The history of yuri culture in anime, and how to succeed at anything.
If you follow the J-List Facebook page or Twitter feed, you’ll know that I post a lot of fun fanart pictures, including more than a few yuri images, a genre I’m a card-carrying fan of. The term 百合属 yuri-zoku (meaning “lily tribe”) was coined by the literary magazine Ito Bungaku in the 1970s to describe the new wave of lesbian fiction that had started to surface in Tokyo around that time, and in the West the term yuri has come to represent these themes in anime, manga or games. While yuri anime has been around since the hallowed days of Cream Lemon Escalation (which our Yukkuri Panic Escalation game is a direct homage to), it wasn’t until Sailor Moon and the very special “cousins with benefits” relationship of Sailor Uranus and Neptune that the genre really became a thing with fans. I personally love yuri because the dramatic and/or humorous tension that arises when girls are attracted to other girls is one of the few things that all fans — male or female — can get excited about on completely equal terms, and nothing’s more fun the cheering for your favorite non-canon yuri couple. Incidentally, we have many products on the site, so if you’re a fan why not browse them during our sale?
One of the secrets to getting results at something difficult — say, studying Japanese — is to really focus on it, to become just a little obsessive about it, if you can do it in a healthy way. When I was studying Japanese I fell in love with the phrase 一生懸命 isshou kenmei, a four-kanji word meaning “[try] as hard as you can” or “[do it] with all your might” (it’s often paired with the word 頑張ります ganbarimasu, meaning “to do one’s best”), and I decided to make the phrase my personal motto. While most of the other students attended each class and did the homework assignments normally, I took my studies farther, coming up with unique approaches like finding manga I enjoyed and reading it in the original language, playing fun and engaging games in Japanese, or transcribing and translating my favorite songs, which is good because, if you forget a word, you can literally sing the song to yourself to help remember it. Different methods might work for different people, of course: for example, a J-List employee from Canada came up with an awesome study method of reading digital scans of the Your Lie in April manga with the Japanese pages interspaced with English-translated pages, so he could read a page in Japanese then review it in English. I’ve recently been on a health kick, trying to get more active and healthy, and I’ve been trying to apply this kind of “try and bunch of stuff and see what works” active approach that served me when I was studying Japanese.
J-List’s Facebook page is a popular place to get updates about new J-List products, as well as enjoy the fanart I post for everyone to share and comment on. We reached an important milestone this week, an amazing 300,000 “likes,” so we decided to have a sale to thank everyone! Take $20 off any order of $100 or more from now through the end of May using code JLIST300! This can be combined with any other offers, too, like our 3x point sale on personal stress toys and cosplay and apparel. Limit one use per customer, and it can’t be used on certain items (iTunes Japan cards etc.).
