Archive for the Miscellaneous Category


It’s All An Adventure

April 1st, 2023

I know I told you that reviews would be a bit skimpy on the ground for a bit. Well, here is what happened – I planned a vacation for the first time in 4 years! Yay!

Only…after staying away from people for the pandemic, keeping up on our vaccines, and always masking, my wife and I had to go into NYC two weeks before we left from Germany. We came home with Covid.

It was very mild. A few days of symptoms at most. I spent time lining up reviews for you all to have something to share while I was in Germany, But since then I have a fever which gets very bad, spikes, breaks, then starts again, over and over. We landed in Frankfurt, and the first morning, I collapsed in the shower. I was in bed for 3 days and we bought tickets to come home. Now I have Long Covid and for some reason, am having a technical glitch with Okazu on top of everything. ^_^;

I look forward to having enough energy to once again do some reviews soon. Please send good thoughts and I’ll do my best to recover as quickly as possible. With Long Covid, that may be weeks…or months. Stay safe everyone. Wear a mask. Don’t get this stupid disease even once.





Yuri Bungei Shousetsu Contest Selection 3 (百合文芸小説 コンテスト セレクション)

March 21st, 2023

Once again, today’s review requires a bit of context. In 2019, Pixiv and Comic Yuri Hime ran a Literary Yuri Short Story contest. I finally managed to read and review the first collection in 2021, Yuri Bungei Shousetsu Contest Selection 2019 (百合文芸小説 コンテスト セレクション). I found the first collection to be a delightful mix of stories.  Of course I ran out and got the second volume, the 2020 collection which I did my very best to read, but I have to tell you….I hated it. I hated that second volume so much from the first story to the last. So many of the stories were traumatizing and awful, others were just not readable by my standards. It was such an unpleasant reading experience that I waffled over getting Volume 3. But I did get it. And then I spent more than a year avoiding reading it. ^_^;

Yuri Bungei Shousetsu Contest Selection 3 (百合文芸小説 コンテスト セレクション) was quite wonderful. Quirky, energetic, weird, with great writing and once again, things I haven’t seen before. The sponsors this time have expanded, with Comic Yuri Hime, Pixiv, Hayakawa Publishing’s SF Magazine and GAGAGA (Shogakukan’s light novel imprint.) It is still available from the Animate Online Shop, which you can purchase from using a buying or shipping service, like Buyee/Tenso.) Or you can read all the stories on Pixiv.

Right off the bat, this collection captured my attention with a story so off-kilter and so beautifully written that I was hooked. “Denshibashira Yori” (電信柱より) by Sakazaki Kaoru is a completely unironic and indescribably beautiful story about a woman who cuts down telegraph poles for a job, who falls for a telegraph pole.

The collection has been a great mix of sci-fi, historical, real life and that specific kind of quirky/ magical realism that seems to gain my attention. A fantasy set in Iron Age Japan, a story about a woman who meets someone she’d only ever made up in her imagination. “Stainless Sanagi” (ステンレスのサナ) by Kazuga is a poignant story about vampire  and a robot maid in a post-apocalyptic landscape. Entries also include a speculative story about a girl who grows and mutates physically  because of love for her classmate, and a nice little story about a tradeswoman who meets a fashionable hair stylist. I particularly liked that this collection had  two stories about tradeswomen. It’s not something we see that often. We also had several salon-based stories, which makes sense as beauty salon are an established “women’s world.”

The final stories were a sobering discussion of war and memory and another robot story that had a pleasant ending. Overall, this was the best collection of the first three. I think I only stopped reading one story. This collection was not only full of good reads, it was inspiring! I have an idea for a short story now. ^_^

Ratings:

Overall – 8

The 4th Yuri Bungei Competition ended in 2022, and again, you can read some of the winners for free on Pixiv, It will take me another year to get to those stories. But I have read several so far in Comic Yuri Hime magazine and the prevailing wind seemed to be historical fiction, a nice change of pace for me, so I will probably pick this collection up, as well. A 5th contest just wrapped up applications, so we should see a 5th collection in the works soon: Notable applications have been linked to on the Pixiv page for the contest.





Radcliffe Hall, by Miyuki Jane Pinckard

February 13th, 2023

Today we’re doing something a little different, because I just read something so in line with our interests here at Okazu, that I wanted to immediately tell you all about.  Today, we’re talking about Radcliffe Hall from Uncanny Magazine, Issue 48, by Miyuki Jane Pinckard. The title is linked to the full text of this story. I recommend it highly.

Tomoe Kikuchi is a young Japanese woman from the Hakone region of Japan who is running away from a tragedy. Having been schooled in London, she has moved with her family to Boston in the United States and is to begin attending a small women’s college in the American Northeast. As she is driven up to the foreboding building in which she is to live, Radcliffe Hall, it all starts to go dark…and dangerous.

This is a long short story, or perhaps novelette, so I really don’t want to spoil any piece of it, but I must hint. If you wish to read it completely unspoiled – go read it right now. ^_^

Set in the early part of the 20th century as it is, Radcliffe Hall has many influences one might expect from a paranormal suspense novel set in a small women’s college in the American Northeast. Imagine me winking broadly here. There is a Lovecraftian under (and over) tones, and a ‘S’ sensibility that befits the Japanese protagonist. The story is clearly meant to call those two things up.  Aside from these, there is also a strong sense of psychological horror, rooted separately in two period influences – spiritualism and racism. Of these, the greatest horror is white supremacy. The story is too short to let this build up as slowly as it ought to, but it’s there from the beginning and is as much a cause for the overwhelming sense of danger as the paranormal happenings.

This story is also sapphic as heck and in that portion of the story lay redemption and safety. It functions like a beacon of light in an otherwise gloomy setting.

If you are a fan of Otherside Picnic, you may find the explicable terrors a little bit banal, but I think you’ll enjoy the story overall. It hits right in that sweet spot of lesbian loss and love and crazy shit happening that both OP and, the web series Carmilla both capture, with a historical flavor.

Ratings:

Overall – 9

This was a great read. 

Check out Uncanny Magazine for other fantastic stories and consider subscribing and help support great writing!

How about that title, too? Radclyffe Hall was a noted lesbian novelist, writer of the in/famous Well of Loneliness.

 





Global Yuri Fandom Survey Results

January 27th, 2023

0. Introduction

Today is my 5000th post on Okazu! Can you believe it?

I knew this milestone was coming so I wanted to do something extra special for it. Last autumn I came up with an idea that took me a few weeks to build and deploy – I was going to do the first-ever global survey of Yuri fandom and find out who we are. ^_^ The last survey I had done was more than a decade ago. I knew of  several surveys of Japanese Yuri fans –  one in 2007 by Yuri Hime magazine and one more recently by Yuri doujinshi circle Yurijin, one of Galette magazine readers and, of course there was Muromaki-sensei’s recent survey of overseas readers of Yuri for Comic Yuri Hime magazine. I wanted to do something that captured the larger picture. Of course there are limitations with this approach, as well. (See 2. Disclaimers & Biases)

When the survey launched in December 2022, I had hopes, but no specific expectations. The Yuri Fandom Survey has been, I think, a raging success. Thank you to everyone who participated!

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1. Methods & Tools

This survey was built on Google Forms for all the reasons one uses Google Forms. (Cost, value, flexibility, access, etc.) Results were solicited on social media from December 2022 through January 2023.

I am a professional researcher, but I mostly deal with publicly-available (what we call in the industry “secondary”) information. Building primary research tools is not my specialty. I claim absolutely no expertise in the use of surveys whatsoever and I definitely made some mistakes It will not be a gotcha if you say, “Ahah! Your age ranges overlap!” because correct, yes, they do.  I’m slamming up a pie chart and reading the results. Again, my specialty is not statistical analysis. I will, however, editorialize after some results sets. See below about “objectivity.”^_^

 

2. Disclaimer & Biases

Here’s the truth – there is a ton of bias in this survey. There is a ton of bias – and assumptions – in all surveys, which are phrased in ways that academia has agreed are “objective,” but often really aren’t. I can and do assume things – I’m not an academic. But I will always be very clear when I know I am assuming things, instead of pretending that I am objective. ^_^

For one thing, the survey was written in English. If I can do this again some decade, I’ll have it translated into a few other languages (feel free to give me a grant and I’ll get on that). My very sincere thanks to everyone who filled this out when English is not their first, possibly even second, language. I assume that the language bias and my own time zone for promotion and discussion means that North America is likely to be a disproportionate majority. If we take gross population into account, I could be wrong. There may actually be more self-identified Yuri fans in North America than Japan. Proving that would be a different project altogether.

Results were obtained by promoting this survey on social media only, which of course skewed results to “people on social media.”

My personal biases also colored the choice of words, especially the descriptions of sexuality and gender. For instance in the alpha version…I forgot to add “heterosexual” as a choice. Woops.

Here is what I wrote about word choice in the survey intro:

Because this survey asks about personal identity, we’ve tried to be as inclusive as possible while 1) Not asking so many questions that the survey becomes overwhelming and 2) Keeping the data in a form that can be summarized. Several questions have a response of “Other” or “None of the Above” and you’re welcome and encouraged to provide more detail if you wish. We’re not trying to make you feel excluded by having simple categories, there’s just only so much room in a pie chart.  

When I failed to be inclusive enough, that is my fault and no one else’s. I apologize sincerely.

And then there were the biases against me, personally. Some of these are long-standing, but I’m sure I’ve offended a whole new generation of people by having opinions. I’m not worried about these, but it does mean that there are people who simply won’t be represented here because I’m the one running this survey. I can’t fix that. Sorry, reddditor who might have responded but when they found out it was me, they noped out for reasons of their own. ^_^

All the images have alt text for accessibility purposes. If you encounter an error, please let me know and I’ll fix it as soon as possible.

Verbatim responses have been edited for punctuation and spelling for the purposes of consistency and legibility.

For the purposes of this summary, “queer” is being used as a shorthand for “all sexual and gender minorities and their subsets.”

***

3. The Results

All that said, here are the results of the Yuri Fandom Study, run from December 11, 2022 – January, 11 2023 on Google Forms, created by Erica Friedman for Okazu and Yuricon. There were a total of 1618 responses.

 

Part 1. Yuri Fandom

Q1. Do you self-identify as a “Yuri fan”? 
Pie chart: 54.3% Yes, 25.5% Hell yeah, Yuri FTW! 15.1% Depending on context, (For instance, with friends, but not at a general event, etc.) 3.2% Other, 1.9% No.

 

Part 2 of this question asked for people to self-identify when they chose Other. Some appeared to be reticent to commit to an identity as a “fan.” As one respondent said, “I don’t know if I’d call myself a Yuri fan, exactly.”

Several others were at pains to explain that they consume a lot of women loving women (or sapphic or lesbian) content and Yuri is part of that. “I don’t use the word “yuri”, I say I enjoy GL or sapphic romance” and “I tend to just say I like queer romance.” were among those kinds of responses.

A few commented on the less-common terms Himejoshi and Himedanshi that were proposed by Comic Yuri Hime a few years ago. I haven’t seen them in English-language discourse that much. The respondents that mentioned these were split on whether they liked them.

And, finally, there were a few answers who chose different words completely, “I would call myself a Yuri enthusiast,” “…sometimes I just say I’m a huge yuri freak,” “Enjoyer.”

 

Q2. In what decade did you discover Yuri?

Pie chart: 54.5% 2010s, 24.7% 2000s, 13.5% 2020s, 5.9% 1990s, 0.04% Other

I had no expectations on this one. ^_^ It’s pretty self-explanatory.  In the 0.04% slice, at least one response suggested it was the 1970s was when they became a fan.

 

Q3. What was the media  you credit as your first “Yuri media”?

This one was going to be difficult with different titles, nicknames, languages for the same thing. And, of course, the difficulty of picking one title…or simply not remembering which of them was the one.

After I reformatted the names for a common (mostly English) version, and removed the “don’t remember”s, and generalized formats like “anime,” “manga,” “doujinshi,” etc. these were the most mentioned franchises (with at least 10 mentions each.)  This is all consistent with the above question, so no huge surprises here. The surprises were in the small fry – the variety of media was astounding.

 

Bar chart of the Top 20 series that were mentioned as their formative as their formative Yuri series. Bloom In To You 126, Citrus 123, Strawberry Panic! 85, Sailor Moon 70, Revolutionary Girl Utena 66, Girl Friends 60, Sakura Trick 55, Puella Magi Madoka Magica 36, Yuru Yuri 31, Kannazuki no Miko 28, Maria sama ga Miteru 21, Aoi Hana 20, Kase-san 20, Love Live 17, Kashimashi Girl meets Girl 14, Whispered Words 14, Touhou Project 13, Tamen de Gushi 12, Card Captor Sakura 11, Noir 10
 

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At this point, the questions turn towards the share of participation in fandom and fan activities.

 

Q4. Do you create Yuri media? (write, draw, podcast, videocast, create game, etc.)

Pie chart with 64.5 % responding No and 35.5% Yes.

Q5. Which of these sentences describes you most accurately?

Pie chart with the following responses: I consume (watch, read, play) more Yuri than I create 82.6%, I create (write, draw, videocast, create games etc.) and consume (read share, discuss, etc) Yuri media 12.1 %, I don't create or consume much Yuri media now, I'm more of a legacy fan 3.5%, I create more Yuri than I consume 1.8%

When I entered Yuri fandom it had been through writing fanfiction. It occurred to me that other people likewise created Yuri content and I wanted to get a feel of the active to passive fandom of Yuri with these questions. Early responses were weighted heavily towards creation, but as more people answered, the percentages swung towards consumption.

 

Q6. Thinking about your participation in Yuri fandom, please check off all of these that describe you:

I participate in Yuri conversations in general online communities, 625 (38.6%), I participate in online Yuri communities 572 (35.4%), I run a Yuri or Yuri-adjacent online community 64 (4%) I create/facilitate/present Yuri-related programming 60 (3.7%) I travel to attend Yuri-related programming 37 (2.3%) I attend Yuri programming when the events are near me 152 (9.4%) I read/watch/play Yuri media but don't participate in fan communities 988 (61.1%)This question was multiple choice and I am fascinated by the fact that a fair number of people chose that they participate on online communities and went to events, but also chose that they don’t participate in fan communities. On the one hand, my choice of language might not have been clear, but also, I conjecture that this may be a result of gatekeeping in some fandoms where hanging out on a fan Discord isn’t fan enough. People may have understood “fan communities” to represent specific media fandoms (like a Sailor Moon community) and well, yeah, I don’t typically hang out in series-specific communities, either, so fair cop. 

Not sure why Google cut off the ‘I’ from every answer. It’s there on the responses, but wouldn’t cut & paste.

 

Q7. Thinking about the media you enjoy, do you prefer

Pie chart: “Queering” characters/people who are explicitly not queer 2.5&, “Queering” characters/people who are may or may not be queer, or can be seen as implicitly queer 36.2%, Realistic representation of explicitly queer characters/people 61.7%

This is something that has been on my mind a lot recently. While reading and reviewing the amazing book, Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia I kept coming across an assumption that was stated as a known fact – that the queering of non-queer characters by fans is somehow a queer act, and non-queer fans “queering” characters is likewise a kind of queerness. I strongly don’t agree with this. In fact, I see the queering of non-queer characters by non-queer audience as a form of queersploitation. A commercially successful and subjectively acceptable form, to be sure. Does it hurt me if, say, a fan pairs two K-Pop  or Thai idols? Does it hurt the singers? Does it hurt the larger queer community? These are all questions other researchers are looking at. In fact, Thomas Baudinette has a new book coming out in September in regards to Thai media: Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture.

I wanted to know if Yuri fans felt that queering non-queer characters was, well, interesting. My presumption was that that doing so is an act that is more popular among non-queer fans. So I asked a question as neutrally as I could think of: what kind of queerness were Yuri fans looking for in their queer media?

Again, perhaps I biased the response with my choices, but nothing here surprised me. Yuri fans overwhelmingly are looking for realistic representation of explicitly queer characters. Given the demographics below, this seemed inevitable. Nonetheless, we now have a clear statistic for this, in case someone else presents shipping of non-queer characters as the standard, as it seems to be in BL. While queering non-queer characters does exist within Yuri fandom, what 3/5ths of Yuri fans want most is realistic representations of characters who are explicitly queer.

 

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Part 2. Awareness of LGBTQ+ Issues

This section was just taking the temperature of respondents’ awareness of issues pertaining to the larger LGBTQ+ community at home and abroad.

 

Q8. Were you aware of LGBTQ+ people and the issues they face in larger society before you became a Yuri fan?

Pie chart: Yes 82.7, No 17.3%

Q9. Did becoming a Yuri fan change your perspective on LGBTQ+ people and the issues they face?

Pie Chart: Yes 59.6%, No, 40.4%

I’ll add the assumption here that some (many, most?) of that “No” is because the folks were already queer and paying attention. See the Demographics section below. ^_^

 

Q10. Did becoming a Yuri fan make you more interested in the political and social landscape around LGBTQ people?

Pie chart: Stayed the same 54.7%, More interested, 43.7%, Less interested, 1.6%

 

Q11. Did becoming a Yuri fan make you more aware of your own sexuality or gender?

Pie Chart: Yes 74.5%, No. 25.5%

Based on the many people I have met over the last 30 years in fandom, and all the conversations I have had with people, this did not surprise me in the least. Being made aware of queerness doesn’t make people queer – it gives them space in the world to be who they are. There’s a ton of research to that effect on various marginalized populations.

 

Q12. Did becoming a Yuri fan make you more aware of someone else’s sexuality or gender. (I.e., a relative or friend?)

Pie chart: Yes 73.3%, No 26.7%

This surprised me a bit, to be honest. The “why” of this would be a whole separate research project. ^_^

 

Q13. Do you think Yuri changed your empathy or awareness of LGBTQ+ people and the issues they face?

Pie chart: Yes, 50.9%, No, 49.1%

 

Again, in Queer Transfigurations, some of the researchers noted that the non-queer fans they had talked to had been made aware of and more empathetic to queer issues through their BL fandom. Again, I assumed that might be true with Yuri. I was really leading somewhere with this line of questioning. This next question was where I was leading.

 

Q14. If you self-identify as a sexual or gender minority, has Yuri changed your empathy or awareness of other people’s sexuality or gender within the queer community?

 

Pie chart: 50.3% No, 49.7% Yes

 

Q15. If you answered “Yes,” to Question 13 or 14, will you give an example? 

The example I had provided was this:  “As a cisgender lesbian being active in Yuri fandom has made me much more supportive of trans lesbian issues within the larger lesbian community.” A few folks used that for a “me too.”

A number of people offered something similar to this respondent’s comment, “Yuri really introduced me to the concept of same sex romance as a child and was basically my gateway into self discovery and joining the queer community.” Quite a few folks said something along the lines of “As a trans lesbian, yuri helped me figure out my own gender & sexuality, and yuri fandoms helped show me a way into the lgbtq community.

The cis/het folks had a few comments as well: “I used to be homophobic, but reading Yuri and participating in the Yuri community has led me to realizing how wrong I was.” and “As a heterosexual man, marriage equality always felt like the right thing to do but someone else’s issue. Since becoming a yuri fan I feel that I have to support real life couples in the same way as 2D couples.

Again, further research would be needed, but in my experience, a key quality of Yuri fandom is that folks are coming together through a shared interest and meeting and becoming friendly with folks from other global communities. This leads to a broadening of perspective overall. When coupled with a specific focus on LGBTQ+ issues and topics, there is a good chance for education and empathy-building.

Now the questions turned to awareness of Japanese LGBTQ+ issues.

Q16. If you are not Japanese, how “alien” do you find the tropes and themes when you are reading manga?

 

Pie Chart:Very alien, I am constantly reminding myself that this is something from another country that is not my own 1.3%, A little alien, I sometimes remind myself that this is something from another country that is not my own 20.9%, Not very alien, I’m so used to reading manga that the tropes seem perfectly normal to me 73.8%, I'm the one who feels alien when I encounter something that is clearly from another country 4%

 

Q17. How informed are you about Japanese LGBTQ+ community issues?

Pie chart: I stay very informed 108%, some news crosses my feed, 65.5%, I don't may much attention to that 6.5%, I am not very informed about Japanese LGBTQ+ community issues 65.5%

 

Q18. Have you become more supportive of Japanese LGBTQ+ rights and people from reading Yuri manga?

Pie chart: I already was very supportive 498.8%, Yes, definitely I have become more supportive 24.9%, A little bit more supportive 10.2%, I have become less supportive o.o4%Again no real surprises for me. I assumed an audience with a majority of folks who were supportive of LGBTQ+ people and at least peripherally aware of their issues. I was surprised at the small percentage of active news consumers in Q17. A third of respondents choosing that reading Yuri has made them more supportive of LGBTQ+ rights also screams for some follow up research. ^_^

 

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Part 4. The Boring Demographics

 

What is Your Age Range?

Pie chart: 18-25 49.4%, 25-35 37.6%, 35-45 9.3%, 45-55 2.5%, , 55-65 .7%, 65+ .5%

I borked this one. I forgot under 18, and have overlapping ranges. But even with that said, that’s a lot of  young fans!

 

How do you identify your own Gender?

Pie chart: Female 50.7%, Male 24.5%, Nonbinary 11%, Agender 3.2%, Gender Queer 3%, Genderfluid 2.7%, Other/None of the Above 4.9%

 Do you consider yourself…?

Pie chart: Cisgender 53.8%, Transgender 31%, Neither/Other 15.2%
I want to openly disclaim that I had an agenda with these two questions. I wanted to surface the fact that very nearly a third of Yuri fandom is trans. I know there are many sapphic fandom communities that are “not-cis”-exclusive (trans, NB, agender, genderqueer, genderfluid, etc.) I wanted folks to see that that’s how many people were being excluded by unfriendly policies that target non-cis folks.

At Yuricon, we have always bluntly stated that Yuri is by anyone and it is for everyone. Yuricon communities have always welcomed fans of all kinds, in an aggressive manner. ^_^

I also wanted to get it on record that the majority of Yuri fans are not men. Folks who identify as women are a slim majority and folks who identify as neither male nor female are another quarter of Yuri fandom. I’m not checking creds, looking at DNA or demanding conformity. I just honestly have seen who comes to what panels and who buys what things. It is my considered opinion that men have always been the minority of Yuri fandom, but men take up more space in conversation, particularly when they are holding the reins of the media we consume. Next time someone insists that “Yuri is for men,” you can point them here and note than slightly less than a quarter of Yuri fandom identifies that way. ^_^

 

How do you identify your Sexuality?

Pie chart: Lesbian 35.7%, Gay. 0.09%, Bisexual 19.5%, Pansexual 6.8%, Asexual 7.7%, Other/None of the Above11.1%, Heterosexual 18.2%

For the last two questions, I offered folks a chance to provide their own terminology, as well. Once again, I think another piece of research could be done on the way some people simply do not feel covered by common labels…even if the thing they say they are is listed. Gender and sexuality researchers have a lot to do before we have scratched the surface of gender and sexuality knowledge. What we can say here is that Yuri fandom is pretty darn queer. ^_^ 

 

On which continent do you live?

Pie chart: Asia 15/9%, Europe 22.2%, Africa 0.06%, Australia /Pacific Rim 3%, South America 5.5%, 52.3 %, Middle East 0.06%In retrospect, I should have said “region” not continent, and added in Central America. Next time. As I mentioned in the Biases section, I can’t tell if North America is really that much more than others because of population or language/time bias. To clarify a bit, I then asked…


In which country do you live? 

Bar Chart: USA 700, Canada 94, Japan 82, UK 59, Mexico 56, France 53 Germany 52, Philippines 46, Brazil 39, Australia 32, Indonesia 30, Italy 30, Spain 21, Chile 17, Netherlands 17, Poland 14 Argentina 10, Sweden 10

This chart took me a long time to render because of my lack of skill in creating surveys, I didn’t really think through a standardized way of indicating countries. I’ve only included the top 18 countries (those with over 10 entries each), but wow, we really did get answers from all over the world. As you can see, the USA has 7x the number of respondents from any other country. I have no way of knowing what part of that is the language, time, or me bias and which part of that reflects any kind of accuracy.  More research (which I will not be doing ^_^) is clearly needed.

 

4. Conclusion

Now we have a relatively recent, global (if not entirely comprehensive) survey of Yuri fandom to point to in terms of who and what we are. Of course the results here are not that far off what the readership of Okazu looks like.

Yuri fandom is young, is queer, and looking to find queer representation in their Yuri.

Above anything else, what the results taught me is that we are everywhere. Yuri fandom exists around the globe, from Canada to the Russian Federation to China, From Chile to New Zealand, from Scandinavia to Ethiopia, and of course, from my own home here on the east coast of the US to Japan. ^_^

I’m glad to have a set of results to point to for conversations in the future. And I very much look forward to your research using this data!

 

5. Thanks

Thank to folks who suggested various means and methods on various media platforms, especially to folks who talked it out with me on Facebook. Thank you to folks on the Okazu Discord, and my Okazu Patrons, who were my alpha and beta testers.

My very sincere thanks to every single person who filled out this survey!

And thank you to my wife for listening to me process this project endlessly. ^_^

If you would like a copy of the anonymized results for your own research, please contact me.





Comic Yuri Hime February 2023 (コミック百合姫2023年2月号)

January 22nd, 2023

A girl wearing a navy blue Japanese school uniform and white school bag, faces away from us, looking across a train crossing at two girls in the same uniform, walking toward her, smiling and waving. The gate is up, but she does not appear to be moving.Mebachi’s cover story continues, this time with the addition of a young woman with a beat-poem-esque inner monologue, as she sees the two from last volume. Will she reach her destination? Would it be better if she never did? We’ll have to wait and find out. Somehow I felt this appropriate for the cover of Comic Yuri Hime February 2023 (コミック百合姫2023年2月号.) I’m still recovering from the explosion of color and texture on last year’s issues and this palate and design seem so stark in contrast. It’s not at all bad, it’s just very different.

Rae and Claire have reached Euclid, Rae and Misha’s hometown, in this chapter of “Watashi no Oshi ha Akuyaku Reijou.” They meet Hans, a local businessman, so we see a side of Rae’s life we had not previously seen…even if Claire cannot see it, yet. And they run into Dole, who makes some harsh arguments against addressing poverty. Their vacation is off to a rocky start!

Chinese-esque fantasy about  death doula and her bodyguard starts to develop in “Kono You de Ichiban Sutekina Owarikata.” I hope this series develops a plot, now that we have the basic outline. What I want to see from Yuri manga in this magazine now is a bold approach to story-telling. They are two girls who live together…less of why and more of and then what happens?

“Haduki’s Osoto Gohan” is an idea in search of a hook. Clearly Yuri and food work well and camping is pretty hot, but just doing another Yuru Camp, isn’t gonna cut it, so we meet Fuuka who has just moved out in order to start her adult life. But her dreams of serving delicious food to her family and friends are not met, because her apartment – most especially the kitchen – is small, now her family is not nearby and she has no friends. In an amazing coincidence she wins a huge box of meat at the store. Upon arriving home, Fuuka encounters her neighbor Yomogi, who mostly camps in the garden of the apartment building. Now she has a friend and food, but the kitchen is still small. But since Yomogi is a relative of the landlord, she’s allowed to cook outside…and so, a camping-at-home-Yuri-food-manga is born. One hopes that it will be less convenient in the Yuri than it was on the setup, but it seems unlikely. Don’t get me wrong. I love Yuri and food stories, this just seemed a tad lazy.

Big doings in “Onna Tomodachi to Kekkon Shitemita”by Usui Shio! Rio has gotten a job and Ruriko told Kurumi that she likes her. Kurumi’s clued in now that this is more than just friends like, maybe this is a step forward for her?

Also big things happening in “Odoriba Skirt ni Naru”  – the first contest toward the Quadrille is upon them. Michiru and Kiki are *ready* and Kiki’s former partner, Shion, and Kiki have a long talk about the past.  The results surprise everyone, and now the stakes are higher. Michiru and Kiki are starting to notice how cute each other are, and thinking about feelings they hadn’t had before.

One of the new columns in the back is called “Design Yuri Hime.” It’s talking about the various looks the magazine has had over the year. I also learn that Nakamura Seitaro, the founding editor of Yuri Hime, is back in the Editor-in-Chief seat, now that Umezama Kanako has left for Alphalopolis. But this issue was about one of my favorite design changes, the year when they began to include the cover novels. The first one was by Fukami Makoto, with art by Kazuaki (whose art I still really like) and cover design by BALCOLONY. This still is one of my favorite years of cover art. ^_^ The story was messy and not Fukami’s best work. The whole year was collected into a book called GIRL’S UPRISING, which I reviewed in 2016, even though it was the 2011 cover. I am going to try and read these columns, because the year-long themed covers are a joy. I might not like every year, but I love the idea behind it.

And Muromaki’s column about overseas Yuri fandom is, for obvious reasons, very interesting. I’ll be really interested to see the results of their poll (I assume it was for the column.) My own Yuri Fandom polls results will be my 5000th post here on Okazu, which should be….this week! Keep an eye out for both.

A lot of the new stories are not appealing to me so far this year, several for the art and at least one about cyber-harassment and a few continuing series that aren’t my thing. I think the magazine is striking a balance between slice-of life and adult content, but I still would really like to see some honest action or scifi stories. And sports. I cannot understand why this magazine almost never runs a sports story? It seems much more likely to fall in love with a teammate than a person camping in your yard or who wants you to record their final statement.  Ah well. ^_^

What I do like here, I like a lot. I just want more of that! ^_^

Ratings:

Overall – 7

The March Issue hit shelves in Japan last week (so, for one brief second I am caught up…hah!).