Girl on girl action!

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. According to Awstats, the single most popular search phrase that leads people to my web site is “japanese girls”. That phrase accounts for more than 10% of all searches leading to matt-thorn.com. I suspect  those searchers are disappointed with what they find. So I thought I’d tease them even more with this misleading blog entry.

"A Private Conversation" by Katsuji Matsumoto

If you’re big into manga, chances are you’ve heard of yuri, stories of love (and sometimes sex) between girls. Yuri actually has roots that go way back. Before the war, when sex-segregated education was the norm, it was considered normal for girls to get crushes on other girls and enter into what was called an “S” (from the English word “sister”) relationship. These girls exchanged love letters on a daily basis, held hands and otherwise displayed physical affection, both in public and in private. How far that physical affection extended is a matter of debate, and also a matter of individual difference. Such homosocial/homosexual relationships were also common in same-sex boarding schools in the West prior to World War II. And in both Japan and the West, it was assumed that this was a sort of “rite of passage” or “phase” which adolescents would eventually outgrow and leave behind.

For most Japanese girls, that was no doubt the case. It was a schoolgirls’ game. But for others, it was neither a phase nor a game. The most famous example is novelist Nobuko Yoshiya (1896-1973). Making her professional debut at the tender age of 19, Yoshiya spent decades writing stories of intense “friendships” between girls. She was also the most popular writer of shôjo shôsetsu (“girls’ fiction”) of her time, and is still widely read today. There is, of course, no mention of sex in any of her stories. But there are countless descriptions of longing, feelings of passion, tears, kisses, caresses, and, in at least one case, what seems to be a double suicide committed by a pair of “friends” who chose death over separation. Yoshiya herself was a rare example of a woman who, thanks to the economic independence earned through her writing, was able to avoid the pressure to marry, and lived her entire adult life with her “special friend,” Chiyo Monma.

The girls’ magazines of prewar Japan–particularly from the mid 1920s till roughly 1940–were overflowing with “yuri-like” content. In addition to the fiction, there were articles about “true stories” of friendship, beautiful illustrations, and–always a popular item–stationary for writing a letter to that one “special friend.”  Here’s a gallery of “yuri” images from prewar girls’ magazines. Most are scanned from reproductions, but a few come from my own modest collection of prewar girls’ magazines.

Enjoy!