Anime Herald

The Takarazuka Revue, Girl Princes and Modern Yuri

Added 2024-06-23 01:18:01 +0000 UTC

Author: Hipólita
Editor: Masha Zhdanova

What do musical theater, crossdressing, the Tokugawa shogunate and yuri manga and anime have in common? Well, just about everything. The lily bloom of modern yuri has its roots in many different ponds - from the gay magazine Barazoku where lesbians had their own column, to the classic novels of “Class S” literature which seem so tame to our modern expectations. But above all other things, you can draw a line as sharp and straight as Utena Tenjou’s dueling foil between yuri and the all-female musical theater troupe known as the Takarazuka Revue.

Founded in 1913 in response to the surge of popularity enjoyed by western musicals and inspired by the all-female model of onna-kabuki – which were banned in 1629 by the shogunate for having an ostensibly deleterious effect on public morals– the Takarazuka Revue is still going strong and the effects it has had not only on yuri manga and anime, but on real-world LGBT culture in Japan is undeniable.

As with most things theatrical, the real stars of the lavish, Broadway-style Takarazuka musical performances (which range from iterations on classics like Faust to their delightfully silly but heartfelt adaptation of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney) are, well, the stars themselves, the performers. During their time at the Takarazuka Academy, which boasts an acceptance rate lower than Tokyo University, the women eventually settle into either becoming musumeyaku or otokoyaku, corresponding to female and male roles respectively. The adherence to these strictly marked gender roles goes beyond the stage - both classes of performers live and embody their assigned gender elsewhere, whether it be at the academy itself, TV appearances or simply going out for groceries. Swapping from one role to another at some point in your career is not impossible, but is rare enough that it might as well not exist as a possibility.

The Takarazuka Revue being closely related to LGBT culture in Japan throughout the decades should not be mistaken for the Takarazuka Revue being actually queer. While queerness is unavoidable by its very nature, and lesbians are overrepresented as a percentage of the general population in both the fans and the performers themselves, the owners of the Revue (which is itself a subsidiary of the Hankyu Railway Company) should not be mistaken for progressive people. The company, like modern-day J-pop idol agencies, requires the performers to remain virgins and not date while being employed by the Revue, which of course hasn’t stopped many of them from pursuing lesbian relationships or even becoming LGBT activists, such as the famous case of former otokoyaku Koyuki Higashi, who held a same-sex wedding ceremony at the Tokyo Disney Resort after much back-and-forth with the resort's authorities.

Far from supporting the performers and ensuring their well-being, the owners of the Revue encourage strict adherence to harsh, sometimes unreasonable rules. For instance, students at the Revue Academy are prohibited from wearing any colors other than navy, black, white and brown even outside of school premises. Underclassmen must wake up hours before their upperclassmen to clean the various rooms, props and musical instruments, the thoroughness of which must be verified by their upperclassmen. Dorm life is equally strict: the actresses are forbidden from talking in the hallways or even letting the microwave bell ring, and it’s common practice to keep alarm clocks under the pillow and not letting them ring more than once, lest another student is awoken by the sound. In addition to this, the students and actresses are essentially drafted into the highly exploitative and much-criticized competition for the Top Star and Top Musumeyaku titles, respectively held by an otokoyaku and musumeyaku from each of the Revue’s five troupes, which guarantee them the leading role in every production. This cutthroat competition forces the performers into mutual hostilities as well as promoting unhealthy levels of effort and dedication towards achieving the much-coveted and prestigious title, something the anime Revue Starlight makes a great effort to criticize.

While both otokoyaku and musumeyaku are fundamental members of the stage productions, it’s undeniable that the real head-turning, headline-grabbing stars are the otokoyaku. These impressive women not only play male roles on the stage - they perform masculinity off stage as well. From wearing their hair short to dropping their voice, wearing men’s clothing and even adopting male speech mannerisms (such as the masculine boku personal pronoun), the otokoyaku give us a glimpse into masculinity through a different lens. They are immensely popular with women because although they are aping manly attitudes, they are understood to be the pinnacle of both masculinity and femininity, simultaneously. Like drag kings, they portray an idealized, fantastical masculinity while delighting in subverting gender expectations.

Nowhere is this brash masculinity suffused with tender femininity typical of otokoyaku more evident than when we see a Girl Prince on screen or on the pages of a manga. Osamu Tezuka, often called the God of Manga, was a huge fan of the Takarazuka Revue, having accompanied his mother to see several performances as a child growing up in the eponymous town of Takarazuka. It’s no surprise, then, that he created the character of Sapphire from Princess Knight, a “girl” who possesses both the blue heart of a boy and the pink heart of a girl. Sapphire, who balances her dually-gendered nature by being both a heroic swordswoman as well as an object of desire for women, is quite literally the blueprint for all future Girl Princes. As Erica Friedman puts it in her excellent history of yuri By Your Side: “Sapphire is the hero many little girls want to be before the stories explain that they are merely meant to be the reward for the Prince. What women want, when we watch otokoyaku, is to be wooed by a “man” who understands us (because he is a woman). When we look at the Girl Prince, we simply want to be her”.

Any discussion of the Takarazuka Revue would be woefully incomplete without a mention of The Rose of Versailles. While Princess Knight takes the feeling of watching an otokoyaku portray a prince, The Rose of Versailles’ lifts the Takarazuka aesthetic wholesale in a much more brazen way, and to great effect. In 1973, the venerable Riyoko Ikeda published The Rose of Versailles in Margaret magazine. In Versailles, Lady Oscar is raised as a boy in the tumultuous years leading up to the French Revolution. We see women fawning on her, adoring her beautiful, gender-defying visage although her real love is the handsome Andre. Versailles shines by not having the protagonist grapple with her inner gender identity - Oscar lives her otokoyaku life fully and daily, like a real otokoyaku would. The conflict in her romance with Andre comes not from her gender but from the difference in status and, most importantly, military rank, as Oscar outranks Andre. Oscar represents the ideal of the Girl Prince but also a common pitfall: upright, noble, just, honor-bound, but ultimately giving her heart to a man and only a man.

Contrasting with Oscar slightly, Ikeda’s other Girl Prince, the perpetually tragic Asaka Rei, our Saint-Juste of the Flowers, from Dear Brother (Oniisama E…) establishes an intense and deep romantic relationship with the everygirl Misonoo Nanako. While the ending of Dear Brother had different plans for our poor Rei, the seed was planted. Girl Princes could fall in love with women and pursue relationships with them, and they would be cast in what we’d call a “butch” role in said relationships.

Other Girl Princes, butches, otokoyaku type characters and the like have made their mark on manga, especially shoujo manga, throughout the years but it would be silly to assert that the main landing party of this trope on western shores was anything other than – you saw this coming –Sailor Moon’s own Sailor Uranus, or Tenou Haruka, a character for which Takeuchi Naoko channeled the very essence of the Girl Prince as otokoyaku, while also very clearly inspiring her design and personality on Japanese host club employees, whose solicitous demeanor and manly good looks make them archetypal beauties and objects of desire for their female clientele. Haruka always looks stylish and stunning in perfectly tailored men’s suits and we’re constantly reminded “she” is both a man and a woman (you may have seen the “everyone thinks I’m hot which means everyone is gay” meme). Though she sometimes struggles with this dual nature, her relationship to Michiru, who was infamously portrayed as her cousin rather than romantic partner in the English dub, has her always coming around to accepting and embracing her unique gender role within the magical girl genre, which historically had been and continues to be extremely “girly”.

As one last example of historical significance and in an effort to finally let my manga and anime touchstones approach the current century, I can’t not mention the character who is, to me, the Girl Prince. The one to Prince them all: Tenjou Utena from the legendary Revolutionary Girl Utena. Utena’s backstory mirrors what I’ve mentioned earlier about wanting to be the Girl Prince, as it involves her being saved by a prince and thus seeking to become a prince herself in turn. She makes a huge splash on her first day at school by showing up in the men’s uniform, an extremely Lady Oscar-ish French style military uniform. Utena made explicit what had previously been implicit – it gave yuri fans first-episode confirmation of the kind of thing we previously had to parse subtext for.

Where other Girl Princes grapple with what it means to be a man instead of a woman, Utena cares about what it means to be a prince, a paragon of noble ideals and a savior to those in need, as opposed to a princess. Through a gauntlet of surreal, allegorical sword duels suffused with rose motifs – the rose historically being the flower associated with male homosexuality in Japan – we accompany Utena on a journey to discover what being a Prince even means. As an audience, we are spoiled for choice, as the anime, the manga, the movie, and the manga for the movie all have different takes and approaches on the subject. Utena also pays homage to the early 20th century Class-S literature that informs nearly all modern yuri, from the secluded school modeled after a Catholic mission school (as famously seen on Maria Watches Over Us or Strawberry Panic), to the main lesbian couple living together in an attic away from their fellow students, to an ending involving a trip to Europe, a common trope in Class S literature which often had their characters move to the West, presumably to pursue lesbian relationships in more open, forward-thinking societies.

While the character archetype of the otokoyaku does not feature as overtly in modern yuri, their presence is still felt deeply – from Taishou Baseball Girls’ oblivious but lovable Tomoe Tsukubae to literally everything about Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight, an anime that is equal parts a love letter to the Takarazuka Revue as well as a harsh indictment and criticism of the Top Star system mentioned earlier. For better or worse, RevStar wears its inspirations on its sleeve: it’s a dash of Madoka Magica, a pinch of Utena and a big dollop of the Takarazuka Revue. In this setting very directly inspired by the Takarazuka Academy, our resident otokoyaku is Futaba, who rides a motorcycle, a common shorthand visual indication that a character is a lesbian. This motorcycle lesbian trope can be seen in all sorts of media, such as Sailor Uranus’ badass bike, the symbol-of-rebellion motorcycle Priss rides in Bubblegum Crisis or, my favorite example, Saber from Fate/Zero, who rides a motorcycle to indicate to savvy audiences that she's not merely Irisviel's bodyguard but also an intimate partner. Modern yuri audiences may not be aware of this very 90s trope, but Urobuchi Gen certainly is.

Revue Starlight’s Futaba isn’t the only lesbian in the show, not by a long shot - in fact, RevStar is pretty unique as far as yuri goes in that it makes pairings evident and canonical very early on, every “duel” between the girls easily read as either a declaration of love or as divorce papers, in addition to representing the aforementioned dog-eat-dog competition for the title of Top Star. The relationships being so clear and evident works in its favor, letting it establish high emotional stakes and intense romantic tensions that come to a head in the iconic duels, equally literal and allegorical sword fights, the winner of which inches closer to becoming the Top Star and having their wish granted. This is precisely why the lead characters in the fictional Starlight stage play central to the show seek to “grasp a star together”, as two, in contrast with the duels’ orchestrator’s demand that only one girl may ever become the top star. By embodying the ideals of yuri and romantic love, the protagonists simultaneously undermine and overthrow the system that seeks to place them in direct competition with each other.

In one episode, the otokoyaku-coded Tendou Maya loses a duel, causing her musumeyaku counterpart Claudine to break down, declaring herself the loser, as the Maya she idolizes as a performer and as a woman could never possibly lose. Like practically everything in Revue Starlight, this is no coincidence: contrary to traditional gender roles establishing the “man” of the relationship as protector and stoic savior, a musumeyaku covers for her otokoyaku. The otokoyaku, being the more “gender-deviant” of the two, the more high-profile one, has so much more to lose and her behavior is more closely scrutinized and judged, hence Claudine deflecting from Maya’s failure and taking it all upon herself - perhaps in the same way the Rose Bride in Utena takes on the pain of so many women, or how Madoka takes on the pain of every hopeless girl in the world.

Tendou Maya being defeated is a massive turning point in the show - as the leading star of past Starlight productions, she is the RevStar world’s equivalent of a Takarazuka Top Star, seemingly a beneficiary of the system but in reality yet another victim of it, being crushed by the pressure and expectations placed upon her. In every duel she’s in, she utilizes the elements of the stage to her advantage; as the top star, she is in her element when she’s on stage. Most notable among these is her use of the staircase, an iconic prop of Takarazuka productions, rolled into stage for the grandiose, lavish final number. Maya stands at the top of the staircase to gain the advantage, to stand apart from her opponents, and in so doing perfectly embodies not just the role of the Top Star, but Takarazuka itself: to defeat Maya is to land a blow against the system, even as it breaks your heart to do so.

While the predominantly male owners and showrunners of the Takarazuka Revue as well as the men running the manga publishing industry may seek to downplay, bury or even deny lesbian relationships, girls’ love and any notion of gender being challenged, it is both our right and our duty as fans – if not of yuri, then of anime and manga in general – to expose these histories and lift them up. We must strive to understand the centuries-old traditions which inform the modern yuri we read, to acknowledge how the past resonates deeply through the media we love. I hope the next time you pick up a yuri manga or rewatch Revue Starlight or decide to try reading the Maria-sama novels you are also able to find nuggets of previous inspirations and view yuri as much more than the substanceless, queerbaiting high school themed fluff we’re so often expected to be content with, and instead see in it the long history of a genre whose works are in constant conversation with each other, and which has historically defied not only the otherwise set-in-stone four-quadrant demographics of manga publishing, but also a society and industry which sometimes seeks to flatten yuri into something less than what it truly is.