (Rappori: Special Yaoi Issue). They created the acronym because their work was a collection of scenes and episodes with no overarching structure. The story features two youths in a suggestive but not explicitly sexual relationship. There were yaoi parodies of Gundam in the early 1980s, but, says Thorn, "it was the 1985 Captain Tsubasa boom [dōjinshi based on a popular manga about boys' soccer] and the subsequent Saint Seiya boom of 1987 that put the acronym into the vernacular." (46)
With the large number of yaoi dōjinshi published in the past 25 years, summarizing their plots is beyond this article's scope. Their approach ranges from serious to humorous. Some have no depiction of sex. Others have scenes that may seem to leave little to the imagination but, if read without some understanding of Japanese culture, lose meaning which greatly enriches the text. (47)
Yaoi goes West
Yaoi's rise in the West has been driven by the increasing popularity of anime shown on commercial television for children and by the Web as a dissemination medium for fan-written stories. (48)
Two popular fandoms for yaoi are Gundam Wing and Weiß Kreuz. In Gundam Wing, a quintet of 15-year-old male space pilots fights to defend their colonies against the OZ forces of earth. Weiß Kreuz, based in modern Tokyo, relates the adventures of a band of male assassins in their teens and early 20s who battle organized crime. In both, group dynamics figure heavily in the canon, but not sex, much less homosexual sex. Anime critic Patrick Drazen says, "The five [Gundam] pilots...have female counterparts, yet a lot of fan sites are produced as if these girls never existed" (2003:95). Yaoi uses these characters' struggle against evildoers to uncover other needs that can be met only by turning to teammates--or in some cases to their opponents.
Judging by how Western yaoi fans describe themselves, how they write, and conversations with them, many are young. One girl boasted in her blog that she locked out students from her high school's computer lab so she could upload her yaoi stories. Yaoi is an activity of the young in part because anime did not became widely seen in America until the 1990s. (49)
Yet is clearly something many girls will do if given the opportunity. Japanese science fiction author Mariko Ohara began writing yaoi not long after she was 10 (McCaffery et al.). Two slash authors have said as children they began to entertain thoughts of homoerotic relationships among male media characters. One author was five years old; the other about eight (Lemon; anonymous, personal communication).
Authors post yaoi stories to their sites or fan-fiction archives. (50) Many stories are not sexually explicit, but as sex underlies romantic love, sex is present in much of yaoi. Sex goes to the heart of what we might want in our relations with another. Depicting it gives the author a platform to explore desire with an urgency not possible any other way.
Yaoi stories range from minimalist sketches, such as Kai Foster's Coloured Salt, and a Story, to detailed scenarios of different worlds, such as Mikkeneko's Spoil of War. Many are like fairy tales, which scholar Jack Zipes says was a genre established in literature by the French aristocracy. They became the basis for today's children's publishing, much of which, produced by corporations such as Disney, are paeans to industriousness and heterosexual monogamy. (51)
By contrast, yaoi fairy tales, such as RazorQueen's After the Fire, are about desire. They are stories without a corporate agenda, tender fantasies which explore possibilities, not circumscribe them. After the Fire pairs Gundam pilot Duo with his former opponent Zechs. It has, as archivist Nitid says about yaoi generally, "a sweet innocence, and [an] unabashed display of...affection...." (52) Yaoi can also take us on darker journeys, such as Chalcedony Cross' Fäden aus Mondlicht and BrightAngel's Measure for Measure. Both have ambiguously constructed scenes of nonconsensual sex between Weiß teammates Aya and Yoji.
Artist: Pluto www.thatdamncat.com and www.umbrellastudios.com
Anria's Thinking About Forever pits Duo against a relationship between fellow pilots Heero and Trowa. We see Duo struggling mightily to overcome his inhibitions to join them in a ménage à trois. Scenarios like these are not necessarily fictional. The noted author Samuel Delany said he was approached at a science-fiction convention by a very young man who asked him if it were possible for three people to have a relationship. Delany said it was, at which the young man "gave an immense sigh of relief... [and] I thought, 'I am doing something right'" (Westerfeld).
All good fiction is transgressive, says historical novelist E.L. Doctorow. Writers must "have the sense of...doing something forbidden.... If you have that feeling, the work is going well." (53) Good fiction needs more, of course. The sex in gay erotica written by amateurs is transgressive, but often it seems an end in itself. In yaoi, the sex serves the goal of getting the characters to connect.
Yaoi has not escaped censorship. Sharon Kinsella describes a moral panic in Japan in 1989 which resulted in the police arresting about 80 people, almost all teens or in their twenties, and confiscating thousands of dōjinshi from Tokyo stores (1998a). She documents how parents' groups which claimed to be protecting children were in reality fronts for government agencies involved in controlling manga. One such, the Tokyo Mothers' Society, operated out of a police station (2000a:152-155). (54)
Yaoi in the West is nowhere as visible as it is in Japan, probably a reason a Choisir-type debate has not happened here, (55) but anime and manga have been attacked. Sailor Moon and Ranma 1/2 were taken off the air in Mexico, accused by a group of Catholic priests and families of promoting homosexuality and satanism. Their respective manga were withdrawn from the market. (56) Sales of the manga Dragonball Z were suspended in Finland after members of Parliament accused it of "promoting pedophilia." (57)
Anime broadcast on U.S. television has much of its sex and violence altered or deleted, as well as content deemed offensive to Christians. The Sailor Moon character Zoicyte had his gender changed to female during dubbing to eliminate a same-sex relationship. Texas and Oklahoma prosecuted comic store employees for selling sexually explicit works to adults. Such prosecutions are infrequent but can have severe consequences. (58) Other examples of changes commercial broadcasters have made in the name of protecting U.S. children:
·Card Captor Sakura (WB network) altered to downplay or delete displays of same-sex and/or age-discrepant romantic affection;
·Sailor Moon S (Cartoon Network) changed a lesbian relationship to that of cousins;
·Dragonball Z (Cartoon Network) scenes removed showing women's breasts and people striking one another; also deleted was the word "hell," the producers claiming viewer sensitivity toward the concept of Satan. (59)
Even the critically acclaimed antiwar manga Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen) was attacked by the U.S. Comics Code Authority, which complained that depictions of the atom bomb destruction of Hiroshima were "too graphically violent," according to Saya Shiraishi (2000:305), who quotes Schodt that the Code "nearly 'sanitized [U.S. comics] to death'."
Artist: Kitsune www.silvertales.com
Why yaoi?
A remarkable factor in yaoi's popularity in the West is the dissimilarity of Western and Japanese cultural contexts. This includes radically different conceptions of sex and gender as seen in religion and in their depiction in literature and other expressive forms over a millennium. It also includes a different course for women's literature. These would seem to argue against yaoi's acceptance in the West.
Yet the prevalence of anime in Western culture has provided Westerners with an alternative set of canonical texts to those from Anglo-North American publishers and television producers which slash fans appropriate. These texts may not be overtly sexual, but they are informed by different conceptions of gender roles.
For example, in anime broadcast on the Cartoon Network, I have seen scenes, no more than a few seconds long, of young male teenage characters holding hands after their successful defeat of an opponent. Fleeting though these may be, they are a departure from the gender portrayals on mainstream cult tv, a science fiction/fantasy genre encompassing stories such as the Star Trek series, The X Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In these stories, observes Dee Amy-Chinn, even the "[a]lternatives to the sex/gender paradigm with which we are familiar serve to consolidate the norm that privileges both masculine values and heteronormativity. [While] women are able to become empowered and achieve status when they adopt masculine forms of behaviour...when men enter the traditional female domain the result is their humiliation and abjection" (Amy-Chinn, forthcoming).
Fans report different reasons for why they like yaoi. (60)
One seems to be erotic attraction coupled with freedom: yaoi transcends gender roles and male bodies are attractive.
As feminist author Joanna Russ said, women want "a sexual relationship that does not require their abandoning freedom, adventure, and first-class humanity...they want sexual enjoyment that is intense, whole, and satisfying, and they want intense emotionality. They also want...to create images of male bodies as objects of desire." (61)
This desire varies. Some women prefer yaoi's young male characters be hunky, others androgynous, others feminine.
At the beginning of As Long As You Love Me part six, Missa and Miriya say, "If we owned any of these bishies we wouldn't be writing about them. We'd be watching them boffing like bunnies and video taping it.... But since we don't own them, all we can do is play with them in our own little fantasy world."
Fantasy is not necessarily about escaping reality as much as it is desiring a different one. (62) Some yaoi authors imbue their stories with playfulness, as does Saiyana in The Turn-On Tea. But play can also be quite serious. Bruno Bettelheim valued the violence of fairy tales for helping children come to terms with their feelings of aggression and impotency. (63) Yaoi author Rose Argent says "I put my characters into the worst possible situations and see what happens. I also pull them back out. It's a little bit of self therapy."
Yaoi provides a safe place from which to explore sex. In yaoi author Joyce Wakabayashi's words, "[male characters] have to go through a lot of what the women have to go through, being vulnerable and not always in control.... it's a bit of voyeurism spiced with just a drop of revenge." Quoting Jenn, Jeanne writes, "'A man ain't more vulnerable than when he's got a dick up his ass'", and Jeanne adds, "And hey! these guys are vulnerable for love! who could ask for more?" (64) Some women say they prefer to appropriate and/or identify with a male, not female, persona.
Slash authors surveyed report their conceptions of sexuality, their own and others, as "fluid" (65) and/or identify as bisexual or "open." (I found no yaoi author surveys outside of blogs.) Several said they were lesbian. (66) English professor James Welker says the ambiguity of boys' love manga gives the reader "licence to vicariously experiment with sex and sexuality, acting as either passive or active lover, or both.... freedom to re-narrate and en-gender--or de-gender--the story [including] opening these texts to lesbian re-interpretations."(67)
Identifications in manga are shifting and incomplete, says Setsu Shigematsu. They move
among multiple contradictory (psychic) sites that are constituted differently depending on the specific history and experiences of the subject. Some of these possible sites might be expressed as: I desire to be the object of desire / I hate the object of desire / I conquer the object of desire / the object of desire wants me / the object of desire hates me. (68)
Western yaoi exemplifies this fluidity. It also resists categorization. Some have labeled yaoi in one way or another as queer. For example, Thorn (forthcoming) describes cosplay at yaoi-centric events as queer. (69) In cosplay, often held at fan events, attendees dress in the costumes of their favorite characters. There is good-natured hilarity as players, often cross-dressed, sometimes erotically tease each other. Thorn identifies multiple elements of gender performativity in this type of cosplay:
When a woman dressed as a man makes a pass at another woman, she is "playing at" heterosexuality, but the fact that she is biologically a woman creates an obvious homosexual element. If the other woman is herself dressed as a man, then the two are "playing at" male homosexuality, yet there is also a suggestion of female homosexuality, since both are biologically women, and, because each woman is ostensibly reacting to the performed "masculinity" of the other, there is a heterosexual nuance, as well. Similarly, when a woman dressed as a man is flirting with a man dressed as a woman, there is a double-reverse heterosexual element, yet, again, since each is reacting to the performed gender of the other, there is also a suggestion of homosexuality.
Welker (2002) observes that in the manga Aran's lesbian-only personals section (called Yuri Tsūshin, or lily communication), some of the ads had photos in which the young women resemble bishōnen. They are using, he says, the "trope of queer other-ness found in the construct of bishōnen to (re)create themselves."
Some may be tempted to analyze yaoi using one or another interpretive methodology. But yaoi is created and consumed by women--and some men--with diverse conceptions of sexuality. Binary labels such as male and female, gay and straight are semiotic strategies which do not reflect reality. Categories such as gay or women's writing are universalist constructs which gloss over varied points of view. (70) I would suggest that "queer," even in its sense of being unable to signify gender monolithically, (71) is inadequate given the disparate motives of the small number of Western yaoi authors with whom I talked. Most of them reject labels. The only common denominator I found as to why they like yaoi is because it is fun. Any attempt at explaining "why" must be done carefully, mindful of contradictions and respectful of the fact that sex and gender are multidimensional and labile. (72)
The future
Two panels from Burning (2002). Artists: Rose Argent, RazorQueen, Gaby Maya, Yoshie, and Datenshi
Published at Yaoi-Con, (73) Burning is one of the few fully realized Western dōjinshi executed in the Japanese tradition, including its distribution at a yaoi-centric event. Set after the war, the ex-enemies Zechs and Duo are drifting through life until Zechs, cruising for a young man to pick up, encounters the former pilot on the street, selling his body.
In some ways Burning evokes a Japanese yaoi dōjinshi, with its clearly defined seme-uke roles, fragmented symbolic dialogue and sparely drawn panels. (In Japanese yaoi, the seme fucks the uke. These roles are not necessarily analogous to the Anglo-Northern European conception of top/bottom.) Physically Burning is similar, with a color cover and black-and-white interior of 66 panels over 16 pages. Burning was a group collaboration, as are many Japanese dōjinshi. On the other hand, Burning's characters are drawn in a less angular style than those in many Japanese dōjinshi, and many Japanese dōjinshi have bolder use of kanji (lettering)--size, weight, placement on page--to indicate dialogue, commentary and sound effects. Unlike their Japanese counterparts, the individuals who created Burning live in three countries. They collaborated over the Internet, using instant messaging to role-play dialogue.
Burning and works like it could mark an increase in visual expressions of Western yaoi, much as the Captain Tsubasa dōjinshi did in Japan. The number of Western dōjinshi will probably increase, facilitated by artists' consortia such as Minkland and Umbrella Studios and events like Yaoi-Con. There is a small but active community of Western yaoi artists working in a variety of media.
Yaoi animation has been posted to Websites. One such takes the form of an interactive sexually explicit game. Commercial anime produced from yaoi dōjinshi is exported to the West. The continued improvement in personal computer tools such as Flash may make it feasible for fans to create their own anime. Flash automates labor-intensive functions such as tweening (moving an object from one point to another). One of the best Flash anime is Osamu Tezuka Cinema's Where's The Doctor?! . It looks much like hand drawn anime. Although it uses seiyū (voice talent), music and sound effects, these are available to resourceful amateurs. Short anime produced with Flash are small enough to be readily stored on Websites. (74)
The increased presence in visual media of Western yaoi raises questions, among them, whether yaoi artists will address racial issues more than they do now, (75) and whether sex acts shown in motion will expose the genre to increased legal risk.
In the U.S., yaoi seems to be beyond the reach of those who would take it away from its creators. It is probable that yaoi and other fan fiction fall within the copyright law's statutory exception for fair use, although this has not been adjudicated. (76) A different federal law prohibiting posting on the Web material harmful to minors was struck down by an appellate court. The great majority of yaoi sites would have been exempt due to the law's commercial requirement. (77) Last year the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a "virtual" child pornography law. (78) Yet obscenity laws remain on the books and could potentially be brought to bear against yaoi authors/artists.
More than play
Yaoi is play, but it is more. Thinking about something doesn't mean one wants to do it or wants others to. But if one thinks about something s/he is acknowledging it exists, even as something only to be imagined. Thinking implies receptivity to additional information and thus the ability to change. Yaoi fans are envisioning possibilities. In so doing, they are taking steps toward their realization. The goal may be symbolic but both the steps toward it and their effects are real:
1) The appropriation of others' texts, which, even in their canonical form, such as Sailor Moon S or Dragonball Z, are considered deviant enough in the West they must be bowdlerized or suppressed.
2) The subversion of these texts. Many, perhaps most, Western yaoi stories destabilize our conceptions of fixed positions for gender and sexuality much in the same way as classic Japanese stories such as Torikaebaya.
3) A discourse among fans and non-fans who post comments to sites' guest books, and read or write reviews and blogs, enter contests, and e-mail site owners. It is easy to imagine more such exchanges as new anime is broadcast, additional yaoi sites go online and others encounter the genre.
4) Weakening of the punitive social framework described by Gayle Rubin (1993), which structures sexuality in Western societies. She says that privileging some types of erotic behavior sets up a tension as lines are drawn between good and bad behavior and their boundaries contested. When yaoi stories present as desirable what Rubin identifies as "bad sex," usually these presentations are not overtly politicized (though some are, in reference to homophobia). Instead, they are assumed to be "good sex." The Web gives yaoi authors and artists a medium in which it is relatively easy to publish expressive works that endorse as good what others in the West believe is bad. By its nature, the Web makes it difficult for critics to contest such works in front of the writers/artists' intended audiences. The Web thus allows yaoi creators to sidestep arguments of where to set the boundaries.
5) Scholarly work. This is already underway for slash, where people present papers, publish analyses and teach it. It is just beginning for yaoi. Areas of inquiry could include who is writing/drawing yaoi works and why, its content, and how this compares to the content of other erotic fan works in Japan and the West, such as slash, heterosexual and yuri stories and artwork. (79)
These steps apply to slash as much as they do yaoi. One of the key differences between the two genres may be the age of the media characters and of the fans creating erotic works about them.
Anthropologist Anne Allison describes how contemporary toys, games, TV programs and movies, many from Japan, are queering Western children's play. She says the new play objects create "a bleeding of the female/male border." With their transformations and fragmentation, they reflect a "world of flux, migration, and deterritorialization," unlike that of past superheroes, whose "powers were centered in and secured by a holistic...male body." (80) Many yaoi players have only recently left behind the toys Allison describes. Their "play" is deliberate, consciously performed.
A large group of people in the West, most of them female and many young, is imagining non-normative predicates of sex. They are creating alternative constructions of masculinity, often envisioning these as ideals. They are exposing others to these, as took place with the boy who asked if Duo was gay. (81) His question shows that yaoi has already affected how our society views sex. It seems to have started with the young, and it is just beginning. It remains to be seen how powerful its effects will be.
I thank the following people for generously sharing their ideas and insights: Dee Amy-Chinn, Meg Barker, C.M. Decarnin, Sarah Frederick, Erica Friedman, M.J. Johnson, Antonia Levi, Gaby Maya, Timothy Perper and Martha Cornog, Matt Thorn and James Welker. The errors and omissions are mine alone.
Notes
(1) "Ojisan" means grandfather or old man. Crawford is based on a character in a popular manga (comic), Weiß Kreuz. Touma Kiryuu is Firedancer's creation. She chose his given name from a character in Samurai Troopers and his family name from one in Revolutionary Girl Utena (personal communication). Weiß Kreuz means white cross; foreign language titles are popular in manga. Pet Project is at Firedancer's site. The ellipses are mine.
(2) Yaoi is an acronym from the Japanese words YAma-nashi, Ochi-nashi, Imi-nashi (no climax, no point, no meaning). A spoof on "yaoi" is YAmete, Oshiri ga Itai, or "Stop, my ass hurts" (McLelland 2000a:277).
There is no reliable estimate for how many people are involved in yaoi worldwide. My claim of "probably more than a million" is based on attendance at Japan's Comiket of almost 500,000 people twice a year and its large size for the last 20 years; attendance at regional events such as the Osaka comic market, which attracts tens of thousands; the growing yaoi community in Western countries as evidenced by the increase in the number of yaoi pages returned by Google in the past year; and large numbers reported by yaoi archive site hit counters (e.g., as of 5 May 2003: 2,296,528 hits since 20 March 2000 for Gundam Wing Addiction). See also Notes 6 and 8.
(3) Erotic writing featuring same-sex characters borrowed from tv shows, movies and books is called slash fiction. Most depicts two male media characters involved in a sexual relationship with each other, though a small percentage is written about female couples. It has flourished as an amateur art form since the 1970s. The virgule used to join the two characters' names or initials was adopted as the genre's name early on (Decarnin, forthcoming).
(4) Generally the partners are of equivalent ages. The ages reflect those of the protagonists in the canonical text, who are usually teenagers. Occasionally the minor is a pre-teen. A character may be represented as human or as a kami (deity) in a human form. This follows the conventions of anime and Japanese mythology, which informs much of manga and anime's content. Timothy Perper and Martha Cornog (2002) provide an informative discussion of manga's cultural background. For that of anime, see Antonia Levi; Susan Napier; Patrick Drazen.
(5) Dōjinshi means "companion." Japanese Literature Professor Sarah Frederick reports that people sometimes use it to mean a coterie magazine. She says "dōjinshi" was commonly used earlier in the 20th century for literary journals put out by small groups of writers (personal communication).
(6) The summer 2001 Comiket had 480,000 attendees, 35,000 circles (an individual artist or group of artists who exhibit) over three days (Thorn, forthcoming). About 80 percent attend to buy yaoi dōjinshi. Comiket's summer 2002 exhibition catalog is almost 900 pages with about 50 tables per page (Biblos editor Iawamoto at the Yaoi-Con press conference 19 October 2002; Comiket for Dummies panel at Yaoi-Con 19 October 2002). Comiket began in 1976 with 30 circles and about 70 attendees. By the mid-1980s, it occupied Japan's largest exhibition hall (Ishigami; Yonezawa). In addition to Comiket, fans attend smaller events in other Japanese cities and exchange dōjinshi via mail networks. Comiket and some stores sell dōjinshi over the Web.
(7) There are no universally accepted definitions in English for "yaoi" and "shōnen-ai." In Japan, according to Iwamoto, an editor at Biblos, a major publisher of boys' love titles, "boys' love" is used in preference to its Japanese counterpart, "shōnen-ai" (Iwamoto at Yaoi-Con press conference 19 October 2002). See Note 9. Of printed boys' love media in Japan, Keith Vincent (2002) says there are approximately nine magazines published monthly, 12 comic magazines and 30 paperback books published each month.
(8) Google search performed 16 November 2003 for "yaoi." Google searches performed 4 May 2003 for the names of the first two fandoms in the table below plus "description."
The fan fiction archive FanFiction.net contains stories in nine Western and two Asian languages. From 22 July 2002 to 2 May 2003, the number of works archived grew from more than 187,000 to more than 772,500, a greater than four-fold increase. "Anime," which includes stories based on manga, remained the largest category, increasing from 44,361 to 181,941 stories. Stories with nonsexual, heterosexual and yaoi themes co-exist on FanFiction.net and are not searchable by genre; however, yaoi-themed stories were returned on the first page of results for the three categories accessed:
FanFiction.Net
Fandom stories as of.......22 July 2002.............22 April 2003
Gundam Wing.......................6,932....................26,871
Weiß Kreuz..........................906.....................3,770
Yu-Gi-Oh!...........................485....................11,087
(9) In English, from VIZ and TOKYOPOP, respectively. TOKYOPOP markets FAKE as "a shōnen-ai favorite" and says it anticipates male and female readers. The company plans to introduce other shōnen-ai manga to the U.S. (e-mail interview with TOKYOPOP Senior Editor Julie Taylor, 13 May 2003). In Japan, Banana Fish was published by Bessatsu Shōjo Comic and FAKE by Biblos.
(10) See Note 3.
(11) Thorn (1995). See Audrey Lemon (2002) about slash. Yaoi fans have also told me this.
(12) The ban on attending meetings was enacted in 1890 and lifted in 1922 (Nolte and Hastings 1991:154; Silverberg 1991:259). Women were not able to vote until 1946.
(13) Hundreds of Chinese and thousands of laborers from Japan's colony of Korea were killed in riots (many lynched), which were fueled by rumors of looting in the aftermath of the earthquake which devastated Tokyo in 1923. Censured by the foreign press and diplomats for allowing the atrocity to occur, the government persecuted Korean and Japanese dissidents, blaming them for fomenting trouble during the riots (Bowen Raddeker 2002).
Another activist, the Japanese egoist Fumiko Kaneko, was sentenced to death on a specious charge of treason. She had joined her Korean partner in an obscure group of nihilist-anarchists called the Futeisha (Society of Rebels or Malcontents), its name satirizing the way authorities referred to Koreans as troublemakers. When handed the emperor's commutation to life imprisonment, Kaneko glared at her captors and tore up the document. Kaneko and other Japanese women, writes Hélène Bowen Raddeker, "went to great lengths to emphasize their equality with their respective male partners: first and foremost, they were their comrades, not mere (common-law) wives, lovers or even friends or companions."
(14) Yoshiya saw lesbian relationships as liberatory, says Kazue Harada (2001:68), a way to be free from the constraints of conventional gender ideology. But "[d]espite the force of Yoshiya's arguments...the mainstream Japanese feminist movement, growing out of the influences of the Seitō women, would eventually unite with male-centered heterosexual institutions as the country gradually moved into militarism in the Showa period."
Sarah Frederick points out that Yoshiya would use her later novels to argue for changes to Japan's rigid laws regulating the family. Yoshiya's goal was to legitimate her relationship with her life partner, Chiyo Monma (Frederick 2003). Yoshiya did not write for Seitō or adopt the radical views of Itō or Kaneko, but she did publicly defend girls' intimate friendships as late as 1936, at a time when the government banned S stories as "feminine and weak" (Dollase forthcoming). Donald Keene and others mention Yoshiya's collaboration with the government during the war. Frederick (2001) notes that "Yoshiya has not been the object of much scholarship even in the narrower field of 'Japanese women writers,' and her wartime failings have been emphasized in what there is, rather out of proportion to her other works."
(15) Makoto Furukawa cites a 1911 newspaper article by Yūzō Shimanaka claiming that seven or eight women out of ten had experienced love between women (1994:115).
(16) Thorn (personal communication). Bishōnen zukan was published by Heibonsha (Tokyo, 2001).
(17) Gary Leupp says that since ancient times in China, the character for "color" has been understood as a euphemism for sex, and that Japanese and Chinese dictionaries include "sensual pleasure" as one of its definitions (1995:7). An alternative term, used almost interchangeably for many years, was shudō, an abbreviation of wakashudō (the way of youths), from wakashu (adolescent male) and dō (way). The use of shudō was confined largely to the Edo period (1600-1868), whereas nanshoku predated and postdated it (Pflugfelder 1999:26). For nanshoku, see McLelland (2000c); for shudō, Pflugfelder (1999:26-27).
(18) Gregory Pflugfelder's book about nanshoku is unsurpassed. Most of the best works in English about nanshoku have been published only in the past 15 years. See, e.g., Gary Leupp; Makoto Furukawa; Tsuneo Watanabe and Jun'ichi Iwata; Mark McLelland; Paul Gordon Schalow; Stephen Miller; and Timon Screech.
(19) The translation is by Schalow (1993:5).
(20) Schalow's extensively annotated translation, The Great Mirror of Male Love, was published in 1990. It includes an interesting look at Saikaku's career. According to Lane (1958), stories from Nanshoku ōkagamiwere translated into French in 1927, and English the following year. Schalow's translation of five stories from Nanshoku ōkagami are in Miller (1996), together with a story translated by Robert Lyons Danly, Hanyū no nedōgu (Flyboys), from another Saikaku novel.
(21) Gerstle (1996:317-320;1997:312). The play is Shinjū yoigōshin (Love Suicides on the Eve of the Kōshin Festival, April 1722); a translation is in Gerstle (2001).
(22) Xavier's letter quoted in Robert Ellis (2003:162).
(23) For plots against the government, see Shio Sakanishi (1937: 290,302n); for the affair with the court lady, see Hubert Cieslik (1954:9). For e-fumi, see Mario Marega (1939); for the Kirishitan shūmon, Christal Whelan (1992:370) and Cieslik (1954:41). Japanese authorities feared Westerners would use the missionaries as a wedge to subvert the government by stealth, fears which seemed to be borne out as some missionaries went underground rather than leave when Japan ordered them expelled. Ellis says the Spanish "referred to the Japanese archipelago as the Islas Platarias [Silver Isles, and] dreamed of finding silver deposits exceeding in wealth even the riches of the Andes" (2003:167) whose resources they had plundered.
(24) The two best sources for nanshoku's evolution and decline in the modern era are Furukawa, who provides interesting details from the late Meiji-early Taishō periods, and Pflugfelder.
(25) (1994:112). Although he does not identify it as such, Furukawa provides a key element of the classic definition of a moral panic: attacking a relatively defenseless group in order to damage a more powerful one. In this case the newspapers used their attacks on the Satsuma students as a way to impugn their parents, some of whom were high government officials. One newspaper wrote in 1899: "The foolish young men who wear white hakama and try to perform despicable acts on bishōnen are the spawn of such men..." (1994:113). Hakama refers to a student group known as the White Hakama, after the white skirt-trousers they were said to wear. Pflugfelder says their name "is homophonous, perhaps not fortuitously, with that of a band of young Aizu samurai who fought valiantly but perished on the bakufu [Tokugawa] side" in the struggle which saw the bakufu overthrown in 1868 (1999:219n).
(26) The Division was established in 1898. Primary school education became mandatory about 25 years earlier. Wilbur Fridell describes schools becoming the vehicle for inculcating an ideology of absolute loyalty to the emperor and nation after the Meiji government's failed attempts to do so using first the Shintō religion and then Shintō and Buddhism (1970).
(27) The ascendance of the medico-scientific model of sex had a profound impact on how Japanese understood male-male sexuality. Before, sexual topography was divided into either nanshoku or joshoku (male love of females)-- a phallocentric representation of sexual alternatives available to men. It was largely replaced by the dyad of dōseiai (same-sex love) and iseai (cross-sex love), which categorizes eroticism solely on biological sex. "While the two mappings overlapped to a certain degree," writes Pflugfelder, "they were not coextensive." The dōseiai/iseai distinction "implied that the resemblance between male-male and female-female sexualities outweighed their differences.... In this way, the notion of 'same-sex love' was built upon the expectation that male-female interaction represented the sexual norm" (1999:251-252). In addition, under this new system, the designations male and female involved not only the physical attributes of sex but aspects of behavior and personality, i.e., gender. In males, the sexual "drive" was seen as aimed inherently toward females with the result that, "Male-male and female-female sexuality thus contradicted not only erotic norms, but the integrity of the sex/gender system as a whole" (1999:253-4).
(28) Roden (1990:45-46,52). He says Hentai seiyokuron was modeled after Krafft-Ebing's work. At about the same time, says Sheldon Garon (1994:359,361), the Japanese branch of the U.S. Women's Christian Temperance Union (Nihon kirisutokyō fujin kyōfūkai) crusaded for the abolition of the state-supported system of licensed prostitution and strongly supported the police crackdown on the dance halls and cafes frequented by the so-called modern girls (Note 29) and modern boys. The cafes were one of the few places where young men and women of the urban middle classes could mingle socially (Elise Tipton, 2002).
(29) (Frühstück 2000:352-353). The upscale young urban women called moga, or modan gāru (modern girl), were seen as counter to the Japanese spirit by those on the political right. Many men on the left trivialized moga. Miriam Silverberg says moga was a media creation designed to portray women as promiscuous and apolitical. It was a way of displacing the militancy expressed in their political activity, labor in new arenas and adoption of new fashions. By the outset of the Pacific war (Japan was at war from 1931-1945), moga had become a threat to tradition, and gender boundaries were re-inscribed, with symbols of Western decadence outlawed, including permanent waves in hairstyling (Silverberg 1991:260). For left-wing condemnation of moga, see Barbara Sato (2003:37-40). For censorship generally at this time see Jay Rubin; also Richard Mitchell.
(30) Furukawa gives this as Shizu no odamaki (The Spool of Hemp) and says it was a highly regarded story of the love between Sangorō Hirata and a samurai. It was so well known that in 1893 a Tokyo newspaper, in describing a boy's abduction by older youths, characterized him as "a bishōnen in whom lived the spirit of Hirata Sangorō of Satsuma..." (1994:101,123-124).
(31) Furukawa (1994:104). Nanshoku might have continued into World War II. Pflugfelder says that in an unpublished study compiled during the early 1940s, the physician and social researcher Shigeyuki Komine "speculated that newspapers routinely quashed reports" of same-sex suicide among soldiers or sailors (1999:328). It is unclear whether same-sex relations in the armed forces may have been age or status differentiated; the former was a prerequisite of classical nanshoku. Postwar critics such as Masao Yamazaki "emphasized the interrelationship of nanshoku, 'emperor-system ideology,' and the imperial military forces" but Pflugfelder notes "it should not be imagined that officials in wartime Japan would have explicitly acknowledged any such linkage."
(32) Perper and Cornog (2002:49), quoting Rhiannon Paine. Violence and sexism in manga are complex subjects, as may be seen from these five analyses:
Perper and Cornog reviewed all commercially available translated manga in the U.S. with significant erotic content which they could obtain between 1999 and 2001 (about 53,000 pages). They identified 87 stories with rape or sexual assault, of which 80 "show the woman or others taking violent, often murderous, revenge on sexual attackers." Of the five in which the revenge motif is absent, none describe the rape positively or neutrally. There were two in which the rape is depicted as desired by the person attacked. The authors acknowledge that American publishers of translated manga are selective but conclude, "there seems to be little marketing reason for American publishers systematically to pick stories that show women's retaliation and revenge in images as striking as those in our sample" (2002:81). In a subsequent article, they report reviewing additional manga stories: "The occurrence of rape-revenge is a major trope in sexually explicit manga. It is not an artifact arising from our use of a translated sample, because the rape-revenge theme occurs in untranslated manga and in Japanese film, like Takashi Ishii's 2000 live-action Freeze Me and Yoshiaki Kawajiri's 1992 animated Wicked City" (forthcoming). Both articles have informative analyses of erotic manga narratives.
Kinko Ito analyzed 29 volumes of men's weekly manga published in Japan at the end of 1990 and the beginning of 1991. Of the 254 stories with female protagonists, 57 percent contained "sexism of varying forms from manifest to very subtle." Ito does not define "sexism," but in its definition conflates gang rape and murder with what may be consensual activities: e.g., "lesbian sex," "women masturbating," a college student who "loses his virginity" to a sex worker at a soapland, a type of brothel (Ito 1995:127-137). In another article Ito says that "concerned citizen groups protested [against manga] for the sake of innocent children" in the early 1990s, but fails to mention Kinsella's observation (2000a:152-155) that many of these groups were fronts for the government agencies regulating manga and were operating during a moral panic (Ito 2000; see also Ito 1994).
McLelland (2000a:67-69) reviewed 300 volumes of manga for how it treats heterosexual sex. He concludes, "Heterosexual sex...is rarely presented as an equitable exchange in men's manga, mainly because the men are either aggressive super-heroes or miserable failures. In the first case, sex is a commodity men take from women and in the latter case it is a commodity women bestow on men."
Anne Allison provides a nuanced reading of selected cartoons in six issues of erotic manga. Even as she acknowledges that erotic manga is misogynistic and "embed[s] and thereby foster[s] an ideology of gender chauvinism and crude masochism," she finds "a decentering of sex, gender, and even power from male genitalia." She says this disjuncture represents "a move away from something that only men could possess and onto things that could become feminized, degendered, or even disclaimed" and thus hints at a different type of social order which might change the construction of gendered identity (2000b:78-79).
Setsu Shigematsu, in an analysis of rorikon (erotic manga marketed to males which features young girls) and ladies' comics (manga marketed to women, much of which is erotic), seeks to decouple the binary heteronormative assumptions between object choice and gender identity. She argues that identifications are mobilized through a fluid zone of desires (see infra and Note 68 for her description). Citing news articles by Western journalists such as Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times, Shigematsu concludes that rorikon and rape fantasy in ladies' comics are "too easily labeled as retrograde substitutes or perversions of 'real-wholesome-straight-sex,'" and that critiques such as Kristof's "are used to stabilize and recenter the privilege and practice of heteronormativity" (1999:150-151).
(33) Pflugfelder (1992:353,355).
(34) Tonomura quoting Rita M. Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism, p. 10.
(35) (1992:355). Tonomura provides another example of how Western thinking essentialized women:
[E]arly church fathers, between the first and fourth centuries, feminized the flesh by associating man with reason and woman with the body, condemning "not only...the realm of simulation or representations...[but] almost anything pleasurable attached to material embodiment." In the High Middle Ages, as romanticism was invented, desire came to be refocused more on human beings and less on divinity, but romantic notions of idealized woman and love essentialized and dehumanized women. (1994:154, quoting R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love, Chicago, 1991, p 9.)
Moreover, in medieval Japan
there was an utter lack of social prescription regarding virginity, unlike in the medieval West, where virginity was "a defining constant of both theological and literary works" that helped to transform the antifeminism of early Christian writing into "an idealization both of woman and of love." (1994:141, quoting Bloch p. 10.)
(36) Leupp (1995:172-178).
(37) Tezuka was called the kami-sama (god) of manga for his enormous influence on manga and animation.
(38) Sabdha Charlton (2001) provides an informative review of Shōjo Kakumei Utena (Revolutionary Girl Utena), a tale of students in a fantastical boarding school whose narrative centers on the girls Utena and Anthy. Charlton terms Shōjo Kakumei Utena a suite of productions since it comprises a tv series, movie and manga. The movie, Utena: Adolescence Mokushiroku (The Adolescence of Utena, 1998), directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara, was released in the U.S. as Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie, in 2001 and is available from AnimeNation and other sources. It is a tour de force for its story and execution.
(39) Called the 24 nen gumi (year group) because many were born in 1949, the 24th year of the Shōwa period, others include Riyoko Ikeda, Yumiko Oshima and Machiko Satonaka. Ikeda created the hugely popular and influential manga Berusaiyu no bara (The Rose of Versailles, 1972), a work as beloved by many Japanese as, perhaps, is The Wizard of Oz by North Americans.
Thorn (forthcoming) says the 24 nen gumi developed sexual ambiguity as a primary theme of shōjo manga and introduced new genres such as science fiction and fantasy. Some of the original boys' love manga artists went on to explore even more explicit boundaries of gender crossing, as did Hagio with gender-variant characters in science fiction (Ebihara 2002).
Many sources give Hagio's Jūichigatsu no gimunajiumu (November Gymnasium, 1971) as the first boys' love manga. Tomoko Aoyama says Hideko Mizuno's Fire (1968) was the first shōjo manga story to feature a male protagonist (1988:187). She observes that "male homosexuality was never popular among female writers of novels and short stories at it was among shōjo manga writers." Aoyama describes three novellas by Mari Mori published in magazines in 1961-1962 about the love between an adult and adolescent male (1988:191). M.J. Johnson (2002) notes that today many shōjo manga/anime about a male-female relationship also show emotional connections among the male characters.
(40) Kosei Ono (2002). Midori Matsui (1993:186) subjects Gilbert to a Kristevan analysis, claiming his "sexual defilement" represents an abjection which adolescent girl readers of the manga reject in order to be accepted by the patriarchal culture.
(41) Thorn (1997).
(42) Thorn (forthcoming). He also says that publication of Takemiya's work was delayed several years due to its depiction of sex between boys.
(43) Iwamoto at the Yaoi-Con press conference, 19 October 2002. She said boys typically will ask a girl to purchase these titles.
(44) McLelland (2000:78) says that the bishōnen "can be read as a figure of resistance: both to the notion that biology is destiny and to the correlation between biology and gender role."
(45) Sato's complaint is not devoid of merit. To a young Japanese boy beginning to realize same-sex erotic desires, bishōnen are perhaps the only visual representation of same-sex desiring males in the mass media, save for the transvestite entertainers favored by television and the gender-ambiguous members of some J-pop bands. Japanese boys are well aware of bishōnen since boys' love manga such as BeBoy can be bought at convenience stores in even small towns, according to Iwamoto. But to my mind, this is better than the invisibility or homophobia of much of the North American mainstream media. And for the (presumably) subset of same-sex desiring boys who identify as bishōnen and/or desire them as sexual objects, perhaps they feel fortunate.
(46) Thorn (personal communication). Suzuki says the dōjinshi created during the Captain Tsubasa boom were among the first to reflect four factors which gave the yaoi movement impetus: (1) amateur publications were outside mass media restrictions, (2) teenagers, who comprise the majority of yaoi readers, encouraged other teens to write, (3) yaoi is premised on widely known characters and settings, and (4) the characters were depicted as ordinary teenage boys or men in their twenties, the same age group as yaoi fans (Suzuki 1998:252).
(47) Dōjinshi are unlike U.S. comics. They often have one major story, a minor story or two, sketches, and comments from the artist(s). Their visual style follows manga's cinematic techniques. Pages are designed to be read quickly: events flow across panels and the panels morph to suit the action. Sometimes the action stops, and one page may depict nothing more than leaves falling, the symbolic imagery conveying emotion. The brush and pen work is often fluid and sparing, though sometimes scenes are full of detail. Printing is usually high quality.
As befits a visual medium, dialogue is often minimal. Words, too, become symbolic, invested with meanings that lie under the surface. Voices are polyvalent. Takayuki Yokota-Murakami calls this "little, superfluous, self-referential" commentary from other characters, imagined comments by a reader, or the manga artist's own voice. The effect is that, "A subject does not dominate the text. The text just floats somewhere in between" (Yokota-Murakami 1996). This may heighten the ambiguity of the story. The artist uses the Japanese kanji in an onomatopoeic manner to create sound effects, and inking much as lighting is used in theatre. The result is a rich, multi media-like experience.
Sharon Kinsella observes that in Japanese yaoi the symbolic appearance of the characters and their emotions became far more important than plotlines adapted from the canonical works (1998a).
(48) Yaoi in Japan appears to have arisen independently of slash, though both genres were influenced, as Thorn says, "by a global questioning of gender and sexuality" (personal communication). Ebihara (2002) says Hagio cited Western science fiction author Ursula Le Guin as a major influence on her works in the mid-1980s. Other Western authors who influenced shōjo manga artists were speculative fiction writers such as Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr. and Suzy McKee Charnas, especially their feminist-themed science-fiction stories, which Marlene Barr termed "feminist fabulation." Thorn says Takemiya illustrated the covers for a paperback series of Le Guin's works, and that Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness was translated into Japanese in 1972 and Russ' "When It Changed" in 1974 (personal communication).
For an example of Russ' feminist fabulation, see The Adventures of Alyx, stories published originally from 1967 to 1970. Russ wrote slash stories under the pseudonyms Janet Alyx and Janet Alex in the mid-1980s. She also wrote about the slash genre under her own name. Despite J. Z. Eglington's claim in March 1976 of "hundreds and hundreds" of Kirk/Spock slash stories (presumably in English), I have found no evidence of contact between the Japanese yaoi and Western slash communities before the mid-1980s. At that time, according to Thorn, Yasuko Aoike's shōjo manga Eroika tori ai o komete (From Eroica with Love) was translated into English and slash fans produced a large body of slash fiction and illustrations based on it.
(49) Susan Napier says that amine's popularity grew enormously in the U.S. during the 1990s (2001:6). She cites Time magazine reporting that by 1999 at least half of all releases from Japanese studios were animated (2001:15). By the late 1990s, "it was clear that anime both influenced and was influenced by a plethora of Western cultural products" (2001:22).
(50) When the archive FanFiction.net deleted its NC-17-rated stories in 2002, an online protest petition generated almost 25,000 signatures in about two weeks. Most signers included comments. Of those I sampled, some identified themselves as minors who had posted NC-17 works. One claimed her NC-17 fiction was among the most popular at the archive. Several comments mentioned yaoi; none slash. Several were in Spanish; the remainder in English (comments for signers number 21,121 to 24,098 for the petition Reverse the NC-17 Ruling on Fanfiction.net!, accessed 5 October 2002). Authors with stories on FanFiction.net self-rate them.
(51) Zipes says the French elite in the 1690s created and named their stories about power and courtly manners contes de fées. By the early 1700s, the literary fairy tale had evolved into a tool to instruct children in gender- and class-appropriate behavior. After the popular success of the Grimms' tales in the mid-1800s, the brothers having cleansed their narratives of erotic passages (2000:xxii-xxvii), artists in the major romance languages up to the present tend to produce children's fairy tales as didactic stories designed to uphold the status quo, especially when the story is disseminated via a mass medium such as television or movies (1999:26-27).
(52) Nitid, "How A Diehard Mulder-Scully Shipper Became A Yaoi Advocate," no date, accessed 4 May 2003.
(53) National Public Radio, Talk of the Nation, "E.L. Doctorow," 1 May 2003 (accessed 11 May 2003).
(54) Suzuki says police began checking dōjinshi at Comiket. See also Dan Kanemitsu, "Doujinworld: The Subculture of the Japanese Non-Commercial Comic Book Publishing Community," Comics Research Bibliography (accessed 20 April 2003).
(55) Aoyama (1988:189) mentions an early criticism of boys' love manga in a Western feminist journal, citing Kate Brady's 1980 article, in which she "points out that the exclusive use of male homosexuality-- and no lesbian romances-- 'is merely one more way of keeping reality at bay.'" (Quoting Brady, Kate, "From Fantasy to Reality: Magazines for Women," Feminist International, Number 2, 1980.)
(56) The group is A Favor de lo Mejor (Favoring the Best). In Sailor Moon S, Haruka dresses in boys' clothes and displays affection toward another female, Michiru; the series also has a talking cat, presumably satanic in the eyes of A Favor de lo Mejor. Ranma 1/2's protagonist is a teenage boy who repeatedly changes gender to comic effect (Gaby Maya, personal communication).(57) Press reports say that the Finnish publisher suspended sales of Dragonball Z after women members of Parliament demanded state prosecutorial authorities act to protect children ("Age limit imposed on comic with paedophile references," 21 May 2003 and "Publisher withdraws Dragon Ball comic," 22 May 2003, Helsingin Sanomat International Edition). In the U.S., the store Toys "R" Us removed Dragonball Z from its shelves because of a nude character (Fowler, Note 59).
(58) The manager of Keith's Comics in Dallas, Texas, Jesus Castillo, was convicted on obscenity charges in 2000. He had sold a copy of Demon Beast Invasion: The Fallen #2 to an undercover police officer. An adaptation of the popular anime Legend of the Overfiend, the comic was in the store's adult section. Castillo was sentenced to a year's probation and fined $4,000. His appeal was rejected. The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) is to appeal to the Supreme Court. An article on the CBLDF's Website implies the prosecution was politically motivated. It cites an article from a local PTA newsletter and says it:
mentioned that the store was "under investigation" by a city councilwoman in response to citizen complaints.... The city councilwoman involved in our case first made a name for herself with an agenda promising to "clean up" the city and threatening renewed action against purveyors of adult entertainment. Local observers tell us that this same woman stands a good chance of being elected the city's next mayor.
(CBLDF, "Trouble in Texas: Trial Looms," November 2000; Pappalardo, Joe, "Dirty Pictures," Dallas Observer, 4 January 2001; CBLDF, "CBLDF To Appeal Castillo Decision To The U.S. Supreme Court," news release, 5 November 2002.)
Oklahoma City's Planet Comics closed in March 1996 after owners Michael Kennedy and John Hunter pled guilty to two felony obscenity charges for selling the comic Verotika #4 to adults. They had been charged with four felonies and four misdemeanors carrying a prison sentence of 43 years. Following their arrest, Planet Comics was evicted and the owners took a less visible location across town. During the next few months, sales dropped 80 percent and a brick was thrown through the store's door. Kennedy and Hunter received a three-year suspended sentence and fines of $1,500 each (CBLDF, "Planet Comics Opts for Deferred Sentence," 1997).
(59) Sources:
- Card Captor Sakura: Considine, J.D., "Making Anime a Little Safer for Americans," The New York Times, 20 January 2002;
- Sailor Moon S: Sebert, Paul, "Kissing Cousins May Bring Controversy," The Daily Athenaeum, 28 June 2000;
- Dragonball Z: Fowler, Jimmy, "International Incident," Dallas Observer, 20 January 2000;
See also Drazen re Kite (sex, pp. 56-57), Digimon (age-appropriate conduct, p. 58) and Card Captor Sakura (religion, p. 167); and Levi re Star Blazers (anti-U.S., p. 7).
(60) The following discussion is a synopsis from reading 21 essays, mostly about yaoi, some about slash and a few about both; comments reported in two surveys of slash authors (totaling 54 respondents); and conversations with yaoi fans.
(61) Russ (1985). Ellipses mine. This desire for freedom applies in both cultures. Thorn (forthcoming) describes the Osaka comic market: "There was a powerful energy in the air: this space belonged to these girls and women, and they were reveling in it." I saw something similar at Yaoi-Con: the enthusiasm in the room for the Writing Lemony panel was off the scale. A lemon is a story with explicit sex.
(62) Allison citing the gender theorist Judith Butler and psychoanalytic scholars Jean Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis (2000b:124-125).
(63) Allison (2001), citing Bettelheim. Gerard Jones calls children's play with action figures such as Pokémon organizing fantasies, and says this process can be more important than the simple excitement of the action (2002:223).
(64) "Why the Guys? or, Navel-gazing on a Sunny Afternoon," Aestheticism (no date), accessed 25 April 2003.
(65) From Mia's survey of 22 slash authors (2000). Respondents were obtained from e-mail mailing lists. According to Mia's classifications they reported their sexual orientation as: heterosexual: 10, bisexual: five, lesbian: three, "some ambiguity or uncertainty ('mostly heterosexual', '(mostly) heterosexual,' 'straight-ish,' 'probably bi')": four.
(66) From Barker's survey of 32 slash authors (2002). Respondents obtained via questionnaires sent to authors who had posted stories to one slash archive site. More than half the respondents said they were bisexual or "open"; three described themselves as lesbian; the rest as heterosexual.
Salmon and Symons asked members of a mainstream romance readers group, none of whom had read a male-male romance, to read Marion Zimmer Bradley's novel The Catch Trap (about two male trapeze artists who work together and fall in love), and complete a questionnaire designed to elicit their reactions to the work and their views on romances. Seventy-eight percent reported they enjoyed the novel at least as much as they enjoy most mainstream romances. Significantly more said they enjoyed it "somewhat more than average" than said they enjoyed it "somewhat less than average." The authors conclude that most women who read romances can enjoy a male-male romance and identify with one or both protagonists. They also reported that almost every subject who enjoyed the novel said she would have enjoyed it as much if the sex scenes, which Salmon and Symons characterize as "very tame by mainstream romance and slash standards," had been more graphic (2001:78-80).
Barker, Mia, and Salmon and Symons provide useful reviews of the academic literature on slash. The latter interpret slash from an evolutionary psychology point of view. There is very little scholarly literature in English about yaoi that I know of outside of the works cited in the sources for this article.
(67) Welker (2002) cites a group interview in the lesbian magazine Aniisu (Anise, 2001), in which several participants said boys' love manga had a great influence as they were growing up. One interviewee said that her sense of values came directly from 1970s shōjo manga. They named works such as Ikeda's Berusaiyu no bara, Takemiya's Kaze to ki no uta, the boys' love manga June and the tanbiha (cult of aestheticism) magazine Aran (Allan). Welker says this discourse helped shape Japanese lesbian identities.
(68) Shigematsu (1999:136). She is positing a process of identification more fluid and unstable than Freud described in his essay "A Child is Being Beaten." She also notes that identifications are never completed and are not under a subject's conscious control (1999:157).
(69) Thorn defines "queer" in Alexander Doty's meaning of inhabiting the boundaries between the binaries of gender and sexuality and evoking complex, uncategorizable, erotic responses from spectators who claim different sexual identities. He is describing yaoi cosplay in Japan but I saw similar behavior at Yaoi-Con, which is held in the U.S.
(70) Schalow (1998) discusses the latter, using Kitamura Kigin's Wild Azaleas and Maidenflowers as an example of the conceptual categories of "male homoerotic poetry" and "women's poetry" in early modern Japan. See also Sinnott (2002).
(71) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick defined queer as: "the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, or anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically" (quoted in Amy-Chinn, 2002).
(72) In thinking about these categories as labile in Western culture, consider the increasingly outspoken community of gender-variant individuals, some of whom are militating against standard medical practice of assigning male or female sex to genitally ambiguous newborns, as well as the promotion of alternative theoretical constructs for gender dysphoria (see e.g., Anne Lawrence, "Sexuality and Transsexuality: A New Introduction to Autogynephilia," 2000, accessed 25 April 2003).
(73) Burning is in a compilation of stories titled Shōnen Hump Volume 2 (2002). Shōnen means "boy"; the title may be a take-off on that of the best-selling Japanese boys' manga Shōnen Jump. Shōnen Hump Volume 1 was published at Yaoi-Con 2001.
(74) Examples of non-Japanese Flash-based animation are at Wired. An informative Website about technical topics in producing anime, including the use of Flash, is Understanding Anime.
(75) Japanese manga for young people have treated racial tensions in the U.S. frankly and relatively early-- e.g., Machiko Satonaka's Watashi no Jonī (My Johnny, 1968) cited in Schodt (1997:98)-- but John Russell (1996) documents a lack of sensitivity toward foreign racial minorities in contemporary Japan. Most of the Western yaoi fiction I have read is based on canon in which the characters on a closely-knit team are from diverse racial/cultural backgrounds. In canonical text and fan fiction, their differences and issues relating to their integration as regards race and culture are rarely dealt with openly but tend to be subsumed into aspects of their personalities, presumably to maintain group harmony. I do not know if the burgeoning genre of Harry Potter slash subverts the race and class roles Jack Zipes criticized in the canon: "[N]inety-nine percent of the characters are white. The focus is on white boys at a private school.... [Harry Potter] contributes to enhancing the idea that little white boys, extremely gifted white boys, are chosen to rule the world" (Wisconsin Public Radio, To the Best of Our Knowledge, "Children Lost and Found," 8 October 2000, accessed 11 May 2003).
(76) The Supreme Court has said that the fair use doctrine calls for case-by-case analysis. Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 114 S.Ct. 1164 (1994). Hence, yaoi creators are not immune to harassment from corporations with deep pockets. Although attorney Rebecca Tushnet says "Noncommercial users are rarely, if ever, found liable for copyright infringement," she observes fans can be intimidated. She provides examples of past actions by corporations such as Disney, Lucasfilm and the owners of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and recommends copyright law be changed to affirmatively recognize fan fiction's legitimacy ("Legal Fictions: Copyright, Fan Fiction, and a New Common Law," 17 Loy. L.A. Ent. L.J. 651). A key test under copyright law is whether the fan's work transforms the original. Transformative, said the Court in Campbell, means "add[ing] something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning, or message...." Justice Souter wrote for the majority, "[T]he goal of copyright, to promote science and the arts, is generally furthered by the creation of transformative works. Such works thus lie at the heart of the fair use doctrine's guarantee of breathing space within the confines of copyright...and the more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of other factors, like commercialism, that may weigh against a finding of fair use."Attorney Judith Gran believes non-profit fan fiction qualifies as fair use: "[A] non-commercial, transformative use of the original would be entitled to an even stronger presumption of fairness. This is especially so in the case of a non-commercial, transformative use that presumes its consumers will also have consumed the original" ("Fan Fiction and Copyright," August 1999; see also "Censored").
Yaoi fans posting to Websites copyrighted material such as video files, screenshots and anime transcripts without transforming it could be targeted, as 20th Century Fox Television did Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan sites (Graham, Paula, "Buffy Wars: The Next Generation," Rhizomes Issue 4, Spring 2002, accessed 3 May 2003).(77) Ashcroft v. ACLU, No. 99-1324 (2003). The law is the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). It includes written texts and images. Requiring a credit card, digital certificate or "any other reasonable measures" to verify age are only an affirmative defense and would not prevent prosecution. Warnings on yaoi sites for children not to enter are irrelevant under the statute. An appeal to the Supreme Court is likely (see the COPA page at the American Civil Liberties Union). In an earlier ruling most of the Court's justices expressed skepticism as to COPA's constitutionality. The Court unanimously overturned a predecessor law, the Communications Decency Act (Greenhouse, Linda, "Justices Give Reprieve to an Internet Pornography Statute," The New York Times, 14 May 2002).
(78) Ashcroft v. The Free Speech Coalition, 122 S. Ct. 1389 (2002). The six-to-three vote makes it unlikely any subsequent legislative attempt against "virtual" child pornography which might jeopardize yaoi will withstand constitutional scrutiny.
(79) Yuri denotes relationships, often represented explicitly, between girls or women in anime and manga. "What are yuri and shoujoai, anyway?" Yuricon, accessed 5 June 2003.
(80) Allison (2001). She says this has accelerated in more recent toys "such as Tamagotchi-- the portable digital pet lacking ostensible gender-- and Pokèmon with a myriad of parts few of which break down overtly by gender."
(81) Tyr, "Why Yaoi?" Gundam Wing Addiction, accessed 20 April 2003.
Kashō Takabatake and the Chigo Stories
by Mark McHarry
According to the biographical timeline on the Kashō Museum's website, the popular illustrator Kashō Takabatake (1888-1966) remained unmarried. In 1944, when he was 56, Kashō adopted his apprentice, Mitsuru Inoue, who took the name Kako Takabatake. "Ka" in their given names means flower.
The two lived together many years. Kako married the same year he was adopted; a book recounts the births of Kashō's grandchildren. In 1959, Kashō and Kako moved to Hawaii and the following year to Los Angeles, where they opened a small art school. When Kako died in 1985, he was buried with Kashō. Both their names are on the gravestone. (1)
This work by Kashō, Gekkou no kyoku (Moonlight Melody), below, appeared in the magazine Nippon shōnen (Japanese Boy) in 1930.
It recalls another nighttime scene of a youth playing the flute, this one from a medieval scroll illustrating a well-known acolyte story, Chigo Kannon Engi (Acolyte Kannon's Tale). (2)
According to the story told by the scroll, below, the figure on the right is a monk. Longing for companionship in his old age, for three years and three months he made monthly visits to the Hasedera temple, a shrine to the Buddhist deity Kannon, to pray he might find a disciple. One night, on a desolate plain below the temple, he sees a lovely youth of 13 or 14 dressed in a shimmering lavender robe playing a melancholy tune on a Chinese flute. So beautiful is he the monk takes him for an apparition.
Chigo Kannon Engi (Acolyte Kannon's Tale)
Section of a handscroll; ink, colors and gold on paper; height 31.5 cm; total length 983.6 cm. 14th century. Kosetsu Museum of Art, Kobe
In independent scholar Christine Guth's account,
The young man soon convinces him otherwise. After spending three happy years together, the novice suddenly and inexplicably falls ill and dies. When the heartbroken monk performs the final rites before the coffin, Kannon reveals himself before the astonished assembly.
The homosexual relationship between the monk and novice implied in this tale expresses both Kannon's compassion and his accommodation to the needs of a situation. Kannon has appeared to the old man to teach him about human transience and the futility of earthly pleasures. This goal is accomplished because, as the monk's lover, Kannon has become fully integrated in his life. For the Japanese, this didactic message hit home precisely because the story was so firmly grounded in the familiar realities of monastic life. (3)
Japanese Literature Professor Margaret Childs, who translated Chigo Kannon Engi into English, says this reality was reflected in the popular saying about the Buddhist priests who taught chigo (acolytes) in the mountain temples: "Ichi chigo ni sanno" (Chigo come first, the god of the mountain, second). (4)
Another element of Japanese culture to which this tale speaks is mono no aware (a sense of pathos or sadness about things). Antonia Levi defines this today as "the idea that nothing is quite so beautiful as something which is about to end. Its very impermanence adds to its beauty." (5) However Childs notes that
While the language which is used in chigo monogatari [chigo stories] to describe romantic encounters echoes that of Heian love tales, the essential theme of the latter, a bittersweet sense of mono no aware...has given way to the more powerful, tragic concept of transience.... (1980:129)
Chigo Kannon Engi exemplifies the Buddhist notion of hoben, or expedient means, in aiding humans in the quest for enlightenment. It is one of several chigo monogatari from medieval times. Childs discusses eight in her article "Chigo Monogatari: Love Stories or Buddhist Sermons?" Two she calls "simply entertaining love stories." In the others, love is used to present a religious lesson:
These exploit the elegant style of the Heian-period love tales, but, with some action and drama, they develop the concept of transience as experienced by Buddhist priests in the same way as medieval war tales reveal its meaning for warriors (1980:131).
The illustrations on the Chigo Kannon Engi scroll bring the story to life. We see the monk encountering the youth on the windswept plain and watch the two standing there talking. We then see the novice in the monk's home. Accompanied by a person with a stringed instrument, the youth plays his flute for guests as the monk looks on contentedly. In a sudden and dramatic shift, we see the same two rooms, but the novice lays dead or dying, attended to by some people, as the grief stricken monk sits with his head in his hands in the adjoining room. The precise brushstrokes and spare colors have an immediacy and impact which make the story as powerful today as it was to those who saw it 700 years ago.
Although a high-quality reproduction was published in a book after Kashō's death, (6) perhaps he saw the original. In both Kashō's illustration and the scroll's scene of the monk encountering the novice, the youths are dressed in purple, they stand playing the flute in much the same way as the wind tugs at their kimono, and the setting is the nighttime countryside.
Chigo Kannon Engi takes place in Kamakura, on the coast south of Tokyo. The Hasedera temple to Kannon was constructed there in the Kamakura period (1192-1333), probably not long before the scroll was created, when Kamakura was the seat of Japan's first shōgun. The temple remains popular with worshippers and visitors today.
Notes
(1) I am indebted to Matt Thorn for bringing Kashō to my attention.(2) For simplicity, I chose "tale" for "engi" in Chigo Kannon Engi. Watanabe (1935) says that "engi-e" (the "-e" suffix denoting a picture) "is the type of scroll-painting which represents the history of a Buddhist monastery or Shinto shrine, the life of a saint-priest or legend of a Buddhist image."
(3) Guth (1987:16-18). Another description of this story is in Watanabe (1935).
(4) (1980:127). Childs' translations of Chigo Kannon Engi and Genmu Monogatari are in Miller (1996). In Childs (1980), she translates Aki no Yo no Nagamonogatari, which dates from 1377; she says it is considered the archetype of the chigo monogatari genre.
(5) Levi adds, "Cherry blossoms are considered particularly lovely because their duration is so short. Samurai were often compared to cherry blossoms as they rode off to battle. The kamikaze pilots of World War II were likened to falling cherry blossoms as their planes hurtled downward..." (1996:24).
(6) Nihon emaki taisei. Chūo kōronsha, 1977-1979. Chigo Kannon Engi is in volume 24.
(7) Personal communication.
Additional Kashō Illustrations
The titles of Kashō's works shown here may be those of the serialized boys' novels they illustrate. Regarding them, Matt Thorn comments, "No one seems to have raised a fuss about the boys' equivalent [to the Relationship of S], perhaps because boys could carry on reasonably discreet relationships without much restriction.... No one at the time would have identified this literature or illustration as 'homosexual'." (7)
The youth in the kimono protects the one in Western dress.
From the magazine Nippon shōnen (Japanese Boy), 1929
Ayashiki unmei (A Dubious Fate)
From the book Kashō jojou gashu dai ni shu
(Collected Illustrations of Kashō, Volume 2), 1929. The tear in the boy's pants reveals a garter belt. This may have been an illustration for a novel.
The cover of Kashō's Bishōnen zukan, Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2001
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Yaoi Stories Cited
Anria, Thinking About ForeverBrightAngel, Measure for Measure
Chalcedony Cross, Fäden aus Mondlicht
Kai Foster, Coloured Salt, and a Story
Mikkeneko, Spoil of War
Missa and Miriya, As Long As You Love Me
RazorQueen, After the Fire
Rose Argent, RazorQueen, Gaby Maya, Yoshie, and Datenshi, Burning
Saiyana, The Turn-On Tea
Talya Firedancer, Pet Project
Selected Resources
Yaoi Artwork
Yaoi / Yuri Events
Shoujocon
Yaoi Fiction
bishoneninkThe Fan Fiction of Rose Argent
Firedancer's Universe of Chaos
Reviews of Yaoi Fan Fiction and Sites
Ravenwood's Fanfic Reviews and Recommendations
Yuri Fiction
Anime, Bookstores, Dōjinshi, Links, Scholarly, Slash
AestheticismExtensive yaoi information, resources, reviews
Anime Manga Web Essays Archive
Scholarly and fan-written essays; news media articles
AnimeNation
Anime merchandise
AnimeResearch.com
Research on anime and manga, academic and news articles, links
Bibliography of Japanese History Up to 1912
Comprehensive bibliography by Peter Kornicki, University of Cambridge
Biblos
Publisher of Japanese boys' love manga
Central Park Media
Anime and manga
Comic Book Legal Defense Fund
News about North American censorship
Comic Box
Japanese magazine about manga
Comics Research Bibliography
Extensive annotated bibliography
Comiket
Tokyo's comic market
The Foresmutters Project
Slash history
Genderbent
Research re gender fluidity in Japanese pop culture
Greenegret's F/F Slash Fan Fic Links
Yuri and shōjo-ai
Kashō Museum
About the artist Kashō Takabatake
K-Books
Japanese bookstore
Kinokuniya
Japanese bookstore
Mandarake
Japanese bookstore
Radio Comix
Independent comics
Renegade Slash Militia
Slash site reviews
Sequential Tart
Web zine about the comics industry, published by women
Slayage
Peer-reviewed scholarly articles about Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Tokyo Pop
U.S. licensee of anime, books and other products
VIZ
U.S. publisher of manga such as Shonen Jump, videos and other products
Wordsmiths
Essays on yaoi and slash
Yaoi Translation Project
Translations of yaoi dōjinshi and boys' love manga
Yoshiya Nobuko Memorial Museum
About the writer Nobuko Yoshiya