Acknowledgments
Chapter 3
Literature review
Although yaoi doujinshi spring directly from Japanese cultural phenomenon that have received increased academic attention in recent years— anime and manga —surprisingly little has been written about them specifically. The small pool of English-language literature studying yaoi / shonen ai as a genre 16 is almost exclusively focused one of three subjects: mainstream manga and anime . real-life queer studies, or the American ‘mirror’ community of boy-love fans. The material available touches upon doujinshi only as it relates to these categories, and often only in brief, making it difficult to get an absolutely clear picture of the field—particularly of the details.
However, considering the obscurity and semi-underground nature of the amateur comics subculture, it seems fortuitous that there is any documentation of it in English at all. Examinations of mainstream manga and even American fanfiction have produced theories that are also valid when applied to yaoi doujinshi . and contrasting the experiences of desire between real same-sex people with the images portrayed in mass media gives insight into the boundaries of the fantasy. So while the accessible literature is scant and focused mainly on issues to which doujinshi are only peripheral, what resources do exist are still quite valuable.
The materials containing information on doujinshi (and the topics related to it) range from Internet articles written by the fans themselves to professionally published anthropological studies. I have gathered some of the most coherent summaries of the Internet discourse about slash and yaoi fanfiction, books about factual Japanese homosexuality in the past and the present, and articles concerning narrative in Japanese media. The texts described below have particularly informed my analysis of the doujinshi used in this thesis.
A great many of the existing theories about why young Japanese women like to read and write about young men in relationships have to do with the cultural expectations and pressures they deal with day to day. Therefore understanding the fundamental constructions of the Japanese cultural milieu is essential; for example, one has to know how and why collectivism operates in Japanese society before its influence can be seen in the way girls suppress their own personal sexuality only to express it through doujinshi (they subordinate their own personal and potentially disruptive sexual desires in order to fit in.) The Japanese Today: Change and Continuity is a useful reference to look up generalized cultural trends and get an overall picture of some aspects of Japanese life. The chapter on women’s position in society and how they are treated by men is especially helpful in extrapolating why some doujinshi fantasy themes, such as the extremely sensitive, caring and domestic male, are so common.
However, there are certain problems with this text on the basis that it does oversimplify, and occasionally offers an anachronistic, Orientalist viewpoint. The sentence “Japanese men are blatantly male chauvinists and women seem shamefully exploited and suppressed” seems to be overstated, for instance, though from my personal experience it also has a certain ring of truth; for that reason I attempt to interpret this resource with discretion and utilize it mostly to corroborate previously gained university knowledge. I feel justified in claiming it as a legitimate reference because frequently in the name of intercultural education simplifications are made; there will always be many exceptions to the “rules” about another society, but generalized knowledge is a necessary baseline from which to start. Takie Sugiyama Lebra’s Japanese Patterns of Behavior is a more nuanced, but also much more academic, resource which I feel compelled to also mention here.
Any study of doujinshi necessitates basic knowledge and commentary on its parent media, particularly manga . and Frederik L. Shodt has long been considered an authority on Japanese comics. His two books, Manga! Manga. The World of Japanese Comics and Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga both offer insight onto subjects such as the genesis and current status of the comics publishing industry, common story themes and visual conventions of specific genres, and social issues surrounding the medium. Shodt uses examples of classic manga to illustrate his points, and particularly in Dreamland analyzes individual publications for their unique characteristics and cultural implications. Shojo manga stylistic innovations, like large dewy eyes and androgyny, are often reflected in yaoi doujinshi, as are narrative conventions such as the tendency for storylines to focus on interpersonal relationships.
Dreamland also has a short section titled “The Dojinshi World” which gives an outline of doujinshi convention life, genres, and mentions such prominent gatherings as Super Comic City and Komiketto. Also, the history, organization and mood of these conventions are discussed briefly. Perhaps the most valuable parts of the article are the perspectives offered by the author’s interviews with people involved in the administration of Komiketto, which give ideas about why doujinshi are a popular hobby and why there are so many female fans involved with it. Schodt also provides here some important statistical data, such as the estimated total number of doujinshi circles in Japan and the amount of money circulated around conventions like Komiketto, helping to establish the doujinshi subculture as a substantial population. Unfortunately all the facts in the book are slightly dated, as it was published in 1996, but this too can offer insight into the way doujinshi culture has evolved in the last decade when compared with more recent sources.
Sharon Kinsella’s Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society is another important and often-cited piece of literature in the field of manga studies, particularly where it intersects with doujinshi . Like Schodt, Kinsella summarizes many of the manga business’ publishing mechanics and details the long history of illustration in Japan, but the thesis of her book concerns the relationship between editors and artists and how it has changed over time. In the course of discussing the for-profit industry’s problematic relationship with artistic creativity, she explains how the underground comic subculture originated as a way for marginalized mangaka to express their “unusable” ideas, and then evolved into the doujinshi subculture dominated almost entirely by amateur hobbyists. The second half of the chapter on amateur comics goes on to detail how “the otaku panic” and features of the underground, like lolicom 17 , went on to effect the mainstream industry.
There has been a certain amount of criticism leveled at this book in the anime / manga fan community, particularly over Kinsella’s application of the term lolicom. However, while agreeing that her use of this word is too liberal, I find the great majority of her work to be perfectly solid. In particular she provokes thought about the relationship of the mainstream manga industry to its shadowy twin, doujinshi . because they invariably do impact one another to a great extent. Without mainstream series, yaoi doujinshi in the derivative form it exists as today would dry up for lack of new storylines to play with; however, conventional publishing’s adoption of boys’ love/yaoi as a genre worthy of new original work, and its occasional hiring of doujinshi artists as promising new mainstream talent, proves that the influence flows both ways. Mainstream publishers cannot afford to ignore the huge number of young female consumers engaged in the doujinshi subculture, and the doujinshi subculture itself certainly has no intention of ignoring the mainstream media it is founded on.
Matt Thorn’s article “Girls and Women Getting Out of Hand: The Pleasure and Politics of Japan’s Amateur Comics Community” is perhaps the best single resource on the subject of Japanese yaoi doujinshi that currently exists. Published in the 2004 book Fanning the Flames: Fans and Consumer Culture in Contemporary Japan . this essay gives a broad and informative overview of the doujinshi subculture in its present form, traces its origins, connects it to the American Internet slash/ yaoi fanfiction phenomenon, and describes the salient features of convention life. The second half of the work is devoted to analyzing that eternal “why” that always comes up in connection with yaoi —why do women enjoy these homosexually-themed stories?
Using both his experience with fans and the work of other sociologists (who, again, largely worked with yaoi manga instead of doujinshi ) Thorn concludes that the thing yaoi fans around the world share are a “discontent with the standards of femininity to which they are expected to adhere and a social environment and historical moment that does not validate or sympathize with that discontent” (180). He also identifies doujinshi as primarily a vehicle for social interaction among those who, for one reason or another, do not fully subscribe to majority gender norms; while not necessarily obvious deviants themselves, “they do not see themselves as the conventionally beautiful characters who inevitably get the perfect guy or girl in mainstream media for women or men” (183).
Though the extremity of Thorn’s theoretical claims may sometimes seem a bit farfetched (all of Japan is lodged in the “feminine mystique” phase of feminist thought?), the larger connection is one of the most important to understand in the study of doujinshi . Most of the conjectures surrounding the BL genre and the amateur comic medium are concerned with females taking control of their environment. The unauthorized utilization of mainstream characters, the juxtaposition of seme and uke . and the self-publishing of the magazines themselves all have to do with reclaiming individual power from an amorphous society; using yaoi to unleash the sexuality repressed in or denied to females, and abusing favorite male characters in order to come to terms with personal abuse, are even more obviously feminist issues.
One of the most surprising and least obvious aspects of yaoi is its complex relationship to the realities of Japanese homosexuality. Understanding the interaction of historical traditions with modern ideas is essential to understanding how the pop-culture fantasies in yaoi doujinshi arise, and why they present in the way they do. History is one of the main factors that influences any societal perception, and Japan has a long record dealing with same-sex desire; a great many of the baseline understandings about homosexuality that were formed in antiquity still have a hold on Japanese notions of same-sex love today. Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan by Gary P. Leupp outlines the beginnings of Japanese homosexual tradition and its common practice up until 1868, through the analysis of period primary source material. His analysis of the love poems, paintings, novels, advertisements, and humor of the Edo period paints a complex picture of a society familiar and comfortable with same-sex desire.
Many of the same homosexual tropes that were formulated in historical times are still evident in doujinshi . For example, the subconscious definition and assignment of roles for each partner in a homosexual relationship has its origins in the interactions of 13 th century priests and acolytes, and 15 th century prostitutes and their patrons. Influenced by the Confucianism of their time, the monks, samurai and merchants of pre-modern Japan structured their homosexual behavior according to age and status dictates; the younger person in the relationship or encounter was always the passive insertee, the older person the active inserter, and they both were required to act in certain ways regarding one another. This same kind of role-structuring is seen in the interactions of doujinshi seme and uke; in both cases there is one younger-seeming partner who is interpreted as “the loved” and one more mature partner constructed as “the one who loves.”
Furukawa Makoto’s article “The Changing Nature of Homosexuality: The Three Codes Framing Homosexuality in Modern Japan” fits in with Leupp’s work by tracing how these same patterns of behavior found before and during the Tokugawa Era flowed into the modernizing Meiji period that followed it. This helps to establish my point that these constructions have remained stable and relevant in the populace’s minds even over long periods of time, and that they influence today’s doujinshi creators as the subtle cultural paradigm dictating homosexuality’s unspoken “rules.”
Mark J. McLelland’s Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan: Cultural Myths and Social Realities takes on the daunting task of untangling media stereotypes and popular misconceptions—many of which seem to be manifestations of the above-mentioned historical paradigm—from the actual experience of contemporary same-sex desiring Japanese. His argument encompasses a detailed discussion of women’s yaoi manga . establishing that the content of the comics is distinctly fantasy with a feminine flavor: very far removed from reality in general and specifically from the current experience of actual homosexual men (the final section of his chapter on the media focuses on real gays’ reactions to and impressions of boys’ love in comics.) In his examination of the genre McLelland also covers possible reasons why women create these stories and characters as “morphs” of their own situations, and what societal functions yaoi currently serves and reveals in Japanese culture.
McLelland establishes yaoi manga as a feminine genre by contrasting the kind, sensitive characters and emotionally revealing eroticism of the BL genre to the unequal and largely degrading pornographic experience of women in men’s comics. Unexplained force and coercion on the part of at least one of the partners are typical features of sexuality in men’s media; manipulation is also present in yaoi . but it has emotional meanings or intentions which are known to the reader rather than simply being used for explicit, impersonal sexual intent. In short, the things written by men, for men, and even the heterosexual comics aimed at women, have more to do with biology and violence than love or feelings.
Three themes are prevalent in McLelland’s description and scrutiny of yaoi manga . the way the ‘other’ is portrayed (71), gender play (74), and purity (84). The confluence of these three factors gives a lucid description of sexuality’s fluidity in women’s yaoi . explaining how and why gender and romance are idealized in the medium. He concludes that yaoi . in contrast to heterosexual pornography, has more of a focus on the emotionality of the sex act than the sex act itself. Depictions of boys’ love gain the capacity to concentrate on the sentiments surrounding love and attraction because they remove many of the typical biological/social associations involved with heterosexual relationships, and idealize the focal characters in a liminal space outside the normal world. This theory, while formulated from professionally-published manga . has obvious applicability to yaoi doujinshi . which play upon the same kind of subject matter.
One of the most extraordinary resources on the topic of same-sex love stories for women is available on the Internet. Mark McHarry’s article “Yaoi: Redrawing Male Love” was originally published in a November 2003 edition of The Guide . a Boston-based gay magazine. The annotated version, available at http://www.guidemag.com/temp/yaoi/a/mcharry_yaoi.html stretches to forty-five pages, covering the questions of “what is yaoi . who produces it, reads it, and why?” not only from the perspective of Japan, but also by including interviews and data collected from the American boys’ love fan community.
While McHarry introduces only limited analysis of his own, he does an amazing job of collecting and citing the existing research surrounding the field, summarizing arguments by people such as McLelland, Kinsella and Anne Allison 18 (among many others.) The copious notes, Internet links, and citations at the end of the article prove the tremendous amount of research that is condensed in this work. His biggest original contribution is noting a variety of American fanworks available online, and condensing some of the discourse that has gone on among fans for years by giving quotes from email conversations he has had with various girls on the subject. McHarry also speculates on the future of the American yaoi fangirl subculture, pointing out that Flash animations, American-produced doujinshi, and webcomics with BL themes are already being produced in growing numbers, and that an increasing amount of formal research is beginning to be published on the topic.
Overview of Circles
One of the main points of this project is that very individual doujinshi is unique, but read in larger volumes there are trends that begin to emerge. These trends, the result of communication within the fan community, are overarching fantasy constructions: archetype-like understandings that tend to give each character pairing their own set of standards, which in turn influence new pieces concerning them. However, in addition to these more pervasive developments, there are also major threads of similarity that often run through the work of a single circle, repeated motifs or traits that distinguish them from the crowd even as they embroider and illuminate the fanon itself. Their ideas capture more clearly and perfectly the overarching fantasy by illustrating a piece of it that is focused on or mentioned only in their work.
For this reason, I felt it would be worth describing some of the authoresses, and their circles’ “personalities” that have had an effect on my theories and writings about certain pairings. They are certainly not the only creators or pairings I have looked at in uncovering and explicating my characterizations of the various pairings, but due to the quality, representative attributes, and relative quantity of their magazines I feel they can function as excellent examples in many cases.
I admit, getting reliable personal information about the authoresses themselves is difficult, mostly due to the language barrier. Some circles have personal websites, but it is largely beyond my ability to use these resources with any certainty; also, these websites seem to appear and disappear very quickly, and a great number of the URLs listed within the pages of my collection lead only to “404, Page Unavailable” errors. Unsubstantiated rumors abound on the Internet, which is also where most English-language information is available (though there is actually not much available in English.) Consequently I have only included what I’ve been able to translate and observe directly from the doujinshi themselves.
Chenhaikonsu (Amidamaru x Yoh Asakura)
Osaka Prefecture 1. Osaka City
Chenhaikonsu does an excellent job of representing the tropes of a small but significant section of fandom. Their books are typical of Shaman King doujinshi in that they contain a large percentage of gag strips, but there are always one or two longer, more serious and better-drawn stories that feature the pairing’s romance as well. Yoh’s youth and innocence is played upon for sexuality to some extent, which is also common in Amidamaru x Yoh doujin, but it is not as prominent a feature with this circle as it is when reading some other artists’ work. What this group excels at is showing how natural and effortless it is for Yoh and his spirit guardian to be a couple, despite the huge gulf of difference between them created by age, upbringing and biological status (one is, after all, a ghost whose body has been dead for centuries.) Their versions of Amidamaru and Yoh project a sense of calm happiness together; interestingly, Amidamaru’s view of the relationship and the benefits he receives from their interactions seem to be focused on more often, which is an exact reversal of the original manga ’s perspective. The feeling of mutual happiness between the pairing is maximized by the principle author’s use of exceptionally simple plots that could easily happen during everyday interaction. Individual authors’ stories sometimes have a subtle seasonal theme, determined by what time of year the magazine is being published.
Hero Rukawa’s Hero Kingdom (Uchiha Sasuke x Uzumaki Naruto)
Ishikawa Prefecture 19. Kanazawa City
Hero Rukawa is a new and exceptionally prolific authoress of exclusively Naruto -related doujinshi ; when I went to the store where I gathered the majority of my material, it often seemed as though nearly a third of the “Naruto-as- uke ” section was dominated by her Sasuke x Naruto and Kakashi x Naruto books. Doujinshi . like much of Japanese popular culture, is constantly under the influence of trends 20. and Rukawa seems to have gotten in on the ground floor of the Naruto boom. Besides her frequent focus on Sasuke’s complicated moods and attitude (often through poignant interior monologues which preserve the character’s cold exterior while revealing a sensitive side to the reader), one of this author’s most interesting and persistent themes is the use of seasonality. Characters interacting with traditional Japanese symbols of the season—admiring spring cherry blossoms and swimming in the ocean during the summer, to name only two—show up with extraordinary frequency, and these episodes are often used to segue into and highlight the romantic elements of the narrative. Japanese traditional culture actually plays a bigger part in Hero Kingdom’s version of Naruto than it does in the mainstream series; while ninjas are undoubtedly a Japanese invention, canonical Naruto picks and chooses which historical elements to include and seems to be set in a rather culture-neutral alternate dimension. Only in Hero Kingdom do Sasuke and his partner interact with Shinto shrines, go to onsen hot-springs for vacation, and deal with supernatural elements like possessing ghosts.
Moriyama Yumi’s Trick Star (Heero Yuy x Duo Maxwell)
Chiba Prefecture 21. Sakura City
Trick Star’s Gundam Wing work is particularly remarkable because it does such an outstanding job of showing the typical Heero x Duo dynamic while adding considerable depth to it in the process. Writing mostly from Duo’s perspective and mostly in sequence with the actual anime ’s timeline, Moriyama shows with great realism how deeply emotionally tormented her main character is by his partner’s often inexplicable behavior; where other authors’ versions of Duo can be melodramatic, two-dimensional, or even occasionally provoking of emotional mistreatment for the sake of a chosen storyline, Moriyama’s acts and reacts like a real person (I can only speculate, but it makes me wonder if Moriyama might be an older author than the average artist.) Her chosen characters’ emotions have personal consequences to them and are acknowledged as confusing and multi-faceted in a way that is rare within the doujinshi medium. The ways in which Duo attempts to go about dealing with his problematic relationship while continuing to function in the outside world adds further to the sense of truth in her portrayal.
Akizuki Ryo’s Yubinbasya (Zax x Cloud Strife)
Kyoto Prefecture 22. Fushimi-Momoyama City
While I was studying abroad in Hirakata I actually had a chance to briefly meet Akizuki-san at a medium-sized convention I attended. This Comic City convention took place in southern Osaka, about forty-five minutes away from Yubinbasya’s hometown in the outskirts of Kyoto. I’ll admit I acted like a flustered fangirl (which I was) but she took it in stride, autographed my book, and then busily went back to organizing her booth’s extra stock while her assistant continued selling to the long line of buyers queued up in front of the table. Both she and her assistant were decidedly pretty young Japanese women who looked to be in their late twenties to early thirties; her assistant was elegantly businesslike, and Akizuki-san herself had the professional aura of being used to her fame.
Yubinbasya has been writing and illustrating Zax x Cloud stories for a very long time; the earliest doujin I have by them 23 is dated 1999, but there are fanlistings on the Internet reporting that they began publishing for Final Fantasy VII the same year the game came out, 1997. Even though the actual urban fantasy-themed game (an exceptionally popular yaoi subject) was released such a long time ago, they have continued to publish new doujinshi for this pairing up until the present, as well as doing illustrations for calendars, art books and other media and even serving as editors for compilations of Zax x Cloud-related doujinshi anthologies. Consequently their body of work is large and influential to the point where even most doujinshi collectors outside of Japan are at least faintly familiar with them; their books are sought voraciously both at home and abroad, as evidenced by the line in front of their convention booth, and the number of pieces on online auction sites. This could easily be due to how high quality and distinctive their art, storylines and publishing is.
One of Yubinbasya’s most unique hallmarks, aside from the art itself—most often done in a graceful, sketchy style and sometimes colored with gentle pastel watercolor effects—is their expert use of paneling techniques. For instance, although this circle seems to do more explicitly sexually-oriented doujin than many, because of the way that each comic panel is framed a sense of elegance and tastefulness is imparted even to the biological act. It is more about what isn’t shown than what is shown, in many cases; a close-up on a face or a hand communicates much more than its’ simple subject to the reader. Yubinbasya’s use of paneling influences story pace, mood and content in a way frequently utilized, but to much lesser effect, by other artists.
