Contemporary Performance Interactions

Contemporary Japanese Women’s Theatre and Visual Arts

Contemporary Performance InterActions Series Editors: Elaine Aston, Lancaster University Brian Singleton, Trinity College Dublin Editorial Advisory Board: Khalid Amine, Bishnupria Dutt, Mark Fleishman, Janelle Reinelt, Freddie Rokem, Joanne Tompkins, Harvey Young Theatre’s performative InterActions with the politics of sex, race and class, with questions of social and political justice, form the focus of the Contemporary Performance InterActions series. Performative InterActions are those that aspire to affect, contest or transform. International in scope, Contemporary Performance Interactions publishes monographs and edited collections dedicated to the InterActions of contemporary practitioners, performances and theatres located in any world context.

Joanne Tompkins THEATRE’S HETEROTOPIAS Performance and the Cultural Politics of Space Forthcoming titles include: Stephen Farrier & Alyson Campbell (editors) QUEER INSTRUMENTS Local Performance Practices and Global Queernesses Des O’Rawe & Mark Phelan (editors) POST-CONFLICT PERFORMANCE, FILM AND VISUAL ARTS Cities of Memory Sarah French PERFORMING POSTFEMINISMS Sexuality and Gender Politics in Contemporary Australian Theatre and Performance Charlotte McIvor MIGRATION AND PERFORMANCE IN CONTEMPORARY IRELAND Towards a New Interculturalism Contemporary Performance InterActions Series Standing Order ISBN 978–1–137–35987–2 Hardback 978–1–137–45593–2 Paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and one of the ISBNs quoted above.

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Contemporary Japanese Women’s Theatre and Visual Arts Performing Girls’ Aesthetics Nobuko Anan Lecturer in Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK

© Nobuko Anan 2016 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-37297-0 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

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The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2016 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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ISBN 978-1-349-55706-6 DOI 10.1057/9781137372987

ISBN 978-1-137-37298-7 (eBook)

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anan, Nobuko, 1973– Contemporary Japanese women’s theatre and visual arts : performing girls’ aesthetics / Nobuko Anan. pages cm Summary: “This book explores the concept of ‘girls’ aesthetics,’ where adult Japanese women create art works about ‘girls’ that resist motherhood. It traces their beginnings in homoerotic novels about schoolgirls around the 1910s and their later expression in early ‘Boys’ Love’ (BL) manga in the 1970s. The aesthetics are also manifested in contemporary theater and dance performances both in avant-garde and popular theater groups (e.g., Takarazuka) as well as in cult films.

‘Girls’ aesthetics’ are distinct from the well-known ‘kawaii’ (cute) culture and contemporary art theories that emphasize the child-like nature of Japanese arts.

The book situates these aesthetics within a history of Japanese performance and visual arts during the modern and contemporary period and links them to historical events such as the violent 1960s leftist movements, the 1970s women’s liberation movements, and the post-war Japan-US relationship. The aesthetics provide an alternative to Western approaches for theorizing women within feminist theory.

This is an important book for scholars and upper-level students of international performance and Japanese studies”— Provided by publisher.

1. Theater—Japan—History. 2. Women in the theater—Japan—History.

3. Aesthetics, Japanese. 4. Performing arts—Japan—Philosophy. 5. Women in the theater—Japan—History—19th century. I. Title.

PN2921.A515 2015 792.0952—dc23 2015026705 Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

To Franklin Chang

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Contents List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: Girls’ Aesthetics

1

1 Girls’ Time, Girls’ Space

18

2 Girlie Sexuality: When Flat Girls Become Three-Dimensional

65

3 Citizen Girls

112

4 “Little Girls” Go West?

152

Afterword: Girls’ Aesthetics as Feminist Practices

177

Notes

181

Bibliography

203

Index

215

vii

List of Illustrations 1.1

Scene from Lear © YUBIWA Hotel 2004

34

1.2

Granddaughters © Shiseido Gallery 2002

57

1.3

Granddaughters © Yanagi Miwa 2003

60

2.1

Illustration from Princess Knight © Tezuka Productions

75

2.2

Illustration by Takahashi Macoto for Shōwa Note © Takahashi Macoto c. 1970–4

76

2.3

Scene from The Heart of Thomas © Hagio Moto/Shogakukan Bunko 1974

79

Scene from The Heart of Thomas © Hagio Moto/Shogakukan Bunko 1974

85

Scene from The Heart of Thomas © Hagio Moto/Shogakukan Bunko 1974

93

2.4 2.5 2.6

Scene from The Heart of Thomas © Studio Life 2010

106

2.7

Scene from Summer Vacation 1999 © NIKKATSU/Aniplex Inc. 1988

109

Scene from The Rose of Versailles © Ikeda Riyoko Production 1972–2

118

Scene from The Rose of Versailles © Ikeda Riyoko Production 1972–3

122

3.3

Scene from The Rose of Versailles © Ikeda Riyoko Production 1972–3

126

3.4

Illustration by Nakahara Jun’ichi for Girls’ Friend © Nakahara Jun’ichi/Himawariya 1937

133

4.1

Profile of the members of KATHY © KATHY c. 2005

154

4.2

Scene from Mission/K © KATHY 2002

166

3.1 3.2

viii

Acknowledgements I would like to thank many people who supported me during the writing of this book. It was Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, my mentor at UCLA, who first opened a door to the world of performance studies for me. Under her guidance, I developed a greater understanding of the body in performance and visual arts, and I am very grateful for her continuing encouragement. Janelle Reinelt, my mentor at the University of Warwick, where I was a Newton International Postdoctoral Fellow, saw the development of this book from the beginning. I am deeply indebted to her for her enthusiasm as well as for her acute comments on multiple drafts. She told me about the Newton program at a conference in LA and this fellowship brought many valuable experiences and encounters. My life would have been very different if we had not met there.

I would also like to thank Elaine Aston, who, with Janelle, read the manuscript and gave me detailed suggestions and comments.

I feel privileged that they shared their thoughts with me. My sincere thanks also go to my teachers, colleagues, and friends, who read parts of the text at various stages and whose work and personal charms have been a source of inspiration for me: Michael Bourdaghs, Sue-Ellen Case, Elin Diamond, Susan Leigh Foster, Milija Gluhovic, Yasuko Ikeuchi, and Jiayun Zhuang. I am also grateful to Tadashi Uchino, Naomi Tonooka, and Azuma Sonoko for providing helpful information. I would like to extend my thanks to the Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College for providing me with a good research environment, and to the School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick for providing abundant scholarly opportunities through which I was able to develop my perspectives. I also thank my colleagues Jane Arnfield, Laura Cull, Elizabeth Kramer, and Jenny Lawson at the School of Arts at Northumbria University. Many thanks go to Elaine Aston and Brian Singleton for including this book in their series, and to Jenny McCall, Peter Cary, and Paula Kennedy at Palgrave Macmillan for their editorial assistance. I would also like to thank Nishihara Momi, my dearest ix

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Acknowledgements

“girl” friend, who helped me locate materials in Japan. I am very grateful for our more than twenty years of friendship.

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the artists and companies who have granted permission for me to print images of their works: Hitsujiya Shirotama of YUBIWA Hotel, Yanagi Miwa, Shiseido Gallery, Hagio Moto, Shōgakukan, Tezuka Productions, Takahashi Macoto, Studio Life, Aniplex, Ikeda Riyoko Production, Himawariya, and KATHY. The book has greatly benefitted from the excellent images they generously provided. Earlier versions of parts of Chapters 3 and 4 appeared as “The Rose of Versailles: Women and Revolution in Girls’ Manga and the Socialist Movement in Japan” in the Journal of Popular Culture (2014) and “KATHY’s Parody of Singin’ in the Rain” in Portrayals of Americans on the World Stage: Critical Essays, edited by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr (2009). Thanks to Wiley and McFarland for permission to reprint them.

My heartfelt thanks go to my parents, Anan Etsuko and Kang Chang Ho, for their love and support. My mother nurtured my girlie sensibilities by introducing me to literature and manga during my childhood. She bought me an issue of the manga magazine Ribbon, which was my first encounter with girls’ manga. She also bought me ten volumes of The Rose of Versailles when it was beyond my means.

My father shaped my critical perspectives through his life as a Korean living in Japan. Whenever I go back to Japan, I find the newspaper clippings that he has left for me on a range of topics from international politics to the Takarazuka Revue. Many thanks to my brothers, Yoshikazu and Yoshimune, who have stayed close to our parents and helped them in many ways while I have been working abroad. Lastly, I would like to thank my partner, Franklin Chang, for commenting on multiple drafts of this book. Although he is not a performance scholar, he has developed a good command of performance theories, which testifies to the amount of time he has spent on my manuscript. For this and for his deep appreciation of girls’ aesthetics, this book is dedicated to him.

Introduction: Girls’ Aesthetics

Japanese girls’ culture can evoke various images. One might think of the so-called kawaii (“cute”) culture exemplified by Hello Kitty.

Or Gothic-Lolita girls hanging out in the streets in Harajuku, Tokyo.

Or perhaps cute fighting girls in girls’ anime (animation) and manga (graphic novels) such as Sailor Moon. These “representatives” of Japanese girls’ culture tell us many things about Japanese society and women. Hello Kitty, a cute “girl” with no mouth, might symbolize Japanese women’s voiceless status. As a matter of fact, Sanrio, the company which designed Hello Kitty, oddly but somewhat suggestively claims that she is not a kitten but a girl in the form of a kitten (Sanrio 2014). Her “official profile” – a “white” girl named Kitty White from London whose favorite dish is apple pie made by her mom (Sanrio 2014) – might symbolize Japanese women’s desire for the West, in a similar way to Gothic-Lolita girls’ performance of their imagined West. Lolita girls’ cuteness also resonates with that of Hello Kitty, but Gothic girls’ dark image might remind us of the association of women with witches who possess mythic power. Fighting girls in anime and manga might reflect Japanese women’s challenge to the dominant gender construction. However, although these “representatives” of Japanese girls’ culture vary in many ways, they are now all part of the global economic circulation, reproduced in various formats such as novelties, toys, films, anime, and so on by big business corporations. In other words, these girls are “authorized.”

In contrast, this book examines the ways in which “girl artists” create girls as an aesthetic category. It also examines the ways in which girls as an aesthetic category are represented in performance and 1

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visual arts. These girl artists are not only involved in experimental art projects, but also in pop-cultural industries, and, as such, they are not immune to market forces. However, they reconfigure what is available to them in this consumerist society in order to create a subversive space. The girls they produce include a group of girls who dream of committing suicide in experimental works by performance troupes YUBIWA Hotel and NOISE; old women as girls in visual artist Yanagi Miwa’s work;1 members of the all-female Takarazuka Revue, which stages heterosexual romances set in the nostalgic West; androgynous girls in Hagio Moto’s and Ikeda Riyoko’s girls’ manga, and many more. I approach these girls primarily from perspectives of performance and feminist studies and interrogate concepts and material manifestation of bodies. In Japanese scholarly and artistic communities exploring girls’ cultures, there are many characterizations of different facets of “girls,” but this monograph traces a genealogy of a particular type of girls, like those mentioned above, and theorizes it for the English-reading audience outside of Japan.

The theoretical framework employed in this book is what I call “girls’ aesthetics,” which celebrate girls who reject stereotypically defined female material bodies. This rejection can be seen in girls’ strategic reconceptualization of the notion of female “innocence.” In many cultural artifacts, such as computer games, anime, or manga, which target heterosexual male consumers, innocence means a lack of heterosexual experience. Male artists and consumers tend to fetishize female innocence, because it increases the pleasure that is derived from the eventual violation of it. Girls’ aesthetics are also obsessed with purity as heterosexual inexperience. However, in contrast to the masculinist notion, it involves the rejection of women’s bodies as reproductive organs and hence heterosexual experience. In girls’ aesthetics, innocence symbolizes nonconformity to the patriarchal, heteronormative social structure.

I call those who share this resistant politics “girls.” Therefore, girls are not necessarily female adolescents. In many pop-cultural works, female adolescent characters are typically searching for a conventional, heterosexual romance. These characters can rebel against traditional social mores in many ways, but they do not fundamentally question dominant gender and sexual ideology, and their eventual goal is heteronormative union. My theorization of girls’ aesthetics occupies a space outside of this conventional representation of

Introduction: Girls’ Aesthetics 3

young women. The kernel of the aesthetics is the resistance to the reduction of women’s bodies to materiality associated with reproductive functions. Girls in this book are preoccupied with “lightness,” freed from their material bodies, which try to drag them down to Mother Earth.

In their examination of Western girls’ cultures (British, American, and Australian), Sally Mitchell and Catherine Driscoll also respectively dissociate girlhood with adolescence. Pointing out the experiences in the imaginative space of modern girls’ novels shared by those from different classes and age groups, Mitchell states that girlhood “signifies … a state of mind rather than a chronological or legal concept” (1995:7). Driscoll discusses the different historical constructions of girlhood and argues that girls in the late modern sense are understood as “not necessarily teenagers and not exclusively young women either; rather, they are defined as in transition or in process to dominant ideas of Womanhood” (2002: 6). As in these approaches, I consider “girlhood” as a “state of mind” and “girls” as those who are in the liminal space between childhood and a conventional version of womanhood. I want to emphasize here that girls in this book see this liminality positively. Driscoll explains that, in Western contexts, girls have been seen as failing to progress into the realm of adulthood-cum-subjecthood, that is, “manhood.” As failures, they have to wait to be “transformed” into women (Driscoll 2002: 56–7).

Girls in this book also experience this stigma in their reality, but they reconfigure such a status, as some girls in Driscoll’s discussion do. Girls’ aesthetics do not see girls as failures. Rather, they reject the masculinist notion of subjecthood. They also reject the stereotypical construction of womanhood and actively wish to stay in the liminal space. In other words, they wish to transform liminality into eternity.

Moreover, like Mitchell’s girls, “girls” in this book live an “imaginative life” (1995: 9). “Girls” here is an aesthetic category referring to certain kinds of representations and those who identify themselves with these representations, such as producers and consumers of “girlie” arts, regardless of their material reality, including their actual age and sex. Indeed, in most of this book I will be discussing how grown-up women, and even a male artist, sympathize with and use these aesthetics. Girls in this book are primarily immaterial images in various art forms, and, as will be elaborated on throughout the book, this “immateriality” is a key concept of the aesthetics. As such, this

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book is not so much about the social and material reality of Japanese women. It is about the ways imaginary girls are constructed and manifested in the arts as a result of the desire of those with “girlie sensibilities” to create an alternative to their everyday reality. While I make a distinction between girls’ imagined sphere and their reality, I am not claiming that their reality is not a construction. My goal is to explore the ways in which girls imaginatively create aesthetics resistant to social constructions of gender and sexuality. They associate adult womanhood with compulsory wifehood and motherhood and challenge the dominant developmental paradigm used to gauge a woman’s life trajectory. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that all adult women live such a life, although, as will be clear in the chapters to follow, the social pressure to do so is relentless in Japan. There are many representations of resistant adult women (including those of wives and mothers) in arts, but discussing them is beyond the scope of this book.

In the liminal space between childhood and adulthood, girls dream of “light,” immaterial, fictional bodies, leaving their “heavy” material reality behind. These bodies in the imaginary sphere are “unproductive.” Girls disregard heteronormativity and often express their erotic sentiments to/for other girls. They can also appear as androgynes in this fantastical world. Indulged in everlastingly young and beautiful images of themselves, girls fantasize that they exist outside of teleological modern time and space. Yet, they are aware that such a girl status is only possible in the imaginary realm. In reality, they will be pushed into the world of adult womanhood when the “right” moment comes. As if to make up for this transience, they often decorate their imaginary world with abundant flowery and sugary images (and hence there are some similarities to kawaii culture). Girls also fill this world with overly sentimental emotions. This excess, together with their love for “fictions” or “fakes,” sometimes resonates with campy sensibilities. Copious images float without anchoring on single signifieds in the immaterial, that is, two-dimensional, imagination in girls’ aesthetics.

The above aspects of girls’ aesthetics manifested in performance in various media are examined in the following chapters, but I will provide here a brief historical overview. What is now typically categorized as Japanese girls’ culture consolidated its place in the market in the 1970s, but girls’ aesthetics originated in girls’ schools that developed

Introduction: Girls’ Aesthetics 5

in modern times around the turn of the twentieth century. In this monograph, by the term “modern” I mean the period roughly from the establishment of the Meiji government in 1868 to the end of World War II. These schools were established to indoctrinate female students with the state-sanctioned ideology of the “good wives, wise mothers” (ryōsai kenbo) in the process of Japan’s nation-building, and here emerged a social category of girls. They were female students who would serve the nation upon graduation by giving birth to and nurturing Japanese citizens. However, girls as an aesthetic category was also developed in these sites, involving those who disregarded these national goals (at least in their imaginations). The female students were isolated from society in girls’ schools so that their virginity was protected, but girls reconceptualized this space of sexual surveillance as a community of those who wished to put off their future roles as reproducers. This was possible because, at least during their studentship, girls could avoid wifehood and motherhood, even though their bodies were ready to fulfil these roles. Magazines targeting schoolgirls were first published around the 1900s, and they played a key role in the development of girls’ aesthetics. Girls used the readers’ columns in these magazines to communicate with other girls and hence create an imagined, exclusive community of girls.

Also, in literary pieces they sent to readers’ columns, they collectively created images of immaterial, “unproductive,” homosexual, and/or androgynous girls living in an ahistorical space. Girls’ rejection of women’s material bodies charged with modernist gender and sexual ideologies thus resulted in the development of the aesthetics that erase these bodies in their imagination. In this sense, girls, although they are a construct of the modern, deny the modern. They resist a modernity that is characterized by a linear progression of time that destines them for wifehood and motherhood.

Girls’ aesthetics survived wartime, but a large shift took place under the US Occupation (1945–52) during the immediate postwar period when co-education was introduced. Many girls lost their homosocial world as a chief site of their everyday lives and had to face a heterosocial environment. However, they sustained their girlie sphere via girls’ magazines. One of the strategies that they employed was to feminize male students in their imaginations. In the prewar period, girls with boyish traits were often depicted in novels. Moreover, girls were attracted to the androgynous features of the male-role players

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of the all-female Takarazuka Revue (Takarazuka kagekidan). To this category of androgynes was added feminized boys in the 1950s. This type of androgynous boy might arguably be the origin of a genre of girls’ manga called Boys’ Love manga that arose in the 1970s and deals with male same-sex romance.2 In the postwar period, the environment surrounding Japanese women has changed greatly, but resistant girls’ aesthetics have not lost their appeal. During the US Occupation, women were finally given suffrage in 19453, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s women’s liberationists challenged the marginalization of women in various facets of society and claimed multiple possibilities for women’s bodies. In the 1980s, women achieved equality with men in respect of employment conditions under the law (although not always in reality); the Equal Employment Opportunity Act (Danjo koyō kikai kintō hō) was issued in 1985. The 1990s witnessed the emergence of many feminists who critiqued women’s involvement in Japan’s imperialism and colonialism, leading them to question the validity of the Self-Defense Forces (Jieitai).4 From the 2000s onwards, many of these debates have been ongoing, with some new issues surrounding women’s employment status in an increasingly neoliberal society and a possible revision of the pacifist constitution in an increasingly right-leaning society. Thus, women have been raising their voices in the public arena and achieved some success in changing their circumstances. Despite these changes, however, girls’ ˉ tsuka Eiji aesthetics continue, and after what critic of girls’ culture O calls “the big bang of girls’ culture”5 in the 1970s (1989: 49; 1996: 205), they are expanding their place from girls’ magazines to various other media. The aesthetics emerged as a reaction to the modern hegemonic gender and sexual ideology which renders women’s bodies as reproductive tools. The survival and expansion of these aesthetics testify to the degree that the conception of women’s bodies remains unchanged, even though women have gained more political visibility. Even in the 2000s and 2010s, male politicians continue to make sexist remarks with regard to women’s reproductive roles, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 4. What girls’ aesthetics have been resisting might sound somewhat outdated, especially in Euro-American contexts, but it absolutely isn’t in the case of Japan.

Although both feminists and girls resist stereotypical womanhood, girls do not publicly protest against patriarchy. In addition to girls’

Introduction: Girls’ Aesthetics 7

schools and girls’ magazines, amateur female manga communities which have been active since the mid 1980s are a good example of a closed space for girls. These girls produce and consume subversive pieces, mainly Boys’ Love manga, only within their communities.

Girls deliberately look inward into the in-between space inhabited only by “eternal girls.” As such, as Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley note, girls’ resistance to masculinist gender and sexual ideology does not “conform to the traditional ‘radical’ political position of ideological debate or participation in direct action movements of whatever persuasion” (2011: 8). However, this does not mean that girls are apolitical. Rather, they quietly leave disturbing reality for their imaginary girlie space and, as I will discuss by drawing on James Thompson, Elaine Aston, and Geraldine Harris in Chapter 1, imagining a better place is a starting point of politics. Girls in this book are therefore different from the relatively straightforward “aggressive” girls in “girl power” culture as represented by the British girl pop band the Spice Girls and the subculture of riot girl bands in the 1990s examined by Driscoll and others.6 Moreover, girls in this book, although they have a place for androgynous boys in their girlie sphere, do not wish for boyhood in its typical sense, unlike modern British girls, who pushed Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, to establish the Girl Guides as the equivalent of the Boy Scouts in the 1910s (Mitchell 1995: 117–26).

While the girls who appear in works of girls’ aesthetics confine themselves to the closed space, the artists whose works are discussed in this book are all professional and many of them are established public figures. As such, their works inherently belong to the public domain and are open to non-girls as well. Many of these artists appear in various media and venues such as national and international art festivals, symposia, and art and literary magazines/journals for a wide variety of audiences. Thus, although I have called them “girl” artists, there is a gap between the girls in their works and the artists themselves. However, these artists sympathize with these aesthetics and they are also aware of their political potential.

I should also mention that, although girls imaginatively live in isolation from the outside world, within this space they move freely across geographical, cultural, and historical borders. In this book, we will travel with them to a 1970s boarding school in Germany, to lateeighteenth-century France during the time of the French Revolution,

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to a 1980s boarding school in Japan, or to somewhere in Japan whose time and location are not specified. As seen in the choice of these locations, girls tend to look to the West as their destination, but we will also visit a transnational imaginative space where Japanese girls meet with their counterparts from different parts of the world. In this sense, as “girl” artist and critic Yagawa Sumiko writes, girls represent “a nation without land” (2006: 198). What they share is neither language, religion, nor racial/ethnic origin, but resistant aesthetics.

Yagawa further states that they even belong to a “privileged class,” in that they are freed from all social constraints (2006: 198). With their “lightness,” girls nullify all restrictions in their fantastical world.

Terminology I reiterate that I refer to girls as a category distinct from female adolescents in this monograph. However, such a distinction is difficult to make when I mention a certain artistic genre and when I cite from other scholarly and artistic sources. For example, “girls’ manga” does not necessarily mean manga exhibiting girls’ aesthetics. It is a label commonly used to designate a manga genre for female teens. But there are many pieces appealing to girlie sensibilities in this genre, and they are read by “girls” dissociated from their material age and bodies. In addition, although girls’ aesthetics originated in modern girls’ schools, not all the female students shared girlie sensibilities.

What complicates the term further is that many researchers, artists, and commentators equate female adolescents with girls, and therefore, when I cite from their works, there often arise discrepancies between what they mean by “girl” and what I mean by the term. I will make every effort to alert readers in these instances.

Another point which needs clarification is my usage of terms and phrases, such as homosexuality, lesbianism, and same-sex love. In my discussion of girls’ desires for girls, I sometimes use homosexual/ homosexuality and same-sex love interchangeably, but whenever possible I use the phrase “same-sex love” as a translation of a Japanese term, “dōsei-ai.” It is a term coined around the early 1920s as a translation of the English word “homosexuality” (Furukawa 1995: 206).

Dōsei-ai included both female and male relationships, but came to be used more to designate women’s intimate friendship, due to an “accident” in translation; “ai” in “dōsei-ai” signifies affection rather than

Introduction: Girls’ Aesthetics 9

carnal desire. Women were considered to lack sexual drive (Furukawa 1995: 207), and schoolgirls’ intimate bonds, or so-called “S relationships,” were seen as a prime example of dōsei-ai (Furukawa 1995: 207; McLelland et al. 2007: 8). I prefer the term dōsei-ai or its English translation, “same-sex love,” in part to acknowledge a gap between dōsei-ai and the English word homosexuality. However, this does not mean that I consent to the de-sexualization of girls (and women). As I will scrutinize in Chapter 2, girls seem to have been aware of the gap themselves and taken advantage of it in order to maintain their queer space. By the term “queer,” I mean non-normative gender and sexuality, not only homosexuality. Girls’ practice of “romantic love” problematizes the line separating homosexual relationships (often considered to involve genital pleasure) from homosocial intimacy (often considered to lack genital pleasure) and urges us to reconsider what constitutes erotics. In this book, I do not necessarily consider those whom I call “girls” lesbian7 for the same reason, but, as I will also discuss in Chapter 2, they can be lesbian in the sense of a “lesbian continuum,” as proposed by Adrienne Rich in order to expand the scope of erotics.

Some readers may point out that dōsei-ai means both female and male homosexuality in contemporary Japan, and this is indeed true.

Using the term as a female-oriented one may be anachronistic for my focus on contemporary performance and visual arts. However, I still prefer the term (and its English translation, “same-sex love”) to designate girls’ romantic relationships in order to delineate the continuation of girls’ aesthetics. They have been characterized by an imaginative reconfiguration of what is given rather than an attempt to overthrow the oppressive social structure, and a queer space opened by girls during modern times under the term dōsei-ai demonstrates such mentalities.

Previous studies of Japanese girls’ cultures and performance In Japan, what might be called girls’ studies is attracting more and more scholarly attention, and there have been many academic books and articles published in the past 30 years. Following “the big bang of girls’ culture” in the 1970s, in the early 1980s what was hitherto dismissed and despised as “women’s and children’s stuff” had

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started to claim its place not only in journalism, but also, with the effort of feminist scholars, in academia. I would argue that the rise of feminism in the 1970s contributed to this. Honda Masuko’s book Children as Different Cultures (Ibunka to shite no kodomo) (1982), which discusses the emergence and genealogy of the social and fictional categories of girls by exploring prewar girls’ magazines, was seminal.

As will be clear in the following chapters, my theorization of girls’ aesthetics is in part inspired by her discussion, especially in terms of girls’ valorization of fictionality. Following Honda, researchers in Japan have further historicized and theorized various aspects of girls’ and female adolescents’ cultures. Many of them investigate a social category of girls and its historical shift by focusing on the prewar girls’ magazines and the school system. Those who are working on contemporary contexts often look at female high-school students involved in the sex business.8 Some of them also examine representations of female adolescents in anime and manga and their female fandom. Studies on Japanese girls’ and female adolescents’ cultures have also been carried out in Euro-American and Australian contexts in various fields, including literary studies, sociology, and cultural studies primarily focusing on manga and anime.

Unlike my approach to girls, the majority of these works, both within and outside of Japan, consider girls as female adolescents.

However, my view of Japanese girls as a category unbounded by one’s material age seems to be shared by some Euro-American researchers – but in a different way. For example, Bad Girls of Japan (2005), edited by Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley, includes many essays on “women,” whether they are representations in cultural artifacts or real-life figures, who behave outside of conventional gender norms; just to name a couple, Christine Marran’s essay discusses the case of Abe Sada, a woman who in 1936 cut off her lover’s penis after she murdered him and carried it with her for three days until she was arrested, and Gretchen I. Jones’s essay is about heterosexual pornographic manga targeting middle-aged married women. While this book provides some insightful literary and sociological analyses on women challenging social conventions, it is not clear why those discussed cannot just be called “bad women of Japan.” Being “unwomanly” is an oversimplified definition of a girl. Unlike most of the essays in Bad Girls of Japan, Deborah Shamoon contextualizes a social category of girls in the history of Japan from the modern to the

Introduction: Girls’ Aesthetics 11

contemporary period in her book Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan (2012), where she looks primarily at a history of girls’ manga. Some parts of my monograph are devoted to the discussion of girls’ manga, but in contrast to Shamoon’s view that girls’ manga is for female heterosexual adolescents, I consider some pieces in this medium for those with what I call “girlie sensibilities.” Girls’ aesthetics are not the aesthetics of girls’ culture.

As mentioned, there is a growing body of research outside of Japan on Japanese girls’ and female adolescents’ cultures, but as Aoyama and Hartley indicate, there are gaps between Japanese girls’ studies within and outside of Japan. Euro-American researchers tend to focus on the concept of cuteness and girls’ status as “mindless consumers” (Aoyama 2008: 286; Aoyama and Hartley 2011: 7). Kawaii-ness (cuteness) is an important element of Japanese girls’ cultures, and when taken to an extreme, it can be subversive. However, disproportionate emphasis on this aspect has resulted in a reductionist view that it is the central drive of Japanese girls’ cultures. With regard to consumption, girls and female adolescents do consume, but they are not always mindless. Catherine Driscoll (2002) points out Western feminists’ tendency to conceptualize girls, or female adolescents, as mindless and immature in their views: Feminist practices (including feminist theory) are still dominated by adult models of subjectivity presumed to be the endpoint of a naturalized process of developing individual identity that relegates a vast range of not only people but roles, behaviors, and practices to its immature past … [F]eminist discussions of girls rarely engage with [them] without constructing [them] as opposed to, or otherwise defining, the mature, independent woman as feminist subject. (Driscoll 2002: 9) Since the publication of Driscoll’s book, Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory (2002), there have been more studies of girls (or female adolescents),9 which do not see them as immature and dependent.10 However, this does not always apply to Western researchers writing about Japanese girls’ culture. In girls’ aesthetics, girlness does not signify immaturity. Through consumption, those whom I call “girls” produce a space where they collectively develop resistant aesthetics.

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Aoyama and Hartley are two of the researchers outside of Japan whose works on Japanese girls (and female adolescents) are informed by both Japanese and Western scholarly works and theoretical perspectives. Aoyama edited a special issue of Asian Studies Review titled “The Girl, the Body, and the Nation in Japan and the Pacific Rim” (2008), and it includes many insightful and informative articles, especially on wartime and immediate postwar girls’ cultures. With Hartley, Aoyama also published an anthology, Girl Reading Girl in Japan (2011), which consists of many essays showing familiarity with the discourses of girls’ studies in Japan, although “girls” in this book are primarily posited as female adolescents. The book also carries English translations of Japanese materials, including Honda’s “The Genealogy of Hirahira: Liminality and the Girl” and Kawasaki Kenko’s “The Climate of the Girl in Yoshimoto Banana.”11 Aoyama and Hartley also translated the Introduction to Takahara Eiri’s Girls’ Territory (Shōjo ryōiki).12 The works of Honda, Kawasaki, and Takahara explore the representations of girls in (girls’) novels from the modern to the contemporary period and provide excellent insights with regards to their gender, sexuality, and relation to nationalism, but they have not been read widely by researchers outside of Japan, presumably due to the barrier of language. My monograph continues Aoyama and Hartley’s efforts in introducing to an English-reading audience some aspects of Japanese girls’ cultures, as well as scholarly and artistic discourses on them.

Most importantly, I explore girls’ performance in various media and trace their aesthetic connections, unlike many of the previous studies, which tend to focus on one genre of cultural artifacts.

In English and Japanese, book-length studies on the intersection of performance studies and girls’ studies have focused exclusively on the all-female, mainstream musical/revue company Takarazuka Revue. Kawasaki Kenko’s Japanese-language books on the company include Takarazuka: The Spectacles of Consumer Society (Takarazuka: shōhi shakai no supekutakuru) (1999) and The Utopia Called Takarazuka (Takarazuka to iu yūtopia) (2005). In English, we have Jennifer Robertson’s Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (1998) and Makiko Yamanashi’s A History of the Takarazuka Revue Since 1914: Modernity, Girls’ Culture, Japan Pop (2012). All these books provide a historical perspective on the development of the company and its performance style alongside the social and, to

Introduction: Girls’ Aesthetics 13

some extent, aesthetic category of girls. Leonie R. Stickland’s Gender Gymnastics: Performing and Consuming Japan’s Takarazuka Revue (2008) is not grounded in girls’ studies, but it offers a valuable sociological approach, especially on the fandom directed at the company.

These books focus on Takarazuka as a theatre apparatus, but I will apply performance theories to actual performances of the company.

Moreover, I will include other girlie performances in my discussion.

Takarazuka occupies an important place in Japanese girls’ cultures, but it is certainly not the only girlie performance troupe in Japan.

My analyses of both popular and experimental art works will also demonstrate the pervasiveness of girls’ aesthetics in Japanese culture.

One of the artistic genres I will be exploring in this monograph is girls’ manga, and I will pay special attention to its intersection with performance/theatre. The forerunner in this regard is Yoshiko Fukushima. In her Manga Discourse in Japanese Theatre: The Location of Noda Hideki’s Yume no Yūminsha (2003), she elaborates on the ways manga’s visual techniques (for example, a cinematic sequence of panels creating dynamic movements) and narrative complexity (that is, seriousness hidden behind playfulness) have inspired and influenced the mise-en-scène of Noda Hideki’s theatre. I will add another dimension to this area of performance studies by examining the ways in which two-dimensional manga bodies resonate with the supposedly three-dimensional bodies of the performers on stage.

I will further explore their significance from the perspective of gender and sexuality theories.

Definition of “the Japanese” I use the term “the Japanese” in order to refer to those who are acculturated into what is generally imagined as Japanese culture.

I am aware that many foreign nationals in Japan, primarily Korean and Chinese, choose to pass as Japanese in order to avoid ethnic discrimination, which is a remnant of imperialist Japan. It is true that some foreign nationals and Japanese citizens of foreign descent have chosen to emphasize pride in their origins, without hiding their ethnicity. Moreover, now that these nations, especially China, have become economic superpowers, overt discrimination seems to be fading away. However, reactionary sentiments do exist. Since 2013, triggered by disputes on territorial and many other issues in relation

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to Japan’s imperialism and colonialism, anti-Korea and anti-China demonstrations by the right wing have been spreading to many parts of Japan, especially in areas where many Korean nationals reside, ˉ kubo in Tokyo and Tsuruhashi in Osaka. In response such as Shin-O to this, in July and August 2014, the United Nations issued recommendations to Japan to legally regulate hate speech.

As a half-ethnic Korean myself, I know that the majority of ethnic Koreans who choose to pass as Japanese often need to “come out” regarding their ethnicity, for example, to their partners or friends. In this context, it is not really correct to use the term “the Japanese” to describe the artists and audience members in this book, because they may possibly include such foreign nationals or Japanese nationals of foreign descent. As a matter of fact, for example, the Takarazuka Revue actually has Chinese and Korean performers who do not hide ˉ tori Ran (tenure at the company their ethnicity, including Chinese O from 1964 to 1979), Korean Aran Kei (tenure from 1991 to 2009), and half-Korean Aihara Mika13 (tenure from 2004 to 2010). However, the Takarazuka theatre apparatus operates on Japanese nationalist and masculinist ideology, as will be examined in Chapter 3, and therefore, in one sense, the bodies of these Chinese and Korean performers ironically function as conveyers of these Japanese ideologies. Moreover, as long as females in ethnic minority groups live in Japanese society, they suffer from the construction of Japanese womanhood (and most likely from other ethnic constructions of womanhood as well). I use the phrase “Japanese girls” (and “Japanese women”) to refer to those who are oppressed by this constructed Japanese womanhood. I do not feel perfectly comfortable with this usage of the term, but at this moment, I cannot find a better expression.

Organization of this book Chapter 1, “Girls’ Time, Girls’ Space,” examines the ways in which one of the characteristics of girls’ aesthetics – the desire to remain in the girlie sphere and nullify developmental modern time in order to resist standardized adult womanhood – is demonstrated in performance troupe YUBIWA Hotel’s Lear (2004), performance troupe NOISE’s DOLL (1983), and visual artist Yanagi Miwa’s video installation work Granddaughters (2002 and 2003). Both YUBIWA

Introduction: Girls’ Aesthetics 15

Hotel and Yanagi are known for their obsessive use of images of girls. YUBIWA Hotel’s Lear (loosely inspired by Ong Keng Sen and Kishida Rio’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear) stages a tension between girls residing in an imaginary, idyllic, ahistorical space and the unseen patriarchal force which tries to push them out of such a space. Yanagi’s Granddaughters identifies girls and old women as the same entities in that they are both detached from reproductive roles.

NOISE’s DOLL, inspired by a real incident, is about schoolgirls terminating their lives/time through a group suicide. Kisaragi Koharu, the late playwright and director of NOISE, played a key role in the development of contemporary Japanese women’s theatre/performance, and therefore I will also discuss her career trajectory in this chapter to give an overview of female theatre makers after the late 1970s.

Chapter 2, “Girlie Sexuality: When Flat Girls Become Threedimensional,” explores girls’ immaterial, androgynous bodies and same-sex eroticism as the antitheses of conventional Japanese adult womanhood. This chapter discusses Hagio Moto’s girls’ manga, The Heart of Thomas (Tōma no shinzō) (1974), its stage adaptation of the same title by theatre company Studio Life with all-male performers under female directorship (first produced in 1996 and most recently in 2014), and its film adaptation titled Summer Vacation 1999 (1999 nen no natsuyasumi) (1988), scripted by the late playwright Kishida Rio and directed by Kaneko Shūsuke. Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas deals with boys’ same-sex erotic sentiments in a boarding school in Germany. I read this piece as one about same-sex love between girls disguised as boys, and suggest that girl readers experience unconventional gender and sexuality by identifying themselves with androgynous boy characters living “somewhere far away” from Japan. I also suggest that the two-dimensional manga bodies of the characters liberate girl readers from the social constraints imposed on their material bodies and explore how this translates in different media of theatre and film.

Chapter 3, “Citizen Girls,” discusses contradictory aspects of girls by looking at works involving girls and a nationalist sense of citizenship. Girls’ aesthetics are basically not interested in the outside world, but they can be trapped by nationalist ideologies as they share the idealization of immateriality. Lived experiences of bodies are not present in either of them. This chapter examines Ikeda Riyoko’s iconic girls’ manga The Rose of Versailles (Berusaiyu no bara) (1972–3) and its stage

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adaptations by the Takarazuka Revue (first produced in 1974 and most recently in 2014). In these works, nationalist sentiments invade the sphere of girls’ aesthetics through immaterial bodies, and there emerges co-existence of the aesthetics resistant to state-sanctioned motherhood and the aesthetics aspiring to a nationalist sense of citizenship. The Rose of Versailles is about an androgynous girl serving as a part of the revolutionary force in the French Revolution. The portrayal of this androgyne challenges the stereotypical gender and sexuality, but her nationalist sentiments and heroic death evoke the concept of citizenship gained only through fighting for the nation.

This reminds us of the first-wave feminists’ desire for citizenship, but the piece itself was released during the time of the women’s liberation movement, which critiqued the mentalities of the first wave. To contextualize this manga in Japanese society in the 1970s, I will discuss girls and women in relation to the women’s liberation movement as well as the masculinist New Left movement. While this manga exhibits some reactionary aspects, the highly melodramatic performance of the Takarazuka adaptations unwittingly overwhelms these sentiments and instead opens up a queer, girlie space where gender and sexuality do not settle on single signifieds. In addition to the theatrical adaptations, French director Jacques Demy’s film adaptation, titled Lady Oscar (1979), is briefly examined in order to explore the different functions of bodies in different media, as well as how Japan’s imaginary France is reimagined in France.

Chapter 4, “‘Little Girls’ Go West?,” explores the ways in which some of the traits shared by girls’ aesthetics are utilized to critique social conditions more actively. The performances discussed in this chapter may not exactly be “girlie,” unlike those in the previous chapters, so I call girls in this chapter “Little Girls.” “Little Girl” is an antipode of “Little Boy,” a concept developed by the male visual artist Murakami Takashi in order to challenge what he perceives as Western hegemony in contemporary arts. He theorizes postwar Japan as being “infantilized” and “castrated” by the West, which is posited as an adult male, particularly the USA, but he reconfigures this negative trait into a “cool” and unique characteristic of a type of contemporary Japanese visual art inspired by male otaku (meaning geek or nerd) culture. In this “Little Boy” Japan, there is no clear place for girls. In this chapter, I will look at the all-female, experimental dance troupe KATHY. The troupe’s performance deconstructs the binary of

Introduction: Girls’ Aesthetics 17

Japan/Little Boy and the USA/adult man by evoking playful “Little Girls.” I will mainly discuss the troupe’s 2002 parody of an American musical film, Singin’ in the Rain (1952).14 In this performance, the members of KATHY, wearing blonde wigs and pastel-colored dresses, wittily stage failures to dance American dance, suggesting that they, as Little Girls, cannot achieve Americanization as a performative force. However, importantly, this does not result in valorizing unique Japaneseness like Murakami does. When the members of KATHY appear in public for their performance, they hide their racial identities by covering their faces and skin with black and white tights.

Reminiscent of the US-based, anonymous art activist group Guerrilla Girls, they never reveal their personal identities in any media, and so we cannot know who they “really” are, including what racial/ethnic group they belong to.

Most of this book explores girls’ resistant politics unfolded in their closed space, but the last chapter suggests that the strategies of the aesthetics might be useful to bring some change to the “real,” material world. Like the “girl artists” discussed earlier, I deeply sympathize with the aesthetics, but my work belongs to the public sphere. I see that my role as a “girl researcher” is not to remain in the closed girlie sphere, but to explicate to a wider group of readers why girls’ aesthetics have been cherished for over a hundred years in Japan.

1 Girls’ Time, Girls’ Space

MISHIMA: [I]t’s women who dominate time. It’s not men. Ten months1 during pregnancy is what women possess. …

TERAYAMA: But, women believe in another time according to which they bleed every twenty-eight days. This is why they are indifferent to the time created by SEIKO.2 Women are the watches themselves. [……………]

MISHIMA: … [Women] exist within time. Men may end up existing outside of time, so they are so scared without watches.

TERAYAMA: So, I think that men need to stroll around searching for outside watches, because they are always accidental beings.

MISHIMA: That may be true. …

(Mishima and Terayama 2012: 36) The July 1970 issue of the magazine Tide (Ushio) prints a conversation between novelist/playwright Mishima Yukio and theatre/film maker Terayama Shūji. Although titled “Can Eros Be the Basis of Resistance?” (Erosu wa teikō no kyoten to nari uru ka?),3 these two giants of the postwar Japanese arts world jump from one topic to another, from the New Left movement to eroticism, from gambling to Catholicism, from body-building to noh theatre. Towards the end of their conversation, Terayama, out of the blue, asks Mishima what 18

Girls’ Time, Girls’ Space 19

he thinks of women. Terayama’s intention is not clear at all, but anyway, this opens up their brief discussion on women – or women, time, space, and body.

Terayama talks as if there were two different temporalities lived by women: ten months of pregnancy and a menstrual period that comes every 28 days. But they are basically the same thing. Women bleed every 28 days as a proof of missed pregnancy that was supposed to last for ten months. It is all about giving birth. Before discussing the obvious question of the status of “women” who no longer menstruate, I first want to call attention to these men’s association of women with materiality and the materiality with time. Women are watches that tick according to the changes taking place in their wombs. Yet, Mishima soon says, “Women exist within time” (my emphasis). If their bodies are time, how can women exist within time, as though they were separate entities? Mishima seems to unwittingly reveal that he and other men confine women within time. Likewise, in their association of women with the womb, they enclose women within the space/time confines of their womb clock. The little space in their bodies engulfs and traps them.

Mishima and Terayama suggest that, unlike women, men exist outside of time. That is, men exist outside of their bodies. They lack a womb clock, and so they lack a body. They are “accidental beings” as opposed to women as concrete beings, reminiscent of the Platonic model of Man/Ideal and Woman/Matter. Men’s search for outside watches mentioned by Terayama is in one sense (heterosexually) practical, as it seems to allude to copulation of men and women leading to reproduction. Men need women to give materiality to their own copies. But there is also something, maybe something heroic, in Terayama’s idea of men strolling around in search of watches/bodies: men floating around freely without being trapped by time and body/ space. Nothing can nail them down. Their search for adventure is never-ending, because the very definition of men depends on their status as “accidental beings.” Once they have obtained watches/bodies, it makes them non-men. So, men are eternally free, while women are dragged down to the earth, probably until they stop ticking.

Mishima and Terayama are too intoxicated with the idea of men’s eternal adventure to even think about what happens to women when they as watches stop ticking.4 Are they still women? Do they gain the rights to enjoy floating like men? Or, are they simply broken watches?

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This chapter explores the ways in which the artists of girls’ aesthetics reconfigure such masculinist confinement of women into body/space and time. The above conversation between Mishima and Terayama took place in 1970, and this coincided with the time when postwar girls’ aesthetics were consolidated. The aesthetics challenged and continue to challenge the stereotypical view of women typified in these men’s conversation. The works discussed are performance troupe YUBIWA Hotel’s Lear (2004), performance troupe NOISE’s DOLL (1983), and visual artist Yanagi Miwa’s video installation piece Granddaughters (2002 and 2003). These works portray “girls” who reconceptualize the confinement they are forced to enter. They further imagine freezing time to reject becoming future wombs.

At the same time, they also de-materialize the womb itself. In the masculinist discourse, women are enclosed in the womb as body/ space, but the girls reimagine such a space as the one in which they dwell eternally as images without materiality. They let themselves be impregnated by this womb without temporalities.

Space and time in girls’ aesthetics Before discussing these artists’ works, we will look at the historical context surrounding girls’ aesthetics, with a special focus on how they perceive space and time. While this monograph focuses on contemporary performance and visual arts that utilize these aesthetics, it is important to realize that they originated over a century ago in the early 1900s. As we will see in this chapter and the ones to follow, the fundamental traits of these aesthetics remain unchanged while there are shifts in the ways they are manifested. Considering that these aesthetics emerged as a resistance to the dominant gender and sexual ideology in the modern period, their continuation suggests that the ideology remains deeply rooted in contemporary society.

The category of “girls” is a modern construct in Japan. In the premodern or the pre-Meiji period,5 people were simply divided into children and adults, but the development of capitalism during the modernization process created a new category of adolescence, during which those between childhood and adulthood were trained or invested in to become the future labor force (Treat 1996: 280). The investment in this process took place at school. In 1872, the government issued an ordinance requiring all children to receive four years

Girls’ Time, Girls’ Space 21

of education. Although it originally aimed at educating all Japanese citizens, education as a means of investment soon started to reflect the gender divide in the state’s strategies for managing its population. In 1879, the government issued another ordinance to separate women’s and men’s education beyond elementary school (Mackie 2003: 25), and in 1899, each prefecture was mandated to have at least one girls’ higher school (that is, school with three to five years of education for female students after elementary education) (Mackie 2003: 25; Honda 1983: 213). Honda Masuko explains that this process exemplifies the fact that the government assumed that educating female students would not provide as high a return on investment as it would with their male counterparts who after graduation would work in the military and industry. Young women were defined as those who would not appear in the public arena in the future, and it is these women who formed the social category of girls (Honda 1983: 214–15). Girls (shō jo) were thus synonymous with schoolgirls (jogakusei). They were not entitled to receive the same education as boys, but they were able to attend higher schools. What this meant in reality was that the social category of girls was defined as being only those young women whose families were wealthy enough to send their daughters to higher schools. It may be said that, in an expanding capitalist system, “girls” were a commodity that only the wealthy could afford.

Instead of providing future access to the public domain, the government determined that girls should become future guardians of the private sphere. Girls were designated as future “good wives, wise mothers” (ryōsai kenbo) who would represent the moral core of the expanding middle class (Honda 1983: 214–15) and, I would add, as reproducers of loyal Japanese citizens in the process of Japan’s nation-building. Adult women from “good” families were expected to serve their husbands, who were the heads of the households, and these households were considered to be miniature versions of family-state Japan.6 Women were to sustain these smaller versions of Japan and in turn the nation itself by giving birth to and educating (male) Japanese citizens, who would work for the Emperor in his effort to expand Imperial Japan’s national territory. Girls’ schools were established as reservoirs of those who would be the paragons of this state-sanctioned womanhood characterized by qualities such as “grace, elegance, gentleness, and chastity” (Honda 1982: 213).

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Indeed, the Japanese word for girl is shōjo, which literally means “not-quite-female female” (Robertson 1998: 65). Girls’ schools were the places where these “not-quite-female female[s]” were supposed to learn how to be fully fledged, nationalist females. Until they became such women, they were isolated from the rest of the society to remain “pure.”

Thus, girls were enclosed in schools with their sexuality surveilled under the gendered capitalist logic. Nevertheless, capitalism simultaneously opened up a space for their internal rebellion. Barbara Satō suggests that the consumerism in early-twentieth-century Japan brought empowerment at least to middle-class women; as the decision-making agents, these women actively constructed new images of themselves and demanded that their voices be reflected in a broader social context opened to them by the mass media (2003: 16–19). Likewise, schoolgirls experienced empowerment as consumers. Magazines targeting them started to be published in the 1900s.

These magazines contributed to the emergence of an aesthetic category of “girls,” and became the primary site for the development of resistant girls’ aesthetics.

The girls’ magazines did not openly confront state-sanctioned womanhood. Rather, their official policy was in alliance with state policy – to educate future “good wives, wise mothers.” However, the editorial policy of these magazines was (possibly intentionally) ambivalent. While they preached conservative morality, they also functioned as a space for schoolgirls to collectively perform their fictional selves, ignoring the hegemonic gender and sexual ideology. For instance, girls communicated with other girls through the readers’ columns where they often used beautiful pen names such as Harunami (spring wave) or Shin’yō​̄ (heart leaf), as if to leave their material reality behind (Honda 1983: 225–7). They also described the images of their everlastingly young and beautiful bourgeois bodies, which would not produce anything, including offspring. In prose pieces that they sent to magazines, they celebrated such bodies in a sensuous and narcissistic way, using romantic and decorative phrases such as “a water drop running down the slightly flushed cheek after the bath” and “touching a sweet and sour stem [of flower] with lovely lips” (Kawamura 1993: 55). Their erotic desire was often directed towards other girls (Kawamura 1993: 61–4). Moreover, they even fantasized death as the ultimate way to freeze time and

Girls’ Time, Girls’ Space 23

remain young (Kawamura 1993: 64–6).7 All these desires seeped out in the settings of girls’ schools, which were detached from the rest of the world. In/through girls’ magazines, girls thus reconfigured the closed domain of sexual surveillance at girls’ schools as a resistant space. This imaginative reconfiguration was motivated by the fact that they were exempted from wifehood and motherhood during their studentship, even though their bodies were “mature” enough for these roles. Girls thus indulged themselves in an “ahistorical ‘now’” (Honda 1982: 220) in the closed space open only for them.

Therefore, unlike the first-wave feminists, such as the members of the first Japanese feminist group, Seitō (Bluestocking), formed in 1911, girls did not attempt to transgress the boundary between the public and the private spheres. Rather, their rebellion took the form of isolating themselves from the reality they lived in. They twisted the function of the private sphere, or more precisely a liminal sphere between their home and society, in their imagination. This strategy of twisting the function of their surroundings has been the fundamental trait of girls’ aesthetics ever since.

Although girls’ aesthetics primarily advocate the fictionality of girls in a closed space without temporalities, they were also expressed by actions in the “real” world, which blurred the boundary between fiction and reality. For example, there were several cases of double suicides among girls, which became fodder for scandal in the mass media. The first reported case took place in 1911, where two graduates of a girls’ school in Niigata Prefecture killed themselves in despair at not being able to continue their romantic relationship in heteronormative society after graduation (Suzuki 2010: 24; Akaeda 2011: 104). Akaeda Kanako reports that there were also frequent double suicides of this kind around this time, with the peak from the late 1920s to the mid 1930s (2011: 107). These cases suggest that girls’ desire to freeze time and to discard their material bodies is closely linked to their rejection of adulthood-cum-heteronormativity. The incidents further confused the public ideas of “pure” friendships and pathologized romantic relationships between girls (Suzuki 2010: 25; Akaeda 2011: 110–11). This suggests that, while girls’ schools were primarily seen as safe places to protect girls’ virginity, there existed some anxiety over confining them in these institutions.

Girls’ aesthetics during wartime and the immediate postwar period will be discussed in the chapters to follow, and therefore I will briefly

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consider only a few important points here. The tradition of these aesthetics did not die out even during wartime, despite the increasing pressure from the government to remove girlie images from the girls’ magazines and instead to portray stout and healthy female adolescents who could protect the home front. After the war, “democratic” co-education was instituted by the US Occupation (1945–52); however, while girls faced a new heterosocial environment, many did not let go of these aesthetics. It seems that one of the ways in which they dealt with the change in their everyday reality was to feminize male students and include them in their imaginary girlie sphere. This is demonstrated by girls’ magazines from this time, in which male students were depicted with stereotypically feminine gender and sex markers such as colored lips and long eyelashes (see Chapter 2 for more discussion).

The unprecedented magnitude of the consumer society of the ˉ tsuka Eiji, a subculture and girls’ studies theo1970s brought what O rist, calls “the big bang of girls’ culture” (1989: 49). So-called kawaii (cute) culture burgeoned in this period, and the industry for cute items such as stuffed animals and frilly dresses rapidly bloomed.

After the recovery from the devastation in the war, girls were rediscovered as consumers. Moreover, the category of schoolgirls became more mainstream, as more and more women started to have at least a high-school education. In 1970, the percentage of women who went on to high schools exceeded 80 percent for the first time (Tōkei kyoku [Statistics Bureau] 2005). Prewar girls’ aesthetics were largely enjoyed by upper-class schoolgirls, but from the 1970s onwards, the aesthetics became more accessible to lower-class girls through consumable items and events, including magazines, fashion, manga, films, and theatrical and social performance.8 Similar to the experiences of prewar girls, consumerism prepared a space for girls to collectively question hegemonic womanhood.

Importantly, the “good wife, wise mother” ideology survived the war and is still prevalent in contemporary society. One example is the current national pension system, which started in 1986. It gives preferential treatment to housewives; a housewife who has no paid employment but is married to a company employee or a schoolteacher can receive a pension without paying for it.9 The idea is to encourage married women to stay home; housewives are supposed to be contributing to the nation by taking care of their households and

Girls’ Time, Girls’ Space 25

nurturing future citizens of Japan while their husbands are working outside.10 Girls’ aesthetics show discomfort with this valorization of wife/motherhood.

Although the media for girls diversified after “the big bang of girls’ culture,” magazines continued to play the central role. However, following the shift of entertainment media from primarily textual to primarily visual in the 1950s, manga magazines became one of the important sites for girls’ aesthetics. The market of girls’ manga expanded in the 1970s, and, moreover, the content was revolutionˉ tsuka 1989: 49, 53). Girls’ manga, particularly those by “the ized (O Year 24 Group” (“Nijūyo nen gumi,” a group of female manga artists born around the 24th year of the reign of the Shōwa Emperor, or AD 1949), became a site for girls to critically and collectively speculate ˉ tsuka 1996: 221–3).11 Hagio Moto, on bodies, gender, and sexuality (O ˉ shima Yumiko, Yamagishi Ryōko, Aoike Yasuko, Takemiya Keiko, O and Kihara Toshie are seen as representative of this group, and others such as Ichijō Yukari, Ikeda Riyoko, and Yamato Waki are sometimes included. Many of them are still active and popular. The works by Hagio and Ikeda will be examined respectively in Chapters 2 and 3.

As in the prewar girls’ aesthetics, many artists of the Year 24 Group valorized girls who reject female materiality. This rejection was in many cases expressed by the deaths of girl characters, reminding us of the prewar girls’ fetishization of death. For example, Hagio Moto’s Snow Child (Yuki no ko) (1971) portrays a 12-year-old girl who kills herself before she turns 13, which she identifies as the age when the secondary sexual characteristics start to be developed. She abhors her material female body and stops time in order not to become a “woman.”12 While these deaths are in the two-dimensional visual realm of manga, in the 1980s there were many girls’ suicides in the “real” three-dimensional world, and this is discussed below in relation to NOISE’s performance piece DOLL. So-called Gothic-Lolita girls who emerged in the 1990s exhibit some girlie sensibilities with regard to space and time (although they are losing their edge now that they are treated as “cute ambassadors” by the Japanese government to promote Japanese pop culture to the market abroad). They spend time in the Japanese urban environments dressed in elaborate laced costumes inspired by Victorian and Rococo cultures. Those who are more inclined to the Gothic aspects tend to use black fabrics and employ grotesque imagery, and those who

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prefer Lolita images are in pastel-colored, frilly dresses with ribbons and flowery embroidery. Many of them also combine Gothic and Lolita images. The word “Lolita” is associated outside of Japan with pedophiliac desire as depicted in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, but in Gothic-Lolita culture, it suggests childlike innocence. The eroticism is still evoked by such “innocence,” but it is for the GothicLolita girls to share among themselves and is not directed at males.

They perform the nostalgic (imagined) past as well as the (imagined) West. I will touch on the girls’ infatuation with the West in other chapters, so suffice it to say here that Gothic-Lolita girls enact their dream of eternity – eternal childhood (Lolita) and eternal life (Gothic) in “somewhere else” both in time and space. They carry with them the non-Japanese space whose temporalities do not synchronize with that of the contemporary Japanese cities in which they stroll.

In the following sections, I will discuss how these configurations of girlie space and time are played out in contemporary performance and installation arts.

YUBIWA Hotel’s Lear YUBIWA Hotel – a girl or a whore?

Performance troupe YUBIWA Hotel was founded in Tokyo in 1990 by female members including director/playwright/performer Hitsujiya Shirotama, who now serves as the artistic director. The members vary with each production, but for nearly all of YUBIWA Hotel’s works, the cast consists only of women. The troupe is known for its experimental, visual-oriented performances without clear narrative structure, and they are often staged in unconventional venues such as cafés, beaches, etc. However, what characterizes the troupe most is its obsessive attachment to girlhood. Performers, although they are adult women, wear costumes and make-up like those of Barbie dolls (Satomi 2000: 119; Naitō 2004: 152), and they perform girls who look like they are in their teens or even younger.

In its early phase, YUBIWA Hotel mainly performed in club events along with performances by hardcore bands and strippers, and its performance was quite “fleshy” and carnivalesque. The members staged erotic and scatological performances; they often appeared naked covered with dirt or liquid, and even imitated excretion (by using pancake mix) (Naitō 2004: 148). The company name conveys

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the atmosphere of its early productions. “Yubiwa” in Japanese means ring, possibly signifying chastity, while “hotel” can imply indecency.

This contradictory name is suggestive of the upside-down, carnivalesque world where supposedly chaste women perform indecent acts. In the late 1990s, the company established its present style of staging what Naitō Mao calls “fictional bodies” of girls (2004: 153).

More precisely, however, I would argue that YUBIWA Hotel stages the fictionality of girls through adult women’s bodies. The adult members fail to embody girls with their mature bodies, and this strategic failure reassures us that “girls” are fantastical beings existing only in the immaterial, two-dimensional realm.

Ironically, in YUBIWA Hotel’s performance, the gap between the material bodies of adult women and the immaterial images of girls, together with sometimes sexualized costumes such as short skirts which do not fully cover their frilly underwear, can evoke eroticism, which appeals to masculinist desire. Revealing adult flesh while performing girls can be a way to exhibit girls as an imaginary construct, but it risks communicating the erotic commodification of female bodies. To some, adult women performing girls may appear as though they have given up their agency (typically considered to be lacking in girls) or even show complicity with their exploitation. Thus, YUBIWA Hotel’s strategy of revealing their bodies as a site where the tension between material reality and the imaginary world takes place does not always have the desired effect on every audience member. As a matter of fact, the company has many male audience members, some of whose aim seems to be to watch the semi-naked bodies of the performers. The company received its first review in a weekly magazine for male readers: a July 1994 issue of Weekly Playboy (Shūkan pureibōi) where they were dubbed as “Japan’s first ‘sex-business’ (fūzoku) theatre company” (Hibino and Naitō 2001: 77).13 Such a view seems to have been shared in the circle of theatre criticism. Although YUBIWA Hotel is now recognized as a leading experimental theatre company in Japan, it was marginalized in critical discourse in the 1990s. Even in the mid 2000s, academics were not positively disposed towards the company’s “erotic performance.” More recently, the company is receiving the critical attention that it deserves, and this may be due to the emergence of younger critics and researchers who are more accustomed and sympathetic to “girlie” arts. The company was selected as one of the most important performance groups in Japan

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in culture journal Eureka twice in 2005 and 2013. Moreover, in the 2000s and onwards, it has performed outside of Japan as well, visiting various countries including the Philippines, France, the UK, the USA, Poland, and Brazil.

While the company is often eroticized by the masculinist gaze, Hitsujiya has been told by some male audience members that they attend YUBIWA Hotel’s shows to experience nostalgia for the time when they played with their sisters and female friends in their childhood (cited in Hibino and Naitō 2001: 87), before they entered the gender- and sex- segregated social economy. YUBIWA Hotel’s performance tends to have not just a few girls, but a group of girls, and some of the male audience members feel that they become a part of this community despite their male sex. As long as girls are immaterial images, biologically male bodies should not prohibit men from belonging to this imagined community, and YUBIWA Hotel’s performance provides those men who have girlie sensibilities with a fantastical space and moments. This male identification with YUBIWA Hotel’s girls is akin to an amateur male writer who contributed literary pieces to a modern girls’ magazine under a female pen name (Honda 1982: 226).

Thus, the representation of girls on YUBIWA Hotel’s stage is ambivalent. To some, it appears to be catering to a masculinist commodification of women. In contrast, I suggest that Hitsujiya valorizes the subversive politics of girls’ aesthetics, which reject the materialization of women’s bodies. At the same time, she is keenly aware of the social pressures that push girls out of a utopic girlhood. Careful scrutiny of YUBIWA Hotel’s performance pieces will reveal that the semi-naked bodies of the adult members function as sites of mourning and melancholia for their lost girlhoods. The troupe depicts the psychological pain that women feel as they are forced into the realm of adult womanhood operating on progressive time.

Melancholic blocking of women’s rites of passage In my discussion of YUBIWA Hotel’s Lear, as well as Yanagi Miwa’s Granddaughters, I am informed by Freudian psychoanalysis. Some scholars of Japanese culture alert us not to “impose” this Western theory onto the understanding of gender and sexuality in Japanese contexts. For example, anthropologist Anne Allison employs the “Ajase complex” developed by Japanese psychologist Kosawa Heisaku

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as a theoretical framework more suitable than the Oedipus complex to her discussion on the dyadic bond between mother and children (especially sons) in many Japanese households, where the patriarch father is relatively absent due to long working hours outside of their homes (2000: 3). However, while it is very important to be sensitive to cultural differences, as Allison herself also notes, Japan shares many traits with Western countries, including patriarchal oppression of women (2000: 18, 24). What we perceive as gender and sexuality in contemporary Japan were largely shaped during the modern period, which Japan shared with the West (and the non-West as well),14 and, as such, Japanese women’s experiences should not be marked as entirely unique. Theories generated in the modern West and the reworking of them can therefore be helpful to explain certain aspects of Japanese culture and society.

Some scholars of Japanese cultures may also be wary of considering gender and sexuality in Japan through the lens of Freudian theory, as much of it has been contested and considered misogynistic.

However, second-wave feminists have engaged deeply with Freud and Lacan, and poststructuralist psychoanalysis has compulsively reworked these theories. In particular, they have been important in work on mourning, melancholia, trauma, and cultural memory.

Since Japanese girls’ aesthetics view girlhood as an idyllic time that is traumatically disrupted by womanhood, these approaches provide a useful lens for understanding the aesthetics.

In this section, I will discuss YUBIWA Hotel’s Lear, produced in 2004. It was inspired by the inter-Asian collaborative production, also titled Lear, scripted by Japanese feminist playwright Kishida Rio, directed by Ong Keng Sen from Singapore, and first staged in 1997 in Japan and later performed in many parts of the world.15 Before her death in 2003, YUBIWA Hotel worked, in 2001, with Kishida (and Ong as well) on another production, Dreamtime in Morishita Studios, and Hitsujiya staged YUBIWA Hotel’s version of Lear in 2004 to pay tribute to the memory of Kishida.16 Her version and Kishida and Ong’s version share violence by female characters and the critique of patriarchy – but the reasons for the violence are different. Kishida and Ong’s Lear is about murders committed by a character named Older Daughter (equivalent to Goneril and Regan in Shakespeare’s King Lear), played by a Chinese Opera performer, for the purpose of seizing the throne from a character named Old Man, performed by a Japanese noh

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actor (equivalent to King Lear). Girls in YUBIWA Hotel’s Lear are also extremely violent, but unlike Older Daughter, they resort to violence and killing not to acquire patriarchal power, but to avoid losing the status of girls who can have some distance from the patriarchal, gendered economy. The difference suggests the different political stances of Kishida and Hitsujiya. Kishida often demonstrated her leftist feminist awareness in her critique of Japan’s patriarchy represented by the emperor system (Anan 2005). In Lear, she problematized the symbolic status of the Japanese emperor as patriarch in Asia and staged a revolt by a formerly invaded nation, China. This perspective is absent in Hitsujiya’s version. Girls’ aesthetics are typically indifferent to the space outside of the closed girlie sphere. If Kishida’s major concern is with real-life politics, Hitsujiya’s is the resistance taking place in the imagination as a way to escape the oppressive reality. As a result, these two versions bear little resemblance to each other. One would not notice that Hitsujiya was inspired by Kishida and Ong’s Lear unless one was made aware of it beforehand. But, Kishida does exhibit her girlie sensibilities in some of her lesser-known works, and I will discuss one of them in Chapter 2.

YUBIWA Hotel’s Lear does not have a clear narrative structure. It is made of four scenes, each of which either hints at a murder committed by girls and women or ends with such a murder or murderous violence. The show took place in a fashionable club named Ex’realm in Tokyo, and Hitsujiya created a stage with a little park with cute animal ornaments and a seesaw. In the middle was a tall, thick, colorful pillar, to which small tires were attached. All four scenes were performed in this nostalgic, cute, and yet symbolically masculinist space with the phallus-like, panoptic pillar in the middle. Below is a brief description of each scene.

The first scene opens with two girls in wedding dresses coming to the stage/park. Despite their costumes, they behave extremely childishly, laughing and screaming, asking each other if they look good in the dresses. They look like typical female children playing brides, and this shows the degree to which “ideal womanhood” is inscribed into women’s consciousness in the earlier stage of their lives. Or, this may suggest the girls’ attempt to downplay the seriousness of becoming brides; they may be trying to take it just as a children’s play. Their gambols gradually become violent, and one of them ends up throttling the other.

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The next scene starts with the entrance of a girl played by Hitsujiya herself. She wears a white T-shirt, black high socks, a white ribbon on her head, and a very short black skirt, which reveals the back of her frilly black underwear. While the girl who has just killed the other starts to sing and dance happily, the girl played by Hitsujiya puts the body of the dead girl into a huge plastic bag, and hence she collaborates in the murder. After the girl in the wedding dress leaves, a group of girls enter, wearing costumes identical to that worn by Hitsujiya’s character. They perform an image of idyllic girlhood: reading girls’ manga magazines, sharing food and tea with each other, being angry at each other, laughing together, and making fun of each other. However, this happy environment is gradually trespassed by violence. They start beating each other up until they are covered with each other’s blood, but no matter how violent they become, they cannot die, and they eventually leave the park.

In the next scene, the girls come back to the park as housewives/ mothers. In this scene, they appear in high heels and cardigans on top of colorful, transparent, short dresses. They say that their husbands have passed away, and they show off to each other keepsakes from their husbands. These are strange items such as a chisel made of diamond, a hammer made of black onyx, a pan with an engraving, and so on. While they show off these items, they violently swing them around and hint that they have killed their husbands with them. However, it turns out that they are just playing with their fantasy of murdering their husbands. In the end, they leave the park, saying that their husbands are coming back home from work soon.

In the final scene, two girls come to the park, wearing wedding dresses like those worn in the first scene. They look like they have escaped from a wedding ceremony. Yet, they start to mime giving birth and taking care of a baby. The housewives/mothers from the previous scene come in, and they kill one of the girls and leave the park.

In YUBIWA Hotel’s Lear, murder and violence are employed as a means of resisting those events that are considered to mark girls’ transformation into adult women, such as marriage and childbirth, and the girls’ transformation is marked by their departure from the park. Their violence demonstrates their melancholia with respect to girlhood. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud explains that melancholics are those who cannot mourn the loss of loved objects

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or abstract concepts (1915: 153). Instead of acknowledging the loss, they unconsciously withdraw the objects or concepts into themselves, and thereby, the identification of the ego with the lost object or concept takes place (Freud 1915: 159). Melancholics therefore do not accept that they have lost something, as they have become it.

However, taking in the loss results in the impoverishment of the ego.

It causes the ego to split into two; a part of the ego or “conscience” takes on a role to judge the rest of the ego where the assimilated loss is located (Freud 1915: 157). Various situations surrounding a loss, such as death and “situations of being wounded, hurt, neglected, out of favour, or disappointed,” are transported in the formation of ego, and the conscience directs rage against a withdrawn object or concept which has now become a part of the ego (Freud 1915: 161–2).

Melancholics are characterized by their self-abasement, but this is actually their abasement of the lost ones (now taken in themselves) (Freud 1915: 158). Melancholics’ rage against the loss can even take the form of suicide (Freud 1915: 161–2).

The female characters in YUBIWA Hotel’s Lear are melancholics who cannot accept the end of their girlhood. They attempt to take girlhood into themselves and to become girls themselves, but at the same time they direct rage towards the evading girlhood that they have tried to take in. It may seem that, unlike the melancholics described by Freud, the girls in Lear exercise violence not towards themselves, but to others. However, these female characters are actually identical, wearing the same costumes and acting in the same way as a group. Thus, the violence they exercise towards others is symbolically directed towards themselves. In the first scene, a girl in a wedding dress smothers another girl in a wedding dress to death.

This murder is equivalent to the suicide of a melancholic. What is terminated through the murder/suicide is the transitive nature of girlhood. Therefore, after the murder, the killer keeps living as a girl, enjoying herself happily in the park. She is still in a wedding dress, but it stops signifying marriage here. It simply turns into a frilly party dress. By committing suicide, a girl lives on as a girl.

The motivation for the girls’ violence in the second scene is understood in the same way, but here, they fail to resist the progress of time. Their violence is very intense; they try to choke each other and beat each other up, stained with each other’s blood. However, they fail to commit “suicide.” Their resistance to the progress of time is

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eventually overwhelmed by the masculinist power lurking even in a place like this park, supposedly a liminal space between household and “productive” society. After the girls have exhausted themselves by beating each other up in vain, the prelude to female folk singer Itsuwa Mayumi’s 1972 song Girl (Shōjo) is played by the musicians.

The girls climb up the panoptic pillar in the middle of the park, as if to see who is in this phallic tower – or to protest against the unseen power trying to push them out of girlhood/the park. At this point, they are not the melancholics who “cannot see clearly what has been lost” (Freud 1915: 155). They are acutely aware of what they are losing. As the character played by Hitsujiya starts to sing the following lyrics from Girl, the other girls come down from the pillar to the ground: On the veranda bathed with warm sunshine, a girl was sitting alone in a daze. Out there, it was deepest winter.

White, piled-up snow was gradually melting. She was watching it sadly. Her dream had crumbled away.

On the veranda bathed with warm sunshine, the girl was sitting alone for a long time. Out there, it was deepest winter.

A cold wind stared through a crack in a fence. The girl was always staring far away.

Lovely puppies were growing old. She was watching them sadly.

Her dream faded away in the wind.

The cold wind passed through. The girl knew that someday she would go to the other side of the fence. (Itsuwa 1972) As the forlorn melody of this song mourns the inevitable departure from girlhood, the “women” dance with girlie movements, such as putting their palms together and placing them next to their cheeks and moving forward with small steps. They wave to something – perhaps to the girlhood fleeing away from them. Their dance looks like a ritual to commemorate their happy girlhood. As they dance, one by one, they take off their T-shirts and skirts. Their naked bodies are those of adult women, mercilessly demonstrating that the progress of time is pushing them to “the other side of the fence.” The scene demonstrates that the “girls” only exist in immaterial sphere. The women are trying to become the image of girls, but such identification is destined to fail, as girlness cannot be embodied with flesh.

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Figure 1.1 The girls in Lear, exhausted after the violence to each other in the second scene. Photographer: Ueda Shigeru

After the women leave the park, the character played by Hitsujiya, now alone, stabs the phallic pillar with the ice pick as an act of final resistance, and then undresses herself and changes into the same costume as those of the housewives in the next scene.

The third scene demonstrates that the women have now been incorporated into the masculinist economy. The fact that they speak here, unlike in the previous scenes, tells us that they have entered the symbolic realm. Now, they are housewives in “good,” wealthy households, as suggested by their high-priced “keepsakes” from their husbands and their ladylike speech style. They are also fertile mothers. One of them even says that she has eight children. However, they are apparently unhappy about their situation. They still get together in the park and collectively perform their dream of killing their husbands to liberate themselves. They hint that they used their husbands’ tools for their imagined murders, indicating their desire to become their own masters. Nevertheless, in the end, they have to go back home to do household chores before their husbands return

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from work. Before they leave, they hide the “keepsakes” from their husbands in the park, suggesting that they will return to play the same fantasy again and again. The park is the space where they experience the pleasure of fantasy, momentarily escaping material reality.

Both in the second and third scenes, a big block of ice is used, evoking the fixity of women as opposed to the fluidity of girls. It falls out of a trashcan tipped over in the second scene, so it looks as though it is garbage or something useless. However, it is kept in a corner of the park until the end of the third scene. In the second scene, ice is contrasted with the water-like nature of girls. When they climb up the pillar to challenge what it symbolizes, they pour water from a canteen onto themselves. In the third scene, the character played

by Hitsujiya starts to frantically crush the ice block with an ice pick.

She also tries to liquidize it by rubbing her upper body against it, highlighting the link between girls and water. Honda Masuko points out that in traditional Japanese myth, folklore, and literature, as well as in those in many parts of the world (for example, Hanaori Pass [Hanaori tōge] in Japan and Ophelia in the West), images of girls are often accompanied by water. In many of these imaginaries, girls who resist motherhood are seen as those who disturb the social order, and they are expelled to and die in the world of water, where they cannot touch and defile the fertile soil. However, although water takes their life, it also simultaneously nurtures it. Therefore, the girls that die in water are also reborn in water (Honda 1989: 4–26). Here, they live by dying, like the girls in the first scene of YUBIWA Hotel’s Lear. Drifting in water, girls keep living as girls, never returning to the land symbolizing fertility. As in Honda’s discussion of the link between girls and water, the girls in the second scene pouring water on each other want to return to a fluid state. Even after they come into the world as “women” in the third scene, they are still dreaming of fluidity. In this scene, the character played by Hitsujiya crushes the block of ice and gives pieces to the others, until the block is all gone. They crunch the pieces, as if to enjoy the transient moment when ice melts into water on their tongues. However, such a sensuous, girlie moment is shortlived. The time comes when they have to go back home, or to reality.

The women are aware that they have entered the sphere of adult womanhood, but they are still torn between their material reality and their ideal, immaterial world. In the last scene, they project their desire for girlhood onto a female character who is about to cross the

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border between girlhood and womanhood. They push her back to the girls’ world by killing her or by freezing her time. The scene starts when two girls in wedding dresses (similar to the girls in the first scene, but different performers) have escaped into the park, apparently from wedding ceremonies. Feeling a sense of relief after successfully running away from the ceremonies, they childishly frolic about like the girls in the first scene, but it soon becomes clear that escaping from their wedding ceremonies has not freed them from the social roles imposed on women. While playing around, one of them exposes her swollen belly. This moment, one of the most tragic in the performance, is enacted in a tense and eerie atmosphere. After this revelation, the “women” laugh frantically, indicating that they might be losing their sanity. The other woman mimes a gesture of taking off her wedding ring, but it is too tightly stuck on her finger to be removed. Soon, they start miming mothers; the pregnant one gives birth to a baby and the other one takes care of it.

Both these women are in despair, but they start to show different attitudes to the baby. The one who has given birth is utterly devastated by it. However, the other one, even though this is not her own baby, reveals some attachment to it. It is this attachment that is severed by the housewives/mothers from the third scene coming back to the park. At first, they are reading girls’ manga magazines, but gradually, they start to hold the magazines in the way that one holds a baby. They vocalize the baby’s cry and this indicates that they have taken away the baby from the woman who was taking care of it. She runs around and tries to take it back from them, but they dodge her.

Acting in a childish way, the housewives/mothers turn the object of this woman’s maternal attachment into a girls’ toy. Then they restrict her movement and suggest their violence against her through mime.

After she is killed, the housewives/mothers undress her and leave the park with her wedding dress. The dead woman, reborn as a girl without a baby and a wedding dress, eternally remains in the park.

In his essay “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” Freud argues that women are typically more narcissistic than men and that this arises out of differences in development. Infants are initially narcissistic in the autoerotic phase, where the subject does not distinguish itself from external objects. This narcissism is overcome in the objectseeking genital phase. In his view, women reach this phase later than men, and therefore, women suffer from a more intensified

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narcissistic condition than men. He explains, “With the onset of puberty the maturing of the female sexual organs, which up until then have been in a condition of latency, seems to bring about an intensification of the original narcissism” (1914: 88). Such a state is, he argues, “unfavourable to the development of a true object-choice” (1914: 88). He compares what he considers the underdeveloped nature of narcissistic women to that of children and animals that show no concern for the external world (1914: 89). He argues then that childbirth is the way for women to properly develop into adult human beings: “In the child which they bear, a part of their own body confronts them like an extraneous object, to which, starting out from their narcissism, they can then give complete object-love” (1914: 89–90).

The last scene of Lear twists this sexist formulation of narcissism.

It celebrates narcissism as a “favourable” state in which girls do not “give complete object-love.” The housewives/mothers take the loved object/baby away from the woman and push her back to the narcissistic condition. It is as if they do not want her to repeat the misery they have experienced as non-narcissistic adult women. In the same scene, they kill this woman, as this allows her to be an eternal girl, which is their dream. Although she shows attachment to the baby, she has not given birth yet, and therefore, the housewives/mothers charge her with their never-to-be-realized desire of remaining girls.

(Again, the baby she has been caring for is not her own but the other’s.) Of the two women who escaped the wedding ceremonies and came to the park in this scene, the one who has given birth actually joins the housewives/mothers in the murder of the other and leaves the park with them in the end.

In Lear, the woman reborn as a girl confines herself in the park and does not seek out loved objects outside of this space. The park signifies the liminality of girls, but at the same time this space is not free from masculinist power – it is arranged around a phallic, panoptic pillar in its center, suggesting that it belongs to what Foucault calls “disciplinary institutions,” like modern girls’ schools (Foucault 1975). Remaining in the role of a “non-productive,” eternal girl in this space challenges this disciplinary power. In theory, it pushes girls out of this space to the next stage when the “right” moment comes, but such a moment never comes for this girl. Like modern girls’ schools, the park in Lear has two contradictory roles. A girls’ school

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is a space that disciplines its students as future mothers, but girls have reimagined it as an ahistorical girlie sphere where they could put off their future roles as reproducers. The park in Lear pushes this latter function forward. The girl does not have to put off her future role, because, for her, girlhood is not a transitive moment but an everlasting condition. Time in girls’ aesthetics is thus different from “women’s time” proposed by Julia Kristeva. She theorizes it as cyclical and eternal as opposed to the linear historical time coded as masculine, but while eternity and circularity resonate with girlie time, in her theorization these are seen as maternal. She then acknowledges the stereotypical association of maternity with cyclical, biological, gestative, cosmic nature, but she still finds “unnameable jouissance” (1981: 16) in such maternal time. Girls’ aesthetics celebrate pleasure imaginatively experienced in nullification of temporalities, but this appears as a negation of maternity. Moreover, unlike Kristeva (1974), who considers that “the symbolic” (that is, the system of syntax, which can be linked to masculine, linear, historical time in her essay “Women’s Time”) is constantly being trespassed and threatened by “the semiotic” (that is, what is not reduced to grammar and language structures, such as tones and rhythms of speech, which can be linked to cyclical or a-temporal maternal time),17 girls see maternity as complicit with patriarchy operating on linear time and thus wish to reject it altogether and fantasize a timeless sphere.

“Girlie womb” The park in Lear also twists the function of the womb to which women get reduced in gendered disciplinary society. On the one hand, the park, like modern girls’ schools, is supposed to be a big repository, which contains “future wombs.” In other words, the park itself operates as a kind of womb repository impregnated with future mothers/wombs, and it is a path through which girls as imaginary constructs are transformed into corporeal existences. However, the housewives/mothers in Lear reconceptualize this womb. They themselves have lost their status as girls; they are now women and hence wombs. They accept this, but they imagine having another womb, which retains the ideal image of girls and intervenes in the reproduction of not only children, but also of mothers. In the last scene, they assist the woman to come into this park/womb as a resistant eternal girl. They hinder her from coming into the world outside of

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the womb as a woman/mother/womb. The park in Lear is now their imaginary womb in which they “carry that which is lost” (Phelan 1997: 68), like Anna O.’s womb in her “phantom pregnancy” (Phelan 1997: 64).18 Anna O. was Josef Breuer’s patient whose case study is included in Studies on Hysteria, which he published with Freud in 1895. She suffered from hysteria caused by the death of her much loved father and received Breuer’s treatment. Facing her father’s illness, which would eventually take his life, Anna started to have a bodily symptom of stillness resembling that of her father, as if she thought that sharing the illness with him or sharing her body with him (and thus expanding his body) could mitigate his misery. Despite her love shown by her paralysis, he died, and this traumatized her. The boundary between herself and her father remained blurred. She was haunted by the image of her father haunted by death, and this caused her to experience more bodily symptoms. The treatment Breuer used was the “talking cure,” which was developed to translate a patient’s bodily symptoms into a cohesive narrative. This means that it placed the events that had caused the somatic symptom in the past so that the patient could move forward. Through the talking cure, the body was supposed to discover temporality (Phelan 1997: 56–63). Anna seems to have recovered from trauma through Breuer’s treatment, leaving her father’s death behind in the past. Nevertheless, it is said that at the end of the treatment she experienced a “phantom pregnancy” (Phelan 1997: 64). This suggests that her collaborative process with Breuer generated one more symptom, as though to demonstrate that a woman’s body was ultimately not translatable in the “discursive frame of the always already ‘masculine’ discursive case history” (Phelan 1997: 64). Peggy Phelan argues that Anna’s pregnancy testifies to her recognition that her female body is her own, independent of the body of her father who was inhabiting her, and also of that of Breuer who was translating her bodily symptoms into the “masculine” narrative of psychoanalysis. Her pregnancy thus “returned her to her body” (emphasis in original Phelan 1997: 65). It demonstrates that she had been reborn by acknowledging her father’s death, but did not leave it behind. She attempted to carry the loss of her father within herself as a token of her life, as Phelan explains: “[S]he sought to mark the entwining of these two events [her rebirth and her father’s death] by carrying the breath of his

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death in her (swelling) body. His death changed her body and she wanted her body to display that change by filling it with the life of his death” (1997: 65). Her pregnancy thus nullifies temporalities.

Besides, since this pregnancy was phantom, she never gave birth to what was inside of her womb. What was in her womb was the loss, and therefore there was no way that she could give birth to it. She kept carrying the loss in her womb and functioned as a “living crypt” (Phelan 1997: 65). Her body thus “makes visible the possibility of a body clinging to a permanent present” (Phelan 1997: 67).

While Anna carries the loss of her father in her womb to display that she has regained her female body and life from the masculine spell of temporalities, the women in Lear carry the image of their ideal girl to mitigate the death-like pain of their reality in the masculinist society. However, like Anna’s, their bodies are “living crypts” and resistant to the masculinist rendition of women’s bodies – at least in their imagination. Also, their bodies are “auto-reproductive” (Phelan 1997: 68) in that they impregnate themselves with the eternal girl. Their loved object never comes out of their womb to mark the end of their narcissism. They do not seek the loved object externally. They keep it as a part of themselves, in their womb. Their material bodies cannot resist temporality, but with the eternal girl in their imaginary womb the women try to experience “a permanent present.” Hearing the unheard cardiac sounds of the girl in their imaginary womb, they dream of themselves floating in a bodiless and timeless sphere.

NOISE’s DOLL Kisaragi Koharu’s legacy in Japanese women’s theatre The death of girls is a recurring motif of girls’ aesthetics. Another example from contemporary performance with this motif is NOISE’s DOLL (1983),19 which is about the group suicide of female highschool students. Established in 1983, NOISE was a mixed-gender performance collective led by the late female playwright/director Kisaragi Koharu. She wrote many plays with young female characters, but it should be noted here that she was not particularly an artist of girls’ aesthetics. A leading theatre artist until her unexpected death from illness in 2000, her work encompassed a variety of concerns. She was mostly known as an artist who dealt with the lack of

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genuine communication in urban spaces and commodification of human bodies in consumer society. Her concerns with these issues resonate in DOLL. However, as an exceptional piece in her career, it can also be understood from a perspective of girls’ aesthetics.

Before discussing DOLL, it is useful to review Kisaragi’s career.

She was an influential figure in Japanese theatre, and reviewing her career provides an overview of the development of contemporary Japanese women’s theatre and performance. Kisaragi was one of the first generation of female theatre artists who led their own companies in a field previously dominated by male artists/leaders.20 These women, including Kishida Rio (whose Lear inspired YUBIWA Hotel’s version), Watanabe Eri,21 Nagai Ai, the members of all-female theatre collective Aoi Tori (Blue Bird), and Kisaragi rose to prominence from the late 1970s to the beginning of the 1980s. The 1970s was the time when women’s liberationists were actively protesting the marginalization of women in various facets of society. This was also the time when women became central targets of the capitalist economy, gaining more visibility in a wider social spectrum, and this is reminiscent of the first few decades of the last century when women and girls first appeared as consumers. However, importantly, women’s status as consumers did not liberate them from traditional gender roles, because the consumer society coupled with high-speed economic growth fundamentally operated on the traditional gendered division of labor despite the critique made by women’s liberationists of this structure: men working as breadwinners or so-called “corporate warriors” (kigyō senshi) and women taking care of households and nurturing children (Tonooka 2001: 155). Although these housewives did not have their own incomes, it is traditional in Japanese culture for husbands to give their whole salary to their wives, who manage the household budget. Thus, this traditional view of women as consumers was amplified in this period of economic growth.

In this milieu, these female theatre artists attracted considerable attention in the media. They were featured in theatre and art magazines, but also in mainstream fashion magazines for young women.

In the so-called “age of women,” they were seen as those who achieved creative careers outside of gendered workplaces. However, few of them actually embraced feminism as their central themes.

Moreover, there was no exchange between these women theatre artists and women’s liberationists.22 This represents a crucial difference

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between Japanese women’s theatre and, for example, US and British theatre, where the feminist theatre movement was a part of the women’s liberation movement. Even Aoi Tori, which employed a collective creation method similar to some feminist theatre companies in the US and Britain, did not address issues specific to the lives of women, such as domestic violence, rape, and motherhood (Tonooka 1990: 86).23 Like the majority of female theatre artists of this generation, Kisaragi did not produce specifically feminist pieces even though she experienced gender discrimination. She recalled that male members of her company were reluctant to follow her directions, because they took them as “orders from a woman.” In another instance, male practitioners dismissed her script because it was written by a woman; they said they could use it for training sessions, but not for an actual production (Kisaragi 2001b: 175). In her memoir of Kisaragi, another member of the first generation of female leaders, Watanabe Eri, writes about the atmosphere of the 1980s when she felt that both she and Kisaragi had to be in “full armor” in the male-dominated theatre and society. Despite these experiences, or perhaps as a result of them, Kisaragi’s work in her early and middle career did not focus on gender issues. Even DOLL was not written intentionally as a play on gender, although it can be interpreted as such.

It was at the end of the 1980s that Kisaragi started to tackle women’s issues. She considered not only the problems that Japanese women were facing, but also their positionality in Asia. What motivated her were her experiences at the first and second International Women Playwrights Conference, held respectively in New York in 1988 and Toronto in 1991. At the first conference, she discovered that what she had thought to be her personal problems had relevance to gender issues (Tonooka 2001: 157). The second conference, however, brought her to the realization that these issues varied across regions and cultures, and that ignoring these differences would allow uneven power dynamics among women. Observing that Asian women’s works were not central at this conference, she became aware of the necessity of developing an Asian women’s theatre artists network to discuss the problems they confronted in their respective societies. For this purpose, she inaugurated the Conference for Asian Women and Theatre in 1992. At the first conference, held in Tokyo and Kyoto, participants were from “nine countries including South

Girls’ Time, Girls’ Space 43

Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, India, and Sri Lanka” (Tonooka 2001: 157). Kisaragi invited Kishida Rio to be a member of the committee, and Kishida took over as director at the third conference in Tokyo in February 2001 after Kisaragi’s sudden death in December 2000. At the third conference, other artists of the first generation of female theatre leaders, Watanabe Eri, Nagai Ai, and Kino Hana (a founding member of Aoi Tori), took part as committee members, invited by Kisaragi herself. She thus contributed not only to the development of the exchange among Asian women artists, but also to the facilitation of dialogue among Japanese women artists as well. While labeled as the first generation of female theatre leaders, they had hitherto never got together to discuss women’s issues.

Along with the creation of the network of female theatre artists in Asia, Kisaragi also embarked on a project to examine Japanese women’s involvement with Japan’s imperialist and colonial policy in Asia from the late nineteenth century to the end of World War II. She started to prepare a play about Hasegawa Shigure, the first female playwright in Japan who was also the founding editor of a feminist literary journal, Women’s Arts (Nyonin geijutsu) (1928–32), and a supporter of Japan’s colonial expansion (Tonooka 2001: 152–3).24 She was also planning on writing and directing a play with Kishida Rio about so-called “comfort women” (jūgun ianfu), or women in various parts of Asia who were systematically exploited as sex slaves by the Japanese army during wartime (Ikeuchi 2001: 163). These projects were not completed due to her death, but as Tonooka points out, Kisaragi’s activities from the late 1980s onwards suggest that her concerns finally resonated with those of the women liberationists and feminists who had been problematizing these issues since the 1970s (2001: 153).25 The Conference for Asian Women and Theatre had meetings in the Philippines (in 2000), India (2002), and China (2005), in addition to the ones held in Japan (1992 and 2001), but it faded away.

Kishida, who took the lead after Kisaragi’s death, also died of illness in 2003. Nagai Ai served as director after this, but the conference did not continue. Naomi Tonooka explains that one reason for this is a lack of interest among Japanese female theatre artists. Kisaragi’s concerns (as well as Kishida and Nagai’s) were not shared by the majority of women artists in Japan, even though they attended the third conference (Tonooka 2014).26 However, currently, in 2015,

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Hitsujiya Shirotama of YUBIWA Hotel and dancer/choreographer/ playwright/director Yanaihara Mikuni of the company Nibroll are planning to resume the conference. Thus, Kisaragi’s project has been taken over by a younger generation of female artists. In addition to her performance inspired by Kishida’s Lear, Hitsujiya also created a show inspired by Kisaragi’s DOLL in 2003 as her tribute to this groundbreaking artist. Like her Lear, however, her version of DOLL is very different from the original. I do not have space to discuss her version here, but I would like to point out that it displayed more fluid gender identification of schoolgirls in a “girlie” way, compared to the original discussed below.27 Girls as a trope of a social predicament?

DOLL was the first piece Kisaragi wrote and directed for the company NOISE, which she formed in 1983 after leaving Theatre Company Kiki (Gekidan Kiki). Unlike Theatre Company Kiki, which staged language-oriented plays, NOISE was an experimental, multi-media performance collective involving interdisciplinary collaborations with artists from various fields such as music and visual arts. The production of DOLL took place not in a conventional theatre but in a multipurpose space, Studio 200 in Tokyo. However, it should be noted that Kisaragi’s experimental work in the 1980s with NOISE, let alone DOLL, did not receive much critical acclaim. In his memoir of Kisaragi, Nishidō Kōjin only writes that DOLL looked quite different from typical little theatre plays28 with its usage of visual images projected on a screen and original music scores (2001b: 16). In another of his essays, he fairly accurately summarizes DOLL as a piece about girls who, unable to find meaning in their lives in affluent Japan in the 1980s, killed themselves (2001a: 337). However, he also writes, “It was not very clear what [Kisaragi] intended to do” in this piece (2001b: 16). DOLL is always only briefly recorded as her first (and failed) experimental performance with NOISE, and there are only a few critical examinations of it.29 While I do not deny the possibility that this play has been ignored by critics for legitimate reasons, it may also be the case that its dismissal reflected the typical attitude towards girlie performance in the critical discourse of the period.

DOLL was inspired by the group suicide of three female students, which took place in a Western part of Japan (Nishimura 2005).30 In the 1980s, teenagers’ suicides, both females’ and males’, started to

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be reported widely in the mass media. As theatre critic Nishimura Hiroko recalls, these suicides were so frequent that they became almost like a “trend” (2005).31 Bullying at schools emerged as a serious social problem around this time, and it was a contributing factor in these suicides. The most famous suicide of this period was the one committed by an 18-year-old female pop singer, Okada Yukiko, in 1986, when she jumped from a high building. After this, according ˉ tsuka Eiji, about 40 female adolescents followed her to the grave to O (1989: 10).32 The mass media attempted to find a reason for Okada’s suicide in her relationship with a married actor, and, as evidence, they reported her poems about her unrequited love for an older man ˉ tsuka argues that this is irrelevant, based on in her diary. However, O his finding that she had started to write these poems even before she met this actor (1989: 134). He claims that she created a sentimental fantasy world in which she was, like the heroine of some romantic story, suffering from an unrequited love towards an older man who would only treat her like his younger sister. In his idea, this fantasy had invaded her everyday reality; she projected the fantasy onto a ˉ tsuka concludes that the realizareal-life actor (1989: 150). Then, O tion that she could not share this fantasy with him drove her to death (1989: 150). In other words, the time came when she had to face the “reality,” or become an adult, but she rejected this imperative. He writes that, in despair, she “tries to fly to the everlasting, [fantasy] world of girls” (1989: 239). While we can ultimately never know why Okada terminated her life, this view is tempting as it evokes a girl who lives by dying, although imagining unrequited love for a man is not a feature of girls’ aesthetics. ˉ tsuka’s argument, some suicides of female teenagers If we follow O might have been due to their desire to remain in their girlhood fantasy world. However, Kisaragi does not consider the aforementioned female students’ group suicide in Western Japan to be in this line, at least consciously. She said she did not even aim at writing about girls in DOLL (Honda 1989: 87). Instead, she said that the play was about Japanese society in the 1980s where “the dysfunctional communication as a result of modernization and urbanization of our living environment” was a serious problem (cited in Nishimura 2005)33 and that she used female youth as the trope of this “hard-to-grasp” contemporary society (Honda 1989: 87). She further mentioned that DOLL was not about the death of teenagers sensationally reported

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in the 1980s, but about the possibility of communication through death: “I think these countless children were happy because they had finally been able to communicate with each other in the ultimate situation of death” (cited in Nishimura 2005).34 Kisaragi did not offer an explanation as to why the female youth represented a social predicament.35 Neither is it clear what kind of communication she thought these teenagers achieved through death. However, the communication taking place in the scene in DOLL where female high-school students walk into the sea to drown themselves is striking. It is a collective, militant declaration that they will disregard everything in this world to leave for another, and they invite other female students to join them. While Kisaragi’s primary concern was not girls’ aesthetics, I would argue that this “communication” – sharing the fantasy of living by dying – is very girlie. In DOLL, Kisaragi depicts the process of creating a genuine communion among hitherto isolated female students. The process reminds us that, in girls’ aesthetics, “girl” by definition is a communal identity.

A girl cannot be a girl on her own. She needs to be a member of the exclusive community of girls.

Towards the “white” country of girls DOLL is set in a private girls’ mission high school named St Marianne in Kamakura City.36 The piece consists of six scenes. The five scenes leading up to the last one about a group suicide depict the everyday lives of the five main characters, Keiko, Mari, Kyoko, Midori, and Izumi, all of whom are newly enrolled at St Marianne. They develop their friendship as roommates in the dormitory and seem to be enjoying their lives. However, by the end of scene five, it is made apparent that all of them have some problems. They all feel a sense of isolation, even though they are good friends, and in each scene, each student’s problem or worry is revealed. She is consoled and cheered up by her friends/roommates, but her sense of isolation is not completely removed. Midori is extremely timid and she feels that she is not able to do things with which others have no troubles.

Izumi is a class representative always willing to help others, but her classmates do not appreciate her effort to connect with them. Mari is an academically outstanding student and studying to become a doctor in her father’s hospital. However, she is doing this due to family pressure, and, in fact, she is nihilistic. Kyoko, a typical bad student,

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is constantly breaking the school’s rules by smoking and staying out overnight. Her parents divorced when she was little and this makes her believe that everyone in the world is ultimately alone, and that she has been taking care of herself without anyone’s help. Keiko is a friendly student on the surface, but she is actually not able to relate to people. She finds it difficult to express her true feelings. Among these students, at least two are feeling uncomfortable with standardized womanhood. Mari despises wives and mothers who, in her view, spend their lives on household chores, and Kyoko speaks using male speech patterns and indulges herself in “unwomanly” activities such as smoking and going out alone late at night.

Unlike modern schoolgirls and girls in YUBIWA Hotel’s Lear, the female students in DOLL do not reconfigure their enclosure as a subversive space. It is just a suffocating cage from which they need to escape. In their monologues, they often express a sense of feeling imprisoned in their school. In addition to Kyoko, who often stays out of the dormitory, Midori tries to escape, but fails to do so. In the dark, she gets lost and moves frantically in panic: “I can’t see.

Which way should I go? Left? Right? Oh, it’s a dead end. I’ll try left.

No. What’s wrong? I’m lost. I’m sure this is a way to the station.

No, it’s not. What should I do? I don’t know. I don’t know! I don’t know!!” (Kisaragi 2001a: 26). Likewise, Izumi, disappointed by the fact that no one cares about her effort to be a good class representative, expresses her loneliness and sense of isolation in her poetic, imaginative monologue: I found a small box made of stones. […] I put my right leg, and it almost filled the box. […] I put my left leg, too. I folded my knees and squeezed in. I slid my hands and hugged my knees.

I couldn’t move. […] I couldn’t breathe. […] I heard someone quietly approach and put the cover on top. The heavy, heavy cover made of stone. Then, this person tied a thick iron chain to the box and slowly moved it down into a deep, deep hole, deep down in the underground. A disabled elevator only going downward! Get me out! Get me out of here! Get me out! Get me out! Get me out!

(Kisaragi 2001a: 42–3).

Thus, in DOLL, a girls’ school is a space that compartmentalizes its inhabitants.

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These female students’ dissatisfaction with their lives reaches a climax after Keiko’s date, Uemura, commits suicide. In DOLL, female adolescents do not have a monopoly on suicide. Moreover, unlike typical girls in girls’ aesthetics, who have same-sex relationships or show no interest in heterosexual relationships, the female students in DOLL are heterosexual. Keiko is not particularly fond of Uemura, but, unable to tell him her true feelings, she fails to reject him when he asks her out. She has several dates with him, but finally tells him that she does not want to meet him any more. Then, he kills himself.

Although he dies alone and does not appear later in Heaven with the female students after their suicide, his suicide communicates to the female students the possibility of escaping an unhappy world through death and highlights the unhappiness of each student. After his suicide, Izumi, who was secretly in love with him, but had been hiding it because of her friendship with Keiko, explodes in anger and vehemently blames Keiko. All the students are shocked by the incident and the scene becomes chaotic as they release their emotions. The following morning, while they are watching the sea near the school, Midori abruptly and casually says, “… Hey, why don’t we die …?” (Kisaragi 2001a: 92). The suggestion is too casual, as if she is suggesting that they skip class. Even though they are all severely upset by Uemura’s death, they take their own deaths very lightly.

The direct trigger for these female students’ group suicide is the one committed by a male adolescent, but these female students’ suicide is not a copycat suicide. There are differences between the depiction of Uemura’s suicide and the female students’. The former dies in isolation. Moreover, it is not treated as worth enacting on stage and is simply mentioned as news. Indeed, there is really no character development of Uemura in this play. He just appears very briefly as Keiko’s date and disappears quickly from the world of the play by committing suicide. On the contrary, the girls’ suicide is portrayed as an active departure from this world to another. They militantly march into the sea, and this military bearing suggests that, for them, death is not a coward’s escape from reality. They courageously declare that they have the right to abandon the disturbing everyday reality on the earth. Moreover, importantly, by committing suicide together, these girls create a community. All these girls were unhappy in one way or another, and they have decided to collectively leave their individual worries behind. They have decided that they will not be

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isolated from each other any more while isolating themselves from this world. As they march into the sea, they call for other girls to join them. They want to communicate and connect with these girls: KEIKO:

Proceed! Proceed! Proceed! / Girls who have been enduring in bitter silence / Now, we are informing you / Time has come / Break down the sad and cold wall immediately and march with us / Overcome all trials and tribulations, and do not try to live no matter what happens / Never try to live / March with us! Proceed! Proceed!

MARI: We do not need any luggage. We do not need language, either! / We need nothing but passionate and sincere support from you all / Now, it is four o’clock in the morning on the 26th March, 1983 / Let us assemble in our seashore of Kamakura IZUMI: Ahead to your right, watch out for a great sorrow in the world/ Ignore / Ahead to your left, there is a great disease on the earth / Ignore / Far away behind, watch out for a great lie in this world / Ignore / We are here, here and now KYOKO: Look, that is our country of waves. Over a haze, we can see our undividable country / Repent, repent, repent, girls who have been enduring in bitter silence / Take off your fake clothes / Create your own paths. Get your wings and run! / Go straight, straight, just straight MIDORI: That country is peaceful. That country is gentle / That country is soft. That country is white / White, white, white. The country of light / We will live in harmony. We will cuddle close to each other. We will melt into one in our country (Kisaragi 2001a: 95–7) Responding to these girls’ call, more and more girls appear on the stage and join them (Kisaragi 2001a: 95). Honda Masuko recalls that, in the show she attended, these girls filled not only the stage but also the auditorium (1989: 95).

The girls’ “march of negation” in DOLL shares a striking similarity with Yagawa Sumiko’s poem “The Great March Forward of All Girls Who Support the Eternal Girl” (“Fumetsu no shōjo o yōritsu suru shōjo tachi no daikōshin”) (1985), published around the same time as the first production of DOLL. Dubbed as an “eternal girl” herself, Yagawa

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is a poet, novelist, translator, and essayist, who wrote extensively on girls, from Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, to girl characters in novels by Mori Mari and Nomizo Naoko, both of whom exhibited girlie sensibilities in their work. The poem’s visual image is that of a regiment of “negating girls” marching advance, with the “ETERNAL GIRL” in the center, as if protecting her by denying all the existing values.

Unruly girl Unresting girl Unremitting girl Unparalleled girl Unregretting girl Unwavering girl Unrestrainable girl Unknown girl Unfalling girl Unfaithful girl Unforgettable girl Unfruitful girl ETERNAL GIRL Unfeeling girl Unfortunate girl Unoffending girl Infertile girl Inconstant girl Unsettled girl Incorruptible girl Unsleeping girl Insolent girl Unspeaking girl Insubordinate girl Uneasy girl Unsatisfied girl

Unchaste girl Unconscious girl Uncured girl Unquestioning girl Unexpected girl

Disloyal girl Immovable girl Ageless girl Undistinguished girl Immortal girl Undying girl Disrespectful girl Unworthy girl Untrustworthy girl Unlucky girl

(Yagawa 1985, p.16)

Yagawa comments on this poem: It is not too much to say that girls who do not say “no” are not girls … On the nights I cannot sleep, I pass the time by listening to gentle footsteps of a large group of girls coming close to me like waves from faraway … As long as I am supported by these troops, I can proudly and peacefully celebrate my “no.” (2002: 40) Here as well, girls appear in a group. Becoming a girl is indeed a collective act. Girls can be girls when they are with other girls; since their origin in modern magazines and girls’ schools, girls are those who collectively create an imagined community sharing the resistant aesthetics. Yagawa (regardless of her material age) can be a girl who embraces her negation when she feels that she is supported by other girls, and YUBIWA Hotel’s girls are even identical to each other.

Likewise, girls in DOLL act together in a group, and it gets bigger and

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bigger as they attempt to leave for their “country of waves.” Here, girls appear as if they were auto-reproductive beings, rendering heterosexual copulation useless for reproduction. This reminds us of the women who impregnate themselves with the eternal girl in YUBIWA Hotel’s Lear.

It is not clear if Yagawa knew about Kisaragi’s DOLL. She does not refer to it in her comments on this poem. However, whether she was aware of it or not, “militant girls” were a shared imaginary of at least these two artists during the time when female adolescents’ suicides were a social concern. These artists saw the autonomy of girls who actively and militantly create their own value system that contradicts the existing ones in “this world.” Yet, these girls are not militant in a typical way. They do not cause any conflicts in the public sphere.

Their footsteps in the march are gentle. They do not even attempt to make their voices heard, except to other girls. They quietly leave this world behind in search of a space where they can be peaceful and connected to other girls. Therefore, these militant girls are completely different from female fighters in cultural artifacts such as computer games, anime, and manga targeting heterosexual male consumers. These female fighters, often with magical powers, are skilled in various forms of battle, but male consumers do not completely let these characters trespass “male purview.” Their bodies are eroticized (typically with huge breasts and hips) to the extent that they are even distorted, satisfying masculinist, sadistic desire. Female militancy has a heterosexist erotic function within these cultural artifacts, which contrasts with its use in girls’ aesthetics.

The girls in DOLL disappear in the sea, and it is also an interesting coincidence that Yagawa compares the footsteps of her girl troops with waves. These girls evoke Honda’s discussion of girls’ rebirth in the sea introduced in the discussion on YUBIWA Hotel’s Lear. At the end of the play DOLL, unable to find the girls’ bodies, one of the detectives says: “Have the girls become water?” (Kisaragi 2001a: 107).

Staying away from the fertile land or the Mother Earth, the girls in DOLL (and the girls in Yagawa’s poem) have become fluid entities.

The erasure of their bodies in the sea also makes their existence fictional, as Honda points out (1989: 104); as we have seen, a fictional body is an important characteristic of girls’ aesthetics. Without material bodies, which they consider to be the “real” proof of the girls’ existence, the detectives wonder, “The girls existed, or they might have existed” (Kisaragi 2001a: 105).

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There is no description of the girls’ costume as they march in the published script, but Honda writes that they all wore white frilly nightwear in the production she attended (1989: 95). While their costumes may suggest that they are getting ready to take their last sleep, Honda also indicates that they evoked wedding dresses. As she argues, however, in this “ceremony,” they are not “paired with men” (1989: 99). Indeed, while they are heterosexual, after their death and rebirth in Heaven, they no longer show any interest in heterosexual romantic relationships. When they look back at their first and only year at St Marianne in Heaven, they recall Uemura among other things, but even Izumi, who was in love with him, says that she has lost her attachment to him. Honda maintains that these girls, without grooms in the “ceremony,” are “married into death” (1989: 99).

However, I would argue that the girls are now collectively married to each other. This marriage is not a sexual contract, but what they have gained is something like a “marriage visa,” which allows them to collectively enter their own country. And yet, in this country, they desire to “melt into one” (Kisaragi 2001a: 97), and this does invoke erotic or affective sensation. The girls celebrate this affective binding in girlie, frilly costume. As such, the girls’ bond forces us to reconsider the sexual and the erotic, as I will discuss more in Chapter 2.

In addition to white dresses, the color white is repeatedly mentioned during and after the scene of the girls’ march into the sea.

First, they describe the country they are heading for as a white country: “That country is white / White, white, white” (Kisaragi 2001a: 97). Then, in Heaven, they get excited when they find that their future schedule is eternally empty or “pure white” (masshiro) (Kisaragi 2001a: 102). As they go through the school album, which Midori has brought as a souvenir, they see that there are no photos after April of that year.37 Month by month, they make sure of its blankness or whiteness: MIDORI: ALL: MIDORI: ALL: MIDORI: ALL:

… Then, April, pure white. May, Pure white.

June, Pure white.

July, August, September, October, Forever, white.

Pure white, Hurray!

(Kisaragi 2001a: 102)

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Honda considers that, by dying, these girls have avoided having their “future page” filled with “black ink” (1989: 102). What paints their future in black may include the heteronormative union, as suggested by the absence of males in this white country of waves.

In this country, the girls live as “dolls.” They do not have their organic bodies, and therefore they never age. They collectively exist without growing old, eternally embracing negation of “this world.”

Thus, dolls here are not the playthings of their owners. Since there are many dolls in this play, Naomi Tonooka “translates” the title of this piece as DOLLS in her PhD dissertation. However, the original title was already in English as the singular DOLL. This is more consistent with the view that these dolls wish to melt into one another, such that it may be more suitable to refer to them as the singular entity “doll.” Becoming a doll is a collective act, like becoming a girl.

The portrayal of girls as a single entity implies hope for creating solidarity among isolated individuals. However, this desire for singularity makes girls’ aesthetics sound like a homogenizing ideal. Indeed, to a certain extent, they are. Sara Ahmed, advocating a feminist “we” consisting of those with different affective experiences, convincingly argues, “[W]e may need to stay uncomfortable within feminism, even when we feel it provides us with a home” (2004: 178). She maintains that comfort blurs the distinction between one’s body and the environment one inhabits and, as a consequence, the distinction between one’s body and other bodies also inhabiting that environment: “[I]n feelings of comfort, bodies extend into spaces, and spaces extend into bodies. The … feeling involves a seamless space, or a space where you can’t see the ‘stiches’ between bodies” (2004: 148).

The girls in DOLL desire to remove the “stiches” between their bodies by “melting into one” with each other. To this end, they discard their very bodies as barriers which hinder them from connecting to each other; in their imaginary, bodiless realm, they become one.

Such a desire to imagine themselves as a single entity might reflect feminist sentiments of the 1970s and 1980s when DOLL was first produced, and I am aware that such sentiments are naïve. However, what is important here is that girls’ aesthetics imagine girls as a single identity, based on the recognition that such an identity is impossible in material reality. Girls’ aesthetics are not the body politics that are grounded in everyday reality. In “our” feminist struggle, we should acknowledge differences between “us” and should not claim

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“other’s” experiences as “our” own. Still, is it not consoling to feel that someone like you is with you in need of an imaginary space? In such a space, regardless of the actual differences in our material reality (race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, educational background, and so on), we are one and the same. Can this utopic space not be another home we can inhabit as a stage where we, to borrow Yagawa Sumiko’s phrase, “embrace” our collective “no” to the uncomfortable everyday reality? With the support from other girls in their imaginary realm, girls survive their everyday reality.

This girlie space may simply function as something like a carnivalesque space, which ends up sustaining the oppressive structure of everyday reality. Girls may release their subversive desire temporarily in their imaginary sphere and go back to play a conventional gender role as women in reality. However, does this mean that their feminist consciousness is in vain? Not everyone who has experienced patriarchal and heteronormative oppression has the vocabulary, ability, and power to directly counter such a social structure in the public arena.

The very desire to have this imaginary space itself shows that many women do not fit into their reality. In the creation of such a comfortable space, they may imagine eliminating “stiches” between their bodies, but they do shed light on the “stiches” between their fantasy sphere and their material reality. They live in both these spaces, and the move between them may possibly result in some changes in their material reality. The experiences these girls have in a subversive aesthetic/political realm may affect the ways they make use of their material bodies, and these bodies may affect their surroundings. It is also important to point out that the “oneness” in girls’ aesthetics is in many cases based on the imaginatively transgressive quality of girls. Put differently, girls are equally transgressive in their imagination, and therefore, they are not a static, essentialized entity, as shown in the next section and the chapters to follow.

Yanagi Miwa’s Granddaughters Love and hate for girls Leading visual artist Yanagi Miwa also creates a closed space without temporality, in which girls as a single entity dwell. What characterizes her work is her frequent identification of girls with old women or vice versa. For example, in her photograph series Fairy Tale

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(2004–6), girls and old women enact scenes from fairy tales (which are ahistorical by definition) in a small room. But old women here are actually performed by girls with masks. Windswept Women: The Old Girls’ Troupe (2009), comprising photographs and a short film that were exhibited in the Japan Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, depicts a troupe of women who travel in the desert. The piece conveys a sense of closure and a lack of temporality despite the vastness of the desert, because no matter how far the women go, the scenery is almost the same. Moreover, the “old girls” have bodily traits of both young and old women and are thus ageless. My Grandmothers (2000–) is a collection of digital photographs of old women imagined by younger women. Yanagi asks the women she gathers through her website to imagine what they will be like in 50 years from the time of the interviews and visualizes their “self-portraits” in the photographs; therefore, younger women perform their older selves. This series may seem to be about progressive time, but I would argue that it is rather the result of Yanagi’s desire to contain both present and future in one photographic space. Her video piece Birthday Party (2002–9) consists of repetitions of a scene in which girls disguised as old women surround a huge birthday cake, sing “Happy Birthday,” and blow out numerous candles stuck in the cake. A birthday party is supposed to celebrate years spent since one was born, but the endless repetition of the same scene, as well as old women looking like girls and vice versa, dissolves the sense of duration. As an artist of girls’ aesthetics, Yanagi compresses time and therefore cancels the notion of progress or maturity on the body/space of a girl.

However, girls’ aesthetics in Yanagi’s work are sometimes at odds with her statements about her work. She shows ambivalent attitudes to girls’ culture, saying that she feels both love and hate for it. She argues that girls’ culture functions as a shelter for women who cannot confront patriarchy and that these girls need to mature (2005: 66–7). Such a critique is not so surprising, because, although girls behave subversively in their imaginary world, for those who only advocate political visibility in the “real” world, these girls appear to be maintaining the status quo without facing and challenging patriarchal oppression. Perhaps more surprisingly, she argues that Japanese women “still” tend to be sexually attracted not to men, but narcissistically to women, and she maintains that this is something which they must grow out of (Nishiyama et al. 2003: 83, 85;

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Yanagi and Saitō 2004: 92). From her perspective, reality outside of the “shelter” is associated with heterosexual maturation, and thus she considers Japanese women’s unwillingness to conform to heterosexuality (and to challenge patriarchy in her view) as a sign of immaturity. Nevertheless, her works seem to negate these ideas.

She almost always creates a utopic, isolated world inhabited only by girls. She says, “I think we eventually have to say good-bye to what we used to love” (2005: 67), but her works reveal her melancholia for girlhood or her inability to give up the comfort of a homosocial and homoerotic girls’ community. Below, I will discuss her video installation piece Granddaughters (2002 and 2003) as another example which demonstrates how girls create their own space without materiality and temporality. Unlike her other pieces such as Gloria & Léon (2004),38 Granddaughters does not exhibit homoeroticism.

Her concern in this piece seems to be the alliance of “old girls” and “young girls” who resist being reduced to material reproducers. The piece also presents the possibility of a “transnationally closed” community of girls; Yanagi creates a heteroglossic space in which girls with different racial/ethnic backgrounds reside.

Young girls and old girls Granddaughters consists of a collection of TV-news-like screens projected on the walls in a gallery room (Shiseido Gallery in Tokyo, Japan in 2002) and in a church (Sainte Marie-Madeleine Church in Lille, France in 2003).39 On each screen, an old woman, over 70 years old, appears and talks about her personal memories of her grandmother.

These women are from many different regions of the world such as Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North and South America, and these more than 50-year-old memories of their grandmothers vary.

Some talk about their lives with their grandmothers during wartime, and others talk about the beauty of their grandmothers. Regardless of the contents, they are all personal accounts, and yet these old women appear on a “news program” as if they were correspondents reporting important public incidents from each location. Their utterances are simultaneously translated into Japanese (at the Shiseido Gallery) and French (at Sainte Marie-Madeleine Church) by local schoolgirls whose images in the translators’ booth are also projected onto the wall. Thus, these old women’s speeches about their grandmothers are translated by schoolgirls who are in the generation of these old women’s granddaughters. In other words, the granddaughters are

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translated by (the surrogates of) their granddaughters. Skipping the mothers in the second and fourth generations who mediate between grandmothers and granddaughters, these “granddaughters” gather in this exhibition space.

One way of looking at this piece might be that these women are demanding the right to talk about women’s experiences in the public arena. The public sphere, according to Habermas, is the discursive sphere open to citizens who are concerned with public matters and common interests (Habermas 1962). However, as pointed out by many scholars, this conception of the bourgeois public space operates on exclusions, based on various conditions, one of which is gender. In the public sphere, social inequalities among the participants are supposed to be “bracketed,” but in reality, those who need to have their differences bracketed were often precluded to begin with.

As such, it is members of a dominant group who decide what counts

Figure 1.2 Exhibition of Granddaughters in Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo in 2002.

Old women from various parts of the world talking about their grandmothers in a “news program.” From the catalogue, Granddaughters, published by Shiseido Gallery.

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as the common interest in the name of the all-encompassing public.

The women in Granddaughters who appear in a “news program” may seem as though they are trying to reconfigure the public sphere, first by appearing in this sphere as women and second by talking about what are typically considered to be personal matters. The women may seem to be challenging the systematic exclusion of women and women’s lived experiences from the categories of public and common interest.

However, I would argue that this interpretation does not capture the complete experience of this piece. These women do not form what Nancy Fraser calls “subaltern counterpublics.” Like “subaltern counterpublics,” they “signal that they are parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (Fraser 1992: 123), but they do not seem to “aspire to disseminate [their] discourse[s] to ever widening arenas” (Fraser 1992: 124). They look like they are simply enjoying talking about their memories of their grandmothers, and while they appear on screens that look like those of news programs, they do not seem to be trying to bring their personal memories to the public arena. Importantly, both the gallery room and the church space where the piece was exhibited were small, giving a sense of a private space (although technically they were open to the public), typical of the work of Yanagi and of girls’ aesthetics in general. In this confinement, the memories are shared, as if they were too personally important to make public. For example, a woman talks about the gift that her grandmother gave to her: When I graduated from college, she wanted to give me something special, and had a pearl necklace40 that she always called “her real pearls.” She gave them (sic) to me which was a bit sacrificial, because it was her one treasure. Years later, it started to deteriorate and I took it to a jeweler and asked him, “How do you tell that’s real?” And he said, “You have to destroy one to find out. You have to peel off the layers. Otherwise you don’t know if it’s real or not.”

He said, “It looks to me like it has a few fake ones in it.” I think she may have broken the strain (sic) and bought a few more at the dime store to add on to it. I don’t know. He also said that they (sic) may have glass beads that were put in oysters and were

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coated in pearl. But whatever it was, I never really wanted to find out, because I liked to think I own my grandmother’s real pearls.

(Yanagi 2002: 26–31) For both her and her grandmother, fake pearls from a dime store can be “real pearls.” As if to signal only to those who can share the affect invoked by such fake pearls, Yanagi exhibited Granddaughters in small and intimate spaces. In these spaces, being dubbed by schoolgirls, these women are portrayed as girlishly playing public figures, or possibly, they are portrayed as parodying the public sphere (in a non-confrontational way). The “seriousness” of the public sphere is turned into an intimate atmosphere of old women and girls.

In this space of old women and girls, what is negated is not just the typical public value system. Developmental time is also missing to a large extent. It is true that an older generation’s experiences are passed on to and shared by a younger generation, but the very concept of “generation” does not mean much here. This is because Yanagi has identified the old women and the girls as the same entity.

The schoolgirls serve as simultaneous translators for the old women, and thereby the girls talk as the old women and the old women talk as the girls. They are both granddaughters, and time circulates only among them and does not move linearly. ˉ tsuka Eiji points out, the identification of girls with old women As O is often found in contemporary Japanese media for those with girlie sensibilities (1989: 201). For example, Takano Fumiko’s manga Tanabe Tsuru (Tanabe no Tsuru) (1980) portrays a senile old woman named Tsuru who believes that she has gone back to her girlhood.

Despite her advanced material age, she is depicted in this manga as a girl. Nakamori Akio’s novel Foppish Thief (Oshare dorobō) (1988) has girl characters wishing to “skip ‘women’” and to become old women (obāchan). According to them, old women can have purer “precision of girlness” as impurities have been filtered over time. They say, “If ˉ tsuka old women are girls, we are also young old women” (cited in O 1989: 195). What connects the old women and the girls in all these pieces is the fact that they are both detached from reproductive roles.

The alliance between old women and girls excludes mothers from the girlie space. In Granddaughters and other works of Yanagi, girls do not mature into mothers, and old women are not mature mothers.

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Figure 1.3 Granddaughters in Sainte Marie-Madeleine Church in Lille, France in 2003. Photographer: Jean-Pierre Duplan

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The developmental time line on which mother is a middle point between girls and old women is severed.41 Here, old women are girls whose material bodies have aged. Therefore, following the title of one of Yanagi’s works (Windswept Women: The Old Girls’ Troupe), I will refer to the old women in Granddaughters as “old girls.”

In Granddaughters, the absence of mothers testifies to girlie rejection of material/maternal bodies. However, in this piece, not only mothers’ bodies, but also all material bodies are absent. Both the young girls and the old girls appear as images projected on the walls in an enclosed space. In particular, the room in the Shiseido Gallery was located in “the womb-like basement” as described by critic Kanai Keiko (2002: 23). The mise-en-scène evokes Elin Diamond’s theorization of feminist mimesis, inspired by Luce Irigaray’s deconstructive reading of Plato’s myth of the “cave,” in which he associates women with mimesis or deceptiveness. In order to intervene in the traditional and powerful regime of the representation of gender, Irigaray reconfigures Plato’s arguments and utilizes them for the very purpose of critiquing the masculinist Truth/Ideal model. In the Republic, Plato conceives the wall as “a metaphor for the illusory nature of worldly objects that keep man from contemplating true Forms, the unseeable Ideal” (Diamond 1997: xi). Implying the birth metaphor, he maintains that men cannot see the Truth/Ideal until they go through the painful expulsion from the cave. Irigaray manipulates this metaphor and reconceptualizes the cave as the “womb-theatre,” functioning as the “illusionistic apparatus,” which “obscure[s] the mode of production” (Diamond 1997: xi). In one sense, the womb-theatre may sound like a stage for conventional mimetic (realistic) theatre, but importantly, in this theatre, reflections have no origins. Since those inside of the cave cannot see the origins of the reflections, they experience the reflections as the origins or “mimesis without truth” (Diamond 1997: xi). Like this womb-theatre, Granddaughters creates a space filled only with reflections where there are no true ideal material women’s bodies. However, one difference between the womb-theatre and the womb-like space of Granddaughters is that, while the former “opens and delivers [...] fake offspring” (Diamond 1997: xii), suggesting that the world outside of the cave is also filled with “mimesis without truth,” the latter, as the girlie space, is never opened for delivery. In a similar way to the pregnancy without temporalities in YUBIWA Hotel’s Lear, the girls, both young and old, are

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impregnated in the womb without temporalities and never come into the world.

Also reminiscent of YUBIWA Hotel’s Lear, Yanagi’s Granddaughters is melancholic. The ahistorical space it creates is filled with the intangible images of young and old girls, as if they refuse to let go of each other. They continue to talk about various memories as both old girls and young girls, as if they were inseparable. This communal space constitutes “girls” as a communal identity. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud pathologized melancholics as those who have failed to find a new object to invest in after the loss of the loved object. Challenging this pathologization, David L. Eng and Shinhee Han argue that melancholic response is indeed ethical. A melancholic refuses to “allow certain objects to disappear into oblivion” (Eng and Hang 2003: 365), as “the loved object is so overwhelmingly important to and beloved by the ego that the ego is willing to preserve it even at the cost of its own self” (Eng and Hang 2003: 364). Thus, as Freud himself remarks: “[L]ove escapes extinction” in melancholics (Freud cited in Eng and Hang 2003: 365). Besides, Freud later modified his theorization of melancholia as pathology in The Ego and the Id, maintaining that it is indeed inherent in the formation of the ego. He explains that the ego is the accumulation of those lost objects which have been melancholically internalized: “[T]he character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned objectcathexes and … it contains the history of those object-choices” (1923: 29). In “Mourning and Melancholia,” he defines melancholia as the inability to resolve grief, but in this later configuration, grief is understood as what is permanently unresolved. As long as the ego consists of the grieved objects, as Judith Butler writes, “[T]here is no final breaking of the attachment” (1997: 134). One lives with or as the lost loved objects.

In Granddaughters, in the collective refusal to let go of the loved girlhood, what might be called the collective ego of girls is generated.

Girls who live with and as other girls become constituents of the ego of girls as a single entity. Yet, this “oneness” is not static. Without any weight to nail them down to the earth, the girls vault into this space from various different parts of the world despite the material distances. Crossing whatever existing boundaries, they share the ego of girls. Here, there are neither essential Japanese women’s bodies nor any other essentialized women’s bodies. The space does not silence

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any voices, either. They all talk about their grandmothers, but their stories are different and they are equally cherished.

Most of the memories of grandmothers are recalled with love and warmth, and some show their regret at not having been kind enough to their grandmothers. What connects these girls – young and old across space and time – is affect. This is in contrast to the effectoriented public sphere, where the exclusive citizens discuss how to work together under the logic of productivity to achieve “common” goals. In Granddaughters, girls turn the effective public sphere of a news program to an affective girlie sphere, where girls collectively disregard productivity and immerse themselves in the never-ending joy and pleasure of the act of continually sharing memories of their grandmothers. They have no goals to achieve at the end of the developmental time line. However, this does not suggest that Granddaughters is an apolitical piece. In his claim for a shift in applied theatre from effects to affects, James Thompson counters the typical argument that the affective realm is void of politics. He critiques the marginalization of affects (in this case, “joy, fun, pleasure, beauty” experienced or created through/in art) in the conventional evaluation methods of applied theatre, which are solely based on indicators such as “social impact” and “identifiable effect” (2009: 116). He argues that the aesthetic creation of affective space demonstrates the fact that such a space does not exist in the reality that the creator inhabits (2009: 126) and that therefore, “the creation of a ‘more enjoyable life,’ in its most infinitely demanding sense, is exactly the point of politics” (2009: 128). He further maintains that “[the aesthetic intensity] is, far from being a retreat, a place of safety from which ‘critical inquiry’ (using [Jill] Bennett’s phrase)… can develop” (2009: 128). From feminist perspectives, Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris also argue for the politics in imagination and fantasy in their discussion of mainstream theatre aimed at women, which has been neglected in the scholarly discourse valorizing “alternative,” more consciously political, and hence supposedly more politically effective, theatre. Re-evaluating “the pleasures and possibilities of peculiarly and specifically theatrical ‘transformations’” staged in the mainstream shows, they observe that, even though these transformations “do not necessarily have a literal, instrumental or direct political impact on the world of the social,” they “may have a role in re-imagining it” (emphasis in original Aston and Harris 2013: 11).

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For example, as explained by Aston and Harris, female friendship is a typical theme of the mainstream shows aimed at women. These shows are staged as fantasy, because in real life it is considered difficult to have ideal female friendship. However, the popularity of this theme also suggests female audiences’ re-imagining of their reality or “yearning” for a different space (Aston and Harris 2013: 18).

The arguments by Thompson, Aston and Harris resonate with girls’ aesthetics. Girls isolate themselves from the goal-oriented society and imagine and yearn for “somewhere else” where they can have a “more enjoyable life.” By creating this “place of safety,” they say “No” to the society which operates on a value system different from theirs. Rather than trying to change existing society, they imagine another. And yet, as I have argued earlier, there is a possibility that the girls’ imaginary world may affect their material realm. I would suggest that this might be the ultimate aim of these artists with girlie sensibilities discussed in this monograph. As long as these artists are working in the public domain, their works are open to the public, no matter how “closed” they may seem. As discussed in the Introduction, there is a gap between “girl artists” and the girls they create in their artwork. Yet, these artists sympathize with girls’ aesthetics. Through exhibiting their works in public venues, Yanagi and other artists of girls’ aesthetics expose the affective space of girls in the public domain and thus more directly condemn the “real” world which only allows one way of effectively being a woman.

In the girlie space where no “origin” or “truth” exists, the girls shine. Honda Masuko succinctly mentions that girls are beautiful and lovable, because they are “not real.” As the works discussed in this chapter portray, they are just imaginary constructs without any substantial materiality. Just like the cheap, glass beads sold at a fair that fascinate girls (Honda 1982: 201), they themselves are “fakes.”

Indeed, a community of girls in these works might be compared to the necklace with fake pearls recalled by an old girl in Granddaughters.

Each girl, young and old, is a constituent of this necklace, whose value cannot be judged by the “realness” of the pearls. Girls, like fake pearls, twinkle in the necklace, which has neither beginning point nor end point in its circular structure.

2 Girlie Sexuality: When Flat Girls Become Three-Dimensional

The previous chapter explored girls’ aesthetics’ conception of time and space. I have argued that, by imagining fictional selves living in an ahistorical, closed space, girls resist their reduction to reproductive functions – or what I call “materialization” of their bodies. This chapter considers other aspects of the aesthetics, namely, a desire for immaterial, “unproductive,” androgynous bodies and a same-sex eroticism that go beyond conventional Japanese womanhood. The works examined are Hagio Moto’s girls’ manga, The Heart of Thomas (Tōma no shinzō) (1974), its stage adaptation of the same title by Studio Life with all-male actors under female director Kurata Jun (first produced in 1996 and most recently in 2014), and its film adaptation titled Summer Vacation 1999 (1999 nen no natsuyasumi) (1988a), directed by male director Kaneko Shūsuke and scripted by female playwright Kishida Rio (whose Lear inspired performance troupe YUBIWA Hotel as discussed in Chapter 1). The focus of this chapter is on intangible, fictional bodies in manga in terms of gender and sexuality and the effects of their “three-dimensionalization” in theatre and film. Manga is an ideal medium for girls’ aesthetics as it makes it possible for girls to imaginatively immerse themselves in a “flat” realm where immaterial bodies as signs do not always correspond to referents in the three-dimensional, material world. However, what happens when these manga signs are given actors’ bodies on stage and in film? To what extent are these material bodies “girlie”?

Hagio Moto is a leading manga artist and a representative member of the Year 24 Group (Nijūyo nen gumi), a group of female manga artists who innovated girls’ manga both in terms of narrative and visual 65

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aesthetics in the 1970s. The group name comes from the fact that these artists were born around the 24th year of the reign of the Shōwa Emperor, or AD 1949. The Year 24 Group members, such as Hagio ˉ shima Yumiko, Kihara Moto, Takemiya Keiko, Yamagishi Ryōko, O Toshie, and Aoike Yasuko, came to be grouped together because of their similar themes and visual styles.1 Their works in the 1970s and 1980s are now seen as the classics of girls’ manga, and many of them continue to publish high-quality works.2 Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas is one such classic and regarded as one of the best works of her earlier career. It was serialized in a girls’ manga magazine, Weekly Girls’ Comics (Shūkan shōjo komikku), in 1974, and has enjoyed continuing popularity, having an influence on various arts from theatre to even music.3 Before the rise of this group, girls’ manga was often produced by men and focused on heteronormative romances and comedies among teenage girls. In contrast, the female artists of this group, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, produced works depicting androgynous boys in homosexual or homoerotic relationships. While these manga pieces are about “boys,” I will argue that these androgynous boys are alter egos of girls and that the two-dimensional nature of manga, where characters are drawn without materiality, facilitates girls’ identification with these “boys.” Through these bodies, they questioned stereotypical views of Japanese womanhood, which continued to shape women’s development into wives and mothers.4 Before discussing Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas and its theatre and film adaptations, I will encapsulate in the next section in more detail the genealogy of androgynes and same-sex desires in girls’ aesthetics.

Gender and sexuality in girls’ aesthetics In Chapter 1, I have discussed the emergence of girls’ aesthetics at the turn of the twentieth century and identified girls’ schools and girls’ magazines as their origins and the main sites of their development. Girls, or schoolgirls, as consumers of these magazines, fantasized eternally young bodies of themselves isolated from the rest of the world. Importantly, these immaterial bodies were not just immortal and fictional. They were also often androgynous and erotically attracted to other members of the girlie community.

Before the Meiji Period (1868–1912), male homosexuality, especially in the samurai class, was a common practice. Adult samurai males

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could be in sexual relationships with their younger counterparts, as well as actors and other lower-class males in all age groups. Even monks were able to have their acolytes as their sexual partners. Malemale love was described as nanshoku (or danshoku), consisting of characters meaning “men” and “eroticism.” However, its female equivalent did not exist; there was the term joshoku (or nyoshoku), consisting of characters meaning “women” and “eroticism,” but it referred to malefemale love (McLelland et al. 2007: 5–6). Without a term designating female homosexuality, as Mark McLelland, Katsuhiko Sunagawa, and James Welker point out, “there was no way of cognitively linking both male and female ‘homosexuality’” (2007: 6). Female homosexuality was first recognized in the modern period, but this was during the development of sexology discourses inspired by Western sexologists and psychologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Sigmund Freud, which deemed homosexuality as “abnormal” (McLelland et al.

2007: 7). The term dōsei-ai was coined around the 1910s and 1920s to designate both male and female homosexuality, but as explained in the Introduction, it came to be used more to describe female-female relationships (Furukawa 1995: 205-7).

In addition to dōsei-ai, the terms esu and ome were developed to differentiate the types of female-female relationships. Esu is derived from the Japanese pronunciation of the letter “S,” which stood for sisterhood and implied intimate friendships or platonic romantic attachments between schoolgirls, usually between a senior and a junior. On the contrary, ome was used for gendered butch-femme relationships, and these relationships were considered to involve carnal pleasure. In sexology discourses which were developing in Japan and elsewhere around this time in pursuit of the “scientific” understanding of sexuality, S relationships were taken to be normal because they were understood to be a mere copy of heterosexual relationships for those who had no contact with men and hence were at a preparatory stage for adulthood-cum-heterosexuality/motherhood. However, ome relationships, particularly post-adolescent ones, were pathologized and further considered to be a threat to statesanctioned womanhood in the process of modern state formation (Robertson 1998: 68–70; Suzuki 2010: 24–8).5 Society thus attempted to understand girls and women’s sexuality through the modernist, developmental measurement applied to personal experiences (Suzuki 2010: 3). However, this idea that there was a natural continuum from

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S relationships to heterosexuality was challenged by the incidents of girls’ love suicides discussed in Chapter 1. Girls who were supposed to be preparing for heterosexuality-cum-adulthood terminated their lives in order not to become adults.

Prewar girls’ aesthetics are represented by Yoshiya Nobuko’s novels.

Her representative work, Flower Tales (Hana monogatari), was serialized in the magazine Girls’ Periodical (Shōjo gahō) from 1916 to 1924.

It is a collection of short stories, each of which has a flower’s name as its title. The piece abounds with stylistically ornate, sentimental depictions of extremely intimate “friendships” or S relationships between two girls. Men as romantic partners do not exist here, making a stark contrast with non-girls’ novels around this time, which started to feature schoolgirls as men’s romantic partners or as future “good wives, wise mothers” (Levy 2010: 49–91; Shamoon 2012: 14–28). This suggests a gap between the public and girls’ aesthetics in terms of the relationships that they desired.

Yoshiya adopted the contemporary discourse of female-female love as a transitory, pre-heterosexual phenomenon, as seen in her essay, “The Happiness of Loving One of the Same Sex” (Dōsei o aisuru saiwai) (Suzuki 2010: 36–8).6 However, in Flower Tales and other pieces, she never portrayed heterosexual union as a mature form of love. Rather, compulsory heterosexuality brings misery to girls. For example, in Flower Tales, “Burning Flower” (Moyuru hana) centers on a schoolgirl who tries to protect a young graduate who has returned to the boarding school to escape her marriage. They both die in a fire in the dormitory, set by the graduate’s husband in retaliation for her leaving him. “Yellow Rose” (Kibara) is about a female student and her young female teacher who admires Sappho. They are torn apart by the marriage arranged by the student’s parents, and the teacher leaves for a foreign country in despair. “Flower in the Shadow” (Hikage no hana) depicts an ome couple, one of whom is like a “beautiful boy” (Yoshiya 2009: 37). Two girls experience “the sweetness of forbidden fruit” (Yoshiya 2009: 41). Writing about heteronormative violence against women, Yoshiya herself openly lived with her female partner for almost 50 years until her death.

Another important trait of Flower Tales is that it downplays “Japaneseness” and instead admires Western cultures, which is typical of girls’ aesthetics. In their imagination, girls disregard their Japanese reality and dream of the “exotic West.” While I will discuss

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the topic of girls and the West in Chapter 4, I will do so from a perspective somewhat different from typical girls’ aesthetics, and therefore, I briefly outline typical girlie adoration of the West here.

Relationship of girls to the West was complex, as they were associated with the West not only by themselves, but also by the public.

What these two parties saw as the West was not always the same, but one commonality was that, for both parties, “girls” were tinged with a Western flavor because many of them were educated in private mission schools based on Western models. These schools offered more liberal education and intensive English classes (Inagaki 2007: 160–203). As a matter of fact, many early feminists were educated in or connected to Meiji Women’s School (Meiji jogakkō), the first private Christian girls’ school in Japan, founded in 1885 (Mackie 2003: 26–8). The majority of girls’ higher schools (where female students received three to five years of education after elementary school) were of this type before an ordinance was issued in 1899 mandating each prefecture to found at least one girls’ higher school (Inagaki 2007: 163).7 Due to early association with Western influences, female students tended to be seen not only as the educated, “westernized” women who advocated women’s rights, but also as those who could move freely between the Western and Japanese cultural spheres. This suggests the ambivalent status of schoolgirls in the public imaginary; they were confined in schools in order to learn how to raise future Japanese citizens, but they were also given public recognition as the symbol of the modern, given their familiarity with a Western language (English), ideas, and customs. From this perspective, they disrupted the gendered topography of private and public space. As such, society viewed them with both respect and hostility (Levy 2010: 54).

However, girls’ aesthetics portray the West differently. For example, set in mission schools, many stories in Flower Tales evoke a Western atmosphere, but the Western flavor here is expressed superficially by the abundant usage of English words, descriptions of imported items, and appearance of Christian nuns. Here, the West represents their desire to leave for somewhere else that is detached from their everyday reality in Japan (Honda 1982: 157, 190–1). This suggests that the aesthetics were not immune to Japan’s national efforts to construct its identity vis-à-vis the West; that is, if Japan was not the ideal place for girls, then the West was imagined dichotomously as its opposite. Moreover, as Honda writes, one reason why mission

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schools remained as a favorite setting in girls’ novels may be that Christianity’s idealization of virginity happened to coincide with that of girls’ aesthetics (that is, heterosexual inexperience) (1982: 191). The fact that Christianity is a religion that labels homosexuality a sin was not a problem for these female-female love stories in mission schools, because Western culture was never deeply understood within girls’ aesthetics.8 These different takes on the West tell us that the category of schoolgirls was not monolithic. Among schoolgirls, there were some who were more “straightforwardly political,” such as some graduates of Meiji Women’s School.9 Such differences were also reflected in girls’ novels. While S relationships were a central topic in novels for schoolgirls, another popular theme was female adolescents’ future success in their professional careers. Imada Erika suggests that novels with this theme focused on the emerging subjectivity of the female youth, and she points out that this paralleled the development of feminism in Japan (Imada 2007: 93–4). The first Japanese feminist group, Seitō (Bluestocking), was established in 1911, and the group brought into the public sphere issues such as “the politics of romantic love, chastity, monogamy, free love, contraception and abortion” (Mackie 2003: 48–9). They also physically transgressed the spatial boundaries marked by gender and the social hierarchy between women and men, and between higher-class women and lower-class women, by visiting pleasure quarters and speaking with the female workers there, an activity that was generally frowned upon for middle-class women. Career-oriented protagonists in these novels reflected the time when women started to demand their place in the public sphere, although their careers were usually in the field of the arts (Imada 2007: 99–102, 129–32), which were regarded as “feminine” enough and hence less threatening to the gendered division of social spheres and labor. Interestingly, Yoshiya Nobuko, whose Flower Tales was not straightforwardly feminist in the way Seitō’s activities were, was a contributor to Seitō’s journal (Suzuki 2010: 32). Unlike girls in her Flower Tales who confined themselves in a closed space in girls’ schools, Yoshiya herself was one of the most successful “public” novelists in the prewar period.

Both novels about S relationships and those about future careers gained in popularity, but it is Flower Tales that is remembered as the pre-eminent prewar girls’ novel. It was later published in book form,

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and not only did it become a bestseller (Suzuki 2010: 35), but continues to be reprinted by multiple publishers to this day. After the serialization of Flower Tales in Girls’ Periodical was over, many imitations were carried in the magazine Girls’ Friend (Shōjo no tomo). Even Kawabata Yasunari, a leading male literary figure who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, published serialized girls’ novels about S relationships in this magazine from the late 1930s to the early 1940s.

While girls’ magazines were the primary medium for girls’ aesthetics, they started to be found in novels outside of girls’ magazines from the 1920s onwards. These novels include Nomizo Naoko’s Gardenia (Kuchinashi) (1924) and Osaki Midori’s Drifting in the World of the Seventh Sense (Dainana kankai hōkō) (1931), among others.

They portrayed girl characters, often androgynous, who demonstrated discomfort with the communal sexual norms and aspired to “freedom” from a gender-biased society (Takahara 1999: 12, 18).

Moreover, the resistance of these characters takes place not in the streets, but in their imaginations. As Takahara Eiri writes, rather than claiming access to the public domain, they exhibit the “arrogance” of narcissistically adoring their free-spirited selves in their imaginations (1999: 17–18).

It is also important to note that, around this time, the allfemale musical/revue company, the Takarazuka Revue (Takarazuka kagekidan), emerged on the showbusiness scene. Founded in 1914, it stages heterosexual romances often set in Western countries.

Critically, the female performers who play male roles are androgynous girls and entice erotic sentiments from female fans to this day. Takarazuka also functions as a girls’ school and occupies a very important place in girls’ culture in Japan. I will discuss the company closely in the next chapter.

Girls’ aesthetics during wartime will be examined in detail in the next chapter, and therefore I should just mention here that they survived the period. However, the change in the educational policy under the American Occupation in the immediate postwar period (1945–52) had a direct influence on girls’ culture. The US Occupation transformed the political structure of Japan from “fascist” to “democratic,” and the education system was changed in accordance with the democratic values laid down in the Fundamental Law of Education (Kyōiku kihon hō), which replaced the prewar Imperial Rescript on

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Education (Kyōiku chokugo) in 1947. What affected girls’ culture most was the introduction of boys through co-education in 1947 (Bae 2008: 345). Many private schools still maintained sex-segregated education, but girls who attended public schools faced a heterosocial environment as the primary site of their everyday reality.

Girls’ magazines started to reflect the change in the nature of education, and boys began to appear as girls’ friends or even as their romantic partners (Minakawa 1991: 53, 78). However, this does not mean that girls let go of their homosocial world. Catherine Yoonah Bae, examining the issues of Girls’ Friend in the 1950s, argues that, while girls wished to build friendships with boys (if not always romantic relationships), they also created another homosocial world in their imaginations that was reminiscent of the one with androgynous girls in some of the prewar novels and the Takarazuka Revue.

By analysing readers’ comments, Bae finds that there was almost no difference between girls’ ideal image of themselves and of their boy companions. They are both “clean/hygienic,” “healthy,” “cheerful,” and “kind” (Bae 2008: 347). Moreover, not only gender markers, but also typical sex markers started to converge or become ambiguous in the girls’ imaginary, as seen, for example, in the following reader’s comments on her ideal girl: She would make you think that, if she were a boy, she would definitely make a wonderful, beautiful one – that’s my ideal shōjo [girl]. A tall, slender and graceful body; sharp, intellectual face; thick brows, and underneath them, big, black pupils that shine like a lake filled to the brim with wonder. Covering those eyes would be long lashes; under them, a tall nose … her emotions (are) expressed boldly and clearly. (From a 1953 issue of Girls’ Friend, cited and translated by Bae 2008: 348) Girls started to blend both female and male gender/sex markers (kindness marked as feminine, boldness as masculine, long eyelashes as feminine, tall height as masculine) in their imaginations to create androgynes.

However, at the same time, if we look at illustrations in Girls’ Friend, girls and boys were both depicted in a rather feminine way, and therefore, what is conspicuous is the feminization of boys rather than the mixture of different genders and sexes. For example, Bae

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reprints in her article an illustration of a schoolgirl and a schoolboy for a novel in the magazine (2008: 355). In this illustration, while the girl simply looks like a typical girl with long hair and other feminine traits, the boy is feminized with thick, long eyelashes and colored lips. Only his short hair suggests to viewers that he is a boy. Bae also discusses an illustration in the magazine in which a mermaid and a merboy pose (2008: 349). The mermaid is clearly female, her breasts covered with a bra made of seashells, but the merboy’s sex is hard to tell. He has short hair and thicker eyebrows, which are the typical markers of male gender and sex, but other than these, his facial traits are the same as the mermaid’s. His chest is covered with his arms and a rock in the pond, and this further erases his masculine traits. Thus, there seems to have been two ways of creating a homosocial sphere in girls’ imaginations, and they both involved androgynes. One way was to blend the feminine and masculine gender and sex markers to cancel out the differences between the two. The other way involved feminizing boys while girls remained (typically) feminine. In either case, girls did not lose their grip on the traditional girls’ homosocial sphere, but instead added androgynous boys as their equals. This may anticipate the emergence of androgynous boys as girls’ alter egos in girls’ manga of the 1970s and afterwards.

In addition to the influences brought by the change in the education system, the 1950s witnessed another shift in girls’ aesthetics.

Magazines, including girls’ ones, started to print more illustrations, photographs, and manga (Yonezawa 1980: 54), due to the change from literary to visual media in the entertainment industry. By the mid 1950s, girls’ manga magazines started to surpass girls’ literary magazines (Yonezawa 1980: 55).10 Manga is now one of the most popular forms of entertainment media, and it has been adapted into various different forms, including theatre, film, anime, and TV drama, among others.

Manga was not a new form of entertainment, and it was already present in prewar girls’ magazines. However, these early manga pieces were comic strips, not the story manga. It was Tezuka Osamu, known as “the god of manga,” who brought narrative to the genre.

His hugely popular Princess Knight (Ribon no kishi), serialized in Girls’ Club from 1953 to 1956, was the first girls’ manga with a narrative structure (Yonezawa 1980: 36, 39). It is significant that the first postwar girls’ manga had an androgynous girl as a protagonist, and that it

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provided an archetype of androgynous characters – girls disguised as boys and boys disguised as girls – in many girls’ manga pieces that followed (Oshiyama 2007: 12–13). (Oscar in Ikeda Riyoko’s The Rose of Versailles, discussed in Chapter 3, belongs to this genealogy.) It is well known that Tezuka got the idea for this character, named Sapphire, from the male-role players in the Takarazuka Revue. Tezuka’s hometown was Takarazuka and he was an avid fan of this enormously popular company. He rightly considered that a protagonist like its male-role players would win popularity among girls. Sapphire, the princess of a fictional kingdom (which seems to be somewhere in the West), has been born with a biologically female body and both a “male mind” and a “female mind” due to an angel’s “mistake,” but she is raised as a prince to protect the kingdom. Yet, she is not depicted as truly androgynous. Even though she has a “male mind” in addition to a “female mind,” her true gender identity is supposed to be female. In this manga, a character’s sex determines her/ his gender. After many adventures, the story ends “happily” with Sapphire’s marriage to the brave and protective prince of a neighboring kingdom. The manga thus ended as a lesson about “true” femininity. However, the readers’ response demonstrated that the lesson was not always successful; many of them wrote to Tezuka that they also wanted to be disguised as boys, showing their girlie sensibilities (Oshiyama 2007: 35).

It was Tezuka Osamu who brought narrative to girls’ manga in the 1950s, but it was Takahashi Macoto who created the typical drawing style of girls’ manga. Considering that his thin girls with huge eyes surrounded by thick eyelashes evoke the illustrations by popular illustrator Nakahara Jun’ichi, and others who worked for prewar girls’ magazines, he arguably mediated between prewar and postwar girls’ culture in terms of visual aesthetics. (Nakahara’s illustration can be seen in the next chapter.) Takahashi focused not so much on stories as on the beauty and sophisticated moods of fashionable urban girls, often living in Western countries (Yonezawa 1980: 78–82).

Like that of Tezuka, most of the girls’ manga created by both male and female artists during this time supported the conventional idea that marriage was the ultimate happiness for women (Yonezawa 1980: 134, 149). While manga occupies an important place in postwar girls’ aesthetics, not all the girls’ manga pieces resonate with these aesthetics. However, female artists who began their careers

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Figure 2.1

Sapphire in Princess Knight. Š Tezuka Productions

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Figure 2.2

Illustration of a girl by Takahashi Macoto. Š Takahashi Macoto

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around the end of the 1960s brought “girlie” concerns to the world of girls’ manga. As a reaction to mainstream conservative girls’ manga, these artists, who would be the members of the Year 24 Group, started to ponder issues of girls’ sexuality, bodies, and subjectivity in their work, and they also negotiated with conventional male editors over the contents of their manga (Masuyama cited in Ishida 2008: 302–6). In the 1970s, activists of the women’s liberation movement fought for women’s rights in the public arena, but girls’ manga artists also fought to create a girlie space and this revolutionized girls’ manga. They did not openly demand political rights in the streets, but they worked for an alternative space through which girls nurtured their resistant aesthetics. (I will discuss the intersection of girls’ aesthetics and the women’s liberation movement in detail in Chapter 3.) They also transformed girls’ manga from a children’s popular entertainment medium into a more sophisticated one consumed by a variety of age groups including adults, especially those with girlie sensibilities.11 The 1970s witnessed the important achievements of the Year 24 Group who created what manga scholar Yonezawa Yoshihiro calls the “golden age of girls’ manga” (1980: 217). The group established girls’ manga as a genre to depict the psyche of girls, and embarked on various experiments in order to visually express their inner thoughts and emotions. Manga usually consists of a sequence of square panels, each of which functions like a camera frame or screen in film, but these artists sometimes broke this convention, as can be seen in Figure 2.3 from Hagio Moto’s The Heart of Thomas. In this figure, the panels have been removed and multiple characters are drawn in partially overlapping scenes at different sizes (for example, the head of one character covers the legs of another). The lack of background or depth information leads to a flattening effect, which is a unique feature of two-dimensional media and reminiscent of doodles in a schoolgirl’s notebook. In addition, poetic monologue, which is written outside of the standard balloon in which spoken speech is located, is used to express the internal feelings and emotions of the ˉ tsuka 1989: 62–4). The absence of panels and inclusion characters (O of poetic monologues create a new type of mise-en-scène, which I call non-narrative graphics. These graphics do not depict events in the narrative, but instead convey the emotions that seem to escape from narrative panels. Non-narrative graphics only occasionally appear to

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disrupt a sequence of narrative panels, and I am not saying that the Year 24 Group and its followers’ manga consist only of non-narrative graphics. Since the imaginary affective realm is a key feature of girls’ aesthetics, these non-narrative graphics play a crucial role in creating the aesthetics. Furthermore, these graphics create a more complex reading style. Panels help readers to follow the events, dialogue, and monologue sequentially, but without them, there emerges a sense of disorientation. In the case of Figure 2.3, what further accelerates this is the appearance of multiple images of characters from difference contexts all in one space, which is a visual technique typical of girls’ manga of the Year 24 Group and its followers. Moreover, at the right bottom in the same figure, lines by a character are added, and these are not part of the poetic monologue by the main character, which occupies much of the space. This type of polyphony is also typical of girls’ manga. Receiving multiple layers of information in one space, readers make sense of the disoriented manga mise-en-scène in their own way without the guide of panels organized sequentially. Such mise-en-scène accommodates what might be called the affective rhythm of girls.

Many artists of the Year 24 Group can be further positioned as heirs to prewar artists of girls’ aesthetics, as they also explored gender and sexuality in homosocial and homosexual worlds in their works.

The settings of these manga are in many cases also boarding schools, but now in Western countries. For example, Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas is set in Germany and Takemiya’s The Poem of Wind and Trees (Kaze to ki no uta) (1976–84) is set in France, just to name a couple.12 However, importantly, a large shift took place in girls’ aesthetics; same-sex “intimacy” is not expressed through girls’ S relationships any more. It is expressed through androgynous-looking boys’ or young adult males’ romantic relationships, reminding one of the emergence of androgynous boys and characters like Sapphire in girls’ magazines in the 1950s and 1960s. These manga pieces are referred to as shōnen-ai manga and are the precursors to a genre called Boys’ Love manga that arose in the 1990s, as explained below.

It must be noted that shōnen-ai manga does not aim at depicting male homosexuality in reality. It may appear odd for those who are not used to reading this genre of manga that the “heterosexual” characters fall in love with men, and this was particularly so in the works produced by the artists of the younger generation in the 1980s and

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Figure 2.3 Image from Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas. In Juli’s (the one in the center) emotional recollection of past events, characters appear without square panels. His poetic monologue about love and happiness is overlaid on the images. © Hagio Moto/Shogakukan Bunko

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1990s. These “heterosexual” characters, even though having sexual relationships with men, insist on their heterosexual identity, claiming that their partners are exceptions. This is to enhance the romance, which even transcends one’s sexual orientation, but as queer studies scholar Mizoguchi Akiko points out, this insistence (or rejection of homosexual identity) could sound homophobic (2007: 57). Satō Masaki, a male homosexual critic, also expresses his discomfort with what he considers to be the heterosexual creators’ and readers’ pornographic objectification of male characters in the genre (1996: 163–7).13 Possibly responding to the criticism of homophobia, in recent BL manga, one of the couple is often homosexual or bisexual.

With regard to Satō’s criticism about objectification of male bodies by heterosexual women, as I will show in the section on The Heart of Thomas below, these characters’ bodies are not really male bodies and hence girls do not objectify them in a traditional way. These androgynes incite girls’ identification with them, thereby allowing girls to imaginatively and queerly experience various forms of sexuality.

For example, they can identify themselves with the more masculine “tops,” the more feminine “bottoms,” or both.14 Here, immaterial bodies are freed, not only from fixed gender/sexual roles, but also from obligatory reproduction. Hagio herself says that the reason she often depicts male romantic relationships is that she cannot create a fantastical, unrealistic, “ideal” world with women, because, in her view, they are too closely associated with material reality (Hagio cited in Ishida 2008: 152).15 Indeed, manga is a medium highly suited for girls’ aesthetics, as it can visualize imaginary bodies without materiality, not in a “realistic” way, but in a “real” way.

It is important to note that, unlike the prewar girls’ novel scene in which the S relationship was a main theme, the majority of girls’ manga center on heteronormative romance. Again, not all girls’ manga pieces are “girlie.” This means that the works of the Year 24 Group do not constitute the mainstream of girls’ manga.16 Yet their works have been appraised as classics because of their thematic and aesthetic quality, and the “visual grammar” that they created has influenced later generations of artists. After the emergence of the Year 24 Group, younger generations of female manga artists started to publish works on male same-sex relationships, and this continues today within the Boys’ Love genre.

There are different ways of referring to girls’ manga dealing with male-male relationships: shōnen-ai manga, yaoi manga, and Boys’ Love

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(BL) manga.17 These categories reflect some aesthetical differences, and the primary focus of this chapter is on shōnen-ai manga, which is the label used for the Year 24 Group’s male romance in the 1970s and 1980s. The literal English translation of shōnen-ai is “boys’ love,” but shōnen-ai manga are not the same as present-day BL (pronounced in Japanized English as “bee éru”) manga. Shōnen-ai manga conveyed a “cultured” atmosphere, as it was often inspired by literary pieces such as those by Hermann Hesse, Jean Genet, Mishima Yukio, and Inagaki Taruho, as well as films such as those by Luchino Visconti.

Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas was inspired by Hesse’s Beneath the Wheel, Demian, and Narcissus and Goldmund for example (Ishida 2008: 50–84).

Compared to shōnen-ai manga, BL manga does not always exhibit such a “cultured” flavor. They tend to be lighthearted, although it should be emphasized that there is a great deal of variety in this genre. Yaoi usually refers to self-published works, in which authors “homosexualize” male characters in existing, non-BL or non-shōnen-ai manga (for example, sports manga like Captain Tsubasa in its earlier stage in the 1980s). Yaoi is thus similar to slash in the North American contexts.18 Outside of Japan, BL manga is usually referred to as yaoi manga, and this complicates the meanings of these terms. BL is now a growing genre,19 but it is also important that in the 1990s and beyond, girls’ manga dealing with female same-sex relationships emerged (Fujimoto 1998: 284). Compared to BL manga, the market for this type of manga is smaller, but some of the works are popular and they clearly evoke prewar girls’ novels.20 For example, Shimura Takako’s Blue Flower (Aoi hana) (2004–13) is set in girls’ schools near Kamakura City, and the title of the first episode is “Flower Tales.”21 Kamakura is where Yoshiya Nobuko, the author of Flower Tales, lived towards the end of her life, and her house, converted to the Yoshiya Nobuko Memorial (Yoshiya Nobuko kinenkan), is a popular tourist destination among her fans.

In addition to the fluid and queer sexual identification made possible for the audience, some scholars point out that romantic couples in BL convey the significance of relationships and bonding.

For example, Mori Naoko explains that, unlike heterosexual pornographic manga for male audiences, which focuses on the depiction of eroticized female bodies, BL manga is characterized by the depiction of the pleasure and emotions of both parties in their sexual activities, suggesting the audience’s desire for mutually caring relationships without objectification (2010: 126–95). Similarly, Kazumi Nagaike points out the non-hierarchical, “equal partnership” (2012: 129) of

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couples in BL manga, both in terms of sexual and other aspects of their lives, by scrutinizing its narratives. Azuma Sonoko, drawing on Eve Sedgwick’s theory of male homosociality, sees the couples in BL, who are bound by strong ties of love, as charged with the audience’s (and creators’) wish for female homosocial bonding, which is difficult to establish in male-dominated society where women are exploited as a medium for patriarchal male bonding (2010: 77–106).22 Thus, these “male” bodies liberate girls from hegemonic gender and sexual constructions, but still, the erasure of women’s bodies in this type of manga may not be easy to understand. It is true that “feminine” traits are seen in these androgynes, but they are men in the narrative. As outlined in the Introduction, Japanese women have achieved more political rights and visibility in the public sphere in the postwar period. However, those with girlie sensibilities still need “male” bodies in order to imaginatively escape from their female material bodies. This testifies to the extent to which Japanese society continues to operate on the modern gender and sexual ideology. For example, the state has continually intervened in women’s reproductive rights since the 1890s, this taking various legal forms under the pretext of protecting mothers’ bodies (Mackie 2003: 164–5, 192–3).

Hagio Moto’s The Heart of Thomas Boys as girls’ alter egos Set in a Christian boarding school in contemporary Germany, the story of The Heart of Thomas begins with a scene in which a 13-yearold boy student, Thomas Werner, commits suicide. He has thrown himself in front of a train, but no one knows it was suicide – except for his senior, Julusmole Bayhan (called Juli), and Juli’s roommate, Oskar Reiser. Thomas was in love with Juli and left him a message: “To Julusmole / My last words to you / This is my love / These are my heart beats / You must know what I mean” (Hagio 1995: 12). This message is at first understood as suggesting that Juli’s cold rejection of Thomas is the reason for his suicide, and Juli suffers from a sense of guilt. However, in the end, he learns that the message means something different. I will explore the meaning of the message in this section.

At the end of the story, a critical subplot is revealed involving the scars on Juli’s back, which occurred in an incident a year before the

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story begins. Juli is a model student, but was attracted to a delinquent senior student, Seifriet. Juli was invited to Seifriet’s room in the dormitory for a gathering, but once Juli was there, Seifriet bullied him and sadistically whipped his back, and although not explicitly depicted, raped him as well. The whipping itself may be a metaphor for rape.23 After this incident, Seifriet was expelled from the school, but Juli withdrew into himself. He could not respond to Thomas’s love, even though he was actually in love with him; he felt that he was too tainted for Thomas, who had been admired by many for his angelic grace. According to Juli, the bad part of himself was attracted to Seifriet, while the good part was in love with Thomas.

As mentioned, I see boy characters in this type of manga as girls.24 From this perspective, I suggest that The Heart of Thomas depicts a girl’s pain and trauma caused by being raped, or being materialized.

Throughout this manga, Juli compares the scars on his back with the ones caused when his “wings” were torn off. Wings here symbolize “heterosexual” virginity and the weightlessness of girls. At the same time, this is also a story of “her” mental recovery and the eternal love given by girls to those who wish to remain “pure.” In this regard, it is important to point out that Seifriet, who rapes Juli, is visualized differently from the other characters, signifying his non-girl status.

Juli and the other students all look similar (suggesting “girl” as a communal identity, as discussed in the previous chapter); they are shorter and their eyes and cheeks are rounder. It is often only their hairstyles that distinguish them. Also importantly, it is only their hairstyles and clothes that distinguish them from female youth characters. Some information about the manga’s graphic grammar is relevant here. In general, manga often uses realistic graphics of scenery and props, but graphic images of people are not realistic and function clearly as signs. For example, the shape of eyes and cheeks signifies characters’ age, gender, and sex. Female characters’ eyes and cheeks are rounder than those of male ones, and likewise, younger characters’ eyes and cheeks are rounder than those of older ones. If female and male characters are about the same age, male characters have less round eyes and cheeks. However, in this manga, there are no such differences in the portrayals of male and female youth; for example, Juli and Juli’s younger sister both have round eyes and cheeks. Thus, Juli and the other students look like girls, while they are given some visual markers of boys (that is, boys’ school uniform

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and shorter hair). On the other hand, Seifriet is much taller than the others and has sunken cheeks and oval eyes. Although he has long hair, his facial and bodily characteristics make him look more masculine and older compared to the other students.25 He is thus depicted as the Other, or a “man,” in this space of “girls.”

The second point I need to clarify is that, while I argue that The Heart of Thomas is a story in which girls romantically love other girls, I do not always consider their relationships as lesbian for the purpose of this book. As a genre which entices various sexual identifications, lesbian reading of this type of manga is certainly possible, as Mizoguchi Akiko and James Welker respectively suggest in their writings. Mizoguchi (2007) reflects on her adolescence when she formed her lesbian identity by reading shōnen-ai manga, and Welker (2011) documents its influence on the lesbian communities in Japan by analysing the readership of a gay magazine. However, I propose another interpretation of audience identification, focusing on those whom I call “girls.” I suggest that their same-sex erotic relationships exist at the border of homosociality and homosexuality. More precisely, the distinction between the two is not relevant for them. In this regard, while the girls are not always lesbian in Mizoguchi and Welker’s sense, they can be “lesbian” in the sense of a “lesbian continuum” proposed by Adrienne Rich. She writes: I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range – through each woman’s life and throughout history – of woman-identified experience; not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman. If we expand it to embrace many more forms of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical and political support … we begin to grasp breadths of female history and psychology … (emphasis in original 1980: 648–9) She further elaborates on the erotic in the “lesbian continuum”: [F]emale friendship and comradeship have been set apart from the erotic, thus limiting the erotic itself. But as we deepen and broaden the range of what we define as lesbian existence, as we

Figure 2.4 The scene where Juli recalls the rape incident and tells Erich about it. Seifriet with a whip in his hands and his delinquent friends behind him in the bottom panel on the left of the page. In a panel above this, he welcomes Juli into his room. A close-up of his face in the upper left panel on the right. Notice that the visual image of Seifriet is “non-girl-like,� in comparison to those of Juli and Erich. Š Hagio Moto/Shogakukan Bunko

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delineate a lesbian continuum, we begin to discover the erotic in female term: as that which is unconfined to any single part of the body or solely to the body itself … (1980: 650) If we consider girls’ love for other girls from this perspective, we can avoid labeling their bonds either as intimate friendship or as lesbian relationships, which is what typifies the discourse on girls’ bonds from the modern to contemporary periods.26 As Yūka Kanno also points out, those who are urged to separate intimate friendship and homosexuality base their arguments on the involvement of genital pleasure or the lack thereof in girls’ bonds (2011: 28). In their view, if a girl has experienced it with another girl, she is homosexual. If she has not, she is having close friendship. However, girls’ intimacy, whether genital or not, forces us to reconsider what counts as the sexual and the erotic. For example, why are the affects, including bodily sensations, experienced by exchanging passionate love letters with each other (which was a typical activity of those in S relationships in modern girls’ schools) considered to be qualitatively different from pleasure incited by genital sexual practices? Girls reveal the arbitrariness of such distinctions and expand the scope of the sexual and the erotic. They are affectively and erotically tied to each other in their determination to reject the modern construction of Japanese womanhood.

Deborah Shamoon applies the binary of homosociality/spiritual and homosexuality/carnal to her examination of intimate bonds between female youth in modern and contemporary Japan.

Although she refers to Rich’s “lesbian continuum” and writes, “[M]y point is not to refute the emotional or possibly erotic bonds between girls, but to open the definition of these relationships beyond their current parameters [that is, in her view, homosexual interpretation of their intimacy]” (2012: 33), she quickly moves away from this view, and throughout her book, she insists that S relationships are spiritual and not carnal, or from her perspective, homosocial and not homosexual. She argues that those who explore girls’ intimate relationships from homosexual perspectives fail to contextualize them in the history and culture of Japan (2012: 33). Relying on the modern widespread educational and sexology discourse that says S relationships should be encouraged as a form of spiritual love preparing female adolescents for heterosexual relationships, she denies

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that girls’ intimate relationships, both modern and contemporary, were homosexual (2012: 29–57, 101–36). However, this discourse was shaped by a history of suppressing women’s sexual desire in various forms in the service of Japanese national goals (“good wife, wise mother”), and therefore, it should be problematized, rather than simply being accepted as is. Furthermore, we should not assume that the educators’ and sexologists’ perspectives on S relationships were always accepted and shared by girls. Rather, girls may have been able to imaginatively appropriate the given conditions for their resistant aesthetics. Some stories in Yoshiya Nobuko’s Flower Tales mentioned earlier are good examples of this. Kanno also shares this perspective in her discussion of girls’ culture in modern Japan. She writes: Despite its hypervisibility, female-female intimacy generated in the social space of schoolgirls may not have been visible as such, for the semiotics of shōjo [girls] in such spaces may have differed from those in the dominant arena. Their same-sex love practices might have looked docile and innocuous in that they did not conspicuously challenge the social order. … The tenderness, care, affection, and mutual dependence that these girls exhibited towards their sisters [partners in S relationships] embodied their feminine virtue, signaling that they would behave in the same manner with male partners once they matured. … Keenly aware of such complicity, the key players of schoolgirls’ culture slipped same-sex desires into the literary tropes and visual motifs of friendship and sisterhood. (2011: 23) Akaeda Kanako also challenges the clear binary of spiritual and carnal love in female-female intimacy insisted on by Shamoon and others. She argues that the ideal of “romantic love”, or a non-hierarchical romantic relationship, which became known in Japan in the 1910s and 1920s, was only realizable in female-female relationships, because there was a huge gap between male and female genders in society (2011: 33). Drawing on Anthony Giddens, Akaeda defines the idealized practice of “romantic love” as “to build a non-hierarchical, equal, spiritual bond with the other” (and hence impossible between unequal female and male genders) (2011: 33, emphasis added), but she points out that this spirituality did not imply “de-sexualization.”

Spirituality was not understood in a dichotomous relationship with

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carnal desire (2011: 193–4). By historicizing and analysing discourses by female writers, including Yoshiya Nobuko, on S relationships, Akaeda reveals that the spiritual relationship meant for schoolgirls the one based on unconventional sexuality, which was “liberated from reproduction” (2011: 197). In order to refer to this relationship, they used the term “pure love” (jun’ai), and this was wrongly understood as “platonic” love by others. Thus, the dominant ideology of female same-sex intimacy should not be taken for granted, and we need to go beyond the love-or-friendship paradigm when we explore girls’ desire for other girls.

In her dependence on modern widespread views of S relationships, Shamoon reinforces the heterosexualization of female youth. She argues that the romantic relationships of girls in prewar girls’ magazines and those of boys in postwar girls’ manga are the surrogates of heterosexual relationships for the female adolescent readers who are too timid to embrace “mature” heterosexual relationships. Regarding shōnen-ai/BL manga, she writes, “The transference of the girl reader’s identity onto the boy character can be a powerful means for girls to access eroticism and contemplate their own desires for boys or men” (2012: 111). She also maintains, “Boys’ love manga is a strategy for heterosexual teenage girls to negotiate their feelings about relationships with boys” (2012: 111). While this argument may explain the way that some readers consume this genre, it does not fully explain its popularity. Timid female youth can access eroticism by virtually inhabiting girls or boys in heterosexual romance manga, since all manga activate imaginary spaces. Furthermore, BL manga are popular with adult women who are married or in sexual relationships with men as well (Azuma 2010: 101) and this is unexplained in Shamoon’s account. Instead, I would argue that there is a particular appeal of this genre which reveals the fluidity and queerness of gender and sexual identification of those who consume it, even when they lead a primarily heterosexual and heteronormative life.

Girls’ matricide Now, let us go back to the text of The Heart of Thomas. As mentioned earlier, this is a story of Juli’s mental recovery from rape. The recovery is made possible through the development of his intimate bond with other boys (read as “girls”), Oskar and Erich, who are, like Juli, experiencing a sense of isolation. Juli feels that he is different from

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the others due to the loss of his virginity, but in addition to this, like the other two boys, he has felt isolated and distant from his family. These boys eventually find an alternative home in the boarding school where they are bonded to each other. Juli is the Other in his family due to his racial/ethnic heritage.27 His dead father is GreekGerman and his appearance is said to resemble his father’s. His racist maternal grandmother, who is supporting his family financially, despises black-haired Juli for his “Arab”-like appearance (Hagio 1995: 255), while doting on his blonde younger sister. Graphically, Juli’s facial characteristics do not signify a particular race/ethnicity, but his black hair marks his Otherness. He tries hard to be impeccable, to be a “better German” in his words (Hagio 1995: 260), one who would gain respect in German society as represented by his grandmother.

Ironically, it is his Otherness on which Seifriet capitalizes. His first interaction with Juli involves complimenting him on his black hair and this turns Juli’s Otherness into something admirable. Juli is aware of the contradictory dynamic between disdain and admiration inherent in exoticism, as seen in his inner monologue: “Southern countries … / Dazzling flowers and summer / Rotten stench and tepid water / Indolence / Longing and scorn …” (Hagio 1995: 260).

Still, Seifriet’s words are too seductive and Juli finally gives in to this “man.” In the end, Juli gets doubly Othered; he is neither a “perfect German” nor a virgin in this community of “girls.”

Two other boys also suffer from their family problems. Oskar’s father killed his wife after she confessed that Oskar was not his own.

He then took Oskar to the boarding school headed by his biological father, Mueller. The other boy, Erich, has no father and an excessive attachment to his mother. He felt he had lost his place in the family when she decided to remarry, and he left for the boarding school.

However, he eventually loses his family, as she dies in a traffic accident during her travels with her fiancé.

Importantly, it is these boys’ mothers or mother figures (Juli’s grandmother) who deprive them of their places in their families. In one sense, these mothers seem to have challenged the traditional family structure and successfully destroyed it; Oskar’s mother is involved in extramarital sex and Erich’s, as a single mother, is constantly flirting.

However, this is not really the case. Oskar’s mother hides her extramarital sex in order to sustain the ideal image of a modern family in which women exist only as Mother (and the marriage ends and the

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family dissolves when she discloses the secret), and Erich’s mother is mentally not independent and needs a man to depend on.28 They are surely not attractive from the perspective of girls’ aesthetics. As such, Hagio removes them from the world of these “girls.” In other words, she “kills” these mothers, so that these “girls” can create their own home in the closed space of the boarding school.

As a matter of fact, the death of a mother is a frequent motif in Hagio’s work. She is indeed an artist of matricide. In some pieces, girl characters (who are often boys in the narrative) kill their mothers, and in others Hagio herself “kills” mother characters, as in the case of The Heart of Thomas. She even says in an interview with psychiatrist and critic Saitō Tamaki that she has “no hesitation to kill mothers” in her work (2008: 58).29 By committing matricide, Hagio frees her girls from their mothers’ spell. In The Heart of Thomas, it plays a crucial role, especially in Erich’s relationship with Juli and Juli’s subsequent recovery from the rape incident. Before the death of his mother, Erich had a negative impression of Juli as a cold person. However, he starts to change his opinion when Juli shows some compassion for his loss. Eventually, Erich psychologically separates from his mother and directs his love to Juli, which leads to his recovery, as will be discussed in more detail below. Thus, it is Erich’s acceptance of the loss of his mother which helps the restoration of Juli’s status as a “girl.”

In the motherless space, a girl loves a girl.

Erich, who joined the boarding school soon after Thomas’s death, looks very similar to Thomas, and therefore Juli’s relationship with Erich is a kind of recapitulation of his relationship with Thomas.

Learning that Thomas committed suicide for love of Juli, and discovering the poem he wrote about Juli, Erich starts to sympathize with Thomas. The poem is lengthy, but I cite it in its entirety here, as this helps the reader to understand the reason for Thomas’s death: I have been thinking about this for about half a year / About my life and death / And about a friend of mine / I know that I am only a mature child / So I also know that this love in my boyhood will be thrown at something unknown, something without sex, and something transparent / This is not just a simple gamble / And, that I loved him is not the problem / It is just that he must love me / No matter what / Now, he is almost dead / And in order to have him come to life / I do not care about my body being crushed

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/ They say that one dies two deaths. First, the death of oneself / Then the death in the form of being forgotten by his friends / If so, eternally / I will not experience the second death (He will never forget me even after his death) / In this way / I will keep living / Above his eyes (Hagio 1995: 6, 285–7) Erich is now aware that Thomas truly loved Juli. Erich starts to feel the boundary between himself and Thomas dissolving, as those who suffer from unrequited love for Juli.

Although Juli does not accept Erich’s love at first, he is eventually touched by it. At the end of the story, Juli finally reveals his secrets to Erich. He confesses to Erich that he loved Thomas but that he could not tell him this, because, as he says, “I have no wings!” (Hagio 1995: 407). Throughout this manga, he repeatedly mentions in his inner monologue that he is the only one at the boarding school who does not possess wings. Not exactly sure what he means, Erich asks, “Do you mean the wings which take us to Heaven? You don’t have them?” He continues, “Wouldn’t my wings be good enough? If you think I have wings, wouldn’t my wings be good enough? I’ll give you one of them … I can give you both. I don’t need them. Then, if you have wings, you … you can go to Thomas ... to Thomas …” (Hagio 1995: 407–8, ellipses in original). At this moment, deeply moved by Erich’s devoted love for him, Juli cries out in his inner monologue that he has finally understood the meaning of Thomas’s will (cited earlier), although he does not explain what it is. In my interpretation, Thomas died in order to eternally remain the “girl” who continues to love another “girl,” Juli, and “she” sent the will to Juli in order to tell “her” about it (as seen in the sentences such as “This is my love” in the will, and “I will keep living” and “I will not experience the second death” in the poem). Being loved by a girl assures once more Juli’s status as a member of a community of girls, even though “she” was once materialized by a man. It is revealed towards the end that Thomas was always watching Juli from afar and was worried about “her” sudden change after the rape incident, although “she” did not seem to have known exactly what happened. I would argue that Thomas wanted to tell Juli that, as long as one wishes to be “pure,” her status as a girl will not change. Through “her” death, Thomas was trying to resurrect Juli into the world of “girls” (as seen in “Now, he is almost dead” and “in order to have him come to life”

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in the poem). This reminds us of a girl living by dying, as discussed in the previous chapter. Thomas thus has given Juli his wings, the symbol of girls. All this comes to Juli as a revelation when Erich, Thomas’s double, offers Juli “her” wings. Juli was forced to become a “woman” when “her” wings were torn off, but with the wings given

by Thomas and Erich, “she” can fly once again. And, now that they share the wings, Thomas is living in Juli (and this is reminiscent of the collective ego of girls as discussed in Chapter 1). This emotional realization is depicted through a non-narrative graphic, where Thomas is shown as an angel that showers Juli with “her” blessing within a completely black panel (see Figure 2.5). In this image, both characters are white as angels, even though in the previous narrative panels Juli is wearing a black uniform and has black hair. It should be mentioned here that Juli, in his recovery, is also helped by Oskar.

Towards the end of the story, Oskar confesses to Juli that he loves and forgives his biological father, Mueller, even though he indirectly caused the collapse of Oskar’s family. Juli learns that one can be forgiven even after one has sinned.

In the end, after revealing the rape incident to Erich, Juli leaves the boarding school for a theological school, as he comes to wish to “talk to God again from the bottom of [his] heart” (Hagio 1995: 448).

Rather than taking this as his religious statement, I interpret it as “her” acknowledgement of her status as a “girl” and her oath to eternally remain as such. As explained earlier, modern mission schools, both in reality and fantasy, provided girls with an alternative to the hegemonic gender and sexuality of Japan. Christianity attracted girls not only as “something Western,” but also with its idealization of virginity, not homosexual but heterosexual from the perspective of girls’ aesthetics. The Heart of Thomas, with the setting of a mission school in a Western country, inherits this idealization. Juli’s decision to attend a theological school pushes girls’ wishes for somewhere else and eternal (heterosexual) virginity a little further. Hagio often chooses Western settings for her work, because in her view Japan is too closely linked to the category of Mother (Hagio and Saitō 2008: 61). Instead, she perceives the Western countries as places where only eternal girls are allowed to enter. In other words, in Western settings she can easily kill the Mother.

Thus, in The Heart of Thomas, girls are the happy, eternal residents of a motherless, immaterial world, but it must be noted that, as if to

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Figure 2.5

Thomas and Juli as angels. Š Hagio Moto/Shogakukan Bunko

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demonstrate that the matricide she committed in this piece was not enough, in her subsequent pieces such as Marginal (1985–7) Hagio keeps murdering mothers. After a long career as an artist of matricide, however, she finally seemed to have been liberated from the Mother in her 1992 piece, Daughter of Iguana (Iguana no musume). It is important that this piece is set in Japan, and as such, it is more “down to the earth,” compared to her other pieces set in the West.

The story is summarized as follows. Yuriko cannot love her daughter, Rika, who looks like an ugly iguana to her, although Rika is said to be a beautiful and bright child by other characters. In order to show how Rika looks to Yuriko, in this manga Rika is visualized as an iguana in clothes standing on her back legs, but the story makes it clear that Rika looks like a human being to other characters. Rika, shocked and saddened to learn how she appears to her mother, tries in vain to be loved by her. Rika grows up and gives birth to a daughter, but she cannot love her, as she feels her daughter resembles her mother, Yuriko. (Notice that a protagonist gives birth here, which makes it quite different from many of Hagio’s other pieces.) However, after Yuriko’s death, Rika sees her face at her vigil and it looks like an iguana, which leads her to the revelation that Yuriko could not love her because she found in Rika what she had suppressed in herself, namely, the fact that she was also an iguana. Rika and Yuriko were both iguanas and possibly daughters of iguanas. In the end, Rika says in her inner monologue that she feels that “something” has been “purified” by her mother’s death (Hagio 2002: 51). It seems to mean that Rika has been released from her anger at Yuriko, finding that Yuriko’s inability to love Rika was caused not by Rika’s (or maybe Yuriko’s) personal problem, but by something deeply imbedded in women’s psyche; the Mother also suffers from the iguana-ness haunting generations of women. Rika’s line may also mean that Yuriko has at last been liberated from this iguana-ness by her death. Rika’s last monologue is, “With my tears, I let my pains go” (Hagio 2002: 52). She seems to have broken the iguana’s spell, which has bound generations of women,30 and it seemed likely that there would be no more matricide in Hagio’s work after this.

Nevertheless, the iguana’s spell was not so easily broken. Unlike in her earlier works, in Daughter of Iguana Hagio clearly presented that the origin of the Mother’s suffering and the daughter’s is the same, that is, the iguana-ness imposed on them, but this iguana-ness needs

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to be examined for mothers and daughters to break the spell. As such, Hagio’s portrayal of matricide did not end even after Daughter of Iguana. In her more recent piece, After Us the Savage God (Zankoku na kami ga shihai suru) (1992–2001), whose serialization started just two months after she published Daughter of Iguana, the mother character also dies. The piece shares many similarities with The Heart of Thomas; one of its main sites is a boarding school in Europe, and the protagonist, a boy named Jeremy, is excessively attached to his mother. Above all, he is raped and whipped, leaving scars on his back.

Like The Heart of Thomas, this piece is about Jeremy’s mental recovery from his trauma. His mother, Sandra, remarries a wealthy businessman, Greg, but Greg regularly rapes and whips Jeremy without Sandra’s knowledge. Jeremy cannot tell her about this, as he is afraid of damaging her married life. However, the situation goes beyond his endurance, and he eventually kills Greg by messing up the electric wiring of his car. One of the tragedies of this manga is that Sandra is unexpectedly in the car with Greg and dies with him. This devastates Jeremy, but what is truly unbearable for him, even more than Greg’s violence and Sandra’s death, is his later discovery that she knew he had been raped by Greg. She did not help him, as she could not afford to lose her status as wife. The portrayal of Mother here is even more severe than in The Heart of Thomas. However, like in The Heart of Thomas, Jeremy gradually recovers from his trauma through the bond with a boy, or his stepbrother.

Hagio’s manga, in which matricide recurs, clearly exhibits a form of misogyny. She abhors women as Mother. Girls’ aesthetics are the aesthetics of misogyny in this sense. Girls do not attempt to subvert the association of women with traditional motherhood. Instead, they resist womanhood-cum-motherhood altogether. Takemura Kazuko’s psychoanalytic theorization of mother-daughter relationships, with the focus on the daughter’s melancholia, offers an insight into Hagio’s repeated matricide. Drawing on Judith Butler, Takemura explains the daughter’s melancholia as follows. A female child experiences a double prohibition with regard to her love for her mother; she not only cannot love her mother, but also cannot love those of the same sex as her. The loss she experiences is deeper than the one experienced by a male child, who only shifts his love from his mother to another woman. Unable to bear the pain of the loss, a female child tries to forget that she loved her mother by incorporating her into

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herself. By becoming her own loved object, she denies the loss. Here, unlike Butler, who argues that a daughter incorporates the category of woman into herself, Takemura suggests that it is not so much woman as Mother (Takemura 2002: 174–5). In this regard, it is telling that Erich in The Heart of Thomas shows an intense attachment to his mother, not only as her “daughter,” but also as her “mother,” as he declares that he will be the mother of his mother who is in deep sorrow for the loss of her own mother, that is, Erich’s grandmother.

Takemura argues that the mother lives an oxymoronic existence.

On the one hand, she builds a relationship with the father based on genital attachment, but creates a non-genital attachment to her children. She embodies the exchange of genital love by “pregnancy and delivery,” but she also symbolizes non-genital love endorsed by “the ideology of maternal love” (Takemura 2002: 175). Non-genital love is particularly valorized in her relationship with her daughter as, in the dominant Oedipal formation of sexuality, the mother-daughter relationship is the only one in a family in which genital love is not allowed, while the possibility of genital love between mother and son is implied in its very prohibition. A daughter who incorporates her mother into herself internalizes this dichotomy and thus attempts to reproduce it by directing her sexual desire to a man and eventually, as mother, immersing her children, especially her daughter, in nongenital, “spiritual” love. Moreover, forgetting that she once loved her mother at an all-encompassing level, a daughter builds only a nongenital bond – but a very intense one – with her mother (Takemura 2002: 175–8). However, this “spiritual” love between mother and daughter is a form of misogyny in its denial of other forms of love between mother and daughter. As Takemura argues: [I]f the Self is formed through the separation from chaos and love supplements the separation, identification means to acquire the ability to love and to be urged by the necessity of loving.

Therefore, love includes the emotion of missing at every level, and it should be the force which goes far beyond the dichotomy of materiality and spirituality, contact and distance, homogeneity and heterogeneity (2002: 171).

Construction of Mother as an oxymoronic being denies such allencompassing love. In other words, it reduces women’s sexuality

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to either genital or non-genital. This parallels the arguments of the researchers and critics who distinguish between spiritual love and genital love in female-female intimacy, as discussed earlier. Hence Takemura’s theorization reveals that they lack critical examination of the formation of modern gender and sexuality.

If a daughter wants to be liberated from the oxymoronic mother and to become independent, she may try to commit matricide.

As Julia Kristeva writes, “Matricide is our vital necessity, the sinequa-non condition of our individuation” (1989: 27–8). However, the daughter, who has melancholically incorporated her mother into herself, cannot kill her mother, because, in theory, killing mother means killing herself: “Indeed, how can She be that bloodthirsty Fury, since I am She (sexually and narcissistically), She is I?” (Kristeva 1989: 29). This may explain the recurring matricide in Hagio’s work.

That she needs to keep killing mothers in her work means that she keeps failing to do so. While she says she has “no hesitation to kill mothers” (2008: 58), she rather exposes the impossibility of daughters’ matricide. Besides, matricide would not fundamentally deconstruct the misogyny inherent in the conventional sexual dichotomy; by rejecting the mother, the daughter rejects love at the all-encompassing level that could have been possible between them and ends up limiting the nature of female sexuality (Takemura 2002: 193). Thus, even though the daughter tries to liberate herself from the misogyny on which the mother-daughter “spiritual” love is based through matricide, matricide sustains misogyny. Hagio and the girls are trapped in this vicious circle.

From another psychoanalytic perspective, Amber Jacobs also argues misogyny in matricide. The structure of matricidal myth she theorizes is indeed similar to the structure of girls’ aesthetics.

Arguing that women’s experiences, especially mothers’, cannot be explained solely by the Oedipus structure, she analyses the Orestes myth, dramatized by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the myth of Athena’s mother, Metis, and discusses the ways in which motherhood is rendered useless in these myths in order to sustain the masculinist fantasy of male parthenogenesis (meaning reproduction which does not require someone of the opposite sex). In the Oresteian myth, Orestes’ mother, Clytemnestra, kills her husband, (Orestes’ father) Agamemnon, King of Argo, when he returns gloriously home after victory in the Trojan War. He has sacrificed their

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daughter, Iphigenia, to his war efforts, and Clytemnestra avenges her. However, their son, Orestes, avenges his father’s death by murdering Clytemnestra with the support of his sister Electra. Orestes is hounded by Furies, female deities of vengeance, for his matricide, but Athena, a daughter of Zeus, saves him from the dire situation and puts him on trial in the first democratic court. The votes of the juries are split equally, and Athena plays a crucial role here. She votes for Orestes’ innocence, because from her perspective mothers are ultimately not worthy of being considered. Athena’s vote justifies Orestes’ murder of his mother, who disrespected patriarchy by murdering Agamemnon.

Athena considers that the murder of the patriarch is a capital sin, unlike matricide. In the myth, she was born parthenogenetically from her father Zeus’s head without a mother, and she bases her judgment of the mother’s insignificance on the circumstances of her birth; women are not needed, even for reproduction. However, Amber Jacobs points out the existence of Athena’s mother, Metis, in another lesser-known myth; in this myth, Metis was raped and impregnated with Athena by Zeus. He swallowed and incorporated Metis into his body after this (hence Athena’s birth from him), and as such, the law of the mother was not even properly mourned or lost and thus cannot be represented. Matricide is therefore at the foundation of patriarchy, but this foundation is concealed. Jacobs further points out the ironic consequence of the fantasy of male parthenogenesis. Daughters in the Oresteian myth, including Athena and Orestes’ sisters, remain virgins and do not procreate and therefore will not sustain the family lineage, as motherhood has no value in this myth. Orestes’ sisters instead direct incestuous desire to him, phrased as the “love of the sameness” by Jacobs. In sum, the masculinist fantasy of parthenogenesis is made possible by the misogynist matricide, but this would result in the destruction of the law of the father (Jacobs 2007: 163–77). In girls’ aesthetics, girls react against the reduction of women into reproductive tools and the further belittlement of these tools. Rather than indicting the misogyny in such a rendition of women’s bodies, they wish to disregard their bodies altogether. Like daughters in the Oresteian myth, girls reject motherhood and direct “love of the sameness” to other girls who harbor the same aesthetics as them.

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In her rejection of motherhood and women’s materiality, or in her desire for matricide, Hagio, as a representative of girls’ aesthetics, contributes to the sustenance of misogyny to some extent. As Takemura argues, “If a feminist ... rejects female materiality, she paradoxically accepts the ‘inferiority’ of the socially-imposed sign of ‘female body’” (2002: 192). Indeed, girls, including Hagio, escape such material reality into the world of imagination.

Nevertheless, it is important that Hagio repeatedly fails in her attempt to negate Mother. She cannot let go of her, as Mother is a part of this melancholic daughter. I would argue that her repeated attempts and failures suggest her desire for a way out of the vicious circle of matricide. In these trials, she is searching for alternative paths for women. In the repeated failures lies her gesture towards the restoration of all forms of love between mother and daughter. As much as she keeps failing, she keeps creating a world of “girls,” where multiple forms of love between females are possible. In The Heart of Thomas, Erich, while melancholically performing both “daughter” and “mother,” eventually reaches out to another “girl.” In this world of girls, “subversion of signs” might be achieved not “by looking away from them” but “by radically expanding the scope of the meanings of the signs until they become void” (Takemura 2002: 192).

Studio Life’s The Heart of Thomas First produced in 1996, an adaptation of The Heart of Thomas is the best-known play of Studio Life, a company with all-male actors and a female director/scriptwriter, Kurata Jun. It frequently stages this adaptation, and the most recent production took place in Tokyo and Osaka in June and July 2014. Kurata started her career as a member of Theatre Group En (Engeki shuˉdan En), a company of shingeki, or modern realist theatre, developed in Japan in the early twentieth century under the influence of Western realism.31 (The literal translation of shingeki is “new theatre,” as opposed to traditional Japanese theatre as “old.”) After serving as an assistant to Akutagawa Hiroshi, the founder of En and an important figure of shingeki, Kurata left the company in search of styles other than shingeki (Studio Life 2003: 90). In 1985, she established Studio Life, and for the first ten years she produced non-realistic, typical “little theatre” shows (Fujii

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2003: 156). Little theatre movement started in the 1960s as a reaction to the dominant realist shingeki. Typically produced in small venues, it embraces the intimacy between the performers and audiences and valorizes bodily presence rather than language. During this phase of the company, it also had female actors, but by 1989 only male actors happened to remain. Seeing this, the female editor of a fashion magazine suggested to Kurata that the company stage so-called “gimunajiumu mono,” meaning girls’ manga about homoerotic/homosexual relationships in German male boarding schools,32 because, in this editor’s view, the company had good-looking male actors who seemed to have delicate sensitivities (Imai 1996: 36; Studio Life 2003: 91; Fujii 2003: 156–7). Kurata first directed The Heart of Thomas in 1996, and this became a turning point for the company. It shifted towards the current repertoire often described as “tanbi” (Studio Life 2003: 96). The literal English translation of tanbi is “aesthetic,” but this does not capture what is evoked by the term in contemporary Japan, where it is often used to describe cultural artifacts which beautifully, romantically, or sometimes decadently depict male homoerotic/homosexual relationships. For example, the Year 24 Group’s shōnen-ai manga is also referred to as tanbi manga.

Since its first production of The Heart of Thomas, Studio Life has staged several adaptations of other male homoerotic pieces by Hagio Moto and other girls’ manga artists, as well as adaptations of novels such as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.33 I will be arguing that this production of The Heart of Thomas, although superficially capturing the story and homoeroticism, undermines girls’ aesthetics in the original manga version. This is due in part to the choice of a realistic acting style. After the little theatre phase, Kurata returned to this style with The Heart of Thomas.

As I discuss below, she frequently mentions the power of language in Hagio’s manga, and this coincides with her return to the languageoriented approach of realism. Oddly, manga, which is neither a language-oriented medium nor a realistic form of art, provided Kurata with a chance to return to her “base,” formed during her experiences in Theater Group En (Studio Life 2003: 91). As explained earlier, some of manga’s visual aesthetics are not suited to realism. Non-narrative graphics in particular bring multiple affective feelings and voices of characters in the imaginary realms together into one frame and this is hard to carry into a realist production. More importantly, Kurata’s

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choice causes some tensions surrounding the body in these different media, that is, between manga characters’ “girlie” immaterial bodies and male actors’ material ones on stage. Below, I will explore this issue by focusing on the company’s 2010 production of The Heart of Thomas at Kinokuniya Hall in Tokyo. What motivated the aforementioned female editor to recommend gimunajiumu mono to Kurata seems to be, firstly, her idea that boys in these manga pieces are simply male and that they should and can “naturally” be performed by males, and secondly, her idea that a two-dimensional world can be easily transferred to a three-dimensional sphere. However, if the power of the piece is due to girls’ aesthetics, and Studio Life’s adaptation violates the girlie-ness of the original manga, then this failure is very informative about the appeal of girls’ aesthetics.

In Studio Life’s adaptation, male actors in their twenties and thirties play the roles of teenagers, most of whom are 13 or 14 years old.

Although the actors tend to have a good appearance with slender bodies, and some of them have androgynous features, it is still obvious that they are adult men. Moreover, although they are performing German characters, they do not look Western. Yet, it must be noted that, in modern realist theatre (which is still the dominant mode of theatre production in Japan), actors’ bodies are primarily expected to serve as conveyers of meanings of a written text, and therefore the body’s materiality is marginalized. Modern realist theatre displaces “the internal” to “the textual,” and the body’s materiality should not disrupt the process (Uchino 2009: 125). As such, Tadashi Uchino writes, “According to modern realist theatre aesthetics, the failure/ interruption of valuing the body as interpreter of text lowers the aesthetic value of the given performance. The notion of good or bad acting thus relates to [the] very issue of erasure/negation of the body in the modern realist theatre tradition” (2009: 126). However, as I will discuss soon, Studio Life’s “realist” performance does not work in this way. Materiality of its actors’ bodies constitutes an important part of its stage.

As mentioned, one of the reasons why Kurata adores The Heart of Thomas is the beauty of its language (Fujii 2003: 157, 159; Imai 1996: 38; Tsuruoka 2006: 13). It is true that the language in this piece, especially the characters’ inner monologues, are often poetically beautiful. In the rehearsal process, she puts significance on the meaning of language, as shown in the comment of one of her actors: “Thanks

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to the direction of Ms. Kurata, the language gradually seeped into me, and over time, I came to understand its meaning” (cited in Fujii 2003: 158). Another actor also equates the understanding of this manga with the understanding of its language: “When I devoted myself to reading [this manga], there was a moment when I felt its language. That is when I really understood the manga” (cited in Fujii 2003: 158). Through the understanding of the language, the actors attempt to become the characters. Many of them mention that they aim at “living” as the characters “naturally” on stage (Studio Life 2003: 63–73).

However, Kurata’s realistic approach to The Heart of Thomas is challenged by the Japanese bodies that perform Western boys. As Uchino points out, there is a contradictory dynamic in shingeki productions of Western plays. In addition to valorizing language over body, these productions marginalize the actors’ Japanese bodies in their portrayal of Western characters. Even in realist plays, pioneering shingeki actors wore blond wigs and fake noses to perform Western characters. Thus, while shingeki tried to achieve “transparent representation of the Westerners’ bodies,” the result was the highlighting of Japanese bodies, while simultaneously trying to marginalize them (Uchino 2009: 126). Unlike the earlier shingeki productions, the actors of Studio Life do not depend too much on these “unnatural” devices, but a few characters (such as Erich) wear wigs, which accentuates the unnaturalness of their look. Others simply color their hair brown, but it is not clear if this is intended to mark the Westernness of the characters they are playing, as brown hair is a common coloring in Japan. This means that, even though Juli’s hair is black, his Otherness does not appear as such within the context of these Japanese men with dyed brown hair/wigs. In the manga, his black hair is an important part of his racial Otherness and forms the basis for Seifriet’s first interaction with him. In addition to the problems in depicting race, there is also a problem of age as the adult bodies of the actors are in conflict with the boys that they are performing. Even though some of them try to sound like early teens by pitching their voices higher, they are not always successful. As they struggle to achieve “transparency” as Western boys, the gap between the characters and their Japanese, adult, material bodies widens.34 This gap exists in part because Studio Life promotes the physical charms of its actors, and therefore, in this sense, the actors’ bodies

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should not disappear into the linguistic constructs of the characters.

The company even emphasizes the gap created by these bodies when an anonymous editor of Studio Life’s picture book Troubadour writes in the section on the company’s production of The Heart of Thomas that the actors’ “living bodies” serve as “amplifiers” of the message of the original manga (Studio Life 2003: 81). Balancing Kurata’s realist approach and the company’s strategy of promoting its actors seems to be a difficult task.

More than 90 per cent of the audience members of Studio Life are women primarily in their twenties to forties (Matsumaru 2006: 20), and although the company has only 40 actors (Studio Life 2007b), it boasts 3,800 members in its official fan club (Studio Life 2007a).

It regularly hosts events in which the actors and fans can meet and interact with each other. With its all-male cast and its popularity among women, the company is similar to Johnny & Associates (known as Johnny’s), a very famous show business agency, which trains and manages good-looking male pop singers as well as TV and film actors.35 Studio Life is often referred to as “Johnny’s in theatre,” even though it is much smaller than the omnipresent Johnny’s. The company actually seems to be strategically reproducing some traits of Johnny’s. For example, a member of its official fan club can declare whose fan she is when she applies for a membership, and she is referred to as his “tantō” (meaning someone in charge of something/ someone – in this context, a fan in charge of supporting a particular actor).36 The word tantō is also used in Johnny’s fan clubs. These fans, both Studio Life’s and Johnny’s, seem to be directing their heterosexual desire towards their favorites.37 Therefore, although Studio Life’s repertoire targets female audience members who consume male homoerotic romance, the sexual materiality of their actors seems to work against the weightless bodies that are part of the appeal of the original manga.38 Nevertheless, although the bodies in Studio Life’s version are sometimes at odds with the two-dimensionality of the original manga version, the acting occasionally achieves a kind of weightlessness.

The actors in the company are trained by Kurata in method acting (Matsumaru 2006: 20), but their acting is actually melodramatic in a way that is common in Japanese realist productions.39 Uchino explains the origins of the approach to realism in terms of the history of melodrama, shingeki, and realism in the West and Japan. In

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Europe, realism developed as the antithesis of melodrama. Drawing on Peter Brooks, he explains that melodrama, which emerged at a time of social anxiety when the absolute value systems provided by religion and feudalism had collapsed, aspired to the unification between the signifiers and the signifieds. This aspiration produces excess, such as excessively predictable plots, excessively simple characters, and so on. And, in its excess, melodrama paradoxically ended up exhibiting the absence of absolute value systems. Realism rejected this excess and filled the void left by the absolute systems with a socalled modern subjectivity. However, argues Uchino, when Japanese theatre practitioners created shingeki, Japan’s equivalent to Western realist theatre, there was no Japanese equivalent to Western modern subjectivity, which was generated through the dynamism of the Self and the Other (1996: 70–2, 110–5). The modern “self” in Japan, according to Uchino, did not emerge in its dichotomous relation to the Other. On the contrary, it rejects “all relationality” in its desire for “uniformity” (1996: 109, 113). Therefore, to be precise, it should not be referred to as the modern “self.” It is something very difficult to name, and Uchino tentatively calls it the “absent self” (hi-zai no watashi), which paradoxically prevails in Japan.40 It is “something like an aggregation unconsciously structured in its relation to everyday lives consisting of a bundle of certain kinds of affects,” and it is “very reactionary, conservative and vulgar” (Uchino 1996: 109).

Unlike the Euro-American contexts, it does not revolutionize society as an anti-establishment force, because all it aspires to is uniformity (Uchino 1996: 106). Shingeki or modern theatre in Japan, with such an “absent self,” is destined to be melodramatic in Uchino’s theorization, because Japanese “absent self” and melodrama are similar in the sense that the absolute Other does not exist in them; melodrama emerged with the loss of absolute value systems, and the Japanese “absent self” (paradoxically) exists in uniformity (1996: 113). Thus, shingeki is not a realist form of theatre in the Euro-American sense.

Uchino writes, “Realism of shingeki demanded the audience see completely ‘unnatural’ signs as ‘natural.’ Or, it forced them to acknowledge non-transparency of signs as transparency” (1996: 144). This is why, argues Uchino, we often feel awkward seeing Japanese actors performing Western characters in realist plays (Uchino 1996: 158).

This is highly suggestive with regard to my earlier discussion about the awkwardness of Studio Life’s staging of Western characters. The

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same argument also holds for their performance of boys. Their acting is “seriously excessive,” and it is sometimes difficult to take their excessive performance seriously.

Importantly, in Studio Life’s melodramatic performance, there are also moments when it becomes so excessive that the performance comes close to being kitsch, and it is at these moments that the acting appears two-dimensional. One example of this excess comes in the scene where Seifriet tortures Juli. When Seifriet invites Juli to his room, he snaps his fingers and then extends his arm to Juli and points at him, saying, “Come. I’ll be waiting for you.” This disco-like movement (which is not in the original manga version) is done in a very serious scene where Juli is revealing the rape incident to Erich.

This is followed by the re-enactment of whipping. Seifriet appears on stage dramatically with a red light behind his back, and as he whips Juli, he says these excessively melodramatic lines (which are again not in the original manga): You hate me, don’t you, Mr Class Representative? Ha ha ha ha ha! You’re beautiful, Julusmore. Your eyes are filled with hatred.

I’m relieved. Someone like you, Mr Class Representative, who is always perfect, has hot human blood flowing in your body. Where have you been hiding it? I couldn’t stop thinking about it while I watched you recite the Bible in the mass every Sunday. (Studio Life 2010) These words are uttered with an evil facial expression and stylized movements. As in melodrama, the scene excessively demonstrates Seifriet as the vice and Juli as the virtue. In moments like this, the acting does not seem to convey the intended meanings; it instead distances the audience’s emotional identification. In this regard, although these bodies achieve the status of signs that do not rest on the intended referents, they do not necessarily resonate with manga characters’ bodies as floating signs, as the latter incite the readers’ identification precisely because of their free-floating nature.

These excessive moments in Studio Life’s performance remind us of the performance by the all-female Takarazuka Revue, which will be discussed in the next chapter. In addition to being “Johnny’s in the theatre world,” Studio Life is also called “a male version of Takarazuka.”41 However, as will be explored in detail in the next

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Figure 2.6

Seifriet whips and strangles Juli. Courtesy of Studio Life

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chapter, Takarazuka’s performances exceed Studio Life’s in their excessiveness. Inspired by the French revue in its early days, its performances are highly decorative and never intended to be realistic.

Performers’ bodies in Takarazuka only exist as seductive signifiers, while those in Studio Life walk a tightrope between material bodies and two-dimensional signs. Indeed, it is highly ironic that, although Kurata occasionally intends to create manga-like moments on a “realist” stage by creating a tableau and using voiceover narrations of characters’ inner monologues, her production of The Heart of Thomas reveals the distance between manga and realist theatre.

Kaneko Shu ˉsuke and Kishida Rio’s Summer Vacation 1999 To conclude this chapter, I will briefly discuss Summer Vacation 1999 (1988a), a film adaptation of The Heart of Thomas. Unlike Studio Life’s theatrical adaptation, this film version, directed by Kaneko Shūsuke and scripted by Kishida Rio, is undoubtedly girlie. The film even removes the layer of male bodies and has girls perform the roles of boys. Moreover, the girls do not appear as substantial, material entities in this film. It was Kaneko who suggested the idea of having girls perform the boy characters from this manga. Although he is a male director, he is clearly sensitive to girls’ aesthetics in his casting. His girlie sensibilities are reciprocated by those of Kishida Rio, who was a leading feminist playwright until her death in 2003. As touched on in Chapter 1 where I have discussed YUBIWA Hotel’s Lear, inspired

by Kishida and Ong’s version, Kishida mostly wrote from a leftist feminist perspective. However, she also had sympathies with girls’ aesthetics, as seen in her script of this film, particularly in her treatment of time as discussed below.42 She was also a translator of Mother Goose rhymes and researched vampires, both of which appeal to the girlie sensibilities of, for example, Gothic-Lolita girls as mentioned in Chapter 1. Kaneko mostly directs mainstream popular films, and compared to these, Summer Vacation 1999 is not much known.43 However, it has a cult following, and most fans seem to be female.44 Summer Vacation 1999 maintains a large part of the storyline of the original manga, but changes the setting from Germany to somewhere unspecified in Japan. It also changes, or rather exposes from the perspective of girls’ aesthetics, the “real sex” of the characters

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by having girls perform as boys. As discussed, boys are the alter egos of girls in The Heart of Thomas and many other manga pieces with similar concerns. Kaneko fully appreciates this. As he says, “I thought it would be interesting for girls to perform the drama of shōnen-ai” (Kaneko 1988b: 65). The film reveals that “boys’” homoerotic sentiments in the original manga are actually those of “girls.”

Importantly, Kaneko does not require the girl actors to perform realistic portrayals of the boy characters and this suggests a stark contrast with the direction of Kurata Jun of Studio Life. Kaneko abandons realism altogether in this film. As he says, “During the shooting of this film, I had to keep denying realism” (Kaneko 1988b: 64). He is aware that the world of manga, especially the one of shōnen-ai manga like The Heart of Thomas, cannot always be created through realism. In the story, these characters are identified as boys, and to some extent Kaneko also expresses boy gender by having the girl actors wear short hairstyles and male school uniform, employ a male speech style, and occasionally assume masculine postures. However, their movements are often feminine; when they run, play soccer, climb up the stairs, they exhibit their female gender. The result is the emergence of androgynes, idealized in girls’ aesthetics.

Unlike androgynes in manga, their counterparts in the feature film exhibit some materiality, and this is both carefully highlighted and at the same time erased. Four “boys” in the film – Norio (the equivalent to Ante, who is a friend of Thomas), Yū/Kaoru (Thomas/ Erich), Kazuhiko (Juli), and Naoto (Oskar) – visualize the process in which female bodies mature. Norio is the youngest (13 years old) and Naoto the eldest (16), and although Norio’s appearance is androgynous, Naoto’s is more feminine. However, as if to resist the further process of “maturity,” these bodies are “flattened.” They are dubbed by voice actors who perform in boy-like voices, thereby treated like two-dimensional anime characters.45 The splitting of their bodies and voices prevents them from appearing as organic entities. (I will discuss the body-voice splitting as a resistant aesthetic strategy of two-dimensionality in great detail in Chapter 4.) Furthermore, except for some material aspects of these bodies, the film covers up all the human physical traits such as sweat, body heat, and anything which reminds us of body smell, even though the story is set in the summer and the shooting also took place during the hot Japanese summer. In addition to dubbing, the mixing of gender markers also

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contributes to flattening their meanings. Thus, to borrow Seifriet’s words from Studio Life’s production, these characters do not appear as the ones with “hot human blood flowing in their bodies.”

Kaneko prepares an unrealistic space for these unrealistic bodies to reside in. The story unfolds during the summer vacation. The four “boys” are staying in the boarding school, as they all have some family problems. No other characters appear in this film, no teachers or other workers at the school. Even in the scene when one of the “boys” is on a train, there are no other passengers. These “boys” are thus isolated from the rest of the world. Living alone in the Westernlooking school building in the middle of nowhere in Japan, they are in their own, exclusive world of “girls.”

The time is probably 1999, as the title indicates. The film was released in 1988, so the setting is supposed to be in the near future.

However, it is not exactly clear. The film is also tinged with nostalgia and it is not simply because the film is about “boyhood” (read as girlhood). The retro-future feeling is firstly created by the props. The furniture in the dorm seems to be Western antiques. On the other hand, there are high-tech machines such as a computer attached to

Figure 2.7 Four “boys” in Summer Vacation 1999. ©1988 NIKKATSU/Aniplex Inc.

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each desk in the classroom. And yet, these machines have exposed video tubes and wires and this makes it hard to identify the make or model of the computer, which contributes to the ambiguity about the setting and time. Moreover, Kaneko has the characters wear elementary school short pants, even though male middle-school students are required to wear long trousers in Japanese schools. It is possible that the year 1999 itself also created conflicting impressions from the standpoint of 1988; on the one hand, it was the future, but on the other hand, it is also the year that Nostradamus prophesied as the end of time and the world.

Secondly, the story does not completely suggest its closure, and this also twists the sense of time. As in the original manga version, Kaoru (the equivalent to Erich) comes to the school after Yū’s (Thomas’s) suicide, but unlike the original, Kaoru turns out to be actually Yū. At the beginning of the film, Yū jumps into the lake, but does not die; he comes back as Kaoru to avenge himself on Kazuhiko (Juli). Kazuhiko comes to love Kaoru, but towards the end Yū/Kaoru demands Kazuhiko die with him to atone for his cold rejection of Yū’s love and to prove his everlasting love for Yū/Kaoru. They jump into the same lake together, but only Kazuhiko is saved. However, Yū/Kaoru returns to the boarding school at the end of the story, in the same way he came to the school at the beginning as Kaoru. He keeps returning to stay in love with Kazuhiko. Both at the beginning and at the end when he returns to the school, he uses a train, and the same shot of him on the train is used, suggesting cyclical time in the film. This is in contrast to Studio Life’s adaptation, in which time is projected on the screen at the corner of the stage to give a realistic sense of the story’s progress. Kishida’s lines also emphasize the cyclical conception of time. When Yū/Kaoru asks Kazuhiko to die with him, he says, “Let’s die together. Childhood is the most wonderful thing. Let’s die together and be reborn. As children. Then, let’s die again as children and then be reborn as children. As many times as we want, let’s die as children, and as many times as we die, let’s be reborn” (1988a). (What she means by children here is the same as girls from the perspective of girls’ aesthetics.) Other “boys,” Norio and Naoto, also often utter lines wishing to freeze time.

Nevertheless, this cyclical time is not completely cyclical, as the film is presented as the memory of a middle-aged man. While he never appears as a character, his narration in the scene where Yū/

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Kaoru returns to school for the first time at the beginning of the film suggests that what will be unfolded in the film is his experience: “The summer vacation of that year. … I can recall it very clearly even now. … I feel that it was still yesterday” (1988a). This voice is probably that of Yū/Kaoru as a middle-aged man. Even though it feels as if the summer vacation was still yesterday, this narration indicates that time has passed. Moreover, it indicates that Yū/Kaoru probably became an adult man. The narrator is indeed the only male in this film, and this “out-of-place” status gives him a strong presence. Yet, all these interpretations are again not entirely certain, as Yū/Kaoru keeps coming back to the school. Therefore, on the one hand, it looks as though time has progressed (suggested by the narration), but on the other, that time circulates (suggested by Yū/Kaoru’s return).

This might suggest the trauma experienced by this middle-aged man with girlie sensibilities. Again, girls’ aesthetics can be appreciated regardless of one’s sex and age. This man may not be able to accept the loss of his “girlhood” and therefore may be acting out the coming back to the boarding school. The film may be embracing the traumatic condition of this “girl” like the performances explored in the previous chapter, but it leaves room for another interpretation. Although girls’ aesthetics can be shared by biological men, the presence of an adult male voice in the film could bring alienation effects. It feels as though it is opening a tiny crack in the space of girls, although the film does not specify what this crack may entail.

Kaneko and Kishida are very sympathetic to girls’ aesthetics, but this crack might imply that they do not completely accede to them for some unspecified reasons. Hagio Moto provides a space where girls love other girls without being dominated by dichotomous constructions of gender and sexuality as a way to go beyond the negative aspect of girls’ aesthetics. Kaneko and Kishida appreciate this, but the insertion of an adult male voice in the girlie sphere may suggest that they hope for other ways for those with girlie sensibilities to consider their bodies and subjectivity. Since this adult male narrator is “girlie,” I do not think that Kaneko and Kishida are suggesting that girls should open their world to conventional heterosexism or heteronormativity. However, what is beyond the girlie space remains mysterious.

3 Citizen Girls

The previous chapter explored the ways that girls’ aesthetics allow girls to become liberated from the materiality of their female bodies through the creation of androgynous boy surrogates. The present chapter continues this exploration, but examines the ways that these aesthetics can slip into the romanticization of reactionary sentiments. Girls fetishize immaterial bodies, but immateriality does not always suggest freedom from constraints. Without the weight of material reality or lived experiences, immaterial bodies can be usurped by various ideologies. For example, although girls are typically indifferent to the world outside of their girlie sphere, wartime schoolgirls publicly supported Japan’s war effort while resisting the use of their bodies as reproductive tools in their closed imagined space. I propose that what made it possible for these schoolgirls to reconcile the opposing tendencies of the national and the personal spheres is the fact that they both exist in the realm of ideals with its concomitant sense of the immaterial. Girls’ aesthetics’ valorization of the fictional and immaterial body somehow coincided with nationalist propaganda, including war propaganda, in which aestheticized images of soldiers concealed injured and dying bodies. Such contradictions in these aesthetics continue to this day.

This chapter discusses the relationship between girls’ aesthetics and the nationalist sense of citizenship. In the postwar period, in 1945, Japanese women gained the right to vote (the first election took place the following year), and the essential equality of the sexes 112

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is guaranteed in the postwar constitution, which came into effect in 1947. Since 1996, female personnel of the Self-Defense Forces (Jieitai) have been sent overseas for “peacekeeping operations” with their male colleagues (Frühstück 2007: 90), and in 2013, two female personnel were appointed as captains in the Maritime Self-Defense Force (Nakagawa 2013). Traditionally, participation in military operations is the final gateway to citizenship. As right-wing manga artist Kobayashi Yoshinori asks: “Will you participate in a war? Or will you cease to be Japanese?”1 In this sense, Japanese women have finally achieved full citizen status.

In this chapter, I will examine the co-existence of subversive and reactionary aspects of girls’ aesthetics by focusing on the representation of a girl soldier in female manga artist Ikeda Riyoko’s girls’ manga, The Rose of Versailles (Berusaiyu no bara) (1972–3) and its stage adaptation by the all-female musical/revue company, the Takarazuka Revue (Takarazuka kagekidan) (first produced in 1974 and most recently revived in 2015). I will also briefly discuss Lady Oscar (1979), the feature-film adaptation of this manga, directed by French director Jacques Demy. It should be noted that, while seen as one of the most important pieces in Japanese girls’ manga history, The Rose of Versailles occupies an ambivalent position in girls’ aesthetics.

With the androgynous protagonist girl, it exudes and incites girlie desire as discussed in the previous chapter, but with this protagonist being a revolutionary soldier in the French Revolution, it has a link to political reality. Moreover, while this manga challenges patriarchy, in some aspects it also idealizes a male sphere.

Also importantly, various ideologies of the 1970s are convoluted in this manga. With a heroically patriotic protagonist sacrificing her life for the “rebirth” of France, it reminds us that citizens are asked to fight for their countries. At the same time, this manga was also produced under the influence of the New Left movement as well as the women’s liberation movement, both of which critiqued Japan’s imperialist mentality. In order to unpack the complexity of the piece, I will first discuss it in relation to these political movements as well as in relation to citizenship in general. Then, I will explore how the Takarazuka Revue, one of the key players in Japanese girls’ culture, responds to these ideologies in its theatrical adaptation.

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Ikeda Riyoko’s The Rose of Versailles Subversive bodies of girls Ikeda Riyoko’s The Rose of Versailles, serialized in the girls’ manga magazine Weekly Margaret (Shūkan māgaretto) from April 1972 to December 1973, holds an iconic place in Japanese manga history. It has been published in book form in various editions, and as of 2009, more than 20 million copies have been sold (Bandai 2009). Its continuing popularity is evinced by the publication of the latest volume with new episodes in August 2014, about 40 years after the end of the serialization. The manga is set in the time of the French Revolution and revolves around two female characters, Marie Antoinette and a fictional character, Oscar François de Jarjayes. Oscar, a girl soldier in the Royal Guards, serves as Marie’s bodyguard, but eventually participates in overthrowing the monarchy in the French Revolution. One of the reasons that this manga has achieved its iconic status is the fact that it brought historical narrative into girls’ manga.2 However, what is more significant is that it provided readers with an imaginary stage to experience the life of a revolutionary androgyne who fights to overthrow the ancient, powerful regime of gender and sexuality.

This manga was serialized at a time which saw the development of the women’s liberation movement in Japan. Like their counterparts in other parts of the world, feminist activists were women who were marginalized in the New Left movement (Onna tachi no ima o tou kai 1996: 6). As a radical, student-based reaction to the Old Left – that is, the Japanese Communist Party (Nihon kyōsantō) and the Social Democratic Party of Japan (Nihon shakaitō)3 – the Japanese New Left movement arose in the 1960s to aggressively protest the Japan-US Security Treaty that allowed the US military to operate in Japan and the Vietnam War. Armed with sticks and wearing construction helmets, they often used street demonstrations and fought with the riot police (Marotti 2009; Oguma 2009).4 Like the Weathermen in the US or the Red Army Faction in Germany, some extreme factions of the New Left in Japan started to use guns and hijackings in pursuit of their goals. This culminated with the Asama-Sansō Incident in February 1972, in which five male members of the armed United Red Army (Rengō sekigun) (URA) took a hostage at a mountain lodge (Asama sansō) and engaged in a ten-day standoff with police that ended with a gunfight. After the incident, the police discovered that

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the URA members had tortured and murdered 12 of their comrades because of what they saw as their ideological weakness, and this swept away the remaining sympathy in society for the URA’s resistance to state authority (Igarashi 2007: 120). The New Left’s dream of revolution thus died in the carnage, but women did not surrender their vision of a socialist revolution. The liberationists continued to voice their demands for social equality, particularly in terms of gender and sex. The revolution achieved in The Rose of Versailles was the revolution that these liberationists were struggling for.

This manga also epitomizes the tension among women activists between the socialist consciousness (typically coded as masculine) and the pursuit of personal pleasure (typically coded as feminine) provided by consumerism during a time marked by the shift from the “season of politics” to the consumerist society.5 Oscar’s revolution in The Rose of Versailles was, after all, only possible in this new social climate.6 For example, Jacques Demy’s film adaptation was promoted with a TV commercial for Shiseido’s red lipstick worn by Catriona MacColl, who played the role of Oscar in the film. In the 30 seconds of the commercial, MacColl in her “natural feminine” state and MacColl as Oscar engaged in “masculine” activities such as sword and gun fighting, appearing in turn. At the end of the commercial, there is a close-up of the “feminine” MacColl with a voiceover by a Japanese woman: “Sometimes, I wish I were born a man, but … Dramatic, dramatic spring. Red. Shiseido.” As represented by the production and reception of The Rose of Versailles, this historical moment was charged with contradictory desires of girls and women activists.

The story of The Rose of Versailles weaves together historical facts and fictions. Oscar is brought up as a successor to her father, General de Jarjayes, because he has no male child. Although she is open about the fact that she is a woman, she wears male attire and serves Marie as a commander of the Royal Guards. However, Oscar starts to be aware of social inequality in French society through the political upheaval that leads to the revolution. She resigns from the Royal Guards and joins the French Guards as an officer. Eventually, she participates in the storming of the Bastille with the anti-royalist soldiers of her regiment and helps those in the Third Estate who do not know how to handle weapons. However, she is shot and dies after witnessing the fall of the Bastille.

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Oscar and Marie can be seen as diametrically opposed with respect to motherhood. Marie becomes a mother of three children and the mother of France symbolically, while Oscar is a childless soldier who eventually helps to destroy the ancient regime. Sexuality in relation to motherhood was one of the main foci of the women’s liberation movement in Japan, and the activists intervened in the state’s reproductive control that began in prewar, imperialist Japan (Mackie 2003: 164–6). For example, when the serialization of The Rose of Versailles started in 1972, a partial amendment of the Eugenic Protection Law (Yūsei hogo hō) was submitted to the Diet, and it was vehemently critiqued by the liberationists.7 It attempted to prohibit abortion even when a mother faced financial difficulties in raising a child, except for cases in which the fetus was showing signs of significant physical and/or mental defects.8 Thus, part of the women’s liberation movement was about fighting for the right to control whether a woman becomes a mother or not. Motherhood was also one of the main concerns of girls’ manga in the 1970s, but there was a conflict between the idea that traditional motherhood must be embraced ˉ tsuka 1996: 85). The Rose of and the view that it should be rejected (O Versailles reflects such tensions, but shows more sympathy with the latter view. Marie’s love for her children is presented as respectable, but other than this, she is depicted as an unwise woman. All she does except for loving her children is idle away her time wasting national expenditure on luxuries and thinking of her love, Hans Axel von Fersen (even though she feels guilty about her affair). Unlike Mother Marie, Oscar is depicted as an ideal character. She is intelligent and keenly aware of social issues. She becomes critical of the decadent lifestyle of the aristocrats and the unfair tax system, which exempts priests and aristocrats. The contrast between Marie and Oscar may seem to be based on the classical gender binary. Oscar’s social awareness may seem possible because she is granted access to the male sphere (unlike other works of girls’ aesthetics). However, her critical acuteness does not necessarily come from her privileged, “male” status. In fact, no (aristocratic) man around her comes to share her critical stance towards the status quo.

The Rose of Versailles entails the possibility of transcending a clear gender division and the most conspicuous marker of this is Oscar’s graphic image. She is presented not so much masculine as androgynous, and this is possible because of the graphic conventions in

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manga, as in the case of androgynous boys in Hagio Moto’s The Heart of Thomas (Tōma no shinzō) in the previous chapter. Manga characters are not portrayed realistically and they function only as signs.

For example, the shape and size of eyes signify characters’ sex and age; female characters’ eyes are rounder while male characters’ tend to be oval, and younger characters’ eyes are bigger than older ones’.

A laughing mouth is suggested by an upside-down triangle, and embarrassment is expressed by some tilted lines on the cheeks. Such unrealistic ways of representing human bodies make the visualization of an androgyne like Oscar possible. Except for her feminine long hair, Oscar’s graphic image stands between those of typical male characters and female characters. She is taller than other females, but shorter than males, and her eyebrows are thicker than females’ but thinner than males’. Therefore, she looks more masculine when contrasted with female characters and more feminine when contrasted with male ones (Oshiyama 2007: 167).9 The depiction of her gender and sex is not fixed.10 As a transgressor of static gender and sexual divides, Oscar is free from bodily or material constraints. Such a character can appear real, not realistic, in the two-dimensional sphere of manga. Of course, as graphic images, manga characters ultimately do not have materiality. The point is that the unique graphic convention of manga can give realness to this immaterial androgyne, who does not exist in reality.

The immaterial realness of Oscar in the original manga stands out when she is compared to Oscar in Demy’s realistic film adaptation, Lady Oscar. As critics and scholars including Futaba Jūzaburō, Takayama Hideo, and Makiko Yamanashi point out, Oscar in this film, performed by actress Catriona MacColl, clearly looks feminine and does not have androgynous features (Futaba 1989: 554; Takayama 1991: 301; Yamanashi 2012: 181). Despite many people’s expectation that the film would be a musical (Futaba 1989: 554; Takahashi 1979: 160) like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) (1964),11 it employed a rather realistic acting style in a realistic setting, and this made Oscar seem quite “unnatural.” For example, even though MacColl’s Oscar is very feminine in spite of her male attire, Marie’s lover, Fersen, does not notice that she is female until he is told. The original manga has the same episode, but it is believable because of the graphic conventions of manga.

The film thus highlights the difficulty of representing Oscar with a

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Figure 3.1 Androgynous Oscar in-between the poles of female (Marie Antoinette) and male (Marie’s lover, Hans Axel von Fersen). Š Ikeda Riyoko Production

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material body. The film’s materialization of Oscar also suggests that girls’ aesthetics were not appreciated by Demy. In a scene where Oscar becomes aware of her love for Fersen, she watches herself in the mirror alone in her room, taking off her shirt and exposing her breasts. This shows that she has become conscious of her biological female body by falling in love with a man. The scene, which is not in the manga version, destroys the androgyne that is central to the appeal of Oscar.

Interestingly, rejection of the material body is also a tenet of many New Left organizations. As their protests became more violent, activists were required to train their bodies to the extent of “corporeal privation” (Igarashi 2007: 123). For example, the members of the URA confined themselves to mountain bases, where they trained themselves to become better revolutionary soldiers. As Yoshikuni Igarashi argues, the URA believed that “[b]odies merely belonged to the conditions that must be overcome in order to reach the higher goal of revolution” (2007: 129). Bodily comfort was at odds with the preparation for a revolution and it was labeled as a “bourgeois pleasure” (Igarashi 2007: 129). The binary of bodiless spirituality and bodily comfort was often understood from a conventionally gendered perspective, as can be seen in the motivations for the murder of URA members; two female members were executed because they cared about fashion. Moreover, one member was murdered, accused of the supposed usage of femininity to gain control over male members (Igarashi 2007: 133). While this latter case is not directly related to consumeristic bodily comfort, it provides an example of the URA’s rejection of materiality/femininity. Thus, the New Left and girls’ aesthetics come very close to each other in their idealization of immateriality. This is in contrast to women’s liberationists who valorized the female material bodies repressed in the leftist movement.

However, while the masculinist New Left took gender inequality as given, girls’ aesthetics, like the women’s liberation movement, refuse such conventional gender ideology, including the myth of motherhood. These three parties – the New Left, the women’s liberation movement, and girls’ aesthetics – are convoluted, sometimes sharing the same ideas and at other times conflicting with each other, and this is reflected in The Rose of Versailles.

As discussed in the previous chapters, in addition to their resistance to maternal reproductive bodies, girls’ aesthetics often celebrate

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the fictionality of girls and female same-sex erotics. In The Rose of Versailles, Oscar is a fictional character (unlike many other real-life figures such as Marie Antoinette) and she also incites same-sex eroticism and freedom from materiality.12 Female characters often express erotic sentiments towards her. Rosalie, a servant girl of the de Jarjayes family, is suffering from unrequited love for Oscar, and an aristocratic girl who is in love with Oscar commits suicide in order to resist a marriage of convenience. Also importantly, Oscar’s romantic relationship with her true love, André, who she finds after her onesided love for Fersen, is not stereotypically heterosexual, because André is not depicted in a masculine way. He has more feminine, rounder eyes, unlike other male characters’ masculine, oval-shaped eyes (Oshiyama 2007: 197). He is to some extent androgynous like Oscar. In addition, he is feminized in terms of his social status. He is a commoner and a servant of the de Jarjayes family, and therefore he is socially in a weaker position than Oscar. Due to their class differences, he cannot marry her and turn her into a wife and mother. She treats him as her equal, but he is portrayed as the one who knows his place.13 The sex scene of Oscar and André in particular exudes homoeroticism. The Rose of Versailles was one of the first girls’ manga to feature a sex scene (Fujimoto 1998: 66), but the depiction of entirely naked bodies was avoided. This in turn contributes to the graphic images which obscure the biological bodies of Oscar and André, especially that of Oscar. They are shown holding each other in bed, only exposing their upper bodies, but not Oscar’s breasts. They look like an androgynous couple. Eroticism in the scene rejects the conventionally gendered and sexualized gaze. Moreover, even though they have sex, this act is “unproductive.” Oscar suggests to André that they have sex for the first time the night before they leave for the Bastille. She is aware that they may die, and therefore there is almost no possibility that their sex will lead to childbirth. Thus, their homoerotic sex is an expression of ultimately pure love that is seemingly contradictorily possible only outside of the physical realm. Another important point about the couple’s sexual relationship is that it is similar to the romantic, same-sex relationships depicted in a genre of manga called “shōnen-ai/Boys’ Love (BL)” as discussed in Chapter 2.

I have argued that shōnen-ai/BL manga, with its androgynous male characters, allows its audience various kinds of sexual identification.

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For example, Mizoguchi Akiko, a queer studies scholar, states that Oscar and André helped her form her lesbian identity (Mizoguchi n.d.).14 Although I do not always see girls in girls’ aesthetics as lesbian for the reasons mentioned in Chapter 2, Mizoguchi’s account provides a good example of the non-normative sexuality that this manga represents. In addition, as the readers’ letters to the magazine that carried this manga suggest, Oscar was the target of their erotic sentiments. She was also the object of identification for those who saw themselves unfit for traditional female roles (Oshiyama 2007: 211–14).

The sex scene between Oscar and André had a tremendous impact on the readers. Manga critic Fujimoto Yukari recalls the surprise she experienced when she saw the scene during the serialization of this manga. She writes that this scene determined the image of sex in the minds of middle- and high-school female students around the time. Sex was aestheticized – it came to be regarded not as a daily activity, but as the ultimate way of conveying once-in-a-lifetime love (Fujimoto 1998: 68). However, what is more important than this rather conventional romantic love ideology is that, for this generation of women, homoerotic, bodiless, and “unproductive” sex became the ideal. Interestingly, in 1989, when the readers reached their late twenties or early thirties, the birth rate was 1.57, the lowest ˉ tsuka 1996: 234). In addition, it is signifon record up to that point (O icant that, as the author Ikeda observes, this manga was consciously produced under the influence of the women’s liberation movement (Oshiyama 2007: 209), and conveyed liberationist messages to its readers. Liberationists sought more options for women’s lives than being mothers and wives. Likewise, in her manga, Ikeda went against the social structure that did not allow women’s autonomy. She writes that she wanted the French Revolution in this manga to be “the inner revolution of Japanese women” in an age when they could not choose their own lives (Ikeda 2003: 146).15 In one scene, Ikeda has Oscar pity Marie for marrying without love and fulfilling her duty of giving birth for France. She says in her monologue, “I wouldn’t be able to stand it …!” (Ikeda 1994 [Vol. 3]: 183). The Rose of Versailles was thus one of the influences that impacted on girls in the political climate. While “girls” in girls’ aesthetics attempt to be indifferent to the world outside of their imaginary space, they share the historical and political moments with others living in the outside world.

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Figure 3.2

The sex scene of Oscar and André. © Ikeda Riyoko Production

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The revolution in this manga also reflects the silenced voice of women in the extremist New Left. As mentioned, a few women of the URA were executed because of their “bourgeois propensity” for ˉ tsuka argues, the urge for wearing make-up and accessories. As O revolution and consumerist sentiments co-existed in these women (1996: 21). However, such co-existence was not allowed in the URA, and they were tortured and murdered. Consumerism provided girls with space to explore their subjectivity, and this was also the case for activists within the women’s liberation movement. Although they were not entirely supportive of consumerism, they tried to construct their own worlds with consumable items and images as active agents.

They paid attention to their physical comfort, and self-esteem related to appearance, both of which were satisfied through consumption.

Consumerism helped express their identities, hitherto marginalized in the leftist movement. For example, Tanaka Mitsu, the standard bearer of Japan’s women’s liberation movement, fascinated other women by participating in demonstrations dressed all in black, including black high heels, not in typical jeans and sneakers (Oguma 2009: 715). Women activists of the extremist New Left shared such sensibilities with the liberationists as well as the creators and the readers of girls’ manga, but their voices were muffled. Importantly, Ikeda Riyoko had a similar experience to these women of the URA. She was a philosophy major who studied Marx and Lenin (Takatori 1994: 194). She was also a member of the Democratic Youth League of Japan (Nihon minshu seinen dōmei), which was under the Japanese Communist Party (Takatori 1994: 189). Recalling her days in the League, she complains, “When I attended a meeting in a bright-red suit, they said I was like a bourgeoisie or an aristocrat, and they almost tried to punish me by dismissal from the League” (cited in Takatori 1994: 194). However, unlike the executed women of the extremist URA, Ikeda could demonstrate her feminist politics in The Rose of Versailles, the stage set by consumerism, as if she heard and took over these women’s muffled voices. In addition, Tanaka Mitsu once said, sympathizing with one of the two leaders of the URA, Nagata Hiroko: “Nagata Hiroko is myself.”16 Nagata tried to realˉ tsuka 1996: 16; ize women’s autonomy in the leftist movement (O Oguma 2009: 546), but she was overwhelmed by the masculinism of another male leader, Mori Tsuneo,17 and the movement itself. She was undoubtedly responsible for the murders in the URA, but still, it

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is telling that she spent her time in prison drawing girls’ manga-style ˉ tsuka 1996: 10). It is as if she was trying to express illustrations (O women’s experiences, which were not heard in the New Left movement. The Rose of Versailles reflects not only the desire of girl readers, but also the collective voice of women who could not find their space in the masculinist revolution.

In the space created in and through The Rose of Versailles, girls and women experience the pleasure of playing a central role in the revolution. The ancient regime of France here stands for the sexist, heteronormative, and, to some extent, class system of Japan.18 After the middle phase of the story, these issues are played out in Oscar’s relationship with her father, General de Jarjayes. It is revealed at one point that, even though he raised her like a man, he has started to worry about her safety as a soldier, given the political situation, and therefore tries to have her married off and retired from her military career. Also, the reason he sent her to the Royal Guards was because he thought that even a woman could serve as a soldier there in a safe environment. However, she defies him by leaving the Royal Guards for the French Guards. She also resists his order to get married and declares that she will live as a “child of Mars” (Ikeda 1994 [Vol. 3]: 361). She further challenges his royalist politics by reading and sympathizing with Rousseau and Voltaire. The French Revolution is thus the final stage of her independence from the conventional gender, sexual, and class paradigms represented by her father. As a girl soldier without a material body, Oscar fires a cannon at the old gender and sexual system that tries to drag her down to a world which categorizes its inhabitants according to their biological bodies. She also attacks the class system by participating in the battle to overthrow it.

As in The Heart of Thomas, non-narrative graphics are used to depict the emotional and affective world of the characters. For example, Oscar usually appears in uniform, but in a scene where another character praises her beauty, there is a non-narrative graphic where she is portrayed like a Greek/Roman god. Moreover, when she likens herself to a child of Mars, her head is depicted in profile with a Mars-like figure superimposed over her head (see Figure 3.3), and poetic statements on the side emphasize the emotion involved in swearing loyalty to the life of a soldier. This climaxes in the graphic of her death scene on the battlefield, where she is accompanied by a figure like a Greek goddess in the background, which suggests that

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she has achieved a status equivalent to that of a mythic figure that transcends time (Oshiyama 2007: 206). In other words, by becoming god-like, she is freed from the existing system, which obstructs her autonomy (Oshiyama 2007: 207). Oshiyama Michiko argues that Oscar’s transgressive gender identity and, I would add, sexuality, get “sanctified” as eternal and unchanging through her death (2007: 207). Thus, Oscar does not live in the new world that she has helped to create. The revolution sets the stage not only for the demonstration of her independence, but also for her heroic death. Here the heroic death of a girl is expressed through the flattened, non-narrative graphic that shows explicitly the eternal symbolic imaginary that fuels girls’ aesthetics.

Oshiyama’s argument about Oscar’s transgressive gender (and sexual identity) is persuasive, except for the way she sees Oscar’s trajectory as the growth of a girl under her father’s control to a fully fledged adult. Oshiyama associates girlhood with weakness and submissiveness (2007: 190). By contrast, I would argue that Oscar’s death is a good example of resistance in girls’ aesthetics. Oscar’s “deification” confines her to an ahistorical space, in which she never grows old and never produces anything. Even though, to a certain extent, her life goes beyond the scope of girls’ aesthetics in that her social awareness motivates her to break open the social role assigned to her by her father, and to move into a new world by becoming a part of the force to create a new history, her death insures that she does not change and hence she remains a girl.

Reactionary bodies of girls Nevertheless, Oscar’s fight in the French Revolution is not always subversive. This is because the gesture towards escaping the material body, with its gender and sexual constraints, transforms the body into an immaterial symbol, one that is available for appropriation by a variety of ideologies. Abstraction of the materiality of the body is both liberating and potentially entrapping. One example of this in The Rose of Versailles is its treatment of class differences. While this manga does critique the social hierarchy, it does not aim at depicting the substantial suffering and bodily experiences of the lower classes.

Girls’ manga and girls’ aesthetics are indeed not suited to depict this kind of reality.19 Oscar sides with the lower classes in the battle at the Bastille and claims herself to be a citizen like them. However, she

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Figure 3.3 Oscar accompanying a Mars-like image. Š Ikeda Riyoko Production

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dies in the battle and never lives as a commoner after the revolution.

After all, she is a lofty aristocrat who sacrifices her life for the people.

Ikeda herself observes, “Oscar fought with the common people, but she cannot live as a commoner in dirty clothes” (cited in Oshiyama 2007: 206–7, emphasis added). Given that she was a member of the youth group under the Japanese Communist Party, it may be surprising that she reduces the commoners to fashion. However, this actually parallels the naïveté of the New Left movement around the time, which was primarily led by elite students who romanticized the working class. They revolted against middle-class ideals such as respectability and decency and sided with the working class, but what they actually did was to construct their own image of the working class. They did not have contact with working-class people and therefore did not know what their lives were really like. Ikeda’s statement is also not so surprising, considering the nature of girls’ aesthetics. The commoners function as an image and exist only to enhance Oscar’s heroic martyrdom.

Ikeda’s statement above about the poor also unwittingly reveals a tension in women’s consumerist sentiments, as illustrated by her red suit and the poor’s dirty clothes. Consumerism provided her with a space and commodities through which she constructed her own identity, but the working class generically remained as the poor in dirty clothes. Yet, in her mindset, she was somehow also concerned with social equality. The Rose of Versailles exhibits the predicament of women who had a leftist awareness, but found in consumerism a possible tool to make their voices heard. It was one of the events which marked the shift in the site of political action from class-based street protests to lifestyle-based performance, one that derived much potential from the realm of consumption.

The original manga thus glorifies Oscar’s heroic support of the revolution, but in Jacques Demy’s film adaptation, Oscar’s shift from aristocrat to revolutionary is driven by commoner André. In the original, she develops her critical views on the social hierarchy without anyone’s guidance and declares that she renounces all the rights she has had as an aristocrat before participating in the battle at the Bastille. On the other hand, her romantic partner, André, shows no interest in learning about the socialist movements, even though he suffers from his lower status. He takes part in the battle simply because Oscar does. In his film, Demy reverses the dynamic of the

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couple to a large extent. André questions the position to which he is assigned, while Oscar sees class differences as normal. For example, after he first confesses his love for her, she rejects him, saying, “You have no right.” He refutes this: “Oh, you’re wrong. I do have the right. I’ve loved you for my entire life. And I have the right to keep on loving you.”20 In another scene, she exhibits her hypocrisy by stating that she is “no better” than he “but different” from him.

To this he replies, “Separate. Different. Oh, Oscar, can’t you see that we are equal?” Finally, towards the end of the film, she leaves the de Jarjayes family to join André who is now part of the revolutionary force. Thus, Demy’s version has commoner André mentoring aristocrat Oscar. This power relationship between the couple may be another example of stereotypical gender representations in the film, but it is also true that the film indirectly critiques the aestheticization of an aristocrat’s sacrifice in the original.

The most significant change Demy made in his version is that Oscar does not play a central role as a revolutionary soldier in the battle at the Bastille; she does not fight. Futaba assumes in his review that Demy did not want to distort the history of the French Revolution by having Oscar lead the battle (1989: 554). In Demy’s film, Oscar does not even have a weapon and simply stays around the Bastille with André and other protesters. She is presented as one of the people. Unlike in the manga, there is no single individual who is responsible for the victory at the Bastille. Furthermore, Oscar does not die, which shows that many of the features of girls’ aesthetics did not transfer to the film. Although André dies, his death is not heroic, either. Oscar and André get separated in the crowds that are fleeing from the royalists’ attack and, in this process, André is shot and dies. In the original manga, André also dies, but he dies by a bullet directed at Oscar, and hence sacrifices his life for this aristocrat. His death is highly romanticized; even though he has difficulty breathing, he recites to himself a poem praising Oscar’s blonde hair and blue eyes. In the film, there are no such sentimental effects in this scene. The film ends with Oscar searching for André in vain, overwhelmed by the crowds rejoicing at the fall of the Bastille, hence “contrasting [the] image of collective joy and Oscar’s personal despair” (2013: 46), as Anne E. Duggan puts it. Demy does not grant Oscar the right to die for the “aristocratic honor … to protect [the] lower-class” (Duggan 2013: 46). Considering that he accepted the

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offer to direct this film because he wanted funding for his A Room in Town (Une chambre en ville) (1982), which is about the 1955 strike in Nantes (Duggan 2013: 42–3), he is clearly in support of the working class. However, reminiscent of Ikeda’s ambivalence, Demy needed to shoot Lady Oscar, supported by business corporations such as Shiseido, in order to fund a film about the class struggle.

In addition to the depiction of the lower class, Oscar’s status as a soldier is also problematic as it is treated as an aestheticized image.

Her activities as a soldier are never really shown in this manga, even though she gallantly says, “I dedicate my life to the sword and the cannon” (Ikeda 1994 [Vol. 3]: 361). Even in the scene at the Bastille, the purpose does not seem to be the depiction of the battle, but instead her heroic, aestheticized death. Oscar’s death empowers girls because it completes her fictionalization, but the aestheticized image of a soldier’s death is at the same time disturbing.

Oscar’s aestheticized death is similar to the masculinist tenet of the extremist factions of the New Left, as the activists’ devotion was measured by their “willingness to die for the cause” (Igarashi 2007: 123). As Ueno Chizuko points out, the members of the URA, for example, were aware that they would never be able to overthrow state authority. The overwhelmingly uneven power relationship between the state and the New Left groups resulted in the activists’ romanticization of their “suicidal acts” (Ueno 2006: 98). They heroized themselves. Let us recall here that the suicidal acts of the URA were not grounded in the members’ appreciation of their material bodies. On the contrary, the activists were driven by the idealized, heroic images of suicidal acts. It is also important here to recall that women, being “materialized,” were excluded from this idealized realm. A revolutionary soldier, who had the privilege of dying for the cause, was de facto a man. In theory, as long as women were also ready to die, they could become heroes and hence “masculinized.” However, what happened in reality in the URA is that a woman was involved in the murders of other women to prove her “masculinity.” Nagata Hiroko participated in the murders of other female members because they showed traits typically associated with femininity such as an interest in fashion. Femininity was associated with material pleasure, which would encumber “suicidal acts,” and in order to sustain the possibility of her aestheticized death as a revolutionary soldier, Nagata had to kill other women. Oscar’s heroic death in one sense challenges this

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conceptualization of a revolutionary soldier as a man (and moreover, she successfully defeats the monarchy, the equivalent of state authority), but does not fundamentally change it. When she leaves the battlefield for a moment to move André to a safer place after he is shot, she says in her inner monologue, “Why am I a woman!? … Why am I a woman, to the extent that I can’t stay in command!?” (Ikeda 1994 [Vol. 4]: 333). Leaving the battlefield to care for a severely injured lover is understood as a womanly behavior. After André’s death, Oscar displays her “manliness” by going back to the battlefield.

What ultimately allows her a heroic death is thus her “masculine” status. Deconstruction of the gender divide seen in other aspects of her characterization is absent here. Although she has revolted against patriarchy, she is still granted the “privilege” of masculinity.

By critiquing the masculine status of a revolutionary soldier, I am not suggesting that the rights to fight as a soldier should be extended to women. Soldiers are by definition those who are allowed to exercise violence towards others, whether the soldiers belong to the oppressor or to the oppressed. Oscar fought for the oppressed and her violence was designed to protect them from the royalists.

However, as Ueno asks, is there any “violence for justice” (2006: 77)?

To this question, women’s liberationists and feminists in Japan have provided an answer. They have questioned the validity of any kind of violence by pointing out that the border between the oppressor and the oppressed is not static. Women liberationists in the 1970s acknowledged that Japanese women had been both the oppressed and the oppressor in the militarist regime during wartime and that even the postwar “economic miracle” in Japan was haunted by a militarist mentality. Women had been oppressed by the hegemonic gender and sexual ideology (that is, the “good wife, wise mother” ideology) within Japan, but they, as part of the Japanese state, had been oppressing women in neighboring Asia whose economic and sexual labor had been exploited by Japan’s military during wartime and by business corporations after the war. Based on this acknowledgement, the liberationists critiqued militarism and advocated peace, and this pacifism is not based on the stereotypical notion that women are pacifist.21 While some feminists in many parts of the world seek equal treatment of female and male members in military organizations, the majority of feminists in Japan do not support this and instead question the legitimacy of military violence.22

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Let us now go back to the discussion of heroism and militarism.

The heroism of soldiers is not a problem only for the anti-statist New Left. The aestheticized image of Oscar’s death, together with her deification, reminds us of nationalist right-wing tactics. As Tanaka Mitsu succinctly mentions, the left wing and the right wing are similar in that they both evoke heroic desires to exceed normal limits and enter “unusual spaces” (hi-nichijō kūkan) (cited in Ueno 2006: 115). Therefore, it may not be so surprising that Ikeda Riyoko once described herself as “theoretically leftist but emotionally right-wing.”

She said that she “finds the vanishing aristocracy beautiful” and is also attracted to right-wing novelist/playwright Mishima Yukio (cited in Takatori 1994: 195). It is well known that Mishima and parts of the New Left mutually admired each other (Ueno 2006: 115). Ikeda’s sentiment is reflected in her portrayal of Oscar, who often makes remarks such as “If something terrible happens to France, I will die with her” (Ikeda 1994 [Vol. 4]: 191), which is close to wartime rightwing ideology. Indeed, her last words are “Vive la France …!” (Ikeda 1994 [Vol. 5]: 25).

In the case of prewar imperialist Japan, the fundamentalism of kokutai (meaning national body or polity) cultivated ultra-right-wing sentiments among people. Arising as a corporeal regime in the 1890s (Oguma 1995: 50) and most strictly regulating the people’s physical bodies in the 1930s as a wartime ideology (Igarashi 2000: 48–52), kokutai fundamentalism presupposed Japanese cultural and to some extent racial and ethnic supremacy23 and justified Japan’s imperialist and colonial project. Kokutai defined the Japanese as members of the extended Imperial Family sharing the “everlasting Japanese cultural essence” embodied by the Emperor. The Japanese were supposed to be united within the Emperor’s spiritual body, and soldiers were those who fought to protect this Japanese Imperial Household.24 Those who died for the Emperor were deified. Today, even seven decades after the end of World War II, such right-wing mentality continues, as can be seen in the debates surrounding the Yasukuni Shrine, which deifies the war dead and is often visited by politicians in the Japanese government.25 The abstract, aestheticized image of the Japanese body in kokutai did affect the lived bodies; under the ideology of “good wife, wise mother,” women were expected to function as reproducers of the Japanese soldiers embodying “Japanese essence.” During wartime girls resisted the construct of the ideal

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Japanese woman as a reproductive tool, but they did not question this womanhood as a manifestation of Japan’s nationalism. Rather, they sometimes even shared these right-wing, nationalist sentiments.

The tradition of girls’ aesthetics survived wartime, but girls’ compliance with state policy was at odds with their resistance to statesanctioned womanhood. By the time the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937 and Japan began its course towards total war, images of girls in girls’ magazines had changed from self-indulgent beings floating outside of reality to “girls of the nation” (gunkoku shōjo) (Dollase 2008: 335). Under government pressure to promote images of healthy young women or the “reserves of women on the home front” (Dollase 2008: 326), editors of girls’ magazines moved away from girls’ aesthetics in their images and content. Popular illustrator Nakahara Jun’ichi’s26 girls, with ennui facial expressions, thin bodies with Western-like bigger eyes and wavy hair, were replaced by realistic illustrations of more fleshy Japanese girls. The magazines came to be filled with war propaganda.

However, Honda Masuko points out girls’ magazines’ duality of support for the governmental policy and subtle resistance to it.

She analyses the wartime issues of Girls’ Club (Shōjo kurabu) and reports that, although they were filled with war propaganda, they also abounded with advertisements for cosmetics, luxurious items which the ideal “girls of the nation” should not have even desired.

The advertisements oddly attempted to resolve such a conflict, for example in this one for facial cream: “We wish / we could show / your / pink cheeks / healthy cheeks / to your fathers and brothers in the battlefields” (Honda 1991: 20–2, 31–2). Honda concludes that the nature of girls’ magazines – upholding the national policy but providing a space for girls to ignore reality – did not fundamentally change even during wartime (1991: 28). Moreover, it should be noted that girl readers did not seem to have completely acceded to governmental regulation. For example, readers of Girls’ Friend (Shōjo no tomo) were surprised at the sudden and rapid change of the magazine’s policy and sent in letters of protest (Imada 2007: 175) While girls’ magazines seemed to have retained some girlie space, this was not always the case for “girl” artists. Yoshiya Nobuko, who authored Flower Tales, which is filled with girls’ same-sex eroticism and was discussed in Chapter 2, also supported Japan’s war effort.

She enthusiastically wrote patriotic stories for both girls’ and

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Figure 3.4 Illustration of a girl by Nakahara Jun’ichi on the front page of Girls’ Friend (January, 1937). © Nakahara Jun’ichi/Himawariya

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housewives’ magazines.27 Her service for Housewive’s Friend (Shufu no tomo) magazine as a correspondent in China in 1937 caught the attention of the government and, in 1938, she was selected as one of two female members of the 12 writers of the “pen corps” (Dollase 2008: 330).28 Hitomi Tsuchiya Dollase explains that this position was equivalent to that of a “first-rate citizen” (2008: 330) in an era when women were systematically relegated to the status of what may be called “second-rate citizens,” with neither suffrage nor conscription duty. Furthermore, many other first-wave feminists supported the war. Dissatisfied with the status of “second-rate citizens,” they saw the war as a chance to prove that women could also serve kokutai, especially as patriotic mothers, and hence were entitled to full citizenship.29 Being a mother or advocating motherhood was their way to fight for the nation.

In the postwar period, the word kokutai was not officially used.

However, the ideology survives and is manifested in various cultural artifacts including manga. While providing space for subversive politics, manga, along with other popular media, primarily conveys conservative ideologies. Saitō Minako points out that, since its inception in the 1960s, anime has had a nationalistic tendency, and this seems to be applicable to many manga works as well, because these two media share two-dimensional aesthetics and the audience overlaps to a great degree (for example, The Rose of Versailles was adapted into TV and film anime). As Saitō suggests, anime pieces for male adolescents are usually set in a wartime society where battles with the Others form the central activities of the characters (2001: 18). In these anime pieces, it is the earth, not Japan, for which the soldiers work, and therefore, the team constituted is international. However, the members of the team are mostly Japanese, and they work in a rigid military hierarchy that is reminiscent of the Imperial Japanese Army (Saitō 2001: 20–1). In anime for female adolescents, protagonists wait for Prince Charming, whom they will marry and build families with in future (Saitō 2001: 32–5).

Of course, some genres of manga, such as those by the Year 24 Group discussed in the previous chapter, do not fit into this generalized pattern, but The Rose of Versailles exhibits some ambivalence.

Like the pieces of the Year 24 Group, it deconstructs conventional gender and sexual dichotomies to a great extent. However, it also often places Oscar in the stereotypically masculine domain of

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“the sword and the cannon,” and idealizes the images of soldiers.

When this manga was serialized from 1972 to 1973, women were not allowed to work as revolutionary soldiers of the New Left or as occupational soldiers. The Japanese Self-Defense Forces only partially admitted women as nurses or support staff who helped male soldiers engage in their military activities (Satō 2004: 120–33; Frühstück 2007: 89). Considering this, the fact that Oscar could lead male soldiers into battle might have made it seem as though she had achieved a position completely equal (or even superior) to men as citizens. Indeed, she declares that she is a “citizen” and “one of the people” right before she leads her regiment to the battlefield (Ikeda 1994 [Vol. 4]: 313, 315). Born under the influence of the women’s liberation movement, Oscar did not have to be Mother to contribute to the nation. However, the women’s liberation movement’s critique of violence did not reach her.

Moreover, the graphic images of Oscar in military uniform and frequent references to her blonde hair and blue eyes are problematic.

Ian Buruma writes that the glorification of Oscar in the Takarazuka Revue’s theatre adaptation (which will be discussed in the next section) reminded him of “Nazi propaganda staged by Leni Riefenstahl” (1984: 121). This link with fascist imagery is most likely due to the admiration for the West as expressed through a character with Aryan features (for example, blonde hair and blue eyes) combined with the desire to represent a strong fighting soldier. However, this does reveal the naïveté, not only of Ikeda, but also of the Japanese in general.

Japanese history classes do not teach about Nazi propaganda, even though Japan was allied with Germany during World War II.30 As a soldier without a material body, even in the scene of her death, Oscar cannot portray the weight of a dying body. The moment of her death is decorated by flowers and stars. Her fight and death are romanticized as images. It reminds us of war propaganda and kokutai fundamentalism, which use aestheticized images to disguise the real suffering of dying bodies in the battlefields. For instance, the literary group Japan Romantic School (Nihon rōmanha), founded in 1935, while starting as anti-statist, ended up contributing to the aestheticization of nationalism, including kokutai fundamentalism.

Motivated by a sense of powerlessness in the face of what the members perceived as Japan’s transformation into a rational, Western form of modern society discarding “traditional Japanese beauty” (which

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is anti-rational according to their view), the school developed a decadent attitude of rejecting material and historical reality and aestheticizing decay in an imaginary realm. In the wartime zeitgeist, this resulted in an “aesthetics of death” and mobilized a large number of young men to the battlefields for the sake of kokutai, influenced by the passionate language which the school’s leader, Yasuda Yojūrō, used to evoke “an image of sublime beauty” of “the war and the glorious self-sacrifice” (Iida 2002: 46). For example, critic Hashikawa Bunzō recalls his friend under Yasuda’s influence who hoped to die as “a decaying corpse in a tropical jungle with a copy of the Kojiki [an eighth-century collection of national founding myths] in his hands” (cited in Iida 2002: 46). As Yumiko Iida writes, the aesthetic image masked “a dismal and bloody matter” (2002: 46), or the real deaths of both the Japanese soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army and those in the areas invaded by them. The images invoked by the romantic language thus “killed people” by “promising them the highest moment of aesthetic satisfaction” (Matsumoto cited in Iida 2002: 46).

The Japan Romantic School’s desire to turn away from the historical and material reality to find a refuge in the ahistorical imaginary realm coincides with girlie sensibilities. Although, unlike the Japan Romantic School, girls’ aesthetics were not generated by the perception of “‘the Japanese reality’ denied by Western rationality” (Iida 2002: 45), they do aestheticize death. Death in girls’ aesthetics promises eternal life as resistant girls in the imaginary, but, reminiscent of the Japan Romantic School’s aesthetics of decay, it could slip into the desire for “the highest moment of aesthetic satisfaction” experienced in fighting for the nation. Girls’ identification with or idealization of Oscar’s heroic death may demonstrate the fragility of the line between these forms of desire. Indeed, many fans were disappointed

by Demy’s film version in which Oscar does not fight and hence does not die. One of them wrote in her blog, “Oscar must die as a soldier who protects citizens!” (Midori no hitori goto 2006).31

The Takarazuka Revue’s The Rose of Versailles What is Takarazuka?

The Rose of Versailles has been adapted into various different forms,32 but the all-female Takarazuka Revue’s stage adaptation is undoubtedly the most well known and financially successful, to the extent

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that “The Rose of Versailles” evokes “Takarazuka” and vice versa in Japanese society (Takeuchi 2005: 31). As one of the most popular mainstream theatre companies in Japan, since 1974 Takarazuka has produced various versions of The Rose of Versailles. As of June 2014, the total number of performances of these adaptations is about 2,100, and the audience attendance is over five million (Asahi Digital 2014). In this section, I will discuss how this popular entertainment company stages both subversive gender/sexuality and the reactionary nationalist sentiments demonstrated in the original manga. I will mainly focus on the 2006 production by Snow Troupe (one of the five troupes in the Revue).

The Takarazuka Revue was founded in 191433 by Hankyū Railway and Department Store tycoon Kobayashi Ichizō for the purpose of attracting households along the railway to the spa near Takarazuka Station in Takarazuka City, a suburb of Osaka, which is the secondlargest city in Japan. The company started as one of the single-gender youth chorus groups which emerged in Japan and elsewhere in the 1900s and 1910s (Kawasaki 1999: 38). This single-gender tradition survives in the company to this day, although it ceased to be a chorus group.34 In the company, female performers play both female and male roles in excessively melodramatic, heterosexual romances mostly set in nostalgic versions of Western countries. It sometimes adapts Western movies, literature, and musicals (such as Gone With the Wind, Me and My Girl, among others) but the majority of the shows are its originals, scripted, composed, and choreographed by artists belonging to the company.35 Due to the influence it received from the French revue in its early days, Takarazuka performers are called Takarasiennes (Takarajen’nu) after Parisiennes.

Since its inception, the company has been enormously popular. As of 2008, the annual audience attendance is two and a half million, occupying ten percent of the total attendance in all the theatre productions in Japan (Azuma 2010: 32; Yamanashi 2012: xxi). The company has five troupes, Flower (Hana), Moon (Tsuki), Snow (Yuki), Star (Hoshi), and Cosmos (Sora), and each has 80 members and therefore 400 in total. These troupes not only perform throughout the year in the company’s home theatre, Takarazuka Grand Theatre (Takarazuka dai gekijō), and its Tokyo branch, both with over 2,000 seats, but also tour nationally and internationally.36 The total number of its annual performances amounts to more than a thousand (Azuma 2010: 31).

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With the success of the company, Kobayashi founded the Takarazuka Music School (Takarazuka ongaku gakkō) to train Takarasiennes in 1919. It was one of many modern girls’ schools burgeoning around the time, but unlike typical girls’ schools, it aimed at training theatre artists as well as future “good wives, wise mothers.” To this day, in addition to theatrical training, students are required to learn “traditional Japanese female ethos,” including total obedience to the authority of the mostly male management and teachers, as well as senior Takarasiennes.37 For this reason, even though Takarazuka stages Las Vegas- or Broadway-style shows, the school is often seen as a finishing school for future “good wives, wise mothers.” Takarazuka’s famous motto is “Purely, Righteously, Beautifully” (kiyoku tadashiku utsukushiku) and Takarasiennes must retire from the company upon marriage. They are thus “girls” who are in a hiatus before they go on to fulfilling their reproductive roles. Even though Takarazuka trains “theatre artists,” this career is not typically lifelong. Unlike Western dance/drama/music schools, where graduates have to compete to join performance companies upon graduation, graduates of the Takarazuka Music School are automatically members of the company and, in this way, Takarazuka is not trying to create a professional product, but instead is selling the amateurishness of its performers (although some performers are quite professional). As if to emphasize their amateur status, Takarasiennes are referred to as “students” in the company even after their graduation from the Takarazuka Music School. Thus, Takarazuka as a whole functions as a girls’ school. Fans can also fantasize that they are part of this school and hence are girls by attending its shows and becoming members of fan clubs.

Some Takarasiennes remain “students” and keep performing in the company without getting married. For example, the late Kasugano Yachiyo, acclaimed as “the greatest treasure of Takarazuka” for her excellence in acting and dance, was a “student” and thus a “girl” during her tenure from 1928 to 2012. Until her death at the age of 96, Kasugano was in Takarazuka’s annual publication Takarazuka Maidens (Takarazuka otome), which introduces every member of the company.38 It should also be noted, however, that while Takarasiennes must leave the company after their marriage, many of them actually leave for a variety of reasons, such as pursuing a “professional” acting career outside of Takarazuka, and former Takarasiennes are often seen on TV, in films, or theatre productions.

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In its early days, the gender-role division in the company was not fixed and Takarasiennes could play both female and male roles. After the 1930s, when its repertory shifted from folk tales to romances, the importance of those who could play male roles increased, and it was around this time that the strict division of gender roles was instituted. After this shift, female fans increased, although in the early days, the company enjoyed both male and female audience members from different generations (Kawasaki 1999: 161, 175, 188).

As of 1990, women from various age ranges occupied more than 90 percent of the audiences (Brau 1990: 80), and as of 2008 the percentage remained the same (Stickland 2008: 7). As a mainstream popular theatre group, Takarazuka is premised on the heterosexuality of its female audience members as well as its performers. However, as I will argue in this section, the popularity of this company exhibits the transgressive desires or flexible gender and sexual identification of the self-identified heterosexual female audience.39 In the current system, upon graduation from the Takarazuka Music School, Takarasiennes are assigned what Jennifer Robertson calls “secondary genders,” either male-role (otokoyaku) or femalerole (musumeyaku), by the mostly male management (1998: 11).40 The assignment is based on “both physical (but not genitalia) and sociopsychological criteria: namely, height, physique, facial shape, voice, personality, and to a certain extent, personal preference,” and the students carry their secondary genders throughout their tenure at the company (Robertson 1998: 11–12).41 The most popular male-role players are called “top stars,” while the female-role players are seen as foils. Takarazuka is thus operated on two sets of hierarchies: a gender hierarchy between the male administrators and the female performers, and a stereotypical gender-role hierarchy among the performers.

However, although Takarazuka reproduces a conservative gender hierarchy within the company, non-normative gender-role performance of male-role players has allowed them to go beyond their “primary gender.” These “secondary genders” are assigned by the management for the company’s theatrical productions, but Takarasiennes play these roles offstage in their “real” lives to a great extent. Such performances were already taking place in the 1930s, when male-role players started to appear. They cut their hair short and wore masculine clothes. They were identified as those who transgressed the gender divide and were called “the acme of offensiveness” by local

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media (Robertson 1998: 63, 151). Their fans were also attacked as “deviant” and “anomalous” (Kawahara cited in Robertson 1998: 70).

The mass media was further scandalized by the same-sex romantic relationships of Takarasiennes and the performers of the Shōchiku Revue (Shoˉ chiku kagekidan), another female revue company popular at the time (Robertson 1998: 149–51, 193–7).42 To counter this perception of the revue performers as “perverted,” Kobayashi needed to promote a public image of Takarasiennes as heterosexual, sexually innocent, future “good wives, wise mothers” (Robertson 1998: 151).

Robertson argues that Kobayashi created the aforementioned motto of Takarazuka, “Purely, Righteously, Beautifully,” in 1933 for this purpose (1998: 151).43 As discussed in Chapter 1, there were many cases of double suicides of girls, mainly from the 1910s to the 1930s, as a protest against heteronormativity, and this happened in Takarazuka as well. Robertson notes, “Not a few fans threw themselves in front of Hankyū trains” (1998: 192), which appears to be a kind of protest given that Hankyū is the parent company of Takarazuka.

While demonstrating some ambivalence, Takarazuka is primarily a conservative institution (at least from the management perspective).

As such, its versions of The Rose of Versailles, first produced in 1974 and still staged as the best-known show in their repertory,44 exhibit the male management’s conventional gender and sexual ideologies as well as typical Japanese nationalist sentiments, which resonate with the original manga’s romanticization of Oscar’s devotion to the nation. These sentiments were made particularly explicit on stage during wartime when Takarazuka produced militarist plays.

State intervention in theatre started by the late 1930s as it came to realize the educational potential of this medium (Robertson 1998: 122), and Takarazuka’s repertory started to reflect militarist sentiments around 1937 (Kawasaki 2005: 73). Some plays were written by army and navy playwrights (Robertson 1998: 118), justifying Japan’s colonialism and imperialism in Asia as a mission to “civilize” people in the region (Robertson 1998: 97). The change in its repertory was also probably due to the founder Kobayashi Ichizō’s service to the wartime government as minister of commerce and industry from 1940 to 1941. Up until 1940, the company’s official name was the Takarazuka Girls Revue (Takarazuka shōjo kagekidan), but it took “girls” out and renamed itself the Takarazuka Revue (Kawasaki 2005:

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72–3). As in the case of girls’ magazines, the image of dreamy girls was considered to be inappropriate in the political climate.45 Campy citizenship?

Unlike other Takarazuka productions, which on the level of narrative are straightforwardly heterosexual romances, The Rose of Versailles is more complicated due to Oscar’s character and abundant same-sex eroticism even on the narrative level (for example, servant girl Rosalie and other female characters are romantically attracted to Oscar). In a typical Takarazuka production, the protagonist is a male (played by a female performer). However, Oscar is a female wearing male attire and having a masculine occupation, and she is played by a male-role player (who is a female). It should be noted here that male-role players do not try to look like “real” men. They wear masculine costumes and imitate the masculine movements of male actors, but they also wear heavy make-up such as red lipstick, even though they are supposed to be “men” within the performance. The character of Oscar makes clear, not just on the visual level, but also on the narrative level the ways a male-role player functions in Takarazuka; a “man” on its stage is a “girl” – and such a transgressive, androgynous girl attracts other girls. Let us recall here that Takarasiennes are girl students in Takarazuka as an educational institution. Fans can also feel that they are girls in this school by attending its productions and joining fan clubs. Takarazuka is typically said to portray ideal men for its female audience members, but what they actually find on its stage are their ideal girls. The Rose of Versailles removes a layer of “men” from girls’ desire (like Summer Vacation 1999, as discussed in Chapter 2).

While mostly true to the story of the original manga, Takarazuka’s The Rose of Versailles oscillates between the depiction of the manga’s transgressive aspects and the company’s efforts to tame them. The show was actually not originated by the management, but instead was suggested by a fan. The Revue experienced a decrease in attendance at the beginning of the 1970s, overwhelmed by the popularity of other media such as TV and film, as well as angura (underground) theatre (Kawasaki 1999: 207–8),46 but The Rose of Versailles reversed the Revue’s fortunes and created its postwar popularity.

Like the original manga, Takarazuka’s version portrays the sexism that Oscar experiences. Male characters often look down on her due

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to her sex, but she always successfully proves that she is better at various masculine skills. However, the production also feminizes Oscar in many ways, as if to make sure of her “real” status. For example, she “returns to a woman” when she becomes “André’s wife” on the night before the departure to Paris. As in the original manga, it is Oscar who suggests that they have sex, but the ways she addresses him are different. In the original, Oscar says, “Tonight … I want to spend a night with omae … as wife of André Grandier …” (Ikeda 1994 [Vol. 4]: 281), while in the Takarazuka adaptation, she says, “I want to be called anata’s wife” (2006). Japanese terms omae and anata are both translated into English as “you,” but these are used differently depending on the context. Omae is usually used by a man to address his equal or “inferior,” while anata is a polite form of “you,” and when a wife uses it to address her husband, it means “my dear.” In the original manga, Oscar treats André as her equal despite their class difference, so omae suggests her masculine status (rather than her socially higher status). In the Tarakazuka version, Oscar turns into a good wife who knows how to address her husband. In the first production in 1974, she even appears in a white dress like a wedding gown in this scene. Her feminine status is also emphasized by her movement in this scene. As she asks him to let her be his wife, she kneels down and holds on to his lower waist, creating a tableau in which a standing man (André) creates a more powerful impression than a clinging woman (Oscar). This reverses their positions in the original manga, in which André kneels down after he hears Oscar’s wish and makes sure she is really willing to “give herself” to a man who has “no status,” “no wealth,” and “no masculine, military skills to protect [her]” (Ikeda 1994 [Vol. 4]: 284). André’s posture here may be typical of the one men adopt when they propose marriage in Western contexts, but considering what he says during this act, it simply seems to suggest his gratitude to this aristocrat who is willing to “come down” to his level.

Moreover, Takarazuka’s Oscar has stereotypically maternal features.

This is disturbing enough from the perspective of girls’ aesthetics, but in addition, she symbolizes a nationalist mother. As in the original manga, Oscar has a conflict with the soldiers of the French Guards because of her status not only as a female commander, but also as an aristocrat. Claiming that they are being exploited as “nonhuman” by the aristocracy, the soldiers resist working for her and

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also for France. In the Takarazuka adaptation of this scene, she starts to sing a lullaby out of the blue: “Sleep, sleep my child. Sleep, sleep my child with no worries …” She is joined by female family members of the soldiers who are also in the scene. Their motherly love successfully (and astonishingly) soothes the soldiers; they are even in tears.

Then, the melody changes into one with drumbeats and Oscar starts to sing a militaristic song: “Remember the French sky. Remember the French sea, soil, and songs. As long as we love France, we are all French people. In order to protect France, we will rise up … Glory to our France!” (2006). With their anger soothed by Oscar’s motherly love and their masculinity stimulated by her patriotism, the soldiers eventually join her and they all sing together proudly. Oscar here symbolically functions as Mother Earth (or French sky, sea, soil), which nurtures the soldiers. This Mother Earth is also in need of their devotion to survive. As Marie fails to be the Mother of France, Oscar takes over the role.

The heroic, aestheticized, and yet (or therefore) vague nationalism in the original manga is more intensified in the Takarazuka version.

Takarazuka’s Oscar frequently mentions that the French Guards should protect France, but she never mentions the threat that they face. She also asserts that they need to get back France’s “glory,” but it is not clear what kind of glory has been lost. Marie’s affair with Fersen and her indifference to the financial situation of France may have caused disgrace and increased the misery of the people, but Oscar does not blame her. Thus, she and the French Guards are tasked with some unknown yet glorified cause; they are protecting France from “something” and trying to get back “something” it has lost. When they are ordered to Paris by Louis XVI in the midst of the upheaval, it is still not clear what they are supposed to do in Paris.

The soldiers of the French Guards are rightly worried that they may be forced to attack the protesters, and they want to avoid this as they themselves are from the same social class. Oscar tells them that they will simply go there to “ensure the peace” (2006), but the soldiers are not fully convinced by this. However, when she further says that she will go with them as the commander, they quickly agree to obey the order. While it is not clear what this “ensuring the peace” entails, Oscar’s heroism (that is, going to a dangerous place with her lowerclass soldiers despite being an aristocrat) moves the soldiers – and supposedly the audience as well. Without specifying to the soldiers

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and the audience the nature of the incident that the French Guards might prevent, the intense atmosphere is enhanced – they are doing something important, and while they will be there just to “ensure the peace,” they may even die for it. For example, Oscar’s family members do not want her to go, but her father, General de Jarjayes, asks them to celebrate her “glorious departure for the battle” (hare no shutsujin) (2006). While he himself is worried about her safety, he is heroically fulfilling his role as the head of a military family. And yet again, it is not explained what this “battle” is all about. Dashingly militarist and nationalist words abound and enhance Oscar’s image as a national hero,47 revealing the groundless nature of these nationalist sentiments.

The idea that the existence of the military can deter battles and hence “ensure the peace” is indeed shared by right-wing nationalists in Japan. Even though the postwar constitution of Japan prohibits it from having its own military, it possesses a military force called the Self-Defense Forces and is ranked as one of the top military spenders in the world (Satō 2004: 359; Frühstück 2007: 4). Although the SelfDefense Forces are not technically an army, their recent involvement in the US war efforts demonstrates that they are a military force.48 However, while possessing a military, Japan cannot launch a war on its own initiative due to Article Nine in the constitution, written and enacted under the surveillance of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers; it declares the eternal renunciation of war. In order to “ensure the peace” more vigorously, revision of the constitution has been debated in Japan since independence from the US Occupation, and the current right-wing prime minister, Abe Shinzō (in office 2006–7 and 2012-present), is very active in this matter. In July 2014, he moved a step further towards his dream of “sloughing off the postwar regime” (sengo rejˉı mu kara no dakkyaku)49 by lifting a ban on sending the Self-Defense Forces overseas for the purpose of collective self-defense, and this could result in the revision of the pacifist constitution. To motivate this move, he typically relies on the aestheticization of the nation. When he was previously in power from 2006 to 2007, he embarked on a project, “Creation of a Beautiful Nation” (utsukushii kuni zukuri), and the catch phrase for his campaign for the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party (Jimintō) (which is conservative, despite its party name) was “Beautiful Nation, Japan” (utsukushii kuni, Nippon). While it was not clear what constituted this

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Beautiful Nation Japan, he won the election and obtained the position of leader of his party and hence prime minister of Japan. This demonstrates the political power of aesthetics in Japanese society.

Takarazuka, as a popular entertainment company, does not usually make overtly political statements (except in its shows during wartime), but Ueda Shinji, a director/scriptwriter and former chairperson of the Revue (from 1996 to 2004) who has produced two of its most famous and financially successful shows, The Rose of Versailles and Gone With the Wind (Kaze to tomo ni sarinu) (first produced in 1974 and most recently in 2014), often exhibits clearly nationalist sentiments in his work. As Kawasaki Kenko also points out, although these shows are set in foreign countries, Ueda imbues the settings with his Japanese nationalist sentiments (1999: 211). In The Rose of Versailles, Oscar’s departure to Paris is described by her father using a prewar militarist phrase, “hare no shutsujin,” meaning glorified departure to the battle. She is supposed to be protecting glorified France from some vague threat, which reminds us of Japanese nationalists arguing for the revision of the constitution to protect “beautiful Japan” from some possible enemies. Moreover, as discussed, in the Takarazuka version, Oscar turns into a “good wife, wise mother.”

The same ideology is found in Ueda’s Gone With the Wind, in which the Southerners mourn the destruction of gender ideals in the Old South in the face of modernity. The male Southerners look down on the Northerners who do not respect “the good traditions of the South,” which keep “men for work and women for housekeeping” (1994). This evokes typical postwar Japanese discourse that traditional Japanese womanhood was destroyed by the US Occupation.50 Thus, Takarazuka’s The Rose of Versailles exhibits more reactionary sentiments than the original manga. The Takarazuka version grants “full” citizenship to Oscar despite her sex on the condition that she fulfills the patriotic duty of militantly fighting for the nation as the symbolic mother of her troops. Considering that Ueda’s motive was to write a script that would be easily understood by his audience (Kawasaki 1999: 211), he might have thought that female audience members would understand the complex story of The Rose of Versailles better if it conformed to conventional gender norms and patriotic sentiments. However, at least one Takarasienne, as well as many fans, have expressed their discomfort with Ueda’s portrayal of Oscar. It is well known that Anju Mira, who played the role of Oscar

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in the 1989 production, used omae, not anata, in the aforementioned scene where Oscar “becomes André’s wife.” Anju was a fan of the original manga and voiced her disagreement with Ueda’s feminization of Oscar during the rehearsal, but her opinion was not accepted.

In the actual performances, the audience applauded her revision of Ueda’s version (Satō 2008: 33; Sakakibara 2008: 37).

However, despite Ueda’s (and, in general, the management’s) efforts to restore and reaffirm conventional gender norms in tandem with nationalism by making Oscar into a good patriotic wife and mother, Takarazuka’s The Rose of Versailles does not always succeed on this level. This is because of the allegoric nature of the Takarazuka repertory as well as Takarazuka as a theatre and educational apparatus. Celeste Olalquiaga suggests that allegory does not promise the one-to-one relationship of signifier and signified as in the symbolic system, because “[a]llegory’s metaphorical comment on reality is the perfect emblem for a perception always one step removed from its source” (1992: 21). She argues that the cultural anxiety people experience when faced with the postmodern disruption of the symbolic system, or “the exhaustion of the cultural assumptions that provided a coherent, comprehensive vision of the world” (1992: 22),51 causes them to desire intense and concrete experiences, which they consider to be realized in allegory; to explain this she points to the popularity of 1950s and 1960s space-age films in the United States during the 1980s. These melodramas satisfied the desire of viewers in the 1980s for a concreteness that seemed to fill the vacuum caused by the collapse of the symbolic system. However, allegory’s obsessive efforts to achieve the condensation of signifiers and signifieds result in proliferating floating signifiers which are not tied to the specific meaning of the symbols, thereby exposing “the obviously constructed quality of symbolic truth” (Olalquiaga 1992: 22). In other words, the perceived loss of specific, single meanings propels more allegorical production. Moreover, in its repeated failure, allegory cancels out the progression of time or historicity. As a result, these melodramas become too excessive to be taken seriously, allowing the viewers to keep enough distance from them, in order to be able to reflect on their anxiety (Olalquiaga 1992: 22–3, 33–4).

Likewise, Takarazuka’s The Rose of Versailles is an allegory created by Ueda, who seems to feel anxiety over what he perceives as the loss of nationalist vigor and the destruction of the conservative gender and

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sexual ideal. While he attempts to re-establish them in this show, the intense emotions become hyperbolic in this melodramatic space, never coming to rest on single meanings. For example, as pointed out, although the show is filled with nationalist remarks, what they really mean is never clear. Another example comes from a scene in which Oscar appears on a Pegasus-like horse. In the original manga, there is an episode in which Oscar has her portrait painted, and in this portrait she is riding a horse. In the Takarazuka performance, the portrait is first shown as a manga drawing on the curtain and then, as it is pulled up, “three-dimensional” Oscar appears, singing “My name is Oscar … Pegasus, I fly with you on your back ...” (2006). Her appearance in full armor on Pegasus is supposed to emphasize her mythical status as a national hero (as in the non-narrative graphics in the manga). However, this scene is very campy. The horse is like a stuffed-animal version of a white merry-go-round horse and, as it is carried around the stage by a crane, Oscar sings and smiles at the audience. In this excessive scene, she cannot really appear as a three-dimensional entity. Her material body is transformed into a two-dimensional image. Indeed, Takarazuka, with the overly melodramatic acting, cheap-looking stage sets and props, flashy costumes, anachronistic settings, and adaptations of existing works, can appear camp to those who view it with a postmodern sensibility, even though the company does not intend this reading. Takarazuka is very good at adapting manga pieces, including The Rose of Versailles (unlike Studio Life, examined in the previous chapter), and this is because the performers’ bodies disappear into two-dimensional images in their productions. Jacques Demy’s film adaptation disappointed the fans of the original manga, and as Takahashi and Futaba both note, this is partially because it came after the Takarazuka version (Takahashi 1979: 160; Futaba 1989: 554). After realizing that the manga world could be performed by “human actors as immaterial signs,” Demy’s Oscar was just too fleshy for the fans.

Thus, Takarazuka shares two-dimensional aesthetics with manga, but it is important that its productions still take place in three dimensions. This means that, while the two-dimensional sphere in manga has its own “realness,” as discussed earlier, this is not always the case for the Takarazuka performances. Oscar accompanying a Mars-like image in the original manga is “real,” but Oscar riding a flying horse in the Takarazuka version is hyperbolic. Considering this,

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compared to the nationalist sentiments in the original manga, those in the Takarazuka version could be more easily ignored or treated as something “meaningless,” despite Ueda’s emphasis on them. For example, the audience actually applauded when Oscar appeared on the back of the flying horse, but I would argue that this is not always because they were impressed by the glorification of Oscar’s status as a Mars-like soldier. Azuma Sonoko even reported that many audience members actually laughed in this scene in the show she attended.52 The audiences loved the scene because it was over-the-top. It exposes Oscar’s (and the Takarazuka management’s) nationalism as merely an aestheticized image that is not grounded in substantial, lived experiences. As discussed in the previous section on the original manga version, aestheticized nationalism, which “two-dimensionalizes” lived bodies, could motivate people to sacrifice their lives for the nation. However, the Takarazuka version, which (unwittingly) pushes two-dimensionality to the extreme of being camp, exposes the groundless nature of nationalism.

Moreover, in Takarazuka productions in general, female performers enacting heterosexual romances cannot attain the unification of their bodies and the gendered and sexualized ideal endorsed by the Takarazuka management. The decontextualized space of the Takarazuka stage, where Japanese (masculinist and nationalist) ideology is performed by a French female character (played by a Japanese female performer who usually plays a male role) fulfilling a masculine role at the time of the French Revolution, is saturated with floating signifiers. In addition, various productions of Takarazuka’s The Rose of Versailles basically follow the direction of the first production in 1974 by kabuki actor Hasegawa Kazuo, meaning that French characters are performed using Takarazuka’s typically melodramatic acting style flavored with highly stylized kabuki-esque acting (for example, actors often stop and pose facing the audience as in kabuki). This further accelerates the de-contextualization of the play.

In this space, the audience’s sexual desire is not forced to rest on the single signifieds, or patriarchal and patriotic heterosexism. The allegorical space of eighteenth-century France in contemporary Japan, or contemporary Japan in eighteenth-century France, is where girl audience members can see other girls’ bodies freed from the weight of nationalist and masculinist history. Although girls can sympathize with the nationalist sentiments embedded in the original manga

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version, the popularity of the Takarazuka version suggests that they could also go beyond these sentiments and disregard them within this decontextualized space. Under Takarazuka’s conventional motto of “Purely, Righteously, Beautifully,” the fans can secretly twist the function of the space.

Such a subversive space does not exist in Takarazuka scholar Makiko Yamanashi’s discussion of the company. She critiques what she calls “[e]xcessively political or feminist readings of Takarazuka,” and states that they “can lead critics astray.” Responding to the critiques of Takarazuka’s conservative gender and sexual ideologies, she maintains: Feminists are dedicated to searching for political signs of female victimization in patriarchal societies. If Takarazuka is interpreted in this way, as an elaborate form of female oppression, what can the feminist scholar say about the stage magic, the performers’ joy, the joy of the female audience, and their shared sense of a multi-gender community? (2012: 196)53 In this section, I have taken a feminist interpretation of Takarazuka’s performance, but have focused on the strategies that female fans employ to survive female oppression. Takarazuka instantiates patriarchal ideologies, but also functions as a space where female audience members can collectively displace such ideologies. In a joyful and pleasurable manner, they enjoy witnessing Takarasiennes’ bodies as two-dimensional images.

The immateriality of Takarasiennes’ bodies in relation to subversive gender and sexuality is highlighted by a scene involving Rosalie and Oscar. Oscar encourages Rosalie to marry Bernard whom Oscar trusts,54 but since Rosalie has unrequited love for Oscar, this breaks her heart. Her feelings are expressed in a dance. In the dance scene, multiple Oscars appear one by one, but when Rosalie approaches them, they turn out to be individuals who only look like Oscar.

Eventually, there is a moment in which the “real” Oscar seems to appear and they dance together. However, the other Oscars return and Rosalie cannot get to the “real” one. After this dance scene, Rosalie decides that she will follow Oscar’s suggestion to marry Bernard. Narratively, Rosalie learns that her love for a female cannot be consummated and thus she has to conform to heteronormativity.

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Yet, the stability of representations of gender and sexuality is undermined by multiple, slippery Oscar signifiers that Rosalie cannot pin down. The eroticism in Takarazuka is thus provoked not by Takarasiennes’ material bodies, but by bodies as floating signs that violate or transgress conventional gender and sexual norms.55 It needs to be noted that, on a narrative level, although the Takarazuka version provides Rosalie with the “correct sexual partner,” it does not openly deny her same-sex love for Oscar. There is a scene in which Rosalie confesses her love for Oscar, who turns it down, but very mildly, even thanking Rosalie for her love.56 Then they sing a song in duet which celebrates various “colors” (iro) and “forms” (katachi) of love, while not using the term “dōsei-ai” (same-sex love) (2006). The scene may suggest that the management is careful of the audience’s feelings, as Rosalie here represents them. Ueda Shinji, the scriptwriter/director of The Rose of Versailles, may be aware that it is these female fans’ erotic sentiments for the male-role players which support the Revue, and therefore he cannot offend them, even though he might not see such sentiments as morally desirable.

Nevertheless, it is important to point out that this scene is also oddly the result of the management’s valorization of heteronormativity. In Takarazuka, each troupe has its “star pair” (shuen konbi), consisting of a top male-role player and a top female-role player, and they play the roles of lovers.57 In The Rose of Versailles, however, the protagonist couple cannot be performed by the star pair, due to the nature of Oscar’s character. The top female-role player is cast as Rosalie, not as the top male-role player’s lover (who is André).

The creation of a scene which is almost equivalent to a love scene where they sing about different types of love is actually a result of the management’s desire to insert a “heterosexual” couple into this unusual piece.

Thus, The Rose of Versailles represents the convoluted desires of girls and other agents. The revolution in the original manga is charged with the feminist consciousness of girls and female activists in the New Left movement and the women’s liberation movement. It also reflects their multiple, even contradictory, desires – rejection of masculinist and heteronormative womanhood, desire to construct their own identities in a consumerist society, demand for social equality, longing for the aristocracy, and desire to be counted as citizens by

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fighting for the nation. This last desire particularly resonates with the Takarazuka version. However, it also opens up an allegorical space where such desire could be voided. Swallowing all of these, Oscar floats. In the eternity realized through her death, she lives as an androgyne, an egalitarian, an aristocrat, a mother of her troops, a patriotic soldier, and a child of Mars.

4 “Little Girls” Go West?

On a green lawn under the bright sunshine, three blonde-wigged young Japanese women in 1950s/60s American party dresses dance around, fall over, and have a tea party to the accompaniment of the song “Good Morning,” from the classic American film Singin’ in the Rain (1952). In the film, “good girl” Kathy, played by Debbie Reynolds, dubs the blonde-bombshell star, but this American song is used to dub the dance performance of this Japanese troupe, which is also named KATHY. What can such a performance tell us about contemporary Japan’s national self-image? Do the antics of these performance artists reveal gender conflicts within Japan?

The previous three chapters explored girls’ aesthetics in contemporary Japanese performance and visual arts, focusing on their three characteristics: girls’ wish to reside everlastingly in a space open only to them, their desire to be romantically bonded to each other, and their contradictory pleasures as citizens of both “real” and “imaginary” nations. This last chapter will also consider various characteristics identified in girls’ aesthetics – two-dimensionality as a strategy to reject essentialized Japanese womanhood, twisting the function of female confinement, and westernized imaginative bodies – but it examines performances in which these traits are used to comment more actively on the social conditions of contemporary Japan. Girls’ aesthetics attempt to distance themselves from the reality outside of the girlie sphere, and in this regard performances discussed in this chapter are not always “girlie” as in the previous chapters. They may be considered as an extension of girls’ aesthetics.

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In this chapter, I will discuss the ways in which the above characteristics are utilized to challenge an influential masculinist framework of postwar Japanese arts and society proposed by male visual artist Murakami Takashi. He argues that postwar Japan was symbolically castrated by the United States of America after the defeat in World War II and was forced to adopt the status of “Little Boy,” alluding to the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima of the same name. This framework renders women invisible, as there is no way that they can be castrated, symbolically or otherwise. In this chapter, by analyzing performances by the all-female Japanese dance troupe KATHY, I will look at the ways the troupe critiques both postwar Americanization of Japan and the masculinist Japanese nationalism à la Murakami that emerged as a reaction to it. Through parodying American/Western dance traditions in its work, KATHY resignifies the Japan-US relationship. Like the typical girls in girls’ aesthetics, the Japanese members of KATHY appear westernized. However, in their performance, the West/US is not portrayed as the dreamland into which they would imaginatively escape from their material reality. On the contrary, they challenge westernization/Americanization, and through this challenge reconsider their Japanese women’s bodies, constructed as its byproducts, and aim at opening a new space in their material reality.

This chapter will discuss KATHY’s parody of Singin’ in the Rain in its video work Mission/K (2002) and also briefly examine the troupe’s parody of the same film in its live performance, KATHY Cruises in NADiff (2003). It will scrutinize how the troupe appropriates the theme of the film, which is the split between body and voice (that is, the dubbing of the female voice) that arose during the change from silent film to talking pictures. Formed in 2002, the troupe, with a name evoking the image of generic Western white women, has three members who wear blonde, bobbed wigs and 1950s/60s-style pastel-colored dresses in almost all their performances, not just in the ones discussed in this chapter. This nostalgic image of “good girls” is mixed with grotesqueness since they cover their faces with black tights and their arms and legs with white tights, thus obscuring their racial and personal identities. They depersonalize themselves, claiming to be under surveillance and controlled by an invisible, powerful, god-like entity called Kathy. Thus, the group name is also the name of this entity that urges them to dance/perform. Henceforth, following

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Figure 4.1

Members of KATHY. Photographer: Inoue Yumiko (D-CORD)

Carol Martin’s article, “Lingering Heat and Local Global J Stuff” (2006), which includes a brief analysis of the group, I use “KATHY” to refer to the group and “Kathy” to refer to the god-like entity.

Coming from a background of classical ballet, the members of KATHY often parody Western dance. In their parody of Singin’ in the

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Rain included in Mission/K, they are seen performing in a Broadway manner as though through a fish-eye lens, thus giving viewers the impression that they are watching KATHY’s performance through Kathy’s surveillance camera. Typically in their performances, the members occasionally perform “failure”; for example, they might fall down or dance a misstep. I would argue that these failures performatively suggest that they cannot/do not live up to Americanization as demanded by Kathy. Before interrogating the performance, I will present some historical and theoretical background to anchor this discussion.

Postwar Japan as “Little Boy” In the 1920s and 1930s, after the early phase of Japan’s modernization project, many male intellectuals started to perceive the fragmentation and destruction of “native” Japanese culture by American capitalist modernity, which they associated with westernization. As a reaction, they “sought in historical representations a refuge against the alienating effects of everyday modern life and thus attributed to art and culture … absolute value that remained immune from the changing valuations of the market and the political world” (Harootunian 2000: xxi). The nation’s fanatical belief in the fundamentalism of kokutai (Japan’s national body or polity) discussed in Chapter 3 is a product of these sentiments. Defining the Japanese as those who shared the “unchanging Japanese cultural essence” represented by the Emperor, kokutai rendered Japanese women as the reproductive medium for this essence as “good wives, wise mothers.” They were expected to reproduce culturally (and to some extent racially and ethnically) pure Japanese males who would serve the Emperor, the Father, in his “holy” battle to “free” Asia from Western imperialism and establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere as an extension of the Japanese Imperial Household. While men were associated with the progressive power to transform Japan into a modern nation-state and eventually overcome what they considered to be Western-defined modernity, women were fixed in traditional roles as the core of the national essence.

After Japan’s defeat in World War II, kokutai was forced to transform into a “democratic” body by the US during the Occupation period from 1945 to 1952. In the US-led democracy, women’s status

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changed drastically. For example, they were given the right to vote in 1945. However, in response to this “Americanization,” Japanese masculinists sought a return of Japanese women’s bodies to their “appropriate” role as the embodiment of “essential Japaneseness.”

This continued into the 1960s, as represented by influential literary critic Etō Jun. He argued that the modernization that had resulted in the defeat in World War II and the subsequent US Occupation had exterminated the self-sacrificing Japanese mother, who constituted the basis of the Japanese family, and that the emergence of the modernized/Americanized mother had deprived the father of his status as divine patriarch. Etō maintained that in such a fatherless society, lacking an ethical foundation, people would not be able to attain maturity.1 In the 1960s and early 1970s, there was much discussion regarding the Japan-US Security Treaty, which allowed the US Army to have bases on Japanese soil for their military activities in Asia (for example, the Vietnam War). In the 1980s, as Japan achieved its status as one of the world’s economic powers, the US lost its power as the center of Japan’s political and cultural imaginary, but since the 1990s, the debates on the US bases in Japan and on Japan’s cooperation with the US military have brought the issue of US dominance back to the fore in Japanese politics. Thus we can see that concerns about westernization and Americanization in Japan have a long history that provides a context for Murakami’s theorization of postwar Japanese mentality as “Little Boy.” It bears a striking similarity to Etō’s claim about Japanese immaturity within US hegemony.

Emerging onto the art scene in the 1990s, Murakami is a leading contemporary male Japanese visual artist whose works are inspired by male otaku (nerd or geek) subculture/pop culture.2 He argues that the Japanese became Little Boys in a postwar Japan “super flattened” by the US, so let us first see what he means by the concept of “Superflatness.” He defines Japanese art, mainly paintings and drawings, from the traditional to the contemporary, as “Superflat,” that is, something which neither has any depth nor hidden truth beneath the two-dimensional surface, and which makes no clear distinctions between high and low art, both of which typify Western modern art (2000a: 9–25). He somewhat contradictorily extends this concept of flatness to his analyses of postwar Japanese culture and society, arguing that they were “super flattened” by the US Occupation and

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continuing American influence (2005: 101). He draws our attention to the fact that the prewar Japanese social structure, including the social hierarchy, was dismantled by the US Occupation (2000a: 152). He also writes that postwar Japan as “an American puppet government” represents “[the] monotonous ruins of a nation-state” (2005: 101). What he means by these statements is that monotony in the name of social equality, or flatness in Murakami’s term, was brought about by US domination. It affected the traditional Japanese aesthetic sense of flatness in a negative way. The aesthetic of twodimensionality that was typical of ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) and traditional Japanese painting was transformed into a superflat, monotonous social aesthetic as a result of the US hegemony.

Murakami equates such monotony in postwar Japanese society with a system that does not allow people to attain maturity: “Postwar Japan was given life and nurtured by America. We were shown that the true meaning of life is meaninglessness, and were taught to live without thought. Our society and hierarchies were dismantled. We were forced into a system that does not produce ‘adults’” (2000a: 152). He argues that in a “Superflat” space called Japan live the Japanese who have been “Little Boys” ever since an atomic bomb called “Little Boy” dropped on Hiroshima ended the war (2005: 100–1).3 These Little Boys are equally “comfortable, happy, [and] fashionable” (Murakami 2005: 100) on the surface in such a space, and yet, they merely wait for death without even fighting against the “unnatural state” of a Japan that only functions in an “incomplete, tentative fashion” as a nation-state (Murakami 2005: 123). He compares this condition with that of the children with supernatural powˉ tomo Katsuhiro’s manga (1982–90) and the animated film ers in O Akira (1988), set in a “post-World War III Neo Tokyo”: “The decrepit children who appear in Akira accept the futility of life and encounter their own deaths as children, despite their chosen status and supernatural powers; they are exactly like the Japanese today” (2005: 112).

Imperialist Japan saw itself as God’s country, and likewise, Murakami equates the Japanese with the chosen people.

Japan’s war-renouncing constitution was created under the aegis of the US Occupation, and yet, its terms have been violated and contradicted by Japan’s financial and military cooperation with the US in its international affairs from the 1990s onwards (that is, the Gulf and Iraq Wars). Anti-American sentiment arising in this context

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is understandable, but it often manifests as masculinist nationalism.

Murakami laments postwar Japan, again, in his analysis of Akira: “A cry for freedom from a defeated Japan, its own constitution legislated by another nation after the war” (2005: 111). He continues: Don’t touch me, let me be independent. We don’t need your U.N. or any other help. The image of Kaneda [a protagonist in Akira who lives in “post-World War III Neo Tokyo”] and the others waving a “Great Tokyo Empire Akira” flag seems to mock our current “Japanese Nation of Children,” which lacks the vigor that previously accompanied brandishments of the imperial flag of Japan.

(2005: 111)4 In his view, the Japanese today are living yet dying, lacking the “vigor” that imperialist Japan possessed. His statement, “We don’t need your U.N.,” ominously reminds us of the time when Japan declared its withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933 due to the condemnation it received over the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo.5 These nationalist sentiments resonate with the reactionary politics of the Japanese government. For example, former prime minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō (in office from 2001 to 2006) angered much of Asia with his yearly visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, which deifies the war dead, including class-A war criminals.

Current prime minister Abe Shinzō (in office from 2006 to 2007 and again from 2012 to the present) has gone further. As explained in the previous chapter, he is eager to revise the pacifist constitution so that Japan could potentially wage war.

Another important issue of concern with regard to Murakami’s theory of postwar Japan as Little Boy is that, as Marilyn Ivy also points out, it excludes women (2006: 502). While he also uses the gender-neutral term kodomo, meaning child, to describe the state of postwar Japan, he also suggests that contemporary Japan is marked by “sexual incapacity” or “a sense of impotence” (2005: 137), which demonstrates that his concern is the feminized status imposed on Japanese men in “a castrated nation-state” (2005: 141). Considering this, calling himself and other Japanese men “boys,” even though they are “little,” may represent an attempt to register at least a small amount of pride. From such a stance, it would not be difficult to imagine a resurgence of the desire to regulate women’s bodies as

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reproductive tools, as defined in kokutai. While this term is no longer used in postwar Japan, the ideology survives, as can be seen in various facets of society. For instance, in a public debate in 2003, the former prime minister Mori Yoshirō mentioned that only women who bore many children should be rewarded with national pensions (Jinmin Shinpō 2003).6 In 2007, the then minister of health, labor, and welfare, Yanagisawa Hakuo, said that women were child-bearing machines (Mainichi Shimbun 2007: 2; Asahi Shimbun 2007: 2; Yomiuri Shimbun 2007: 2). Moreover, in 2014, when a female member, Shiomura Ayaka, asked a question about public support for pregnancy and childbirth in the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, male members, including Suzuki Akihiro, jeered at her with sexually abusive comments such as “Why don’t you marry?,” “Why don’t you give birth yourself first?,” and “Are you sterile?” (Asahi Digital 2014; Mainichi Shimbun 2014). Murakami argues that there has been no social hierarchy in postwar Japan as it was “super flattened” by the US, but these statements clearly demonstrate that this is not true.

In Murakami’s challenge to the Little Boy status of postwar Japan, he gives one more twist to what he calls “Superflatness.” As mentioned, he theorizes that the traditional Japanese aesthetics of two-dimensionality got mutated by US democratic principles into a monotonous society in which people are all equally immature and vigor-less. However, he reconfigures this negative, mutated, postwar “Superflatness.” He appropriates it as a unique, positive, “cool” feature of contemporary Japanese arts such as anime, manga, and other visual arts inspired by these two-dimensional media. He argues that they can counter Western hegemony in the field of arts (2005: 149; 2000a: 161) and thus takes Japan’s Little Boy status as a badge of honor. In his view, Little Boys in a superflat Japan would eventually be able to reign over the world’s art scene, and he writes, “Japan may be the future of the world – superflat” (2000b: 5).

It is therefore interesting that KATHY made its debut in 2002 at GEISAI (literally meaning “art festival”), organized and chaired

by Murakami for the purpose of developing this “unique” quality of Japanese art. At this event, the members of KATHY performed and sold copies of their first video, Mission/K.7 As will be discussed below, two-dimensionality, or Superflatness to use Murakami’s term, occupies an essential part of the group’s performance. However, it does not appear as a cool and uniquely Japanese aesthetic soaked in

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masculinist nationalism. On the contrary, it is reminiscent of girls’ aesthetics’ valorization of two-dimensionality as a way to reject being materialized (that is, being forced into the status of material reproducers of offspring). The members of KATHY stage a critique of the notion of a Japanese essence preserved and embodied by Japanese women. Yet, unlike girls’ aesthetics, they neither idealize the West nor dream of confining themselves in an exclusive “girlie space.”

Murakami’s masculinist and nationalist art event was the stage for their resistance to Little Boys.

Who and what is KATHY/Kathy?

The members of KATHY do not reveal their identities and never talk about their works in public. It is commonly assumed that it is a Japanese troupe and that the members are female. Other basic information about them is available on their website; they claim that they are under surveillance by a powerful yet unseen entity called Kathy and that they have to fulfill missions constantly assigned to them by Kathy (KATHY n.d.). Also, other information can be found as “rumors” in several art magazines and journals. “Rumors” say that they are skilled dancers with a background in classical ballet and that they are actually well-known dancers in the field of contemporary dance (Sakurai 2004a: 204; Uchino 2005: 206). Moreover, according to one rumor in an article in the magazine Dazed and Confused Japan, their boss, Kathy, is “a typical American,” although the article does not specify what is meant by “typical” (Harada 2003: 25). From this, it is reasonable to conclude that KATHY’s parodies of Western/ American dance are their means of displaying their westernized/ Americanized Japanese bodies as well as wittily denaturalizing the “organic” beauty and grace of such dance traditions. Since what they do in their performances is the mission assigned to them by Kathy, one may say that their parodies are also ordered by Kathy and hence they have no agency. However, I wonder if a performative force with a generic Western name would really have those under its surveillance make fun of Western traditions. If this were the case, this performative force would strangely turn out to be a deconstructive force.

On the contrary, the members are exploiting the very situation over which they are supposed to have no agency. As Carol Martin points out, “The performers [of KATHY] disbelieve in their own agency as

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they obey Kathy’s commands and believe in their own agency as they create ways to subvert Kathy’s commands” (2006: 53).

KATHY’s strategy of taking advantage of what is forced on them is shared with typical girls’ aesthetics. However, unlike girls’ aesthetics, which create an imaginative space distinct from reality, the members of KATHY actively blur the distinction between the two. While they do not have public identities, they do not have stage personae either (as they are “faceless”). Moreover, they often perform in “realworld venues” such as art shops, when and where the customers are shopping. This suggests that their strategy is to comment on reality through imaginative aesthetic practices.

The end of the US Occupation and continuing split of Japan’s voice and body The film Singin’ in the Rain, which KATHY parodies, begins with the splitting of voice and body and ends with their unity. Considering that this film was screened in Japan for the first time in 1953, the year after the US Occupation was over, the body-voice split in the film appears to parallel the situation of immediate postwar Japan – that is, transformation from the defeated voiceless nation into a fully fledged, independent nation. The film depicts Hollywood in 1927, when the industry was shifting from silent to sound cinema, the latter visualizing body with voice as the “totality” or as the “organic” (Doan 1999: 363–4). It also traces the process through which male characters split two female characters’ voices and, at the same time, appropriate their bodies, only to finally bring these disjointed elements together into one woman’s body. Below is a brief summary of the film.

Don Lockwood (played by Gene Kelly) is a superstar in silent films, but the studio he works for has decided to shift to sound cinema. This is problematic for Don as he is always paired with blonde bombshell Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) in his films and she has a shrill voice and uncultured speech style, which do not match her beautiful appearance. His lifelong friend and colleague, Cosmo Brown (Donald O’Connor), comes up with the idea of having Don’s real-life lover, Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds), dub Lina. With Kathy’s help, Don’s new film, The Dancing Cavalier, turns out to be a great success.

Lina insists that her contract allow her to keep using Kathy’s voice,

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without acknowledging this to the audience. But after the movie’s premiere, when the stars come onstage in person and perform, Don and Cosmo pull open a curtain to reveal Kathy, who is standing behind it while dubbing Lina’s voice (just as she does in the film).

These men thus return Kathy’s voice to her body. As Peter Wollen argues, “The underlying theme [of the film] is that of nature as truth and unity, versus artifice as falsehood and separation” (1992: 55).

As mentioned, the year 1953, when Singin’ in the Rain first came out in Japan, was the year after it became an independent, democratic nation, at least formally. It was supposed to be able to regain its “organic” body, but that really was not the case. For instance, the Japan-US Security Treaty of 1951 granted the US the right to maintain its military bases in Japan. In 1960, the then prime minister, Kishi Nobusuke (grandfather of the current prime minister, Abe Shinzō), tried to revise the 1951 version to make it more equal, but it was renewed with only partial modification, leaving the fundamental power relationship between Japan and the US unchanged.

As Yoshikuni Igarashi writes, the new version made Japan recognize again that “Japan gained concessions only through actively recognizing and internalizing US strategic interests in East Asia” (2000: 134). Thus, Japan, although officially independent of the US, had to internalize US policy in its newly reborn national body. Japan’s voice and body remained split.

KATHY’s choice of Singin’ in the Rain demonstrates the continuation of such a state in Japan; although the film ends with the unity of voice and body, Japan as a nation has not been able to achieve such unity.

Indeed, “Good Morning,” the musical number to which the members of KATHY dance, precedes in the original film the moment when Cosmo comes up with the idea of dubbing; right after the number, in which he, Don, and Kathy Selden sing and dance, Cosmo demonstrates the effect of dubbing to Don by having Kathy dub him singing the same song.

Failures to perform American In their parody of “Good Morning” in Singin’ in the Rain, the members of KATHY perform Americanized Japanese women, wearing blonde wigs and pastel-colored dresses and dancing like Broadway dancers, as if not only to ridicule the masculinist construction of Japanese women’s bodies as national essence, but also to display

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their bodies as the products of Americanization. And yet, as if to reconsider their Americanized Japanese bodies, they stage their failure to become perfectly American. They also make fun of classic American female stereotypes.

Choreographically, there is almost no similarity between the dance of Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds and that of the three members of KATHY, except a few steps from the can-can and Hawaiian hula dance towards the end. Unlike the original version, KATHY’s dance has some mime movements; for instance, they lower their bodies and writhe with their heads in their hands along with the lines, “When we left the movie show / The future wasn’t bright,” then quickly shift to skipping with their arms swinging to the next lines, “But time is gone / The show goes on / And I don’t wanna say good night.” They also mime a German drinking a mug of beer to “Guten morgen!” and perform movements stereotypically associated with other ethnic groups to “Bonjour!,” “Buenos días!,” and “Buongiorno!” Their dance thus shows more synchronization of lyrics and body movements than the original. The important point here is that it is not the members who are singing the lyrics. They use the audio recording of the song, and therefore, they are dubbed

by American actors/characters. The members cover their faces with black tights and hence have no mouths, making it explicit that they cannot speak for themselves. They are only moving to the lyrics sung by the Americans. Or, the American voices are moving them.

In Mission/K, the segment of KATHY’s dance to “Good Morning” starts with a shot of a forest, a grass field adjacent to it, and a blue sky on a beautiful, bright, sunny day. With the prelude overture, the camera slowly scans around the forest. Then it switches to the grass and starts moving quickly, as if searching for someone. At the end of the prelude, the camera stops, and we see the members of KATHY lying in a line on their backs in the field. A dark-colored image framing a screen, which looks like the frame of a fish-eye lens, appears for the first time in this shot and remains during the rest of the performance. It gives the viewers the impression that they are watching the members through Kathy’s surveillance camera. At the same time, however, the camera lens sets up the stage for the performers to expose the making of the dance or the constructed nature of performance. When Kathy Selden’s line “Good mornin’” is heard, the middle dancer swiftly raises her upper body, with her right

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arm raised to shoulder height, her elbow bent to make a right angle, and her palm facing forward. It is supposedly a gesture of greeting, but together with her movement, like that of a clockwork doll or a robot, it also looks like an oath, pledging that she will dance an American dance to American music, a mission assigned by “a typical American,” Kathy. The other dancers on either side also raise their upper bodies right after the one in the middle does, and each of them does a similar, but slightly different, gesture. This seems to emphasize that they are in a panic, since they have been discovered by Kathy while lazily lying down, resting on the ground. Kathy Selden’s voice singing “Good mornin’” is like a wake-up call demanding that they perform Americanization.

From the immediate refrain of the same melody, starting again with “Good mornin’,” the members start dancing in unison until the end of the lyrics. They put together movements from different Western/American dance traditions, such as ballet, the Charleston, and Broadway-style dances. The result looks like a showcase of Western/American dances that these faceless women (with black tights obscuring individual facial features) are bound to perform as a routine in Americanized postwar Japan. Performativity is, according to Judith Butler, the authoritative power of compulsory citation and repetition of naturalized practices, which creates and binds subjects (1993: 226–7). Then, Americanization is a performative, since only by accepting the US Occupation and constantly internalizing American values, could the newly born, democratic nation-state of Japan come into being. Ever since, Japan has been functioning as America’s loyal “partner” in the global arena. KATHY’s dance exposes the status of the Japanese who are subjected to such authoritative power.

However, simultaneously, this same sequence deconstructs Western/American dance traditions. The members of KATHY take one movement from a certain tradition and perform it for a short while, and then abandon it to move on to another movement from a different tradition. Moreover, within these traditions, the dancers are required to look like they are performing beautifully and naturally without any effort; by contrast, the members of KATHY do not try hard to look that way. They show how much effort it takes them to dance. For example, in a later sequence, they perform the can-can for a brief moment as the characters in the film do, but the way the members shake their heads suggests that they are gasping for breath

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(although we cannot see their mouths). Thus, while their dance shows their obedience to Kathy as a performative force, it also manifests their subversive attitude. The space framed by the camera lens functions both as the space under surveillance and the space where the way such surveillance operates is exposed.

In her discussion on gender performativity, Butler maintains that a performative is not always successful in its attempt to bind and produce gendered and sexualized subjects. This is so because gender and sexuality are not natural, but constructed, and therefore not everyone can fit perfectly or cite and repeat the norms, even though they try (1993: 231). She sees the possibility of resistance to and subversion of the heteronormative, masculinist social structure in this failure to cite and repeat. As a strategy for such purposes, Butler examines the hyperbolic performance of queerness: “[T]he subject who is ‘queered’ into public discourse through homophobic interpellations of various kinds takes up or cites that very term as the discursive basis for an opposition” (1993: 232, emphasis in original).

The members of KATHY employ the same strategy. They hyperbolically show their failure to dance American dance, thus exposing Americanization as a performative.

After the lyrics are all sung, the movement synchronization of the members of KATHY starts to collapse. This makes a sharp contrast to the original dance in the film, which starts with each character dancing different movements and then shifts to all three dancing in unison after the lyrics end. When the American voice is gone, KATHY’s parody of American dance becomes more extreme and funnier. In one example, one of the members simply walks to the middle of the screen, as if she is bored and bothered, but suddenly, she acts like she notices that Kathy is watching her and, in a panic, starts doing a turn à la seconde, a movement that is typically performed by a male ballet dancer. Here, even though she looks like she is again interpellated by a call from a performative, she only partially fulfills it; she dances, but fails to perform the gender assigned to her. This is followed by other failures; another dancer crosses in front of her, trying to dance, but merely staggering. She moves off screen, but soon comes back with a third troupe member. Citing a classic ballet pas de deux in which a male dancer kneels and supports a female dancer in an arabesque penchée, one of the members lowers her body and looks ready to catch the other’s hands, but the former drops the latter. Here

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again, not only is one of the members playing the role of a male dancer, but also, they mess up the stereotypical gender construction in which a male dancer supports a female dancer.

Indeed, from the very beginning of their dance, the members of KATHY make fun of stereotypically American feminine dance movements and postures. After they answer Debbie Reynolds’ “Good Mornin’” call, they flap their skirts and move their shoulders up and down. In another moment, they raise their arms and slightly bend their upper bodies backward, which is a typical posture to show off glamorous female bodies. They also push their buttocks out to the camera lens and turn their faces to it like women in advertisements.

Moreover, they mimic the typical Broadway musical spatial structure; three of them form a slope by adjusting their height with various postures. Their bodies create a sculpture, displaying depersonalized female bodies. Although all these movements and postures are supposed to be feminine and beautiful in a traditional sense, the black tights covering the members’ faces turn these stereotypes into

Figure 4.2

KATHY’s “failure” to obey Kathy. Courtesy of KATHY

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something grotesque. In this way, they make fun of the US hegemony which defines Japan as its Americanized feminine partner.

Thus, while the members of KATHY perform the postwar Americanized Japanese bodies, they also demonstrate that Americanization as a performative is not always successful. They emphasize that they do not let Americanization abject their “bodies.”

In using this term, I do not mean bodies charged with a “Japanese feminine essence,” but rather a concept that I will expand on in a moment. If we follow Murakami’s idea that Japan has been infantilized by the US, KATHY’s performance might appear at first glance to be a declaration of their “unique” and “cool” childishness in contrast to the adult US. However, I would argue instead that KATHY challenges such Japanese masculinists’ nationalism and the dichotomous construction of Japanese women as the other side of Americanization.

Kodomo shintai (child body)?

In a similar vein to Murakami, dance critic Sakurai Keisuke characterizes contemporary Japanese dancers’ bodies as “kodomo shintai” (child body) (2003: 33). In an essentialist way, he contrasts Westerners’ bodies with Japanese bodies, and claims that, even in a daily movement such as walking, the difference between Westerners’ movements and Japanese ones are obvious; while Westerners cannot help moving smoothly, the Japanese move in a fitful, jerky manner. Then he concludes that the former have more rigid control over their bodies, while the latter only have “loose” control over theirs (2003: 33). He expands and applies this idea to what he calls the “basic pattern” of Western and Japanese contemporary dance. According to him, orthodox Western contemporary dance is based both on “Western, built-up bodies nurtured by dance history” and on “a high level of skills which is made possible by the solid educational system.” In contrast, Japanese contemporary dance has neither of these, but instead, it has Japanese dancers’ “children’s bodies” (2004a: 205).

As an example of Japanese contemporary dancers with such bodies, Sakurai lists a dance troupe, Nibroll, whose jerky dance typifies what he thinks of as childish/Japanese. He argues that the dancers in Nibroll are not “disciplined” enough in the field of Western contemporary dance, and hence they still preserve “memory of the dame (pronounced da-mé, meaning “untutored” and/or “miserable,”

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used by Sakurai interchangeably with “kodomo”) body” (2003: 32).

Although he seems to be somewhat aware that bodies are not natural but constructed in these statements, his argument often slips into essentialist rhetoric.

Like Murakami, Sakurai suggests that the seemingly negative aspects of Japanese dance could be unique tools to counter Western hegemony in contemporary dance (2004b: 181). His theory supports the clear binary between Japan/child and the West/adult, and he celebrates “children’s bodies” as the remnant of pure Japanese bodies that remain uninfluenced by the West. In this framework, the members of KATHY occupy an ambivalent position, because they were trained in ballet. Sakurai describes them as “good students” of Western dance, who, like Western postmodern dancers such as William Forsythe and Jan Fabre, make full use of their built-up bodies and techniques in order to perform “silly” (2004a: 205–6).

He argues that these Western dancers with solid backgrounds cannot regain their children’s bodies and that therefore they choose to distort their technique to challenge the tradition. In the case of KATHY, for example, the westernized members often use the ballet technique en pointe (standing on tiptoe), which was originally invented to help dancers stay balanced, precisely for the opposite purpose of losing balance. What Sakurai unwittingly reveals here is again the constructed nature of bodies, despite his arguments that Japanese bodies and Western ones have different innate abilities.

However, he holds on to a dichotomous framework and concludes that the members of KATHY can still be included in the category of dancers with children’s bodies, because their dance evokes children’s play (2004a: 206–7). It is not entirely clear why Western postmodern dancers’ “silliness” cannot be childlike.8 In any case, however, despite the essentialist aspects in his theory of “child body,” Sakurai convincingly argues that the members of KATHY possess westernized techniques, yet deconstruct them. What he fails to consider is that KATHY seems to challenge rather than celebrate the supposed “uniqueness” of Japanese bodies.

As long as essential Japaneseness is constructed in the dichotomous framework of Japan and the West, taking “childishness” as a badge of honor does not fundamentally change Japan’s relationship to the West/US, nor does it negate Japanese women’s bodies constructed as byproducts of Western/American hegemony. I would argue that

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the members of KATHY perform their failure to dance American dance not to mark their unique Japanese bodies, but to deconstruct such uniqueness and eventually to overcome the binary of Americanization and the construction of essential Japanese women’s bodies. In their resistance to the dichotomy, we find that not being American does not automatically lead to being uniquely Japanese.

KATHY resists not only Americanization, but also the “Japanization” of Japanese women’s bodies.

While they stage their bodies as those which cannot “live up to” American values, the members of KATHY do not present any fixed alternative to such bodies. They simply exist as unknown creatures, wearing blonde wigs, American-style party dresses, black tights on their faces, and white tights on their arms and legs. They stage that they do not have unified bodies and identity. They have us assume that they are Japanese women, but they even abstract this as well.

They are just the products of “rumors,” and as such, we never know what is beneath their surface or what their “essence” is. We never know if such a thing really exists beneath their tights. In this way, they nullify the “other side of Americanization.”

Women dubbing women To further speculate on how KATHY disrupts the unified, organic bodies of Japanese women, let us now look at Kathy Selden’s role and the complicated process of dubbing employed in Singin’ in the Rain.

The group name KATHY, intentionally or not, encourages viewers to identify the troupe with her. As mentioned above, Kathy Selden is a “good girl.” (A “girl” here does not directly relate to “girls’ aesthetics” scrutinized in the previous chapters.) She sacrifices her prior ideals for her lover, Don Lockwood. When they first meet, she tells him that she does not respect silent film actors, since they neither talk nor act but “just make a lot of dumb shows” as opposed to respectable stage actors “speaking … glorious words.” She thus despises the body-voice split. However, after they are involved in a romantic relationship, she decides to lend her voice to his film project.

This gendered power relationship is also seen between Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds. Singin’ in the Rain is usually seen as Kelly’s film, rather than Kelly and Debbie Reynolds’, due to the control he possessed over the production as a co-director and co-choreographer, as

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well as his starring role. As Stephen Prock argues, reflexivity between characters and actors in the film blurs diegetic and extradiegetic realities (2000: 312). For example, Gene Kelly and his character, Don Lockwood, share an almost identical route to stardom and, as movie stars, they discover Debbie Reynolds and Kathy Selden respectively.

Moreover, Wollen points out Kelly’s obsession to establish the priority of the male dancer, with his masculine, athletic body, which in turn diminishes the presence of women’s bodies and forces them to be something like shadows of male bodies (1992: 57). Kathy Selden and Debbie Reynolds are thus both subordinate to Don and Kelly.

Such a gendered dynamic is also seen in the relationships between Don/Kelly and other women. Kathy/Reynolds is replaced by another female dancer/actress, Cyd Charisse, in “The Broadway Ballet,” a long dance piece in film-within-the-film The Dancing Cavalier, starring Don. Charisse never speaks or sings in the scene. Only her dancing body is needed. As Steven Cohan observes, “The female figure is … punished (Lina) and redeemed (Kathy) in the narrative and then, in the ballet, silenced completely in order to be eroticized as pure spectacle (Charisse)” (2000: 63). Female voice is either ugly (Lina), useful (Kathy), or completely silenced (Charisse). Female bodies, in contrast, are always on display – either as sexy-bodied Lina and Charisse, or as cute-bodied Kathy.

It may seem at first glance that KATHY’s name suggests the troupe’s identification with the obedient female body of Kathy Selden.

However, in addition to various failures that the members stage, their appearance adds a comical yet uncanny tone to such identification.

They perform “unknown-ness” which lacks the “essence,” and this resonates with the “unknown woman’s body” of Kathy Selden; in the film, she dubs Lina Lamont, but in reality, Debbie Reynolds is also dubbed. Wollen writes that her singing voice is dubbed by Jean Hagen, who plays the role of Lina (1992: 56), and Cohan writes that when Kathy dubs Lina’s singing and speaking, Reynolds’ singing voice is dubbed by Betty Noyes and her speaking voice is dubbed

by Hagen (2000: 59). Moreover, Kaja Silverman notes that while Reynolds’ voice is not used for Lina’s speech, it is used for her singing, except for the number “Would You” in The Dancing Cavalier, dubbed by Noyes (1988: 46). Thus, it is not clear which part of Reynolds’ voice is dubbed by whom. This fact tells us that, although the film ends with the happy unity of Kathy Selden’s voice and

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body, such unity is never attained extradiegetically. This eternal split evokes KATHY’s mouthless/voiceless bodily performance. According to Cohan, it was the male director(s)’ decision to employ such dubbing in the film. He refers to Hugh Fordin’s assertion that co-director Stanley Donen mentioned that Reynolds was dubbed, since her regional accent was considered unsuitable for Lina’s sophisticated speech in The Dancing Cavalier (2000: 59).

I would argue that the members of KATHY, by hyperbolically performing this male-created split, employ it as a means of countering the unified, essentialized image of Japanese (and any) women’s bodies. Returning now to KATHY’s performance, we see that, after a series of failures, the members resume dancing in unison to “Good Morning.” In this sequence is inserted a scene in which three of them approach the camera lens and pretend to kiss it in an overly flattering manner. This is as if to show that they are obedient, gendered female, Japanese subjects produced by “typical American,” Kathy. At the same time, it comically suggests the irony that, even if it wants to, Japan cannot kiss the US, since Japan was not given a mouth by the US. Similarly, although they pretend to enjoy Western tea (elegant tea cups are associated with femininity in Western culture), balancing gracefully on tree branches, they have no mouths and therefore cannot drink anything. During this tea party, another member is doing barrel leaps (a technique both used in ballet and Broadway-style dance) behind them, and the camera shifts its focus from the two performers on the tree branches to the dancing one.

The sequence emphasizes that the members have no mouths, and hence no voices, and yet their bodies (represented by one dancing member in this scene) are dancing an American dance. What is striking is that they seem to be celebrating this split state. It is as if they are demonstrating that, although the splitting of voice and body has been imposed on the Japanese by the US, they can take advantage of it in order to disrupt the belief in Japanese femininity as an organic whole, which is a byproduct of Americanization.

Another important point about the complex dubbing in Singin’ in the Rain is that Kathy Selden/Debbie Reynolds’ body functions as a medium through which a muffled woman’s voice, that of Lina Lamont, is heard. Jean Hagen, who played the role of Lina, speaks in a very oblique way, through Kathy/Reynolds’ body. As explained above, it is difficult to determine who dubbed which part of

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Reynolds’ voice, but Hagen was at least involved. This complicated process of dubbing at diegetic and extradiegetic levels was not the choice of these actresses, but that of male director(s). However, what is interesting is that a good obedient girl turns out to be the one who lets a “bad” woman speak through her body. The members of KATHY without mouths/voices may identify themselves with Kathy/ Reynolds in this regard.

Another parody of the same film by KATHY, that of the number “Would You,” also supports this interpretation. The parody is included in the troupe’s 2003 live performance, KATHY Cruises in NADiff, consisting of various short scenes of dances and mimes, at art shop/gallery NADiff in Tokyo. In a short scene performed to the song “Would You,” one of the members mimes singing, moving her arms gracefully and romantically like a Broadway musical singer in the spotlight, but she is obviously dubbed by Kathy Selden, who is dubbed either by Hagen or by Noyes. Meanwhile, the other two members stand behind the one who is miming, and move their bodies gently to the music. With a small mirror ball and a flashlight respectively in their hands, the two create a romantic atmosphere, with a beautiful pattern made of light on the ceiling in a dark room.

Thus, they are making it visible that they are creating a setting for the scene.

“Would You” is the only solo for Kathy/Reynolds in the film.

However, as Stephan Prock observes, it is not given as much recognition as it deserves, either diegetically or extradiegetically. While Kathy/Reynolds sings the song, the camera moves away from her body and shifts to various other visual images; first, her bodily image disappears into that of Lina Lamont, who tries to sync Kathy Selden’s voice in a recording studio, and then, finally, it dissolves into an image of the film The Dancing Cavalier, where Lina is lipsynching Kathy (Prock 2000: 304). This is in stark contrast to Don/ Kelly’s music/dance numbers, in which his bodily images and voice always co-exist in the same shots. In KATHY’s parody of “Would You,” without a camera to displace the singing member’s body, her bodily image occupies the space as the focus of the audience’s gaze.

It might seem as though KATHY is insisting on full recognition of women’s bodily existence. However, it is clear that the singing voice is not the member’s own, and therefore, her body and voice are split, as are those of Kathy/Reynolds. Therefore, while possibly revealing

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the unequal, gendered treatments of Kathy/Reynolds and Don/Kelly in the film, KATHY also demonstrates here the “inorganic” body of women. In this performance, the singing member’s split body functions as a medium for other women’s voices, just as Reynolds’ body mediates the voices of Betty Noyes/Lina Lamont/Jean Hagen. As such, the singing member’s body is not just her own. She has other women in her body, and the other two members are helping to create a space in which women share another woman’s body so as to have their suppressed voice heard.

Thus, by parodying American dance and song, the members of KATHY reject their bodies as Japan’s national essence and transform them into something unknown and unstable. They let their bodies serve as the medium through which multiple women speak. These women are American, but KATHY identifies with them not as such, but as those who challenge the hegemony of masculinism, and therefore this identification is not charged with the power relationship between the former occupier and the occupied. KATHY’s performance forms a space where women can share their experiences, not bound by national power relationships.

Moreover, the members’ disrupted bodies offer a space where the present and the past meet. Through their parody of “Good Morning” and “Would You,” they bring immediate postwar Japanese history into the present and visualize the continuation of US dominance in Japan. They show that their bodies as women in contemporary Japan have been shaped by the history of the Japan-US relationship.

Furthermore, the images of Japanese women in the immediate postwar period evoked by the group’s performance also creates discord with the present art scene, which hails Murakami’s theory of Japan as a country of “cool” and “unique” Little Boys. Let us recall here that KATHY made its debut in one of Murakami’s events, where the members sold the video of Mission/K, which included its parody of Singin’ in the Rain. This “superflat” group seems to have been categorized under “Little Boy” arts despite the members’ gender, suggesting that the issues of female gender were virtually rendered irrelevant in this event. Nonetheless, the troupe’s performance claims women’s place in the postwar Japanese art scene as well as society. This does not mean that the members want to be part of Murakami’s “Little Boy” Japan. Instead, their performance lets us critically examine how this “Little Boy” Japan was conceived and how it could be

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subverted. These encounters with the past and the present further let us think about how women can live their material reality as constituents of Japanese society. In her discussion of what she calls “gestic feminist criticism” (a combination of Brechtian gestus with feminism), Elin Diamond summarizes three temporalities within a single stage figure in Brechtian theatre, that is, temporalities of the historical subject, the character, and the actor. When watching such a figure, the audience’s gaze is constantly split into three, just as we witness the body-voice split in KATHY’s performance. In the process, the audience members, as historians, reject fixity/truth and attempt to capture meaning, based on historical and dialectic comparisons (Diamond 1997: 50–1). With regard to the bodies of such actors and audience, Diamond writes: “If feminist theory sees the body as culturally mapped and gendered, Brechtian historicization insists that this body is not a fixed essence but a site of struggle and change” (1997: 52). Likewise, the bodies of the members of KATHY carrying different temporalities open up a space for struggle and change, having the audience historicize Japanese women’s bodies constructed as natural, as the other side of Americanization. They also highlight the absence of women in Murakami’s hegemony in the contemporary Japanese arts scene, and they further exhibit the persistent masculinist nationalism in postwar Japanese society.

Towards the playground of “Little Girls” After the tea scene, the members of KATHY go back to dancing in unison to “Good Morning,” and at the end of the song, citing a typical movement in musical films, they move out of the eye of the camera. Traditionally, this means that the dancers are proudly moving forward to the future, and this is exactly what KATHY repeats.

However, in their case, it has an ironic twist; the future to which the members are moving forward is outside of Kathy’s surveillance camera. It is as if they are saying to this god-like entity, “We just follow the American dance tradition, and then, we end up moving out of your surveillance camera. Sorry, but it’s not our fault.” Although they actually design their own performances, they blame this unknown power for their deconstructive performance and thus abstract their responsibility in a parodic way. As Carol Martin speculates, “KATHY’s performances are designed to confuse the spectator’s notions of

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cause and effect, of action and responsibility” (2006: 53). This way, the members avoid directly confronting the performative force and yet they contradict it. It is also noteworthy that KATHY’s move out of the camera frame contrasts with the confined status of women in Singin’ in the Rain. As Silverman elucidates in her analysis of the scene where Don and Cosmo pull back the curtain to reveal Kathy dubbing Lina at the premiere of The Dancing Cavalier, these male characters force these women into the diegesis of this film-within-a-film as a spectacle (suggested by the big screen behind them in the scene), while the men enjoy the authority to stage the confinement as the authoritative voice (1988: 57).

The off-camera space or the future which the members of KATHY enter is invisible and out of reach for the spectators. However, considering their defiance, this new space may be where they will ponder how their material bodies work out in their daily lives. The way they move out of Kathy’s surveillance also seems to support this interpretation. Unlike girlie works such as NOISE’s DOLL and Yagawa Sumiko’s poem discussed in Chapter 1 in which girls quietly (although “militantly” in their own ways) leave their material reality for an imaginary world, the members of KATHY powerfully march towards Kathy’s surveillance camera, and in the end step on it, as if destroying what it symbolizes. They subvert the myth of Japanese womanhood by using the strategy of two-dimensionality in their confinement under Kathy’s surveillance camera, and now, outside of it, they may start negotiating and even experimenting and embodying multiple new forms of female materiality. Nothing can be promised. However, KATHY’s performance encourages us to imagine what this new space would be like and what women’s bodies would be like in such a space. Its performance lets the spectators experience what Jill Dolan calls “utopian performatives,” which, “even if through fantasy, enact the affective possibilities of ‘doings’ that gesture towards a much better world” (Dolan 2005: 6). As she notes, such a better world or utopia is not offered as “prescription.” Theatre and performance only allow the audience to have a glimpse of “a utopia always in process”; in its literal sense, utopia is “no place” (Dolan 2005: 6–7). The space outside of Kathy’s surveillance is utopic in this sense.

It may not be a radical space in which the members of KATHY and the audience members are completely liberated from constraints. It does not offer a model of an alternative womanhood. Nevertheless,

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it is a space they choose to enter as a form of resistance to surveillance. It is a space the members as well as the audience can inhabit as a playground for their trial and error.

While typical girls’ aesthetics valorize girls’ confinement as a way of negating conventional Japanese womanhood as endorsed outside of their girlie sphere, the members of KATHY take a different approach. They twist the function of confinement (in their case, space under Kathy’s surveillance) like girls’ aesthetics, but they eventually move out of it. Since KATHY’s performance deviates in important ways from girls’ aesthetics and can also be seen as an alternative to Murakami’s Little Boys, I will call their approach that of “Little Girls.” Like girls’ aesthetics, these Little Girls employ two-dimensional, westernized bodies to resist essentialist notions of Japanese women’s bodies, and they also create closed spaces where they can dance with other girls. However, these Little Girls choose to actively ground themselves in the reality outside of their romantic space in order to change the reality. Little Girls’ performance lets us hope that our playground could be within this material reality.

Afterword: Girls’ Aesthetics as Feminist Practices

Our travel with girls to various times and places within their closed space is coming to an end. With them, we have visited modern and contemporary Japanese girls’ boarding schools, a German boys’ boarding school, eighteenth-century France during the French Revolution, a “transnationally closed” girlie sphere in contemporary Japan and France, among others. If my readers have girlie sensibilities, they have hopefully experienced being a member of a community of girls bonded with each other by collectively ignoring conventional gender and sexuality and instead fantasizing fictional, immortal selves who often fall in love with other girls. With their “light” bodies in their imagined world, girls freely move across various borders – gender, sexual, historical, national, racial, and ethnic.

Their resistance to normative womanhood takes place within the imagined sphere, detached from their “heavy” material reality.

I see girls’ aesthetics as a feminist approach to theorizing and living female lives. However, girls’ celebration of immateriality may not seem feminist to some of those in performance studies who valorize material bodies. Indeed, as pointed out in Chapter 2, girls’ negation of the female material body can be misogynist, but as shown in the same chapter, it is also charged with their desire for flexible gender and sexuality. The aesthetics also suggest that the body is not the only place where people’s experiences are grounded. Lived experiences should not always be the most important things to be recognized in the field of performance studies. Material body is one of the media, not the sole medium, through which people perform.

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Moreover, the fact that girls’ resistance does not take place in the public domain could be used to claim that they are only escaping their reality without any political awareness. It is true that girls’ departure from their material reality to the imaginary realm is escapist. However, they are also actively creating an alternative, ideal space in order to survive their oppressive reality. Thus, escapism should not always be considered as negative and apolitical, and instead it could be described as an “active disregard” of this world as demonstrated in the group suicide committed by girls in NOISE’s DOLL, examined in Chapter 1. Clearly, the hegemonic understanding of political activity is gendered in ways that exclude girls’ aesthetics. The gendered nature of what counts as resistance can be seen in Catherine Driscoll’s critique of the Birmingham School’s exclusion of female teenagers from the category of youth culture, which emphasizes the “public spectacle of resistance” created by male youth (2002: 258).

In contrast, I have explored the ways in which girls rework the space they are forced to enter and use it as a site for their resistant politics.

The idea that political resistance requires putting your body on the street limits the range of the political.

Direct confrontation with authority is certainly important, as it challenges it in the public sphere and urges the public to recognize the experiences of the oppressed. However, the method can also cause backlashes. For example, as we have seen in Chapter 3, the outright “revolutions” by the New Left students in the 1960s and early 1970s did not achieve their political goals. As seen in the aftermath of the United Red Army incidents, they instead led many people to distrust leftist ideas and ended the “season of politics” in Japan. Women’s liberationists actively voiced their demands in the street in the 1970s, but many of them became burnt out as a result of facing the rigid oppressive social structure, and the movement had been supplanted by the state-led version of feminism by the late 1970s. The turning point was the inauguration of International Women’s Year in 1975 by the United Nations. By this time, the grassroots energy of the women’s liberation movement was waning in Japan, but the Japanese government was motivated by the subsequent United Nations Decade for Women (1976–85) to work on the improvement of women’s status. This is, in a way, one of the achievements of the international women’s liberation movements,

Afterword: Girls’ Aesthetics as Feminist Practices

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but it also resulted in limiting the scope of the grassroots movement that existed beforehand. As Kanō Mikiyo points out, the women’s liberation movement aimed at radically changing the social structure, but the state-led reform only tried to modify the unfair treatment of women in society without questioning the social structure itself (Kanō cited in Nishimura 2006: 44).

Ironically, what gave a voice to the oppressed was consumerism, rather than socialist ideals and the direct confrontation with authority; as consumers, women started to voice their opinions in a wide range of situations. Of course, I do not intend to deny some achievements of these political movements, especially those of the women’s liberation movement. But if we contextualize the burgeoning of postwar girls’ aesthetics in this milieu in the 1970s, we can shed a new light on girls’ aesthetics’ “inwardness.” They share resistant politics with these other movements, but they take an alternative approach. For decades girls have been protecting their sphere from being swept away by society and this shows how resistant aesthetics can persist over different generations.

For sure, girls’ inner resistance could end up preserving the conservative gender and sexual ideology in the world outside of their closed, exclusive community. They may perform resistant girls only in their imaginations and return to their reality where they are subject to conventional womanhood. However, as discussed in Chapter 1, even if a space of girls’ aesthetics is just utilized as an outlet for escaping their reality, the very desire for the space testifies to their feminist consciousness. They are unfit for the kind of womanhood imposed on them in their reality and want to resist it even if the resistance only happens in their imaginations. And yet, such “practices” may result in gradual change in their everyday lives, as a “residue of girls” may stay with them even after they return to their outside reality after a respite in the girlie sphere. The line between their reality and the girlie imaginative sphere may gradually dissolve as the girls frequently move between them. In other words, social change may follow internal change, and therefore imagination and social change do not constitute a dichotomous relationship. For example, the Boys’ Love (BL) manga discussed in Chapter 2 has been attracting considerable interest in the fields of art and literature since the late 2000s, showing that those in these fields have started

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to recognize the politics and artistic quality of the BL genre. What started in a closed space of girls is now connecting with gender and sexuality issues outside of the girlie sphere.

Girls have thus been practicing feminism in their own ways. They produce and consume girlie arts for themselves and for other girls.

They reimagine the space of sexual surveillance as one in which their transgressive desire can flow towards any target. Within this two-dimensional space in their fantasy, they become whoever and whatever they want to be and they go wherever they want to go.

Girls do not raise their voices in the public arena, but this does not mean that they are content with their surroundings. Resisting the values which dominate their reality, they collectively create a girlie sphere as a platform for their feminism.

While there are those who may use the girlie sphere as a temporary shelter from their everyday lives, “girl” artists in this monograph, the majority of whom are grown-up women, provide another way of partially being a girl. I view these women as akin to “Little Girls” as the antithesis of Murakami Takashi’s theorization of Japan as a “Little Boy,” as discussed in Chapter 4. Like the members of dance troupe KATHY, these Little Girl artists publicly challenge the reduction of Japanese women’s bodies to reproductive organs. However, while they do not separate themselves from the rest of the world, they produce girls who confine themselves within an isolated community. By doing so, they urge the public to consider the meaning of this isolation. This book is also one of these Little Girls’ attempts.

I cherish a girl within myself, but I have written for a wider group of readers, both girls and non-girls, about Japanese girls’ aesthetics to provide an alternative approach to understanding female bodies and performance.

Notes Introduction: Girls’ Aesthetics 1. In Japanese names, family names come before given names. I follow this order in this book, except for individuals who publish their writings in English.

2. To be precise, it started as shōnen-ai manga. The differences between shōnen-ai manga and BL manga are detailed in Chapter 2.

3. Adult males were granted suffrage in 1925.

4. The postwar constitution of Japan declares eternal renunciation of war, and the Self-Defense Forces are supposed to only defend the Japanese land and people in cases of foreign attack. However, their status is ambivalent, demonstrated in their involvement in the Gulf and Iraq Wars, for example. For more discussions on the Self-Defense Forces, see Chapter 3.

5. I translated all of the Japanese titles except those that were previously translated into English.

6. See Driscoll’s book Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory (2002).

7. The term “lesbian” started to be used in Japan in the 1950s. At this early stage, it was pronounced “resubian,” not “rezubian” like it is now. This is because, as Akaeda Kanako reports based on her extensive archival research, the term was initially introduced in relation to French culture and the terms lesbien and lesbienne (2014: 138–42).

8. For more details, see Miyadai Shinji’s Choice of Girls in School Uniform: After Ten Years (Seifuku shōjo tachi no sentaku, After 10 Years) (2006) and Sharon Kinsella’s Schoolgirls, Money and Rebellion in Japan (2014). In the 1990s, the mass media started to report widely that female high-school students were involved in prostitution or other forms of sex business with middle-aged men as their clients, but these forms of sex business in fact emerged earlier, in the 1980s. As Miyadai explains, the modern, gender-segregated educational system resulted in the emergence of the idea of female high-school students as a “sex brand” (Miyadai 2006: 131) because they evoke the image of sexually innocent female students who have mature bodies and yet whose sexuality is surveilled and protected by schools. I acknowledge that resistant girls’ aesthetics also embrace this image of sexually innocent schoolgirls. However, as explained in the Introduction, the meaning of sexual innocence is different in girls’ aesthetics. Therefore, for the purposes of this book, the female high-school students in the sex business are not considered to be “girls.”

9. Driscoll distinguishes between what she calls “feminine adolescence” and “female adolescence,” but it is beyond the scope of this introductory chapter to explain the differences.

181

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10. Yet, the term “girl” still seems to have negative connotations, as pointed out by Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris in their book A Good Night Out for the Girls: Popular Feminisms in Contemporary Theatre and Performance (2013: 2). The mainstream theatre aimed at women is promoted as “a good night out for the girls” in the British media. One of the reasons for this is that the sentimentality evoked in these shows is associated not with mature womanhood, but with girlhood.

11. These English titles are given by Aoyama and Hartley to the excerpts from Honda’s and Kawasaki’s books, and therefore there are no original Japanese titles I can provide here. But the former is from Honda’s Children as Different Cultures, mentioned above, and the latter is from Kawasaki’s Fine Days for Girls (Shōjo biyori) (1990).

12. In Women Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women’s Writing (2006), edited by Rebecca Copeland.

13. She is the daughter of the late Tsuka Kōhei, a resident Korean (zainichi Korean) and renowned playwright.

14. The performance does not have a particular title, but it is included in its 2002 video work, Mission/K.

1 Girls’ Time, Girls’ Space 1. In Japan, the period of a pregnancy is counted from the time of conception, and therefore lasts ten, not nine, months.

2. SEIKO is a Japanese company that produces wristwatches and clocks.

3. English translation by Nobuko Anan and Franklin Chang is available in the programme of the Tate film Shūji Terayama: Who Can Say That We Should Not Live Like Dogs? (2012).

4. However, Terayama was familiar and sympathized with girls’ culture, or what I call “girls’ aesthetics” in this monograph, in his earlier career. With renowned illustrator Uno Akira (also known as Uno Aquirax), he contributed to a book series, For Ladies (Foa rediisu), which targeted girls, despite its title, in the mid 1960s until he founded his theatre company, Tenjō Sajiki, in 1967. Uno and Konno Yūichi, the editor of Yasō, an important subcultural magazine for those with girlie sensibilities, describe this shift on Terayama’s part as one from the lyrical world of girls to the world of theatre with material bodies (Uno and Konno 2013: 36). Hagio Moto, a girls’ manga artist who will be mentioned in this chapter and discussed in more detail in the next chapter, also worked with Terayama for this series (Hagio 2011: 105–7). The series was published by Shinshokan from 1965 to 1981.

5. The Meiji Period is from 1868 to 1912.

6. However, as Koyama Shizuko elucidates, in theory there was supposed to be no hierarchical relationship between women and men in the “good wife, wise mother” ideology. Both parties were supposed to belong to the category of the people of Japan, a status achieved through different, but equally valuable, contributions to the nation. Nevertheless, as Koyama

Notes 183

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

also indicates, in reality women were apparently secondary to men because, even though the former were in charge of homemaking and the education of children, they were dependent on the latter financially (Koyama 1991: 55–7).

The magazine Kawamura looked at is Female Learning World (Jogaku sekai), and this was not specifically categorized as a girls’ magazine. It was a “women’s magazine,” but it was also read by schoolgirls (Imada 2007: 19).

However, girls’ aesthetics in the modern period did not always exclude the poor, lower-class female youth, such as servants in wealthy households. They could identify themselves with the imagined community of girls through participating in the communications taking place in readers’ columns (Watanabe 2007: 309). It should also be noted that middleclass status in modern Japan was more precarious due to fewer social support services (for example, unemployment insurance began in 1947).

Therefore, as Watanabe Shūko writes, the status of the social category of girls was rather fragile; a girl’s status could easily fall with the death or illness of her father (2007: 305).

Even when she is working part-time, as long as her annual earnings are less than 1,300,000 yen (about £7,300 as of March 2015), her duty to contribute to a pension is waived. Moreover, when a wife’s annual income is less than 1,030,000 yen (about £5,800 as of March 2015), her husband can receive a preferential rate for his income tax.

In an increasingly aging society with a low birth rate, the debates over the change in the pension system have been ongoing, but as of 2015 no change has yet been implemented.

The Year 24 Group is not a self-organized group. It is a label used to categorize female artists who started their careers around this time and contributed to the development of content and visual aspects of girls’ manga.

Snow Child demonstrates another trait of girls’ aesthetics to be explored in the next chapter, namely, the longing for an androgynous body in order to imaginatively disregard female material bodies. The girl protagonist of Snow Child is disguised as a boy.

Japanese theatre and the sex business have a long intertwined history. For example, kabuki began in 1603 with female performers, but it was later banned by the government due to the involvement of the performers with prostitution. After it was banned, adolescent boys performed kabuki until it was banned again in the mid seventeenth century due to prostitution. It finally settled on adult men as performers.

Here, I agree with Harry Harootunian’s argument that modernity was a phenomenon shared across the globe. He critiques the “time-lag” theory, which presumes that there was a correct model of modernity, that of the West, followed by other, “less developed” nations. He also rejects the idea of “alternative modernities,” which some have argued that these “less developed” nations experienced, because it presumes “exceptionalism and uniqueness” (2000: xvi). Rather, he calls our attention to the “coexistence” of the modern experiences: “[W]hatever and however a society

184

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

Notes

develops, it is simply taking place at the same time as other modernities” (2000: xvi). “What co-eval suggests,” he explains, “is contemporaneity yet the possibility of difference” (2000: xvii).

Participants came from six countries (Japan, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia) and from different fields such as traditional and contemporary theatre, dance, and music. Although the script was originally written in Japanese, it was translated into four languages (English, Chinese, Indonesian, Thai) for the multilingual production (Hata 1997: 17–18).

Dreamtime in Morishita Studios was directed by Ong, and Kishida participated in the production as general advisor. For details, see my PhD dissertation, Playing with America: Parody and Mimesis in Contemporary Japanese Women’s Performance (University of California, 2009).

She thus defines the symbolic more narrowly than Lacan, who means by the symbolic the broader system of signification, even the culture in general. Moreover, what she means by the semiotic is not the study of signs (that is, semiotics), but a particular type of practice signifying affects (which do not get signified in the symbolic).

This womb is also reminiscent of the “secret tomb” or “crypt” theorized

by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok where “the objectal correlative of the loss is buried alive” (1994: 130). They propose that this tomb or crypt appears in the psyche of melancholics when “[t]he abrupt loss of a narcissistically indispensable object of love has occurred, yet the loss is of a type that prohibits its being communicated” (1994: 129) and when “the shameful secret is the love object’s doing and when that object also functions for the subject as an ego ideal” (1994: 131). The unspeakable secrets include incestuous desires, for example. Girls’ aesthetics’ idealization of girlhood is not unspeakable in this sense, but in the sense that such desire does not have a place where it can be realized in the symbolic, it may be “unspeakable.”

This is the original title. It is written in capital letters.

She also belongs to the so-called third generation of the postwar little theatre movement in Japan. For a discussion of the genealogy of postwar Japanese theatre, see Senda Akihiko’s Contemporary Japanese Theatre (Nihon no gendai engeki) (1995), for example.

She changed her stage name from Watanabe Eriko to Watanabe Eri in 2007. Her memoir of Kisaragi cited in this section was published before the name change, but to avoid confusion, I will refer to her as Watanabe Eri in this monograph.

For more detailed discussion of the first generation of female theatre leaders and the women’s liberation movement in Japan, see Naomi Tonooka’s PhD dissertation, Four Contemporary Japanese Women’s Theatre Groups: Subjectivity-Formation in Performance and Creative Process (University of Hawai‘i, 1990), and my article “Identity Politics in Women’s Performance in Japan” in Theatre Research International (2012).

One exception is their production of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine in 1985 and 1986. The production had male guest actors for the cross-dress casting.

Notes 185

24. For a discussion of Hasegawa Shigure and the English translation of her play Rain of Ice (Kōri no ame), see Cody Poulton’s A Beggar’s Art: Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama, 1900–1930 (2010).

25. Here, I separate women’s liberationists and feminists, as they were seen as different groups in Japan. The former were the activists who worked outside of the institutions, while the latter were seen as “elite” women in the government and academy. There were negative feelings, especially among liberationists, towards feminists. See, for example, Tanaka Mitsu’s essay “The World Is Waiting for the ‘Vulgar’” (“Sekai wa ‘yaban’ o matteiru”) in From Zenkyōtō to the Women’s Liberation Movement (Zenkyōtō kara ribu e), edited by Onna tachi no ima o tou kai (Group Which Questions the Present of Women) (1996). Other essays and roundtable talks included in this book are helpful to understanding the history of the women’s liberation movement and feminism in Japan.

26. I thank Naomi Tonooka for providing me with this valuable information in her email sent to me on 12 August 2014.

27. For more discussion on Hitsujiya’s version, renamed as Passion (Jōnetsu), see Tadashi Uchino’s Crucible Bodies: Postwar Japanese Performance from Brecht to the New Millennium (2009). His argument regarding the conflict between the images of girls projected by YUBIWA Hotel’s performers and the material bodies of the actual female high-school students who appeared in the last scene of the show is insightful.

28. The “little theatre” movement emerged in the 1960s as a reaction to shingeki, Japanese modern theatre influenced by Western realism. Little theatre plays tend to valorize the strong presence of performers’ bodies.

29. Naomi Tonooka also discusses the piece briefly in her PhD dissertation, but her discussion focuses more on the shift in Kisaragi’s work from textbased plays to performance arts marked by this play.

30. From theatre critic Nishimura Hiroko’s website, Nishikun. She does not specify when and exactly where the incident happened. However, archival research of newspaper articles suggests that Kisaragi may have been inspired by the group suicide committed by three middle-school students (one of whom survived) in Aichi Prefecture in 1977 (Asahi Shimbun 1977).

31. From Nishikun.

32. It is reported that there were about 800 teenagers’ suicides in 1986. In his website, Tokyo Tama Lifeline (Tokyo Tama inochi no denwa), Saitō Yukio, the director of the Japanese Society for Prevention of Suicide (Nihon jisatsu yobō gakkai), explains that in the previous year there were about 500 cases, and therefore 300 cases were influenced by Okada (Saitō n.d.).

However, it is not clear if these were all copycat suicides, as there might have been other factors that existed in 1986, which did not in 1985.

33. From Nishikun.

34. From Nishikun.

35. This is actually odd, as in her other works, including MORAL (1984), non-female youth characters also suffer from “dysfunctional communication as a result of modernization and urbanization of our living environment.”

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Notes

36. Even though Kisaragi might not have been familiar with the discourses of girls’ studies per se, she probably had some knowledge of girls’ culture in general. Kamakura City is where Yoshiya Nobuko, a leading girls’ novelist in the prewar era, spent her later years. Her house in Kamakura is now open to the public as the Yoshiya Nobuko Memorial. As mentioned, Kisaragi was planning on writing a play about the life of Hasegawa Shigure, and it is likely that she was aware of the work of Yoshiya as well, who started her career around the same time as Hasegawa. They were both feminists and supporters of Japan’s military expansion during the war.

37. The school year starts in April in Japan. These girls commit a group suicide in March, the last month of their first school year.

38. For detailed analyses of her Gloria & Léon, see my article “Two-Dimensional Imagination in Contemporary Japanese Women’s Performance” in TDR (2011).

39. Lille was chosen as European Capital of Culture in 2004. Granddaughters was exhibited in a local church as a part of the “Lille 2004 Project.”

40. The quotation is from a bilingual (Japanese and English) catalogue of the exhibit of Granddaughters published by Shiseido Gallery in 2002. In the English translation, the word “string” and not “necklace” is used here, but in Japanese it is written as “necklace” (nekkuresu). Therefore, I use “necklace,” not “string,” in this quotation for clarity.

41. The identification of girls and old women in tandem with the resistance against motherhood is also found in YUBIWA Hotel’s performance Candies Girlish Hardcore (first produced in 2006 and most recently in 2010). In the flyer for the 2007 production, Hitsujiya Shirotama writes a poem or prose on the theme of the show: When I become seventy-five years old or so, … I will have Alzheimer’s and first forget about my husband. Then, I will completely forget about my children and pretend that I have returned to a seventeen-year-old girl. On that night, I will have a dream in which my dead mother has revived. Then, I will definitely tell her, who is sitting in front of me: “I want you to turn down this offer of the arranged marriage.” (2007) Here, the mother is seen as the one who has internalized the genderbiased social convention and drags her daughter into the same misery with her.

2

Girlie Sexuality: When Flat Girls Become Three-dimensional

1. It is not clear who came up with this group name. Many of the members ˉ izumi Salon,” an apartment were the frequent visitors to the so-called “O ˉ izumi in Nerima, Tokyo, which Hagio and Takemiya shared from 1970 in O to 1973 while their income as beginning manga artists was still insecure (Hagio and Yamada 2010: 23–6). In the “salon,” the members helped with each other’s work and discussed their ideas.

Notes 187

2. Takemiya and Hagio also teach manga studies at universities. Takemiya, who teaches at Kyoto Seika University, is the first manga artist to be appointed as a full professor. She has been serving as chancellor there since 2014.

3. Musician So Akashi released a music album, Gymnasium (Gimunajiumu), in 2011, inspired by Hagio’s 1971 piece Gymnasium in November (Jūichi gatsu no gimunajiumu). It is a short piece she published using a similar setting and characters to those of The Heart of Thomas. The illustration on the album jacket was drawn by manga artist Nakamura Asumiko. Hagio’s influence on Nakamura can be seen in her work such as All about J (J no subete) (2004–6).

4. Some of their well-known pieces include Takemiya Keiko’s The Poem of the Wind and the Trees (Kaze to ki no uta) (1976–84), Kihara Toshie’s Mari and Shingo (Mari to Shingo) (1977–84), Aoike Yasuko’s From Eroica with Love (Eroika yori ai o komete) (1976–present), and Yamagishi Ryōko’s Emperor of the Land of the Rising Sun (Hi izuru tokoro no tenshi) (1980–4).

5. However, Akaeda Kanako’s research suggests that the term ome originally referred to intimate friendships (2011: 110–13). The derivation of the term ome is not clear, but it is likely from the term omedetai (happy or joyous), which celebrates schoolgirls’ relationships. The mass media and intellectuals misunderstood the meaning as “man-woman” (“o” can mean man and “me” can mean woman), and subsequently the term was used to designate a female same-sex couple, one of whom had masculine traits (2011: 110–13). The term has since fallen out of use.

6. Michiko Suzuki discusses this essay in detail in her book Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature and Culture (2010: 36–8).

7. Students did not have to be Christian to study at mission schools, and most of them were not (Inagaki 2007: 189–92).

8. Yearning for the West remains an integral part of girls’ aesthetics to this day. Even during wartime when Anglo-American cultures were criticized as diseased (Robertson 1998: 133), girls did not relinquish their longing for the West. For example, although Yoshiya Nobuko supported Japan’s war effort (as I will discuss more in Chapter 3), she publicly countered critiques of the admiration of Western culture by claiming that it was originally Japanese men who had eagerly tried to learn from the West.

See Hitomi Tsuchiya Dollase’s article “Girls on the Homefront: The Examination of Shōjo no tomo 1938–1945” (2008) for more details.

9. The so-called “moga” (“modern girls,” a Japanese equivalent to flappers) overlap with these straightforwardly political schoolgirls. Moga appeared in the mass media in the late 1920s and 1930s and “publicly expressed [their] desires for sex and for work in public places, thereby challenging the assumption that [they] belonged in the home” (Silverberg 2006: 64).

10. In 1955, Girls’ Friend, which survived wartime, discontinued publication, while manga magazines Ribbon (Ribon) and Good Friend (Nakayoshi) were inaugurated (Yonezawa 1980: 55). As of 2015, these magazines are still in circulation.

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Notes

11. For example, in the case of The Heart of Thomas, even when it was being serialized in a girls’ manga magazine, its readership was older than the magazine’s target audience, which was below 13 years old. In her conversation with philosopher Yoshimoto Takaaki, Hagio mentioned that she had those between 14 and 18 in her mind when working on this piece. Yoshimoto said that he thought the readership would be even older (Hagio 2012: 61–2). This shows that this manga, or many manga under the label of “girls’ manga,” continues to appeal to those with girlie sensibilities in various age groups, not just to female adolescents. The episode also suggests Hagio’s independence from her editors. As Jennifer S. Prough writes, manga pieces are usually co-created by manga artists and magazine editors, even though they are published under the names of the artists (2011: 57–109). However, artists like Hagio maintain their autonomy to a larger extent.

12. Of course, this is not the case with all the manga of this kind. For example, Kihara Toshie’s Mari and Shingo is set in a boarding school in prewar and wartime Japan, and Yamagishi Ryōko’s Emperor of the Land of the Rising Sun is set in ancient Japan. The point is that, regardless of the locations, these stories were often set in somewhere/sometime faraway from girls’ everyday reality.

13. In the 1980s and 1990s, there were also other critics and researchers who argued that male characters in this type of manga represented heterosexual female youth’s desire for men. However, such arguments are not supported by more recent BL studies, for the reasons I explain in this chapter. For a summary of the arguments in the 1980s and 1990s, see Kaneda Junko’s article “Yaoi Discourses of Tomorrow: Part 2” (“Yaoiron, asu no tame ni sono 2”) in the journal Eureka (2007).

14. Kazumi Nagaike discusses the female audience’s multiple forms of sexual identification by analyzing multiple forms of sexual acts and pleasure experienced by characters. As she writes, although top and bottom are often fixed roles in this genre, there is a subgenre called “ribāshiburu” (reversible) in which penetration and being penetrated are done by both parties. She also points out that the bottom experiences not only “vaginal” (or anal) but also phallic pleasure (2012: 118–19).

15. Satō’s criticism is not directed at the Year 24 Group, but at artists from younger generations whose works are often explicitly sexual and even pornographic. However, I would argue that this statement of Hagio also explains the sexual nature of these newer works. Male bodies initiate girls into the ideal world where they can experience flexible gender and sexuality.

16. It should be noted that the Year 24 Group artists also publish girls’ manga about heterosexual romance, but still, most of their works are not conventional romances.

17. While I consider that all these genres belong to girls’ manga (or more specifically, “girlie manga”) because of their origin and shared visual aesthetics, BL manga is usually not categorized as a genre of girls’ manga,

Notes 189

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

suggesting that a clear distinction has been made between the former, which deals with male homosexual relationships, and the latter, which focuses on heterosexual relationships. As such, publishers often have separate divisions for BL and girls’ manga.

For a comparative discussion of yaoi and slash, see Kumiko Saitō’s article “Desire in Subtext: Gender, Fandom, and Women’s Male-Male Homoerotic Parodies in Contemporary Japan” (2011).

However, it is still considered alternative and, as such, the majority of BL manga are published by small specialist publishers. Representative artists include Yoshinaga Fumi, Mizushiro Setona, Nitta Yūka, Ono Natsume (also known as basso), Nakamura Asumiko, Hidaka Shōko, Kumota Haruko, and Yoneda Kō, among others. Before BL manga started to be published on a commercial basis at the turn of the 1980s/1990s, they were mainly produced in a self-published form by amateurs and sold at amateur manga markets, with some exceptions such as magazine JUNE (read as “juné”), inaugurated in 1978. It carried not only manga, but also novels about male-male romantic relationships primarily for female readers, and many artists of the Year 24 Group contributed to it.

Girls’ manga of this kind existed before the 1990s, although the number was even smaller. They include Yamagishi Ryōko’s Two in the White Room (Shiroi heya no futari) (1971), Ikeda Riyoko’s Dear My Brother…

(Onˉı sama e…) (1974), and Yoshida Akimi’s Cherry Orchard (Sakura no sono) (1985–6), for example.

Another example is Nagasawa Satoru’s The Virgin Mary is Watching (Maria sama ga miteru) (2003–10), set in a mission school. This is a manga adaptation of Konno Oyuki’s popular girls’ novel of the same title. Thirty-nine volumes of the novel version have been published since 1998, and the series still continues as of 2015.

Saitō Tamaki makes similar points to Mori, Nagaike, and Azuma by drawing on his discussion with female manga artist and critic Nobi Nobita (also known as Enomoto Nariko) in his article “Otaku Sexuality” in Robot, Ghost, and Wired Dreams (2007), edited by Christopher Bolton et al. His interview with Nobi is available in her book Adults Don’t Understand (Otona wa wakatte kurenai) (2003).

Manga scholar Matt Thorn also sees this incident as rape. See his interview with Hagio in 2004 on his website, matt-thorn.com (Thorn 2007).

In this interview, Hagio also suggests that the incident involves rape.

The view that these boys are the alter egos of girls is shared by other researchers and manga artists as well. See, for example, Midori Matsui’s “Little Girls Were Little Boys: Displaced Femininity in the Representation of Homosexuality in Japanese Girls’ Comics” in Feminism and the Politics of Difference (1993), edited by Sneja Gunew and Anne Yeatman, and Hagio’s conversation with philosopher Yoshimoto Takaaki in 1981, which is reprinted in her book Language for You, Manga for Me (Kotoba no anata, manga no watashi) (2012). Female manga artists Yamada Naito and Yoshinaga Fumi also relate representations of male-male relationships

190

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

Notes

and androgynes in girls’ manga to girls’ resistance at being rendered as reproductive tools (Yoshinaga 2007: 27). Their conversation is included in Yoshinaga’s An Intimate Chat with That Person: A Collection of Yoshinaga Fumi’s Conversations (Ano hito to koko dake no oshaberi: Yoshinaga Fumi taidanshū) (2007).

Seifriet’s long hair may look feminine, but it is probably a sign of his delinquency. His appearance is rather similar to that of a rock musician.

It should be noted that Rich’s conception of the lesbian continuum has been much contested. Opponents have argued that it essentializes women’s experiences and removes sexual aspects from lesbian experiences.

However, more recent scholarship has re-evaluated it as Rich’s strategy in calling for solidarity among women who challenge institutionalized heteronormativity. See, for example, Victoria Hesford’s “Feminism and Its Ghosts: The Spectre of the Feminist-as-Lesbian” (2005) and C. L. Cole and Shannon L. C. Cate’s “Compulsory Gender and Transgender Existence: Adrienne Rich’s Queer Possibility” (2008).

The protagonist’s status as the racial/ethnic Other is found in other manga pieces of this genre published by the Year 24 Group. For example, Serge in Takemiya Keiko’s Poem of Wind and Trees is half Roma, and Mari in Kihara Toshie’s Mari and Shingo is half German. While not the racial/ ethnic Other, Umayado no ōji, the protagonist of Yamagishi Ryōko’s Emperor of the Land of the Rising Sun, possesses supernatural power. Such “alien” status might reflect girls’ sense of alienation in their everyday reality, although the “Westernness” of some characters symbolizes their longing for the West.

Juli’s mother is portrayed as a good person, but her position in the household is weak as she needs to depend on her mother financially. Moreover, when her mother labels her late husband as an Arab, she just responds by saying, “My husband is German” (Hagio 1995: 255), without fundamentally challenging her mother’s racism.

In many other interviews, she mentions her troubling relationship with her own domineering mother (although she does not bring up the issue of sexuality.) For example, see Yamada Tomoko’s interview with Hagio, “My Manga Life” (“Watashi no manga jinsei”) (2010), Language for You, Manga for Me (2012), which is a collection of Hagio’s conversations with prominent cultural figures, and An Intimate Chat with That Person (2007), a collection of Yoshinaga Fumi’s conversations with various manga artists including Hagio.

However, the final inner monologue (probably by Rika, but possibly the author’s voice) reads: “Somewhere, Mother’s tears remain frozen” (Hagio 2002: 52). This prevents the story from achieving a cathartic effect.

To be more precise, shingeki was established under the influence of modern Western theatre, and therefore, while realism is dominant in shingeki, its productions also include more “experimental” modern plays such as those by Brecht.

Notes 191

32. “Gimunajiumu,” pronounced in a Japanized way, is the Japanese transliteration of the German term “gymnasium,” meaning a school to prepare students for university entrance. To my knowledge, girls’ manga set in gymnasiums are mostly by Hagio Moto. Therefore, “gimunajiumu mono” may just refer to Hagio’s manga of this kind. Or, this foreign word may be used to include other manga about male-male romance set in boys’ boarding schools in Western countries, such as Poem of Wind and Trees by Takemiya Keiko, which is set in France.

33. Studio Life is not the only theatre company which has adapted Hagio’s manga. Her Half God (Hanshin) (1984) was produced by playwright/ director/actor Noda Hideki in 1986. Hagio scripted the play with Noda.

He staged the piece also in 1988, 1990, and 1999. For an examination of Noda’s theatre, which is closely linked to manga, see Yoshiko Fukushima’s Manga Discourse in Japanese Theatre: The Location of Noda Hideki’s Yume no Yūminsha (2003).

34. However, another observation is needed when we discuss these male actors’ performance of female roles. With all-male casts, female roles are played by male actors in the company; in the case of The Heart of Thomas, this means Juli’s grandmother, mother, and Thomas’s mother. They wear female costumes and wigs and employ typically feminine movements and speech style, but they do not overly alter the tone of their voice. Very interestingly, their performance of female characters does not appear as awkward as their performance of Western boys. This may suggest the excessiveness inherent in the “performance of women” per se.

35. The agency was founded in 1962 by American-born Johnny Kitagawa.

36. The benefits a fan can enjoy include a birthday card handwritten by her tantō actor.

37. However, it should be noted that female fans of the male artists belonging to Johnny’s are not always dreaming of their own heterosexual romances with these stars. For example, among them, there are those who produce yaoi novels and manga by fantasizing romance between their favorites in the self-published format or on their personal websites. I would argue that what makes this possible is largely the two-dimensionality of these celebrities. They are images rather than “real” human beings with flesh.

38. There may be female fans who fantasize about homoerotic relationships between the male members of Studio Life, just as some fans of Johnny’s do with their favorites. However, I speculate that there may not be so many.

Due to its smaller scale, Studio Life’s actors are more approachable, or “more real” human beings than the celebrities from Johnny’s. For example, as mentioned, the fans can directly interact with the actors at fan club events, while such occasions are extremely rare for fans of Johnny’s. It is probably more difficult to fantasize “bodiless homoeroticism” using “real people.”

39. There are, of course, various types of realistic theatre. Playwrights/directors such as Hirata Oriza and Okada Toshiki have their actors deliver their very colloquial lines in a realistic way as in Euro-American realism.

192

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

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However, Okada’s works are not always categorized as realist because of the choreographed, dance-like movements he assigns to his performers.

I thank Tadashi Uchino for his suggestion for the English translation of the phrase, “hi-zai no watashi.”

However, unlike Takarazuka, Studio Life does not have its actors specialize in either male roles or female roles. In its productions, male actors perform female characters, but this does not mean there are actors who only perform female roles. While there is no gender specialization in Studio Life, in other aspects it seems to consciously replicate Takarazuka’s “educational” structure. For example, in Takarazuka, those who enter the company in the same year are grouped together until they retire. As will be discussed in the next chapter, Takarazuka operates on the principle that it is a girls’ school, and this group system is typically employed at schools in Japan. The same system is used in Studio Life, possibly aiming to evoke a boys’ school atmosphere. One ironic similarity between Takarazuka and Studio Life is the amateurishness of their performers. As a “girls’ school,” Takarazuka rather promotes its performers’ amateurish status (as those who are performing on stage just until they get married and retire from the company). On the contrary, Studio Life’s performers are probably unintentionally amateurish. Theatre critic Kawaguchi Ken’ya writes that its performances are like those at a “gorgeous school festival” (gōka na gakugeikai) (1998: 77).

While she was primarily a playwright/director, she wrote several film scripts. She also published a novelized version of Summer Vacation 1999 in 1992. The first theatrical production based on her film script took place in 2011 as a part of the annual Kishida Rio Avant-Garde Festival in Tokyo.

Earlier than this, in 1998, lesbian theatre company Pink Triangle adapted the film for its first production. The company dissolved in 2006.

However, it was screened at various film festivals in the USA such as the Telluride Film Festival in 1988, Seattle International Film Festival, New Directors/New Film series in New York City, Los Angeles International Gay and Lesbian Film/Video Festival in 1989, and the New Festival’s Downtown Winter Series in New York City in 1991.

For example, in 1988, a group of fans started to get together to discuss the film, and in 1993 this developed into a private fan club, “Friends of Summer Vacation 1999” (“‘1999 nen no natsuyasumi’ tomo no kai”). One of its activities was to collect documents about the film. In 1999, there were about 100 members (80 women and 20 men) (Nakamori 1999: 144), but the fan club discontinued its activity that same year. Another group named “Angel House” took over some of the activities and is currently running a website where abundant information about the film is provided and fans can discuss various issues surrounding it (Angel House n.d.). ¯ Otakara Tomoko, the actor playing the role of Kazuhiko, is even dubbed by male voice actor Sasaki Nozomu. However, Norio and Yū are not dubbed. Yū (the equivalent to Thomas) and Kaoru (Erich) are played by the same actor, Miyajima Eri, but when she plays the role of Kaoru, she is dubbed by voice actor Takayama Minami. Yū does not appear much in the film because he commits suicide at the beginning of the film. As

Notes 193

such, Miyajima mostly appears as Kaoru, dubbed by Takayama. I assume that Mizuhara Rie (now known as Fukatsu Eri), who played Norio, was not dubbed, as her voice was androgynous enough.

3

Citizen Girls

1. This is from the obi (a narrow cover attached to the top of a book for publicity) of his Discourse on War (Sensōron) (1998).

2. As explained in the previous chapter, it was Tezuka Osamu who brought narrative structure to girls’ manga, but it was not historical narrative.

Ikeda was inspired by Marie Antoinette (1932), a biography written by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. See Anne McKnight’s article “Frenchness and Transformation in Japanese Subculture, 1972–2004” (2010) for a discussion on the ways this biography’s narrative style and portrayal of historical figures influenced The Rose of Versailles.

3. It was renamed the Social Democratic Party (Shakai minshutō) in 1996.

4. William Marotti (2009) argues that the New Left activists’ violence was largely a reaction to state violence. He details the scenes of the protests in which the riot police exercised brutal violence against protesters, including beating and kicking. They even used water cannons and tear gas.

5. The Asama-Sansō Incident, which slightly preceded the serialization of this manga, also reflected this shift. The police stormed the lodge after a fierce battle with the URA, and this was televised live, with an audience rating at 89.2 percent (Kunō, cited in Igarashi 2007: 119). By the end of the 1960s, 90 percent of households in Japan owned TV sets (Oda, cited in Igarashi 2007: 121), a symbol of consumerism that was the New Left’s ideological enemy. Ironically, the URA’s defeat was presented to the viewers as a consumable image.

6. The popularity of this manga, serialized in a mass-market magazine, led to its reproduction in other media. In addition to the theatre adaptations by the Takarazuka Revue and the film adaptation by Jacques Demy, it was adapted into another musical production with male and female actors (1975), a televised anime series (1979–80), and anime films (1985, 1990, 2007). Moreover, a “drama CD” series (2003, 2010), which included some scenes performed by voice actors, was released. Most of these adaptations were later released in VHS and DVD format.

7. This law originated in 1948 for the purpose of reducing the physically and mentally challenged population.

8. The bill was discarded in 1974 after resistance from physically and mentally challenged people and the women’s liberationists.

9. Oscar’s androgynous appearance is therefore different from that of the androgynous boys in Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas. As explained in the previous chapter, these boys appear almost like girls as they share the same graphic features, except for their male gender markers such as short hair and male school uniform.

10. In her discussion of this manga, Deborah Shamoon argues that Oscar is chūsei (2012: 131). Literally meaning “middle sex” in Japanese, the term

194

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12.

13.

14.

15.

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is similar to, but different from, ryōsei guyū, meaning an androgyne possessing traits of both sexes. As Oscar stands between female and male characters, chūsei as “middle sex” in its literal sense rightly describes her portrayal. However, Shamoon defines chūsei as “someone sexless and genderless” (2012: 46). The crux of Oscar’s characteristics is her unsettling sexual and gender identification, not the static state of sexlessness or genderlessness. She appears more feminine or more masculine, depending on the surroundings. To emphasize this point, I use the term androgyne.

Many people were disappointed by the realistic adaptation (Futaba 1989: 554; Takahashi 1979: 160), showing their awareness that the twodimensional sphere of manga is not easily translatable to the “realistic” three-dimensional sphere.

In her discussion of The Rose of Versailles, Honda Masuko writes that Marie represents girls as she follows her passion (that is, her love for Fersen), ignoring her social roles of wife, mother, and queen (1982: 155).

While my discussion of girls’ aesthetics has been inspired by Honda’s theorization of girls’ culture, I would argue that Marie is not “girlie.” She is portrayed as a loving mother, even though she is neither a good wife nor a good queen. It is Oscar, not Marie, who represents girls.

As an example of André’s “unmanly” aspects, Shamoon points out his emotional, stereotypically “womanly,” reaction to Rousseau’s romance, Julie, or the New Heloise (La Nouvelle Héloïse), which is about unrequited love caused by class difference (2012: 125). She writes, “André decides to find out more about the republican politics that have so preoccupied Oscar by reading Rousseau. But rather than one of Rousseau’s philosophical works, he reads the romance La Nouvelle Héloïse and sees himself in the story of forbidden love between a noble lady and a commoner” (2012: 125). However, this is not correct as André actually finds out about the book from the Count of Girodelle, who knows the story mirrors the class differences in Oscar and André’s relation. Furthermore, Oscar also reads the novel and sheds emotional tears in the process of finding her love for André.

See her online essay “Longing for Europe” (“Akogare no yōroppa”): http:// web.archive.org/web/20030509131032/http://natmi.coco.co.jp/AM/ berubara.htm (accessed 30 June 2015).

Jacques Demy said something similar to this, reported in the evening issue of Asahi on 5 January 1979. He said that Oscar was not so much a French character during the time of the French Revolution as a contemporary person in Japan (Asahi Shimbun 1979).

While in this manga the French Revolution is linked to the feminist consciousness of 1970s Japan, early feminist consciousness in France was born during the Revolution. There was a group of women who demanded the right to form a female unit of the national guard, although the request was ignored. In 1793, a group of militant women established their society, the Club des Citoyennes Republicaines, for the purpose of securing food. Olympe de Gouges published a pamphlet, “The Rights of

Notes 195

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

Women,” in 1791, demanding that women should be given equal rights with men (Forrest 1995: 102–3).

She has an essay titled “Nagata Hiroko Is Myself” (“Nagata Hiroko wa atashi da”), in which she writes about her thoughts on Nagata’s involvement in the murders of her fellow URA members. The essay is included in her book Wherever I Am, I Am Riburian (Doko ni iyō to, riburian) (1983).

Mori clearly detested women, demonstrated in remarks such as “Bleeding ˉ tsuka 1996: 16). during periods is disgusting” (O As Alan Forrest notes, the financial crisis caused by the French involvement in the American War of Independence was the trigger for the Revolution (1995: 13), and this manga explains the process accurately.

However, for the readers, such historical facts probably did not matter so much. As pointed out above, Ikeda herself intended the French Revolution here to be the “inner revolution of the Japanese women.”

She probably borrowed this dramatic historical event in France simply because the West was admired by girls. Anne McKnight suggests that Ikeda chose the setting of the French Revolution as the universal origin of human rights in order to counter what many felt as American-imposed democracy, and it was indeed an important agendum of the student protests at the time. She writes, “[T]he plot of Rose of Versailles (sic) dramatized how ‘rights’ were an invention of a popular, anti-imperial, spontaneous uprising, not the imposition of a foreign occupying power, as in the case of women’s voting and other rights in Japan under the American Occupation” (2010: 124–5). This is an interesting observation, but in this chapter I consider the setting of this manga from the perspective of girls’ aesthetics; the West functions as a girls’ dreamland. In addition, if the West is often imagined as a “site of transvestism” in Japan, as Jennifer Robertson notes (1998: 76), then it is a good setting for a character like Oscar.

However, there are pieces dealing with working-class experiences in a genre of manga called gekiga, which is characterized by a realistic graphic style and stories. See Sharon Kinsella’s Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society (2000) for a discussion on gekiga.

The language employed in this film is English.

The women’s liberation movement in Japan is said to have started on International Anti-war Day, 21 October 1970, and this suggests its close link to the peace movement.

For discussions on this issue, see Thoughts for Survival (Ikinobiru tame no shisō) (2006) by Ueno Chizuko, Military Organizations and Gender: Women in the Self-Defense Forces (Gunji soshiki to jendā: Jieitai no joseitachi) by Satō Fumika, and From Zenkyōtō to the Women’s Liberation Movement (Zenkyōtō kara ribu e) (1996), a volume edited by the Onna tachi no ima o tou kai, for example.

Even now, most people seem to believe that Japan is a racially and ethnically homogenous nation, but as Oguma Eiji’s research demonstrates, this is a postwar construction. He speculates that one of the reasons for the

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25.

26.

27.

Notes

ongoing power of this idea may be the desire of the Japanese to believe that the supposedly homogenous, peace-loving Japanese were led into a disastrous war by outside forces (1995: 363–4). Oguma traces the shift in kokutai fundamentalism over time and explains that, from the 1890s to roughly the 1900s, many theorists of kokutai advocated the idea that Japan was a homogenous nation, consisting of the racially and ethnically “pure” Japanese (1995: 49–71). However, after Japan colonized Taiwan in 1895 and Korea in 1910, it became difficult for these theorists to claim Japan as a homogeneous nation, because Japan forced the colonized to join the category of “the Japanese,” for instance, by encouraging marriage between the colonized and the Japanese and by drafting the colonized into military service. The Japanese government assimilated them into its extended Imperial Household as “adopted children” (1995: 146) or “younger brothers” (1995: 383), claiming that the Japanese, the Taiwanese, and the Koreans shared the same ancestor. By the end of the 1920s, Japan as a racially and ethnically heterogeneous nation was emphasized by kokutai’s advocates in order to mask the crude reality of colonization and the invasion of neighboring Asia with the beautiful family image of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (daitōa kyōei ken) (1995: 136–51).

According to Oguma Eiji, the concept of kokutai originated in the Edo Period (1603–1868), but he does not specify when in the Edo Period it emerged. However, he points out that kokutai in the modern period arose in the 1890s, after the Imperial Rescript on Education (Kyōiku chokugo) was promulgated in 1890 (1995: 50). The rescript is a paean, worshipping the Imperial Family as the mythic origin of the Japanese nation and swearing its people’s loyalty to the nation and the Emperor. Students were forced to recite it every day at school, thus implanting the idea that each of them was a member of Japan as a family-state. Yumiko Iida differentiates kokutai in the early phase of modernization from kokutai in the 1930s. She argues that in the 1890s kokutai simply functioned as a tool to link the nation and the people in order for Japan to progress towards the higher condition of a nation-state, since such a link did not exist in the Edo Period, where each feudal lord governed people in his own territory. However, according to Iida, in the 1930s this link had already been exhausted in the public mind, because by then they were confronting various problems, which they thought were caused by the westernization-cum-loss of the “Japanese experience.” In this context, the idea of the Emperor as the manifestation of the universal, “true Japan” could effectively function as a wartime ideology (2002: 18–22).

They include prime ministers. In the postwar period, four prime ministers, Miki Takeo, Nakasone Yasuhiro, Koizumi Jun’ichirō, and Abe Shinzō visited the shrine to honor the war dead.

He was an illustrator for the magazine Girls’ Friend (Shōjo no tomo).

For example, her short story in 1941, “To Become a Kernel of Wheat” (“Hitotsubu no mugi to mo naran”), preaches the importance of “sisterhood”

Notes 197

between Japanese and Chinese women. The protagonist, a Japanese girl, determines to become “a kernel of wheat” by selflessly working as a schoolteacher like her Western teachers in order to educate Chinese girls so that they will understand the significance of creating “the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” As Dollase writes, “A Christian tale of sacrifice is here put into the service of Japanese colonial expansion” (2008: 331). Yoshiya was certainly different from masculinist nationalists in that she always wrote about women and girls in her pieces and sympathized with Chinese female victims of the war in her reports from China. However, her feminism or her desire for “universal sisterhood” was only possible through the suffering of Chinese women who, she fanatically believed, needed Japan’s help in order to fully understand why “friendship” between the two nations was needed (Dollase 2008: 332–4).

This short story is also a good example of Yoshiya’s persistent admiration for Western culture, represented here by Western teachers. Even during wartime, she never let go of this important aspect of girls’ aesthetics.

28. The other was Hayashi Fumiko. Male members included Kikuchi Kan, Kume Masao, and Yoshikawa Eiji, for example (Dollase 2008: 330).

29. Many researchers have written about the first-wave feminists’ involvement in the war. See, for example, Ueno Chizuko’s Engendering Nationalism (Nashonarizumu to jendā) (1998) and Vera Mackie’s Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality (2003).

30. It should also be noted here that shōnen-ai/BL manga sometimes finds homoeroticism in Nazi images. There are several shōnen-ai/BL manga pieces which feature Nazis as characters. For example, the inaugural number of JUNE (1978), the first magazine to print manga and novels dealing with male same-sex relationships, included an illustration by Kihara Toshie in which two Nazis are dancing romantically under the swastika banner. It comes with the line: “Hey, Rudolf, wouldn’t it be nice if we turn off the light …” (cited in Ishida 2008: 218). One might argue that the homosexualization of Nazis challenges the Nazis’ persecution of homosexuals in some ways, but this does not seem to be the case here.

The girls’ manga artists who initiated shōnen-ai/BL often list Luchino Visconti’s films as their source of inspiration (Ishida 2008: 141). For them, his films were “romantic,” and they earnestly observed the details in his films, such as lace attached to dresses. On the contrary, male literati such as Mishima Yukio saw the protest against the Nazi Party in Visconti’s The Damned (La caduta degli Dei) (1969), which is about a family of steel magnates manipulated by the party (Ishida 2008: 126–54). Particularly at the early stage of shōnen-ai/BL manga, girls’ manga artists often chose to set their work in Europe, because they thought that Japan was not suitable for their homoerotic fantasies (Ishida 2008: 142–3), even though Japan has a long tradition of homoeroticism, for example, in kabuki theatre.

Kihara’s illustration of two Nazis seems to have been inspired by The Damned, and here the image of Nazis represents the homoeroticism and romanticism associated with Europe.

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Notes

31. Similar opinions are also found in the review section for this film on the website of Amazon Japan.

32. See note 6 of this chapter.

33. More precisely, it started as the Takarazuka Chorus (Takarazuka shōkatai) in 1913, and its first performance took place in 1914. In Takarazuka’s official record, its founding year is 1914.

34. However, Takarazuka recruited males in 1919, 1926, and 1945. Although it aimed at having male performers onstage, these recruits ended up as directors and some minor chorus members. Training of male members ended in 1954, due to the resistance of Takarasiennes and fans (Kawasaki 2005: 150).

35. However, Takarazuka sometimes hires composers and choreographers from outside of the company for its productions.

36. Tours abroad started as early as 1938. The company has performed in many parts of the world, including Asia, Europe, and North America.

37. The most famous student activity at the school is the obsessive daily cleaning of the school building, as documented in the film Dream Girls (1994), directed by Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams. This started around 1970 and continues today. However, while sewing was taught as a womanly skill in the early days, it is not offered in the current curriculum (Stickland 2008: 81). Leonie R. Stickland writes that, in terms of traditional Japanese female etiquette, only a tea ceremony class had been offered (2008: 81), but as of 2015 it is not in the curriculum any more, according to the website of the Takarazuka Music School (Takarazuka ongaku gakkō n.d.).

38. The publication includes information such as each Takarasienne’s stage name, hometown, hobby, and so on, but it does not include her age. This is because all the Takarasiennes are supposed to be maidens regardless of their actual age. A Takarasienne stops concealing her age after her retirement from the company, but the fans can usually guess from various sources while she is still a member.

39. The assumption that the majority of Takarasiennes and fans are heterosexual risks rendering homosexual ones in the community invisible.

There are lesbians surrounding Takarazuka, such as Higashi Koyuki, a former male-role player of the company and currently a lesbian activist, and Emoto Junko, a director/playwright/performer of theatre troupe Kegawa-zoku (Fur Tribe). For Kegawa-zoku’s parody of Takarazuka, see my article “Two-Dimensional Imagination in Contemporary Japanese Women’s Performance” in TDR (2011).

40. However, according to Kawasaki Kenko, the management often determines students’ secondary genders even at the entrance exams of the Takarazuka Music School (1999: 188).

41. There are cases in which male-role players change to female-role players, but the opposite seldom happens (Kawasaki 1999: 189).

42. It must be pointed out that Robertson’s writing is ambiguous in her discussions of the romantic relationships of the “revue performers.” She

Notes 199

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

discusses not only Takarazuka, but also Shōchiku, but she often does not specify which one she is referring to. She mentions one Takarazuka performer and two Shōchiku performers whose same-sex practices became public, but it is not always clear which performers she is discussing.

While the motto sounds blatantly patriarchal, Kawasaki Kenko points out that it might have suggested a feminist attitude if we contextualize the discourse of “purity” in the feminist and other liberal movements in the late Meiji (1868–1912) and Taishō (1912–26) Eras (1999: 228). While she does not explain what “purity” meant in this period, Kawamura Kunimitsu does in his research on girls’ culture of that time. He writes that it meant a status untainted by the subjugation of women’s sexuality to the patriarchal economy (1993: 14). Thus, even though the motto was imposed on Takarasiennes by Kobayashi, they might have been able to find a subversive meaning in it.

Ever since, Takarazuka has produced various versions of The Rose of Versailles, such as the ones focusing not on Oscar and André but on Fersen and Marie.

However, like other girls’ media, Takarazuka did not completely function as a conveyer of state ideology. It kept staging romances even during wartime (Robertson 1998: 130–1). Moreover, it kept evoking a westernized atmosphere, while simultaneously identifying Western influences as “germs” (Robertson 1998: 133). For example, the Revue’s 1943 production of The Navy (Kaigun) contains a Hawaiian song, which was officially banned by the government (Robertson 1998: 112). As a popular company managed by a business corporation whose goals were not always in alliance with the state, Takarazuka could have been an outlet for the suppressed desires of the audience. From the audience’s perspective, heterosexual romance performed by girls and Hawaiian music might have appeared as covert resistance to militarism. At the very least, such “unhealthiness” probably provided the audience with a momentary respite from their tightly regulated everyday reality.

Angura theatre started in the 1960s as a protest against dominant shingeki, as discussed in Chapter 2. The angura practitioners associated shingeki’s realism with what they considered the Western form of modernity. They instead used pre-modern Japanese imaginations and combined them with international avant-garde dramaturgy in their work.

While the story of The Rose of Versailles and the history of the French Revolution are well known, the audience would probably only have had a vague idea that the conflict was between the royalists and the revolutionary forces, as the historical context is not explained in the play. Moreover, Oscar’s image as a national hero is enhanced even at the cost of narrative consistency. For example, General de Jarjayes is on the side of the royalists, and yet he glorifies Oscar’s departure to fight for the revolutionary forces.

Although the Self-Defense Forces were not involved in the activities on the front line, they have helped the US in other ways, such as removing

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50.

51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

56.

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underwater mines in the Persian Gulf in 1991 and giving rear-guard support in the Indian Ocean from 2001 to 2007 and from 2008 to 2010.

This was one of his slogans when he was previously in office from 2006 to 2007.

For more detailed discussion on Takarazuka’s Gone With the Wind, see my article “Two-Dimensional Imagination in Contemporary Japanese Women’s Performance” (2011). Another show that clearly demonstrates their anti-American sentiments is Wind in the Dawn: The Challenge of Shirasu Jirō, Samurai Gentleman (Reimei no kaze: samurai jentoruman Shirasu Jirō no chōsen) (2008). For more about this show, see my article “The Takarazuka Revue’s Wind in the Dawn: (De-)nationalization of Japanese Women” in Theatre and National Identity: Re-Imagining Conceptions of the Nation (2014), edited by Nadine Holdsworth.

Olalquiaga mentions “the replacement of the organic and human by the technological” (1992: 19) as a cause of this anxiety.

From my personal conversation with her on 26 December 2013.

By “a multi-gender community,” I assume she means that there are male fans as well. While she may be acknowledging male audience members, she renders invisible the fans whose sexuality is non-normative in her heterosexual reading of the company and its performance.

In this scene, Oscar mentions that Bernard has asked her to let him marry Rosalie, but Rosalie does not know about his wish. Here, Rosalie is treated as masculine Oscar’s possession (although Oscar does not force her to marry Bernard). This is reminiscent of a traditional Japanese marriage arrangement. In the original manga, Oscar does not suggest to Rosalie that she marry Bernard. She does marry him, but this is because she has eventually fallen in love with him.

One such example, as in the case of the original manga version, is Oscar’s romantic relationship with André, which resembles that of a couple from a BL manga. Takarazuka shows actually feature something like male homoeroticism in the interaction among male-role players. Kawasaki Kenko indicates that popular relationships among characters include “rivalry between male characters” and “male comradeship” (2005: 151), which are indeed BL-like.

This is quite different from the original manga in which Oscar rejects Rosalie’s love, saying, “Don’t forget. I’m a woman” (Ikeda 1994 [Vol. 2]: 115). Oscar also gets furious when she is falsely accused of being Marie’s lesbian lover at one point. While the manga abounds in homoeroticism, it treats lesbianism as a dirty word. This may resonate with homophobia in shōnen-ai/BL manga as discussed in Chapter 2.

There is a tacit understanding that a female-role player is younger than her male counterpart in the star pair. In the highly stratified Takarazuka apparatus, age, as well as “gender,” is an important constituent of the hierarchy among the performers. Thus, in the star pair, the female-role player needs to portray herself as dependent on the male-role player, producing stereotypical gendered power dynamics. This convention started

Notes 201

at the beginning of the 1980s. Before this, top female-role players did not exist. While this may be another example of “gender” bias in Takarazuka, the lack of top female-role players also made it possible for female-role players to develop their skills without being restricted by the convention of the star pair which requires them to be foils for the male-role players. There used to be popular female-role players who were regarded as “exceptional” (bekkaku) before the 1980s (Matsumoto 2008: 23).

4 “Little Girls” Go West?

1. Etō discusses these points in various parts of his book Maturity and Loss: The Collapse of the “Mother” (Seijuku to sōshitsu: “haha” no hōkai) (1967), but particularly in the section on Kojima Nobuo’s 1965 novel Embracing Family (Hōyō kazoku), in which Etō analyzes the “inverted” power dynamic between a married couple in the age of postwar democracy.

2. He mainly produces paintings and installation art works, which adapt aspects of Japanese otaku (usually male geek or nerd) culture. For example, there is a subculture of making and collecting small eroticized figurines of anime or fantasy characters. Murakami has made versions of these figurines, but larger than human size and with exaggerated features. One figure, Hiropon (1997), is a large naked female figure with large breasts and milk flying out to create a circle around the character, while another figure, My Lonesome Cowboy (1997), is a large naked male character with sperm flying out of his penis like a lasso. For more of Murakami’s works, see collections of his artworks such as DOB in the Strange Forest (Fushigi no mori no DOB kun) (1999), Superflat (2000), and Little Boy (2005), the catalogue of an exhibit of the same name that he organized in New York in 2005.

3. To be precise, Japan surrendered after another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. This one was called “Fat Man,” but Murakami focuses on “Little Boy” because the name symbolizes what he thinks of as postwar Japanese mentality.

4. I am quoting from his Japanese-English bilingual catalogue, Little Boy (2005). The original English translation is as follows, but this does not convey the meaning of Murakami’s writing in Japanese: Don’t touch me, let me be independent. We don’t need your U.N. or any other help. The image of Kaneda and the others waving a “Great Tokyo Empire Akira” flag, with none of the conviction that accompanied brandishments of the former imperial flag of Japan, seems to mock our current “Japanese Nation of Children.” (emphasis added) This translation is not correct. As Murakami’s writing in Japanese clearly suggests, he finds in Kaneda and others hope for a revival of the “vigor” that imperialist Japan used to possess in his view.

5. The official withdrawal took place in 1935.

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6. In the same public discussion, while not directly related to masculinist ˉ ta Seiichi praised men who gang-raped nationalism, former diet member O women as being “energetic” and hence “close to normal.” For details, see, for example, “Still, It’s Good That They Are Energetic. They Are Close to Normal, Aren’t They?” (Mada genki ga arukara ˉı. Seijō ni chikain ja nai ka) in Mainichi, “Those Who Gang-Rape Are Energetic” (Shūdan reipu suru hito genki aru) in Asahi, and “Those Who Gang-Rape Are Energetic” (Shūdan reipu suru hito genki aru) (the same title as the piece in Asahi) in Yomiuri, all dated 27 June 2003 (Mainichi Shimbun 2003: 31; Asahi Shimbun 2003: 38; ˉ ta and Mori were widely Yomiuri Shimbun 2003: 39). These remarks by O reported in the mass media, but when I tried to locate articles about them ˉ ta. This may be in the major newspapers, I could only find those about O due to self-censorship by these newspapers or other forms of censorship with regard to the former prime minister’s comments. However, there are sources available online about Mori’s comments – see, for example, Jinmin Shinpō (Jinmin Shinpō 2003).

7. In their booth, they created a room with a TV screen showing Mission/K. In their performance in the room, they did not dance, but simply stood, lay down, or sat on the floor (BT 2002: 156).

8. However, he later modified his theory to include both types of bodies – bodies with loose control over themselves and bodies trained in Western dance traditions – into the category of “children’s bodies,” as long as the latter make “wrong” use of their techniques (2005: 50–1).

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Index ˉ

Abe, Shinzo ˉ, 144, 158, 162, 196 Abraham, Nicholas, 184 “absent self” (“hi-zai no watashi”), 104, 192 adolescent, 2, 3, 8, 10–12, 20, 24, 45, 48, 51, 84, 86, 134, 181, 188 adult, 4, 11, 14–17, 20, 21, 26–8, 31, 33, 35, 37, 45, 66, 68, 77, 78, 88, 101, 102, 111, 125, 167, 168, 181, 183, 189, 195 Aeschylus, 97 aesthetics, 1–17, 20, 22–5, 28–30, 38, 40, 41, 45, 46, 48, 50, 51, 53–5, 58, 63–6, 68–71, 73, 74, 77, 78, 80, 87, 90, 92, 95, 97–101, 107, 108, 110–13, 116, 119, 121, 125, 127, 128, 132, 134, 136, 142, 145, 147, 152, 153, 157, 159–61, 169, 176–84, 187, 188, 194, 195, 197 affect, 54, 59, 63, 64, 86, 104, 131, 184 Agamemnon, 97, 98 Age of Women, 41 ahistorical, 5, 15, 23, 38, 55, 62, 65, 125, 136 Ahmed, Sara, 53 Aihara, Mika, 14 Ajase complex, 28 Akaeda, Kanako, 23, 87, 88, 181, 187 Akashi, So, 187 Akutagawa, Hiroshi, 99 alienation effects, 111, 155 allegory, 146 Allied Powers, 144 Allison, Anne, 28–9 alter ego, 66, 73, 82, 108, 189 amateur, 6, 7, 28, 138, 189 American War of Independence, 195 Americanization, 17, 153, 155–6, 163–5, 167, 169, 171, 174

anata, 142, 146, 189 androgyne (ryˉosei guyuˉ), 2, 4–7, 15–16, 65–6, 71–4, 78, 80, 82, 101, 108, 112–14, 116–19, 120, 141, 151, 183, 189, 190, 193–4 Angel House, 192 anime, 1, 2, 10, 51, 73, 108, 134, 159, 193, 201 Anju, Mira, 145, 146 Anna O, 39, 40 anxiety, 23, 104, 146, 200 Aoi Tori, 41, 42, 43 Aoike, Yasuko, 25, 66, 187 From Eroica with Love (Eroika yori ai o komete), 187 Aoyama, Tomoko, 7, 11, 12, 182 applied theatre, 63 Aran, Kei, 14 aristocrat, 116, 123, 127, 128, 131, 142, 143, 150–1 army, 43, 114, 134, 136, 140, 144, 156, 178 art, 2–4, 7, 9, 13, 16–18, 20, 26, 27, 41, 43, 44, 63, 66, 70, 100, 152, 153, 155, 156, 159–61, 172–4, 179, 180, 185, 201 Aryan, 135 Asama-Sanso ˉ Incident, 114, 193 Asia, 30, 42, 43, 56, 130, 140, 155, 156, 158, 162, 196–8 Aston, Elaine, 7, 63, 64, 182 Athena, 97–8 atomic bomb, 153, 157, 201 attachment, 26, 36, 37, 52, 62, 67, 89, 96 audience, 2, 7, 12, 14, 27, 28, 64, 81, 82, 84, 100, 103–5, 120, 134, 137, 139, 141, 143–50, 161, 162, 172, 174–6, 188, 193, 199–200

215

216

Index

Australian, 3, 10 autoerotic phase, 36 avant-garde, 199 Azuma, Sonoko, 82, 148, 189 Baden-Powell, Robert, 7 Bae, Catherine Yoonah, 72–3 ballet, 154, 160, 164, 165, 168, 170–1 Bardsley, Jan, 10 basso, 189, see also Ono, Natsume Bastille, 115, 120, 125, 127–9 biological, 28, 38, 74, 89, 92, 111, 119, 120, 124 Birmingham School, 178 birth, 5, 19, 21, 31, 36, 37, 40, 61, 94, 98, 121, 159 birth metaphor, 61 birth rate, 121, 183 childbirth, 31, 37, 120, 159 rebirth, 39, 51, 52, 113 bisexual, 80 Boys’ Love (BL), 6–7, 80–2, 88, 120, 179–81, 188–9, 197, 200 boarding school, 7, 8, 15, 68, 78, 82, 89–92, 95, 100, 109–11, 177, 188, 191 bodiless, 40, 53, 119, 121, 191 body, 2–6, 8, 11–16, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39–41, 51, 53–5, 61, 62, 65, 66, 72, 74, 77, 80–2, 86, 90, 98, 101–3, 105, 107–9, 111, 112, 114, 117, 119, 120, 124, 125, 129, 131, 132, 135, 147–50, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158, 160–78, 180–3, 185, 188, 202 bond, 9, 29, 52, 81, 82, 84, 86–8, 95–6 bourgeois, 22, 57, 119, 123 boy, 6, 7, 15–17, 21, 66, 68, 72–4, 78, 80–3, 88–90, 95, 101, 102, 105, 107–10, 112, 117, 120, 153, 155–60, 173, 176, 177, 179, 180, 183, 189, 191–3, 201 Boy Scouts, 7 Brecht, Bertolt, 185, 190 Brechtian theatre, 174

Breuer, Josef, 39 Britain, 42, see also UK Broadway, 138, 155, 162, 164, 166, 170–2 Brooks, Peter, 104 Buruma, Ian, 135 Butler, Judith, 62, 95, 96, 164–5 butch-femme, 67 camp, 4, 141, 147–8 capitalism, 20, 22 Captain Tsubasa, 81 carnal, 9, 67, 86–8 carnivalesque, 26, 27, 54 Carroll, Lewis, 50 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 50 castrated, 16, 153, 158 Charisse, Cyd, 170 child, 9, 10, 20, 25, 29, 30, 34, 37, 38, 41, 46, 77, 90, 94–6, 110, 115, 116, 124, 143, 151, 157–9, 167, 168, 182, 183, 186, 196, 201–2 “child-bearing machine”, 159 childhood, 3, 4, 20, 26, 28, 110 “children’s bodies” (“kodomo shintai”), 167, 168, 202 China, 13, 30, 43, 134, 184, 197 choreographer, 198 Christianity, 69, 70, 82, 92, 187, 197 chuˉsei, 193, 194 circularity, 38 citizen, 5, 13, 15, 21, 24, 25, 57, 63, 69, 111–13, 125, 134, 135, 150, 152, 193 citizenship, 15, 16, 112, 113, 134, 145, 197 class, 3, 8, 21, 24, 46–8, 54, 66, 67, 69, 70, 105, 120, 124, 125, 127–9, 135, 142, 143, 183, 194, 195, 198 Club des Citoyennes Republicaines, 194 Clytemnestra, 97–8 co-education, 5, 24, 72 Cohan, Steven, 170, 171

Index

collective, 40–2, 44, 46, 50, 53, 54, 62, 92, 124, 128, 144 collective self-defense, 144 colonialism, 6, 14, 140 comfort, 53, 56, 119, 123 comfort women (juˉgun ianfu), 43 commodification, 27, 41 communication, 40, 41, 45, 46, 183, 185 community, 2, 5–7, 28, 46, 48, 50, 56, 64, 66, 84, 89, 91, 177, 179, 180, 183, 198, 200 Conference for Asian Women and Theatre, 42–3 confinement, 20, 58, 152, 175–6 conscription duty, 134 constitution, 6, 112, 113, 144, 145, 157, 158, 181 consumerism, 22, 24, 115, 123, 127, 179, 193 de-contextualization, 148 corporeal, 31, 38 cute (kawaii), 1, 4, 11, 24, 25, 30 dance, 16, 17, 31, 33, 138, 149, 152–5, 160, 162–74, 176, 180, 184, 202 daughter, 21, 29, 30, 94–9, 182, 186 death, 16, 22, 25, 29, 32, 39, 40, 43, 45, 46, 48, 52, 68, 90, 91, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100, 107, 124, 125, 128–31, 135, 136, 138, 151, 157, 183 deconstruction, 130 de Gouges, Olympe, 194 deification, 125, 131 democracy, 155, 195, 201 Democratic Party of Japan (Nihon shakaito ˉ ), 114 Democratic Youth League of Japan (Nihon minshu seinen do ˉ mei), 123 Demy, Jacques, 16, 113, 115, 127, 147, 193, 194 Lady Oscar, 16, 113, 117, 129 Room in Town, A (Une chambre en ville), 129 Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg), 117 Diamond, Elin, 61, 174

217

disciplinary institution, 37 discursive sphere, 57 double prohibition, 95 Dolan, Jill, 175 Dollase, Hitomi Tsuchiya, 134, 187, 197 Donen, Stanley, 171 Do ˉ sei-ai, 8, 9, 67, 150 Driscoll, Catherine, 3, 7, 11, 178, 181 dubbing, 108, 153, 162, 169, 171, 172, 175 Duggan, Anne E., 128 Edo Period, 196 education, 21, 24, 69, 71–3, 183, 196 ego, 32, 62, 66, 73, 82, 92, 108, 184, 189 ego ideal, 184 Electra, 98 emotion, 4, 48, 72, 77, 81, 96, 124, 147 Emoto, Junko, 198 emperor, 21, 25, 30, 66, 131, 155, 196 Eng, David L., 62 Enomoto, Nariko, 189 Equal Employment Opportunity Act ˉ kikai kinto ˉ ho ˉ ), 6 (Danjo koyo equality, 6, 112, 115, 127, 150 eroticism, 15, 18, 26, 27, 65, 67, 88, 120, 132, 141, 150 escape, 30, 47, 48, 62, 68, 77, 82, 99, 153 Eto ˉ, Jun, 156 eternity, 3, 26, 38, 151 ethnicity, 13, 14, 54, 89 Eugenic Protection Law (Yuˉsei hogo ho ˉ ), 116 Euripides, 97 Europe, 56, 95, 104, 194, 197–8 everyday lives, 5, 46, 104, 179–80 excess, 4, 89, 104, 105, 146–7 exoticism, 89

218

Index

Fabre, Jan, 168 failure, 3, 17, 27, 99, 101, 146, 155, 162, 163, 165, 166, 169–71 fake, 4, 64 family, 21, 46, 89, 90, 92, 96, 98, 109, 120, 128, 131, 134, 143, 144, 156, 181, 196, 197, 201 family-state, 21, 196 fan, 71, 74, 81, 103, 107, 136, 138–41, 145–7, 149, 150, 191, 192, 198, 200 fan club, 103, 138, 141, 191–2 fandom, 10, 13, 189 fantasy, 31, 35, 45, 46, 54, 63, 64, 92, 97, 98, 175, 180, 201 fascist, 71, 135 Fat Man, 201 father, 29, 39, 40, 46, 89, 92, 96–8, 115, 124, 125, 132, 144, 145, 155, 156, 183 Female Learning World (Jogaku sekai), 183 female youth, 45, 46, 70, 83, 86, 88, 183, 188 female-female love, 68 female-female relationship, 67, 87 female-role player (musumeyaku), 139, 150, 198, 200–1 femininity, 74, 119, 129, 171, 189 feminism, 10, 41, 53, 70, 174, 178, 180, 182, 185, 189, 190, 197 feminist, 2, 6, 10, 11, 16, 23, 29, 30, 41–3, 53, 54, 61, 63, 69, 70, 99, 107, 114, 123, 130, 134, 149, 150, 174, 176, 177, 179, 185, 186, 194, 197, 199 feminist theatre movement, 41, 42 feminization, 72, 146 feudalism, 104 fiction, 4, 23, 115 film, 1, 15–18, 24, 55, 65, 66, 73, 77, 81, 103, 107–11, 115, 117–19, 127–9, 134, 136, 138, 141, 146, 147, 152, 153, 157, 161, 162, 164, 165, 169–74, 182, 192, 193, 195, 197–8

flatness, 156, 157, see also two-dimensional fluidity, 35, 88 Forrest, Alan, 195 Forsythe, William, 168 Foucault, Michel, 37 fragmentation, 155 France, 7, 16, 28, 56, 60, 78, 113, 116, 121, 124, 131, 143, 145, 148, 177, 191, 194–5 Fraser, Nancy, 58 freedom, 71, 112, 120, 158 French Revolution, 7, 16, 25, 113–15, 119, 121–5, 127, 128, 148, 150, 177, 178, 194, 195, 199 French revue, 107, 137 Freud, Sigmund, 29, 31–3, 36, 39, 62, 67 friendship, 8, 11, 23, 46, 48, 64, 67, 68, 72, 84, 86, 87, 187, 197 Fujimoto, Yukari, 121 Fukatsu, Eri, 193 Fukushima, Yoshiko, 13, 191 Fundamental Law of Education (Kyo ˉ iku kihon ho ˉ ), 71 furies, 98 Futaba, Ju ˉ zaburo ˉ, 117, 128, 147, 194 GEISAI, 159 gekiga, 195 gender, 1, 2, 4–7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 20–2, 24, 25, 28, 29, 41, 42, 44, 54, 57, 61, 65, 66, 70, 72–4, 78, 80, 82, 83, 87, 88, 92, 97, 108, 111, 114–17, 119, 124, 125, 128, 130, 134, 137, 139, 140, 145, 146, 149, 150, 152, 165, 166, 173, 177, 179, 180, 188–90, 192–5, 198, 200–1 “secondary genders”, 139, 198 Genet, Jean, 81 genital phase, 36 Germany, 7, 15, 78, 82, 107, 114, 135 gestus, 174 Giddens, Anthony, 87

Index

gimunajiumu, 100, 101, 187, 191 girl (sho ˉ jo), 1–18, 20–38, 40, 41, 44–56, 58, 59, 61–74, 76–8, 80–4, 86–92, 95, 97–101, 107–16, 119–21, 123–5, 127–9, 131–3, 136–8, 140–2, 148, 150, 152, 153, 159–61, 169, 172, 174–99, 201 aesthetic category of girls, 1, 3, 5, 13, 22 fictional category of girls, 10, 23, 27, 119–20 girl artist, 1, 2, 17, 64, 180 “girl of the nation” (“gunkoku sho ˉ jo”), 13 militant girl, 51 old girl, 55, 56, 61, 62, 64 social category of girls, 5, 10, 21, 183 Girl Guides, 7 girlhood, 3, 26, 28, 29, 31–3, 35, 36, 38, 45, 56, 59, 62, 109, 111, 125, 182, 184 girls’ aesthetics, 1–11, 13–17, 20, 22–5, 28–30, 38, 40, 41, 45, 46, 48, 51, 53–5, 58, 64–6, 68–71, 73, 74, 77, 78, 80, 90, 92, 95, 97–101, 107, 108, 110–13, 116, 119, 121, 125, 127, 128, 132, 136, 142, 152, 153, 160, 161, 169, 176–83, 187, 194, 195, 197 ˉ jo kurabu), 73, 132 Girls’ Club (Sho girls’ culture, 1–4, 6, 9, 11–13, 24, 25, 55, 71, 72, 74, 87, 113, 182, 186, 194, 199 “big bang of girls’ culture”, 6, 9, 24–5 Girls’ Friend (Sho ˉ jo no tomo), 71, 72, 132, 133, 187, 196 Girls’ Periodical (Sho ˉ jo gaho ˉ ), 68, 71 girls’ school, 4, 5, 8, 21–3, 37, 38, 47, 50, 66, 69–71, 81, 86, 138, 192 girls’ studies, 9, 11–13, 24, 186 Good Friend (Nakayoshi), 46, 187 ˉ sai “good wife, wise mother” (“ryo kenbo”), 5, 21, 22, 24, 68, 87, 130, 131, 138, 140, 145

219

Gothic-Lolita culture, 26 grassroots movement, 179 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (daito ˉ a kyo ˉ eiken), 155, 196, 197 grief, 62 Guerrilla Girls, 17 Habermas, Jürgen, 57 Hagen, Jean, 161, 170, 171–3 Hagio, Moto, 2, 15, 25, 65, 66, 77–82, 85, 89, 90, 92–5, 97, 99, 100, 111, 117, 182, 186–91, 193 After Us the Savage God (Zankoku na kami ga shihai suru), 95 Daughter of Iguana (Iguana no musume), 94, 95 Gymnasium in November (Juˉichi gatsu no gimunajiumu), 187 Half God (Hanshin), 191 Heart of Thomas, The (To ˉ ma no shinzo ˉ ), 15, 65, 66, 77–84, 88, 90, 92, 95, 96, 99–103, 107, 108, 117, 124, 187, 188, 191, 193 Marginal, 94 Snow Child (Yuki no ko), 25, 183 Han, Shinhee, 62 Hankyu ˉ Railway, 137 hare no shutsujin, 144, 145 Harootunian, Harry, 183 Harris, Geraldine, 7, 63, 182 Hartley, Barbara, 7, 11, 12, 182 Hasegawa, Kazuo, 148 Hasegawa, Shigure, 43, 185, 186 Women’s Arts (Nyonin geijutsu), 43 Hayashi, Fumiko, 197 hegemony, 16, 156, 157, 159, 167, 168, 173–4 Hello Kitty, 1 heroism, 131, 143 Hesse, Hermann, 81 Beneath the Wheel, 81 Demian, 81 Narcissus and Goldmund, 81

220

Index

heteronormative, 2, 4, 23, 53, 54, 66, 68, 80, 88, 111, 124, 140, 150, 165, 190 heterosexual, 2, 10, 11, 48, 51, 52, 56, 67, 68, 70, 71, 78, 80, 81, 83, 86, 88, 92, 103, 120, 137, 139–41, 148, 150, 188, 189, 191, 198–200 heterosocial environment, 5, 24, 72 Hidaka, Sho ˉko, 189 hierarchy, 70, 125, 127, 134, 139, 157, 159, 200 Higashi, Koyuki, 198 Hirata, Oriza, 191 Hiroshima, 153, 157 historical narrative, 114, 193 historicity, 146 historicization, 174 history, 10–12, 39, 62, 84, 86, 87, 103, 113, 114, 125, 128, 135, 148, 156, 167, 173, 183, 185, 199 Hitsujiya, Shirotama, 26, 28–31, 33–5, 44, 185–6 Hollywood, 161 homefront, 187 homoeroticism, 56, 66, 100, 103, 108, 120, 121, 191, 197, 200 homophobia, 80, 200 homosexuality, 5, 8, 9, 66, 67, 70, 78, 80, 84, 86–7, 92, 100, 189, 197–8 homosocial, 5, 9, 56, 72, 73, 78, 82, 86 Honda, Masuko, 10, 12, 21, 35, 45, 49, 51–3, 64, 69, 132, 182, 194 household, 21, 24, 29, 33, 34, 41, 47, 131, 137, 155, 183, 190, 193, 196 Housewive’s Friend (Shufu no tomo), 134 husband, 21, 25, 31, 34, 35, 41, 68, 97, 142, 183, 186, 190 hysteria, 39 Ichijo ˉ, Yukari, 25

identification, 28, 32, 33, 44, 54, 59, 66, 80, 81, 84, 88, 96, 105, 120, 121, 136, 139, 170, 173, 186, 188, 194 identity, 11, 17, 46, 53, 58, 62, 69, 74, 80, 83, 84, 88, 121, 123, 125, 127, 150, 153, 160, 161, 169, 184, 187, 200 ideology, 2, 5–7, 14, 15, 20, 22, 24, 82, 88, 96, 112, 113, 119, 121, 125, 130, 131, 134, 140, 145, 148, 149, 159, 179, 182, 196, 199 Igarashi, Yoshikuni, 119, 162 Iida, Yumiko, 136, 196 Ikeda, Riyoko, 2, 15, 25, 74, 113, 114, 118, 121–3, 126, 127, 129–31, 135, 189, 193, 195 Dear My Brother… (Onıˉsama e…), 189 Rose of Versailles, The (Berusaiyu no bara), 15, 16, 74, 113–16, 119–21, 123–5, 127, 134, 136, 137, 140, 141, 145–8, 150, 193–5, 199 Imada, Erika, 70 image, 1, 3–5, 15, 20, 22, 24–8, 31, 33, 35, 38–40, 44, 50, 56, 61, 62, 72, 78, 79, 83, 85, 89, 92, 112, 116, 117, 120, 121, 123, 126–9, 131, 132, 135, 136, 140, 141, 144, 147–9, 153, 158, 163, 171–3, 181, 185, 191, 193, 196, 197, 199, 201 imaginary, 4, 7, 15, 16, 24, 27, 35, 38–40, 51, 53–5, 64, 69, 72, 78, 80, 88, 100, 114, 121, 125, 136, 152, 156, 175, 178 imagination, 4, 5, 23, 30, 40, 54, 63, 68, 71–3, 99, 179, 186, 198–200 imagined community, 28, 50, 183 immateriality, 3, 15, 112, 119, 149, 177 immaturity, 11, 56, 156, 159 Imperial Household, 131, 155, 196

Index

Imperial Japanese Army, 134, 136 Imperial Rescript on Education (Kyo ˉ iku chokugo), 72, 196 imperialism, 6, 14, 140, 155 Inagaki, Taruho, 81 incestuous desire, 98, 184 inner monologue, 89, 91, 94, 101, 107, 130, 190 innocence, 2, 26, 98, 181 International Anti-War Day, 195 International Women’s Year, 178 intimacy, 9, 78, 86–8, 97, 100 Iphigenia, 98 Iraq Wars, 157, 181 Irigaray, Luce, 61 isolation, 7, 46–8, 88, 180 Itsuwa, Mayumi, 33 Girl (Sho ˉ jo), 33 Ivy, Marilyn, 158 Jacobs, Amber, 97, 98 Japan, 2, 4–6, 8–17, 20–2, 24–30, 35, 43–5, 55, 56, 67, 69–71, 81, 84, 86, 87, 92, 94, 99–104, 107, 109, 112–14, 116, 123, 124, 130–2, 134–7, 140, 144, 145, 148, 152, 153, 155–62, 164, 167, 168, 171, 173, 177, 178, 180–9, 192–8, 201 Japan-US Security Treaty, 114, 156, 162 Japanese Communist Party (Nihon ˉ santo ˉ ), 114, 123, 127 kyo Japan Romantic School (Nihon ro ˉ manha), 135, 136 Japanese Society for Prevention of Suicide (Nihon jisatsu yobo ˉ gakkai), 185 Johnny & Associates, 103 jouissance, 38 JUNE, 189, 194, 202 kabuki, 148, 183, 197 Kamakura City, 46, 49, 81, 186 Kano ˉ, Mikiyo, 179

221

Kanai, Keiko, 61 Kaneda, Junko, 188 Kaneko, Shuˉsuke, 15, 65, 107–11 Summer Vacation 1999 (1999 nen no natsuyasumi), 15, 65, 107, 109, 141, 192 Kasugano, Yachiyo, 138 KATHY, 16, 17, 152–5, 159–76, 180 KATHY Cruises in NADiff, 153, 172 Mission/K, 153–5, 159, 163, 173, 182, 202 Kawabata, Yasunari, 71 Kawaguchi, Ken’ya, 192 Kawamura, Kunimitsu, 183, 199 Kawasaki, Kenko, 12, 145, 182, 199–200 Kegawa-zoku, 198 Kelly, Gene, 161, 163, 169, 170, 172, 173 Kelly, Gene and Donen, Stanley Singin’ in the Rain, 17, 152, 153, 161, 162, 169, 171, 173, 175; Dancing Cavalier, The, 161, 170–2, 175; “Good Morning”, 152, 162, 163, 171, 173–4; “Would You”, 170–3 Kihara, Toshie, 25, 66, 187, 188, 190, 197 Mari and Shingo (Mari to Shingo), 187 Kiki, Theatre Company (Gekidan Kiki), 44 Kino, Hana, 43 Kinsella, Sharon, 181, 195 Kisaragi, Koharu, 15, 40–6, 51, 184–6 DOLL, 14, 15, 20, 25, 26, 40–2, 44–51, 53, 164, 175, 178 MORAL, 185 Kishi, Nobusuke, 162 Kishida, Rio, 15, 29, 30, 41–4, 65, 107, 110, 111, 184, 192 Kishida Rio Avant-Garde Festival, 192 Lear, 44, 65

222

Index

Kishida, Rio – Continued Summer Vacation 1999 (1999 nen no natsuyasumi), 15, 65, 107, 109, 141, 192 Kitagawa, Johnny, 191 kitsch, 105 Kobayashi, Ichizo ˉ , 137, 138, 140, 199 Kobayashi, Yoshinori, 113 Discourse on War (Senso ˉ ron), 193 Koizumi, Jun’ichiro ˉ , 158, 196 Kojiki, 136 Kojima, Nobuo, 201 kokutai, 131, 134–6, 155, 159, 196 Konno, Oyuki, 189 Virgin Mary Is Watching (Maria sama ga miteru), 189 Konno, Yu ˉichi, 182 Korea, 43, 196 Korean, 13, 14, 182, 196 zainichi Korean, 182 Kosawa, Heisaku, 28 Koyama, Shizuko, 182 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 67 Kristeva, Julia, 38, 97 Kumota, Haruko, 189 Kurata, Jun, 65, 99–103, 107–8 labor, 20, 41, 70, 130, 159 Lacan, Jacques, 29, 184 language, 8, 12, 38, 49, 69, 100–2, 136, 184, 189, 190, 195 law, 6, 71, 98, 116, 193 League of Nations, 158 leftist, 30, 107, 127, 178 New Left, 16, 18, 113–15, 119, 123, 124, 127, 129, 131, 135, 150, 178, 193 Old Left, 114 lesbian, 8, 9, 84, 86, 121, 181, 190, 192, 198, 200 ˉ ), 144 Liberal Democratic Party (Jiminto lightness, 3, 8 liminality, 3, 12, 37 linguistic construct, 103 Little Boy, 16, 17, 153, 155–60, 173, 176, 180, 189, 201

Little Girls, 16, 17, 152, 174, 176, 180, 189, 201 little theatre movement, 99, 100, 184 “living crypt”, 40 Longinotto, Kim, and Williams, Jano, 198 Dream Girls, 198 loss, 31, 32, 39, 40, 62, 88–90, 95, 96, 104, 111, 146, 184, 201 love, 4, 6–9, 15, 39, 45, 48, 52, 54–6, 63, 67, 68, 70, 78–84, 86–8, 90–2, 94–9, 110, 111, 116, 119–21, 128, 143, 149, 150, 177, 179, 184, 187, 194, 200 loved object, 31, 37, 40, 62, 95–6 Mackie, Vera, 197 magazine, 5–7, 10, 22–5, 27, 28, 31, 36, 41, 50, 66, 71–4, 78, 84, 88, 132–4, 141, 160, 183, 187 male-female love (nyoshoku), 67 male-male love (nanshoku, also danshoku), 67, 80, 189 male-role player (otokoyaku), 5, 74, 139, 141, 150, 198, 200–1 Manchukuo, 158 manga, 1, 2, 6–8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 24, 25, 31, 36, 51, 59, 65, 66, 73, 74, 77, 78, 80–4, 88, 91, 94, 95, 100–3, 105, 107, 108, 110, 113–17, 119–23, 125, 127–9, 134, 135, 137, 140–3, 145–8, 150, 157, 159, 179, 181–3, 186–91, 193–5, 197, 200 marginalization, 6, 41, 63 Marie Antoinette, 114 marriage, 31, 32, 52, 68, 74, 89, 120, 138, 142, 186, 196, 200 Marotti, William, 193 Martin, Carol, 154, 160, 174 martyrdom, 127 masculinity, 129, 130, 143 materiality, 3, 19, 20, 25, 56, 64, 66, 80, 96, 99, 101, 103, 108, 112, 117, 119, 120, 125, 175

Index

materialization, 28, 65, 118–19 maternal, 36, 38, 61, 89, 96, 119, 142 matricide, 88, 90, 93–5, 97–9 Matsui, Midori, 189 maturity, 55, 108, 156, 157, 201 McLelland, Mark, 67 Meiji government, 5 Period, 66, 182 Meiji Women’s School (Meiji jogakko ˉ ), 69, 70 McKnight, Anne, 193, 195 melancholia, 28, 29, 31–3, 56, 62, 95, 99, 184 melodrama, 16, 103–5, 137, 146–8 method acting, 103 Metis, 97, 98 Miki, Takeo, 196 military, 21, 48, 113, 114, 124, 130, 134, 135, 142, 144, 156, 157, 162, 186, 195–6 Miller, Laura, 10 mimesis, 61, 184 Mitchell, Margaret, 212 Gone with the Wind, 212 Mitchell, Sally, 3 Mishima, Yukio and Terayama, Shu ˉji, 18–20 “Can Eros Be the Basis of Resistance?” (Erosu wa teikˉo ˉ no kyoten to nari uru ka?), 18 Mishima, Yukio, 18–20, 81, 131, 197 misogyny, 95–9, 177 mission school, 69, 70, 92, 187, 189 Miyadai, Shinji, 181 Miyajima, Eri, 192 Mizoguchi, Akiko, 80, 84, 121 Mizuhara, Rie, 193 Mizushiro, Setona, 189 modern, 3–10, 12, 14, 20, 28, 29, 37, 38, 47, 50, 67, 69, 82, 86–9, 92, 97, 99, 101, 104, 135, 138, 155, 156, 177, 181, 183, 185, 187, 190, 196–7 postmodern, 146, 147, 168 pre-modern, 20, 199

223

modernity, 5, 12, 145, 155, 183, 185, 199 American capitalist modernity, 155 modernization, 20, 45, 155, 156, 185, 196 moga, 187 monarchy, 114, 130 Mori, Mari, 50 Mori, Naoko, 81, 189 Mori, Tsuneo, 123, 195 Mori, Yoshiro ˉ, 159 mother, 3–5, 21, 22, 24, 29, 31, 34, 36–9, 47, 51, 56, 57, 59, 61, 66, 68, 82, 87, 89, 90, 92, 94–9, 107, 116, 120, 121, 130, 131, 134, 135, 138, 140, 142, 143, 145, 146, 151, 155, 156, 182, 186, 190, 191, 194, 201 Mother Goose rhymes, 107 mother-daughter relationship, 95, 96 motherhood, 4, 5, 16, 23, 25, 35, 42, 67, 95, 97–9, 116, 119, 134, 186 mourning, 28, 29, 31, 62 Murakami, Takashi, 16, 17, 153, 156–60, 167, 168, 173, 174, 176, 180, 201 murder, 29–32, 34, 37, 98, 119, 123, 129, 195 musical, 12, 17, 71, 113, 117, 137, 162, 166, 172, 174, 193 myth, 35, 61, 97, 98, 119, 175 Nabokov, Vladimir, 26 Nagai, Ai, 41, 43 Nagaike, Kazumi, 81, 188, 189 Nagasaki, 201 Nagasawa, Satoru, 189 Virgin Mary Is Watching (Maria sama ga miteru), 189 Nagata, Hiroko, 123, 129, 195 Naito ˉ, Mao, 27 Nakahara, Jun’ichi, 74, 132, 133

224

Index

Nakamori, Akio, 59 Nakamura, Asumiko, 187, 189 Nakasone, Yasuhiro, 196 narcissism, 22, 36, 37, 40 nation, 5, 8, 12–4, 16, 21, 24, 30, 132, 134–6, 140, 144, 145, 148, 151, 152, 155, 158, 161, 162, 178, 182, 183, 195–7, 200–1 nationalism, 12–6, 22, 112, 131–2, 134–5, 140, 142–8, 153, 158, 160, 167, 174, 197, 202 Nazi, 197 neoliberal society, 6 Nibroll, 44, 167 Niigata, 23 Nishido ˉ, Kojin, 44 Nishimura, Hiroko, 45, 185 Nitta, Yu ˉka, 189 Nobi, Nobita, 189 Noda, Hideki, 13, 191 Half God (Hanshin), 191 noh, 18, 29 NOISE, 2, 14, 15, 20, 25, 40, 44, 175, 178 Nomizo, Naoko, 50, 71 Non-narrative graphics, 77, 78, 100, 124, 147 nostalgia, 2, 26, 28, 30, 109, 137, 153 Nostradamus, 110 novel, 1, 3, 5, 12, 26, 50, 59, 68, 70–3, 80, 81, 100, 189, 191, 194, 197, 201 Noyes, Betty, 170, 172–3 obaˉchan, 59 obedience, 138, 165, 170–2 objectification, 80, 81 Occupation (American, US), 5, 6, 24, 71, 144, 155–7, 161, 164, 195 O’Connor, Donald, 161, 163 Oedipus complex, 29 Oguma, Eiji, 114, 123, 131, 195–6 ˉ izumi Salon, 186 O Okada, Toshiki, 191 Okada, Yukiko, 45, 185

Olalquiaga, Celeste, 146, 200 omae, 142, 146 ome, 67, 68, 187 Ong, Keng Sen, 15, 29, 30, 107, 184 Dreamtime in Morishita Studios, 29, 184 Lear, 44, 65 Ono, Natsume, 189, see also basso Ophelia, 35 oppression, 29, 54, 55, 149 Orestes, 97–8 Osaki, Midori, 71 Drifting in the World of the Seventh Sense (Dainana kankai hˉokˉo), 71 ˉ shima, Yumiko, 25, 66 O Oshiyama, Michiko, 125 ˉ ta, Seiichi, 202 O ˉ takara, Tomoko, 192 O otaku, 16, 156, 189, 201 otherness, 89, 102 ˉ tomo, Katsuhiro, 157 O Akira, 157, 158, 201 ˉ tsuka, Eiji, 6, 24, 45, 59, 123 O pacifism, 130 panel, 13, 77–9, 85, 92 parody, 17, 153, 154, 160–2, 165, 172, 173, 184, 189, 198 parthenogenesis, 97, 98 pathology, 62 patriarch, 29, 30, 98, 156 peacekeeping operations, 113 pedophiliac desire, 26 pension, 24, 159, 183 performance, 1, 2, 4, 9, 12–17, 20, 24–8, 36, 40, 41, 44, 65, 101, 105– 7, 111, 127, 137–9, 141, 146, 147, 149, 152, 153, 155, 159, 160, 163, 165, 167, 171–7, 180, 182, 184–6, 191, 192, 198, 200, 202 performance studies, 12, 13, 177 performance theory, 13 performative, 17, 100, 160, 164, 165, 167, 175 performativity, 164, 165 permanent present, 40

Index

personal sphere, 112 phallic, 33, 34, 37, 188 Phelan, Peggy, 39 Pink Triangle, 192 Plato, 61 play, 40, 42–5, 48, 51, 53, 99, 102, 104, 140, 148, 185, 186, 190–1, 199 Playboy, 27 playwright, 29, 40, 43, 65, 107 pleasure, 2, 9, 35, 38, 63, 67, 70, 81, 86, 115, 119, 124, 129, 152, 188 pleasure quarters, 70 politics, 2, 7, 12, 17, 28, 30, 53, 63, 70, 115, 123, 124, 134, 156, 158, 178–80, 184, 189, 194 polyphony, 78 positionality, 42 power, 1, 7, 30, 32, 33, 37, 42, 51, 54, 100, 101, 128, 129, 144, 145, 155–7, 162, 164, 169, 173, 174, 190, 195, 196, 200–1 disciplinary power, 37 girl power, 7 political power of aesthetics, 145 pregnancy, 17–19, 39, 40, 61, 96, 159, 182 “phantom pregnancy”, 39 prime minister, 144, 145, 158, 159, 162, 196, 202 private sphere, 21, 23 Prock, Stephen, 170, 102 productivity, 63 prohibition, 95, 96 propaganda, 112 prostitution, 181, 183 psychoanalysis, 28, 29, 39 pure love (jun’ai), 88, 120 purity, 2, 199 queer, 9, 16, 80, 81, 121, 190 race, 54, 89, 102 rape, 42, 83, 85, 88, 90–2, 95, 105, 189 readers’ column, 5, 22, 183

225

realism, 99, 100, 103, 104, 108, 185, 190, 191, 199 reality, 3, 4, 6, 7, 21–4, 27, 30, 35, 40, 45, 48, 53, 54, 56, 57, 63, 64, 68, 69, 72, 78, 80, 92, 99, 112, 113, 117, 125, 129, 132, 136, 146, 152, 153, 161, 170, 174–80, 182, 183, 188, 190, 196, 199 Red Army Faction, 114 refuge, 136, 155 relationality, 104 religion, 8, 70, 104 representation, 2–4, 10, 12, 28, 61, 102, 113, 128, 149, 150, 155, 189 reproduction, 19, 38, 51, 80, 88, 97, 98, 193 auto-reproductive being, 51 Reynolds, Debbie, 152, 161, 163, 169–73 Ribbon (Ribon), 73, 187 Rich, Adrienne, 9, 84, 86, 190 Riefenstahl, Leni, 135 rightwing, 131 Robertson, Jennifer, 12, 139, 140, 195, 198 Rococo, 25 romance, 2, 6, 66, 71, 80, 81, 88, 103, 137, 139, 141, 148, 188, 191, 194, 199 romantic love, 9, 70, 87, 121 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 124, 194 Julie, or the New Héloïse (La Nouvelle Héloïse), 194 S relationship, 9, 67, 68, 70, 71, 78, 86–8 esu, 67 sadistic desire, 51 Sailor Moon, 1 Saito ˉ, Kumiko, 189 Saito ˉ, Minako, 134 Saito ˉ, Tamaki, 90, 189 Saito ˉ, Yukio, 185 Sakurai, Keisuke, 167, 168

226

Index

same-sex, 6, 8–9, 15, 48, 65–6, 78, 80–1, 84, 87–8, 120, 132, 140–1, 150, 187, 197, 199 sameness, 98 samurai, 66 sanity, 36 Sanrio, 1 Sappho, 68 Sasaki, Nozomu, 192 Sato ˉ, Barbara, 22 Sato ˉ, Fumika, 195 Sato ˉ, Masaki, 80 schoolgirl (jogakusei), 5, 9, 15, 21, 22, 24, 44, 47, 56, 59, 66–70, 73, 77, 87, 88, 112, 181, 183, 187 “season of politics”, 115, 178 Sedgwick, Eve, 82 self-abasement, 32 Self-Defense Forces (Jieitai), 6, 113, 135, 144, 181, 195, 199 Seitˉo, 23 semiotic, 38, 87, 184 semiotics, 87, 184 Senda, Akihiko, 184 sex, 3, 10, 24, 28, 43, 68, 72–4, 83, 89, 90, 95, 97, 107, 111, 112, 115, 117, 120–2, 142, 145, 181, 183, 187, 193–4 sexology, 67, 86 sexuality, 4, 9, 12, 13, 15, 16, 22, 25, 28, 29, 65–7, 77, 78, 80, 88, 92, 96, 97, 111, 114, 116, 121, 125, 137, 149, 150, 165, 177, 180, 181, 186, 188–90, 197, 199–200 Shakespeare, William, 15, 29 King Lear, 15, 29 Shamoon, Deborah, 10, 11, 86–8, 193–4 Sho ˉ chiku Revue, 140 shelter, 55, 56, 180 Shimura, Takako, 81 Blue Flower (Aoi hana), 81 shingeki, 99, 100, 102–4, 185, 190, 199 Shiomura, Ayaka, 159

Shiseido, 56, 57, 61, 115, 129, 186 Shˉonen-ai, 78, 80, 81, 84, 88, 100, 108, 120, 181, 197, 200 sign, 56, 65, 83, 99, 104, 105, 107, 116, 117, 147, 149, 150, 184, 190 signified, 4, 16, 104, 146, 148, 184 signifier, 104, 105, 107, 146, 148, 150 Silverman, Kaja, 170, 175 Sino-Japanese War, 132 sisterhood, 67, 87, 196–7 slash, 81 Social Democratic Party of Japan (Nihon shakaitˉo), 114 soldier, 112–16, 119, 124, 128–31, 134–6, 142, 143, 148, 151 solidarity, 53, 190 son, 29, 96, 98 Sophocles, 97 space, 2–5, 7–9, 11, 14–20, 22–6, 28, 30, 33, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 44, 47, 51, 53–9, 61–5, 69, 70, 77, 78, 84, 87, 88, 90, 109, 111, 112, 121, 123–5, 127, 131, 132, 134, 147–9, 151–3, 157, 160, 161, 165, 172–80, 182 closed space, 7, 17, 23, 54, 65, 70, 90, 112, 176, 177, 180 heteroglossic space, 56 “unusual space” (“hi-nichijˉo kuˉkan”), 131 spiritual, 86–8, 96, 97, 119, 131 star pair (shuen konbi), 150, 200, 201 Stickland, Leonie R., 13, 198 Studio Life, 15, 65, 99–110, 147, 191–2 subaltern counterpublics, 58 subculture, 7, 24, 156, 193, 201 subjectivity, 11, 70, 77, 104, 111, 123 suffering, 45, 94, 120, 125, 135, 197 suffrage, 6, 134, 181 suicide, 2, 15, 23, 25, 32, 40, 44–6, 48, 51, 68, 82, 90, 110, 120, 140, 178, 185, 186, 192

Index

double suicide, 23, 140 group suicide, 15, 40, 44–6, 48, 178, 185–6 Sunagawa, Katsuhiko, 67 Superflat, 156, 157, 159, 173, 201, see also two-dimensional surrogate, 57, 88, 112 surveillance, 5, 23, 144, 153, 155, 160, 163, 165, 174–6, 180 Suzuki, Akihiro, 159 Suzuki, Michiko, 187 symbol, 69, 92, 125, 146, 193 symbolic, 30, 34, 38, 125, 145, 146, 184 syntax, 38 Taisho ˉ Era, 199 Taiwan, 196 Takahara, Eiri, 12, 71 Takahashi, Macoto, 74, 76 Takano, Fumiko, 59 Tanabe Tsuru (Tanabe no Tsuru), 59 Takarazuka, 2, 6, 12–4, 16, 71, 72, 74, 105–7, 113, 135–43, 145–51, 192, 193, 198–201 Takarazuka City, 137 Takarazuka Grand Theatre (Takarazuka dai gekijˉo), 137 Takarazuka Maidens (Takarazuka Otome), 138 Takarazuka Music School (Takarazuka ongaku gakkˉo), 138, 139, 198 Takarazuka Revue (Takarazuka kagekidan), 2, 6, 12–4, 16, 71, 72, 74, 105, 113, 135–7, 140, 193, 200; Wind in the Dawn: The Challenge of Shirasu Jirˉo, Samurai Gentleman (Reimei no kaze: samurai jentoruman Shirasu Jirˉo no chˉosen), 200; Gone with the Wind (Kaze to tomo ni sarinu), 137, 145, 200; Navy (Kaigun), 199; Takarasiennes (Takarajen’nu), 137–41, 145, 149, 150, 198–9

227

Takayama, Hideo, 117 Takayama, Minami, 192 Takemiya, Keiko, 25, 66, 78, 186, 187, 190–1 Poem of Wind and Trees (Kaze to ki no uta), 78, 190, 191 Takemura, Kazuko, 95–7, 99 talking cure, 39 Tanaka, Mitsu, 123, 131, 185 tanbi, 100 tantˉo, 103, 191 teenager, 3, 45, 46, 101, 178 temporality, 19, 20, 23, 26, 38–40, 54–6, 61, 62, 174 Tenjo ˉ Sajiki, 182 Terayama, Shu ˉji, 18–20, 182 Tezuka, Osamu, 73–5, 193 Princess Knight (Ribon no kishi), 73, 75 theatre, 13–5, 18, 27, 40–5, 61, 63, 65, 66, 73, 99–101, 103–5, 107, 135, 137–41, 146, 174, 175, 182–5, 190–3, 197–200 Thompson, James, 7, 63, 64 Thorn, Matt, 189 three-dimensional, 13, 15, 25, 64, 65, 101, 147, 186, 194 time, 4, 5, 7–9, 14–16, 18–20, 22–6, 28, 29, 32, 33, 35–8, 41, 45, 49–51, 55, 59–61, 63, 65, 67, 68, 70–2, 74, 83, 102, 104, 107–11, 113–16, 119–21, 124, 125, 127, 129, 132, 138–40, 146, 148, 158, 161, 163, 171, 177, 178, 182–4, 186, 194–6, 199 cyclical time, 110 developmental time, 59–61, 63 linear time, 38 a-temporal maternal time, 38 Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, 159 Tokyo Tama Lifeline (Tokyo Tama inochi no denwa), 185 Tonooka, Naomi, 43, 53, 184–5 Torok, Maria, 184 tradition, 24, 101, 132, 137, 145, 153, 160, 164, 168, 174, 197, 202

228

Index

transgressive desire, 139, 180 transparency, 102, 104 trauma, 29, 39, 83, 95, 111 Trojan War, 97 two-dimensional, 4, 13, 15, 25, 27, 66, 77, 101, 103, 105, 107, 108, 117, 134, 147–8, 149, 152, 156–7, 159, 175–6, 180, 186, 191, 194, 198, 200, see also Superflat Uchino, Tadashi, 101–4, 185, 192 Ueda, Shinji, 145, 146, 148, 150 Ueno, Chizuko, 129, 130, 195, 197 UK, 28, see also Britain ukiyo-e, 157 underground (angura), 47, 141, 199 uniformity, 104 uniqueness, 168, 169, 183 United Nations, 14, 178 United Red Army (Rengˉo sekigun), also URA, 114, 115, 119, 123, 129, 178, 193, 195 United States of America, 16, 17, 28, 56, 100, 153, 157, 164, 184, 192 unity, 161, 162, 170–1 Uno, Akira, also Uno, Aquirax, 182 Ushio (Tide), 18 “utopian performative”, 175 Venice Biennale, 55 vicious circle, 97, 99 Victorian, 25 Vietnam War, 114, 156 violence, 29–32, 34, 36, 42, 68, 95, 130, 135, 193 virginity, 5, 23, 70, 83, 89, 92 Visconti, Luchino, 81, 197 Damned, The (La caduta degli Dei), 197 voice, 6, 22, 51, 63, 100, 102, 108, 111, 115, 123, 124, 127, 139, 153, 161–5, 169–73, 175, 179, 180, 190–3 voice actor, 108, 193

war, 5, 24, 43, 97, 98, 112, 114, 130–2, 134–6, 144, 153, 155–8, 181, 186, 187, 193, 195–7 Watanabe, Eri, 41–3, 184 Watanabe, Shu ˉko, 183 water, 22, 35, 89, 193 wedding, 30–2, 36, 37, 52, 142 Weekly Girls’ Comics (Shuˉkan shˉojo komikku), 66 Weekly Margaret (Shuˉkan ma ˉgaretto), 114 weight, 62, 112, 135, 148 Welker, James, 67, 84 West, 1–3, 8, 11, 12, 16, 26, 28–29, 35, 44–5, 67–71, 74, 78, 92, 94, 88, 100–4, 135–8, 142, 153–6, 159–160, 164, 167–8, 171, 183, 185, 187, 19001, 195, 197, 199, 202 westernization, 153, 155, 156 wifehood, 4, 5, 23 wing, 14, 49, 83, 91, 92, 131 Wollen, Peter, 162, 170 womanhood, 3, 4, 6, 14, 15, 21, 22, 24, 28–30, 35, 36, 47, 65–7, 86, 132, 145, 150, 152, 175–7, 179, 182 womb, 19, 20, 38–40, 61, 62, 184 imaginary womb, 39, 40 womb-theatre, 61 women’s liberation movement, 16, 42, 77, 113, 114, 116, 119, 121, 123, 135, 150, 178, 179, 184, 195 World War II, 5, 43, 131, 135, 153, 155–6 Yagawa, Sumiko, 8, 49–51, 54, 175 “Great March Forward of All Girls Who Support the Eternal Girl, The” (“Fumetsu no shˉojo o yo ˉ ritsu suru shˉojo tachi no daikˉoshin”), 49 Yamagishi, Ryo ˉ ko, 25, 66, 187, 188, 189, 190

Index

Emperor of the Land of the Rising Sun (Hi izuru tokoro no tenshi), 187, 188, 190 Two in the White Room (Shiroi heya no futari), 189 Yamanashi, Makiko, 12, 117, 149 Yamato, Waki, 25 Yanagi, Miwa, 2, 14, 15, 20, 28, 54–6, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64 Birthday Party, 55 Fairy Tale, 54, 55 Gloria & Léon, 56, 186 Granddaughters, 14, 15, 20, 28, 54, 56–64, 186 Windswept Women: The Old Girls’ Troupe, 55, 61 Yanagisawa, Hakuo, 159 Yanaihara, Mikuni, 44 yaoi, 80, 81, 188, 189, 191 Yasˉo, 182 Yasuda, Yoju ˉro ˉ , 136 Yasukuni Shrine, 131, 158 Year 24 Group (Nijuˉyo nen gumi), 25, 65, 66, 77, 78, 80, 81, 100, 134, 183, 188–90

229

Yu ˉka, Kanno, 86, 87 Yoneda, Ko ˉ, 189 Yonezawa, Yoshihiro, 77 Yoshida, Akimi, 189 Cherry Orchard (Sakura no sono), 189 Yoshimoto, Takaaki, 188, 189 Yoshinaga, Fumi, 189, 190 Yoshiya, Nobuko, 68, 70, 81, 87, 88, 132, 186–7 Flower Tales (Hana monogatari), 68–71, 81, 87, 132 “To Become a Kernel of Wheat” (“Hitotsubu no mugi to mo naran”), 196 YUBIWA Hotel, 2, 14, 15, 20, 26–32, 35, 41, 43, 44, 47, 50, 51, 61, 62, 65, 107, 185–6 Candies Girlish Hardcore, 186 Passion (Jˉonetsu) 185, 194 Lear, 14, 15, 20, 26, 28–32, 34, 35, 37–40, 44, 47, 51, 61, 62, 107 Zeus, 98 Zweig, Stefan, 193