Welcome back to the 100 Years of Yuri 2020 Project! Today we have a very special guest post by Katherine Hanson of the Yuriboke blog. Katherine’s scholarship is top-notch and it was my real pleasure to have her join this project. As I noted yesterday, I set up exactly no rules for this project, so when asked what her criteria was, Katherine replied, “My priorities for this list were trying to balance personal/sentimental value with influence on the genre, trying to balance new and old, and trying to stick to ten.” Which seems like a pretty great place to start. Please give Katherine a warm Okazu welcome!

Titles have been edited so series available in English use official English-language titles, and Japanese-only are in Romaji (with Kanji in parentheses).

1. Yoshiya Nobuko. Big surprise, since she is the progenitor, our Queen of Tropes, who had the gonads to push beyond Class S (in addition to defining Class S) in the Taisho era. Everyone reading this will probably die of old age before her most cutting-edge work, Yaneura no Nishojo, is licensed in English, but I would love to be wrong. For now, I’ll continue to be thankful we got Yellow Rose with Sarah Frederick’s excellent translation and introduction.

2. Ikeda and Yashiro and Yamagishi — the mangaka who helmed the first Yuri wave in the seventies. The Year 24 Group also needs no introduction for breaking new ground, introducing the first canon Yuri to manga with titles like Yamagishi Ryouko’s Shiroi Heya no Futari (白い部屋のふたり) and Ikeda Riyoko’s Futaripocchi (ふたりっぽち), Rose of Versailles, and Dear Brother. Though she isn’t technically in the Year 24 group, I’d like to highlight Yashiro Masako’s Secret Love (シークレット・ラブ) series that ran in Deluxe Margaret magazine in 1970. (Barely before Shiroi Heya no Futari, which I thought was the first yuri manga for years, ran in Ribon magazine in 1971.) Yashiro’s trope of choice was “In love with my best friend” (still seen in… like every other series) while Yamagishi was all about the cool, angsty girl with long, dark hair who is drawn to a more seemingly normal, lighter-haired girl (seen more recently, relatively speaking, in Kannazuki no Miko, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Bloom Into You, etc), and Ikeda was all about the Girl Prince (for later examples, see Utena, Maria Watches Over Us, Kase-san, etc) and girls’ school politics (so many series). The other title I most want to highlight here is Dear Brother for its influence and for being adapted into what I consider the first Yuri anime — the Yuri was central to the story and it treated its characters’ feelings seriously, not like a joke or porn fodder. It had to end tragically, but it was an exceptionally well-crafted first step.

3. Moonlight Flowers. (月下美人) I haven’t found a Yuri manga that respectfully portrayed the lesbian community or was aimed at an adult female audience earlier than Tsukumo Mutsumi’s Moonlight Flowers. (It ran in Office You magazine from 1989 to 1991.) For all I know, this is my josei Shiroi Heya no Futari and an earlier, even more obscure title will turn out to exist, but for now, Moonlight Flowers wins the race. Status as First aside, in addition to being a feels-punching story about second chances, Moonlight Flowers represents a bridge between the mostly tragic/repressed schoolgirl stories of the seventies and the blossoming of blatantly happy endings for teen and adult characters alike in the nineties. One of its two leads, Kaoru, helplessly sees an old school Yuri tragedy play out and doesn’t expect to break out of the tragic queer story mold herself, but she and Sahoko totally do.

4. Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon. Sailor Moon is the earliest of what I call the Shoujo Big Three, along with Revolutionary Girl Utena and Maria Watches Over Us. I’d be shocked if any couple served as a Yuri gateway for more people than Haruka and Michiru (yup, they’re my gateway too) and it’s still an event if a contemporary children’s series has anything approaching Sailor Moon’s level of queerness, let alone its level of both queerness and impact.

5. Revolutionary Girl Utena TV + movie. Because for over a decade, I have consistently described watching Utena for the first time as like looking into the face of God. It’s a lightning in a bottle that can’t be remade and capture the same magic, much as I’ve enjoyed Ikuhara Kunihiko’s more recent work. (Also, Utena + Anthy for life.)

6. Maria Watches Over Us. Konno Oyuki’s MariMite definitely has the lowest amount of canon Yuri out of the Shoujo Big Three, but is paradoxically the most influential, firing up innumerable creators to do the same thing but more blatantly romantic — from high school Katherine’s beloved soap trash Strawberry Panic! to the recently-ended, less trashy but no less derivative A Kiss and White Lily for My Dearest Girl, and beyond.

7. Friedman and Subramanian and Takashima and Tadeno — the ALC Publishing folks who planted the seeds of Yuri in North America. I’ll own I’m biased by friendship, but I need to give snaps to Erica Friedman and Erin Subramanian for their years of work spent building a Yuri audience in North America before the genre took off here, prioritizing #ownvoices/female gaze stories while a number of people labored under the misconception that Yuri is for men. (And also being years ahead of other publishers bringing over some of Morishima Akiko’s early work in the Yuri Monogatari anthologies.) Thank you to them and to Rica Takashima for creating the upbeat, now era-spanning lesbian rom-com that didn’t exist yet in the 90’s and became the first series marketed as Yuri here, Rica’tte Kanji!?, and to Tadeno Eriko for being the rare artist drawing old women adorably in love (more old couple Yuri is on my wish list for the next 100 years), and all the other folks who helped carve out a space for the genre here.

8. The Conditions of Paradise. Because this lovely collection of one-shots mostly about working women (with a dash of high school and historical fantasy) is Morishima Akiko’s first collected volume of Yuri, and nicely represents her position as someone who has prolifically been at the forefront of artists blurring the line between “Yuri” and “bian” manga for decades.

9. Kase-san. Takashima Hiromi’s little series that could. I remember reading the first volume of Kase-san and thinking “Cute!” and not expecting more, then seeing the series (and its leads) grow and evolve through its run in the now-cancelled Hirari magazine, LINE Comics, and now Wings magazine, and ALSO getting a music video that turned into a movie/OVA because people clamored for more. I can’t think of a title that better demonstrates the power that the non-creator side of the Yuri fandom has to convince the industry to give us more nice things.

10. The blossoming of Yuri in unexpected places. Because it’s been rad to see so many people around the world who grew up with Sailor Moon and other Yuri-relevant series produce even more queer content. From global Yuri’s early days with folks like Niki Smith contributing to the Yuri Monogatari anthologies and series like June Kim’s 12 Days, to Steven Universe’s blatant Utena and Takarazuka references and newer artists like Mira Ong Chua and Ratana Satis finding ways to sell their stories directly to fans, global Yuri has hit its stride. And there are too many webcomic examples by Japanese and “international” artists to count — the origins of Kurosada’s Husky and Medley are no longer a big deal in the age of Nagata Kabi’s My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness and Kukuruhime’s Yuri Life. I’m excited to add more Yuri webcomic goodness to my bookmarks and shelves.