Ask John: Could Yuri Become More Popular Than Yaoi in America?

Question:
Do you think that yuri will become more popular than yaoi in America (especially with Media Blasters and Seven Seas releasing it)?

Answer:
Given your question, I’ll presume that you know that “yuri” is the Japanese term for manga and anime dealing with female homosexuality, and “yaoi” is the term for the literary theme of male homosexuality. While yuri and yaoi may be very similar concepts, their relative popularity is very different. There is a slowly growing amount of yuri themed material available in America, but I doubt that yuri will ever rival the success of yaoi in America or Japan.

Yaoi is tremendously popular within Japan’s anime, and especially its manga fan community. Not only are there stores exclusively devoted to yaoi material in Tokyo, the “Otome Road” area of Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district is famous for its concentration of businesses specializing in serving the yaoi and bishonen fan community. Yuri manga and anime are far from rare, but Japan doesn’t have stores that specialize in yuri material, nor a fan community for yuri large enough to support a localized congregation of specialty stores and restaurants. Within Japan’s manga fan community, yaoi constitutes a significant minority. Yuri represents a tiny niche.

Similarly, American publishers including Media Blasters and Seven Seas have dipped their toes into yuri material with releases like Simoun, Strawberry Panic, and The Last Uniform. Nozomi Entertainment is poised to venture into the genre with its forthcoming domestic release of “Maria Watches Over Us” (Maria-sama ga Miteru). And ALC Press has spent years diligently bringing Japanese and international lesbian themed comics to American readers. But these inroads are small and obscure compared to the tremendous American success of Media Blasters’ yaoi line, and the output of domestic publishing lines including 801 Press, Yaoi Press, Drama Queen, June, and Be Beautiful.

The reason for the disparity between the success of yaoi and that of yuri lies in their audience. Yaoi is successful because it’s largely created by, targeted at, and appeals to females. There’s also a smaller male audience for yaoi. However, yuri themed material is not consistently created by female artists, nor is it consistently targeted at female consumers. Yaoi has a tremendous audience of devoted female consumers, but yuri material doesn’t have a massive, devoted fan following. Yuri themed works like Maria-sama ga Miteru are targeted primarily at female audiences, but titles including Kannazuki no Miko, the Strawberry Panic anime, and Simoun are oriented toward male viewers.

Countless female manga and anime fans adore the taboo sensuality and baroque romanticism of yaoi, but yuri themes don’t have a similar singular tone or even a singular goal – Maria-sama ga Miteru, for example, leans toward romantic drama for female viewers to sympathize with while Kannazuki no Miko uses its yuri content to entice male viewers with sensationalistic and exploitive themes. In effect, not only is the audience for yuri in both America and Japan smaller than the audience for yaoi; it’s also splintered. Yuri themes don’t consistently appeal to a large female audience, nor do they appeal to a large male audience. As a result, despite the admirable efforts of domestic proponents like ALC Press, yuri themed material probably has very little chance of ever becoming more than a tiny niche commodity in Japan and America.