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!

****

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. This survey was built on Google Forms for all the reasons one uses Google Forms. (Cost, value, flexibility, access, etc.) 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”? 

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?

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.

****

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.)

Q5. Which of these sentences describes you most accurately?

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:

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: 

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 2/3rds of Yuri fans want most is realistic representations of characters who are explicitly queer.

****

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?

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

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?

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

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?)

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?

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 throught 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?

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?

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

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

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. ^_^

****

Part 4. The Boring Demographics

What is Your Age Range?

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?

 Do you consider yourself…?

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”-exclusve (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?

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?

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? 

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.