Fist of all I want to start by saying that this review will have three parts. It is a very long review and the most elaborate one I’ve ever done.
I apologize for possible spelling mistakes.
Yuri Kuma Arashi - Part I
This is my take on Yuri Kuma Arashi by Kunihiko Ikuhara
Yuri Kuma Arashi is, without doubt, a contemporary Yuri masterpiece. Not for its’ fanservice, weird plot or great art work, but for its symbolism of a massive social critique.
In order to introduce the themes explored by Kunihiko Ikuhara, I want to first explore a little bit of the social perception and representation of queer women in Japan.
Japanese society is known for being strictly hierarchical in favour of a remarkably misogynistic patriarchy in which women do not only have a salary significantly lower than men’s, but are also objectified and their roles in societal progression are reduced to insignificance.
But don’t let yourself get fooled; this patriarchal system traps everyone in a loop of depressive madness:
For most people, it comes down to two choices: work like mad as a single person and have a tiny apartment full of dirty clothes and half-eaten Cup Ramen containers, or get married. (…)
Marriage isn’t a great choice; it’s just the second-worst option. For a man, it means he’s working to pay for his wife. For a woman, it means a life of indentured servitude.
When they say “working”, they mean that the Japanese male worker usually works for about 15 hours, six days of the week; when they say an “indentured servitude” they mean it literally: “the man goes off to work, and when he comes home (…), his dinner is sitting on the table (…), and there’s hot water in the tub. His wife and daughter are already asleep. Shopping, ironing, cleaning, paying the bills, everything’s taken care of for him. ” (http://japaneseruleof7.com/sex-in-japan/ )
These things are, indeed, represented in manga/anime; just not in such a depressive manner. Despite the fantasy, endless sexual drive and overall craziness, we still have little details of the Japanese way of life: the heteronormative families are often depicted following this standard of the working father and the stay-at-home mother as an idealistic setting (this is still the norm, in spite of the image of the working mother starting to appear more and more; in Yuri particularly, I reckon Madoka’s mother in Puella Magi Madoka Magica to be a successful business woman in charge of the house).
And at this point, you must be wondering what the f*ck does any of this have to do with Yuri Kuma Arashi or even lesbians at all. Worry no longer for it will be my next step.
This normativity that I’ve been speaking of obliterates completely the existence of any other sexual orientation or gender identity besides the heterosexual binary. Originated by this heterosexist norm I explained above, is the Japanese social perception of women’s sexuality which is, widely, exposed in Yuri Kuma Arashi and mirrored in every single Yuri work ever done.
Ikuhara is known for his socially/politically aware symbolisms in his works – whilst Revolutionary Girl Utena was a remarkable allegory to the patriarchal system and Mawaru Penguindrum a wide critique to child abuse; the world of Yuri Kuma Arashi is, yet again, an allegory to the social organisation of Japanese society as a heterosexist homophobic one that tends to wittingly ignore and erase LGBTQ+ issues and realities (in this case Ikuhara focused on lesbianism).
In Japan, there are two types of stereotypes linked to lesbian women and their relationships: the romantic friends and the overly sexual rapist lesbians (in Ikuhara language: the Yuri and the Kuma, respectively.).
The Yuri
The canon for most Yuri works is the romantic friendship. The genre of Yuri (as well as the romantic friendship canon) was born with the writer Yoshiya Nobuko in the beginning of the 20th Century: her short stories and novels focused on romantic relationships between women and were written “in such a way that they could also be seen as friendships or lesbian relationships”. Filled with “flowery confessions of love (…) and an all girls school setting she laid the foundation for the motifs and relationships found in modern Yuri.” (http://the-artifice.com/yuri-manga-an-indepth-look/)
What are the social consequences of the prevalence of the romantic friendships more than 100 years later? Well, let us start here: aided by the standard that women grow up to marry a man, it generated the idea that romantic relationships between teenage girls and even adult women are merely platonic and acknowledged as irrelevant – these are the Class S (shoujo); or in other words, the number one obliteration of lesbian romantic and/or sexual attraction: it is dismissed as childish romances and “stepping-stones towards dating men”. (http://the-artifice.com/yuri-manga-an-indepth-look/ )
To sum this segment up I quote Erin Subramian from Yuricon:
“Many Japanese women do not consider the possibility that they might be attracted to other women. One reason for this is the expectation that most women will get married when they reach the right age, regardless of what kind of relationships they might have had in the past. Some women who are attracted to other women think that they can only be happy if they live a “normal” life with a husband and children, while others yield to pressure from their parents and society in general to get married.” (http://www.yuricon.com/essays/women-loving-women-in-modern-japan/ )
How many Yuri works have we seen in which this is the norm? One of the girls leaves for a man and that becomes a reason of distress of our heroine? I reckon, for example, Fragments of Love by Takemiya Jin (this is a great piece of Yuri and I really appreciate Takemiya-sensei’s work, don’t get me wrong).
And now, you’re thinking: “but there are openly lesbian women in Japan! Therefore, not all women dismiss their lesbian attractions! We even have that in many mangas! Just look at Sasameki Koto!”
First of all, Sasameki Koto by Takashi Ikeda is a Yuri masterpiece and even though we have the usual high school setting, the characters are treated as humane with real emotions and feelings, not sex-driven maniacs who sometimes like fluffiness (yes, I am talking to you Sakura Trick).
And yes, you are perfectly correct. We have women who are out of the closet and fighting for their rights! (Props for them all, you are brave creatures!) But is there a social harmful conception for these women? Unfortunately yes, and Ikuhara presents us that same societal idea as the Kuma.
The Kuma
What is the Kuma? Well, it is the over sexual woman that is obviously mentally deranged.
Since romantic attractions between women are impossible to exist in the Japanese conscious, women who do accept and embrace their non-heterosexual sexuality are perceived as deviant - sort of mentally ill sexual predators that prey on other women.
During a speech on feminism and lesbianism, Minako Tsuruga (LGBTQ+ Japanese activist) said:
(…)
Most of Lesbian images on mass media are ‘women who have sex with other women’, ‘women who always want to have sex with women’ and ‘women who rape women’. We can find them in pornography especially.
(…)
This mirrors quite well the misconception Japanese society has of lesbian women and the harmful image of them it propagates through something as trivial as an anime like Shoujo Sect or Sono Hanabira, for example.
It is not a lie that the Yuri genre is no longer made for lesbian/bi/pan/any other sexual orientation women, but for cis straight men – it is the over sexualisation and objectification not only of women and their sexualities, but also of their sexual orientations which cannot exist outside the barriers of pornography or other works of fiction.
In a speech on lesbianism, Ayako Hattori (LGBTQ+ Japanese activist), pointed out what straight women in Japan think of lesbians and sums up the whole heterosexist snowball of women’s sexual confinement: “For them, Lesbians are abnormal people in pornography or strange people in other countries. They don’t think they can be Lesbians.”
And once more quoting Erin Subramian from Yuricon to wrap it all up:
“Homosexuality is often linked either to pornography or to the West; the Japanese are hesitant to believe that homosexuals can be “normal” Japanese people.” (http://www.yuricon.com/essays/women-loving-women-in-modern-japan/ )
So, not only have we heterosexism, but also xenophobia associated with it – another great issue in Japanese society. It is not particularly addressed in Yuri Kuma Arashi; but due to intersectionism we inevitably came across it.
