Born in Japan, Raised in America: Yuri and the Transnational Formation of a Genre of Lesbian Comics

In 2007, Wired magazine published an article by Jason Thompson about  how Japanese comics called manga had “conquered America.” In 2012, Takashi Murakami, in an interview for the Asahi Shimbun, disagreed with this assessment, arguing that manga is “only being accepted by a small group of fanatics” outside of Japan. Whether conceived of as a torrent or a trickle, however, both Murakami and Thompson assume that the movement of contemporary Japanese popular culture is unidirectional, something produced in Japan which then arrives, already fully constituted, onto a distant shore. My research complicates this model of transnational flow. In this paper, I show how the current usage in Japan of the genre term yuri, for lesbian manga, originates from a history of transnational communication and cooperation between Japanese and Westerners. Although lesbians had been drawing autobiographically-inspired manga in Japan for years, they did not call it yuri until they made contact with Western fans of lesbian content in the early 2000s. These fans had been calling the Japanese artists’ work yuri, and the once-isolated Japanese artists quickly began to self-identify as yuri creators. Soon afterwards, Japanese manga publishers began soliciting input from this international group in the development of new magazine anthologies like Sun Magazine’s Yuri Shimai, thereby conferring legitimacy to the genre as well as providing a platform for content which was eventually licensed for re-publication outside Japan. In short, in the words of one informant, yuri was “born in Japan and raised in America” and would not exist at all in its current form were it not for a network of international exchange between Asians and American lesbians.