Except, that is, for anime. Anyone who watches much uncensored anime will quickly get the sense that in Japan they have a different sense of what you can safely show to kids and teens and what cartoons are good for than in the States. Problem is, a fair bit of what gets on TV in the States is censored - among them Sailor Moon, in which the lesbian couple of Haruka and Michiru is passed off as two cousins, and Cardcaptors, which is only 39 episodes long, compared to the 70-episode original, cutting out most episodes that feature the main character (female) to the exclusion of the male rival, as well as most hints of romance.
But today I want to talk about Cardcaptor Sakura, the original. For those of you who haven't seen it, Tomoyo (Madison in the English dub, Tiffany in the French) has a big crush on the main character, Sakura, just as her mother, Sonomi, had on Sakura's mother, Nadeshiko. But Sakura is quite dense, and quite obviously interested in one of the male characters (who, as it happens, is seeing her older brother... yes, it's complicated) and so Tomoyo decides she is fine with watching her love from a distance, as long as Sakura is happy. Sonomi, on the other hand, had wanted to pursue her interest in Nadeshiko, and bears an eternal hatred for Sakura's father, considering him a predatory older man, which is not entirely inaccurate given that he was 25 and Nadeshiko 16 when they married. Of course Nadeshiko and Sonomi are first cousins. Make of that what you will.
Sailor Moon is a more positive example, as Haruka and Michiru are a pretty stable couple... tragic things always seem to happen to them, but then tragic things happen to everyone in the Sailor Moon universe. I only saw this part of the series later, in my teens, around the time I came out.
The other series that comes to mind is Revolutionary Girl Utena, in which the main characters (both female) are implied to be interested in each other but canonically sleep with or date a large chunk of the male cast, to an extent that drives them apart, and the female character who is more explicitly interested in another woman is betrayed by her.
I can think of other examples, but these are the ones from my childhood and teens and I think they make my point: in anime, more women are shown to be interested in women than in North American kids' and teens' shows and especially cartoons, but they don't tend to fare particularly well - it's hard for me to think of one that ends well, whereas straight romances that end well are a dime a dozen and even gay male ones are more common!
As a young lesbian, just realizing that I liked women, I was hungry for lesbians in fiction and in history, so I read everything I could get my hands on. Portrayals like these were better than nothing, but they were also harmful when they were all that I had.
I am not Tomoyo - I do not wish to watch over my love. I am not happy just because she is happy, even though she is with another person. I am not Sonomi. I will not let my life be defined by the woman I did not date and the man she did marry.
But why is anime like this?
Because, it would seem, Japan is like this. In Japan, according to ayako hattori, a Japanese lesbian activist, close emotional relationships between women and girls are tolerated and not seen as sexual even when they have physical aspects because girls are supposed to grow up and get married. Female-female relationships are ignored and devalued and the existence of lesbians is thus denied. "In Japan we lesbians are an invisible people without an original name" she writes (1). When acknowledged, lesbians are mistreated - she tells stories of housing discrimination and parents isolating their adult daughters from friends perceived as bad influences (6). Being unmarried is viewed as a temporary state, particularly for women, and fathers retain their guardian role, to some extent even legally, up until their daughters' marriage (6-7)
Japanese (hetero)sexism functions differently than its North American counterpart, which means that close relationships and displays of physical affection between women are tolerated in fiction and reality, but lesbians are no less marginalized and poorly viewed, when they are acknowledged at all, because they challenge the centrality of marriage and refuse to be dependent on men.
ayako hattori. 1999. "Heterosexism and Women's Lives in Japan,"
Off Our Backs Vol. 29, No. 10: pp. 1, 5-7.
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/20836484> (accessed 28 nov 2011).
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