People Fans
Moon Prism Power! Re-examining the Power of the Magical Asian Schoolgirl
When your youth is marked so clearly, by a crisp sailor collar and the deep pleats of your skirt, everyone feels like they deserve a piece of it, of you.
The room was so dim, the first thing I noticed was how bright a white her socks were under the spotlight. I bet her mom scrubbed them with extra care. The socks dangled at the ends of her spread legs. Suspended in the air, body bounded by rope, her face gave nothing away. She was still in her school uniform. Standing behind her and peeking at her panties was the artist, Nobuyoshi Araki. The Museum of Sex set up The Incomplete Araki so that you couldn’t look away. Every wall housed Asian women, legs spread, nipples hard, lips pouty.
It was my first time showing someone around New York. It didn’t feel natural yet. Months before, I was also wearing a schoolgirl uniform, sitting in classrooms with other matching girls. My visiting friend also used to be one of those matching girls. We chose the Museum of Sex because it was close, because when else was she going to go, because we were fervent, nervous college freshman and this felt like the kind of thing we were supposed to do.
The Asian women framed across the walls were all fantasy—coy, evasive. In contrast, we were Asian girls in turtlenecks—discernible, uncomfortable. Most of the women were more nude, more daring, than the schoolgirl. But looking at her felt the most perverse.
I wanted to hide behind my hands.
I should’ve known she’d be there. She’s everywhere. She has her own genre of anime, naïve schoolgirl by day and magical hero by night. She’s all over Pornhub kneeling, willing to do anything for a better grade. She’s sitting in class, bored, counting the minutes. She’s working nights in Tokyo with men who pay for her time, counting the minutes. And she does it all in the same uniform—sailor collar top, pleated skirt, and black oxfords.
When I first met her, she was the world’s most famous Asian schoolgirl, Sailor Moon. Actually, that’s wrong. I first met her as my sister, Ying. With ten years between us, as a kid I watched Ying leave for the same boarding school I would attend years and years later. Ying came home on the weekends, from Toronto to suburban Mississauga, with a laundry hamper full of sailor tops and knee socks. When Ying was little, our mom broke the crescent moon off her toy Sailor Moon wand, to teach her a lesson about breaking other people’s things. Ying cried for days. Now thirty, she has the same crescent moon as a dainty tattoo on her wrist.
I think it was Ying who showed me Sailor Moon. I don’t remember when or how or why. Maybe it wasn’t Ying. But while she was away at school, in uniform, I remember her things still at home. Her favorite manga and anime on shelves. I remember glimpsing at those shelves, getting to know Ying from afar in small, quick ways. I don’t know where else I would’ve first seen Sailor Moon .
*
A lot of the kid’s shows in Taiwan are imported. After the divorce, when my mom moved us (just her and me, no sister or dad) back to Taipei, I grew up on subtitled Powerpuff Girls and dubbed over SpongeBob SquarePants. My favorite thing to watch, though, was always the Magical Girl animes, like Sailor Moon , imported from Japan.
They were the easiest to love because there was a certain aesthetic draw (they were the pinkest and the most sparkly). While my mom worked late nights, I watched Asian schoolgirls transform into Magical Girls to fight evil. In a pure and bright way, these shows captured what I, at age eight, imagined freedom and agency to feel like.
To get the gist of the Magical Girl genre, you can just read the page on tvtropes.org . “Known as mahou shoujo (‘magical girl’) or just majokko (‘witch-girl’) in Japanese, Magical Girls are empowered by various means with fantastic powers that both assist and complicate their lives but manage to persevere despite this.”
By day, Sailor Moon and her friends are regular schoolgirls but by night, they transform—through a sparkly, glorious montage—into magical warriors. Their skirts shrink and their black flats become heels or knee-high boots, but they’re unmistakably still schoolgirls. Re-watching the anime through the years, I realize how much I took for granted as a kid, how special the show’s cultural moment was. For instance, Sailor Moon features a magical lesbian power couple, Haruka and Michiru. Their relationship survived countless battles against evil. What ultimately broke them up was the producers who brought Sailor Moon to the West. They were thorough in their censoring: erasing breast lines, making gender fluid characters binary, dubbing over any dialogue they deemed unsavory. Haruka and Michiru became Amara and Michelle—cousins who are very close.
A story this fun, girly, and soft isn’t allowed real complexity and credibility in the West. Magical Girl shows like Sailor Moon actually draw in fans of all ages and genders back in Asia. There’s so much culture clash around Sailor Moon ’s censoring, but it comes back to the Western producers being unable to reconcile the underlying sexuality of Sailor Moon with how gosh darn cute she and all her friends are.
*
Ying was the one who took me uniform shopping.
When my mom sent me back to Toronto (no mom, no sister, no dad), she sent me to the same boarding school Ying attended. Ying had long graduated and moved to New York where she got up each day and chose what to wear. In other words: She grew up. But she returned to the designated uniform outlet with me and flipped through grey pleated skirts and burgundy ties. Ying made it feel like we were shopping for real clothes. This was the most time we spent together in five years, maybe even all our lives. The age difference and divorce kept us apart for a long time. It was exciting, but intimidating, to get to know her up close. Ying coped with the divorce largely on her own at boarding school. For obvious reasons, it was rough. Still, she loved her experience there and was excited for me to go. Her being excited made me want to be excited too.
We kept looking at my knees and debating how closely my hem should meet them. Ying playfully, but also seriously, pushed for a shorter skirt.
“Mom will ask to lower your hem. Do not let her. Trust me, it looks better shorter.”
“Let’s ask about those thinner ties, I think they’re for middle schoolers, but let’s ask.”
“Let’s find cuter oxfords at a real shoe store.”
The saleswoman playfully, but also seriously, shook her head as if to say, girls these days. I don’t think the uniform looked right on me that first day. I don’t know that it ever did. But it was fun to try on and show Ying. In the end, Ying got her way. The skirt rose high above my knees. I wondered if it was too short, but she was right. The skirt looked better, stylish, younger, when it was just a little too short.
*
Still fixated on the Asian schoolgirl now, I stay up late at night reading about her. A professor at the University of Warwick, Perry Hinton , explains how the schoolgirl holds a specific, important place in Japanese pop culture. The schoolgirl gets to be “aware of her own youth as a time of unique, yet transient, freedom in Japanese society, with a less desirable adulthood creeping up on them.” In that way, Sailor Moon is less of a kid’s show and more of a teen drama. Hinton equates it to the West having Buffy the Vampire Slayer .
Fun fact: In the first minutes of Buffy’s pilot, before we even see Buffy herself, we see a schoolgirl. Except she’s white; she has on a catholic school cardigan and plaid skirt. She’s sneaking into Sunnydale High with a boy when—oh no, it sounds like something’s out there. Though horny and annoyed, the boy checks if anyone’s there. The coast is clear. The schoolgirl double checks. She relaxes at the sight of an empty hallway. Then, she turns to the camera, reveals herself to be a vampire, and devours the boy. Later, she gets a name, Darla. She also sheds the uniform; evolves beyond it.
It’s a character evolution Sailor Moon never reaches, because the uniform for her is never just a disguise. It defines her. She races to school, sailor collar flapping behind her, skirt the appropriate school length, and oxfords pinching her toes. By night, she has a magical tiara, but Sailor Moon fights evil in the same uniform she wore to English class.
*
Sailor Moon was built around her creator, Naoko Takeuchi’s own experience. Through her teenage years, Takeuchi wore the same uniform . In interviews , Takeuchi also acts just like Sailor Moon, a shy romantic who works by instinct. Why were Haruka and Michiru together? Takeuchi wanted to show all kinds of love, “in this case between two girls.” What’s her advice for aspiring manga writers? “Please make stories that are so fun and interesting that they’ll shock your reader’s heart.” Who’s her ideal man? “He’s gloomy, and he’s an otaku and an enthusiast, and cultured, and a little chubby, and has a lot of complexes, and he’ll take care of and love [her].” And, what did she want to write next? “Something that pursues what it means to be a woman. Something porny.”
But to many, Takeuchi’s standout work is already porny.
*
It’s a weeknight in Tokyo and you’re a tired businessman. It’s been a long day, bars are exhausting, and women are so difficult. Before going home to fall asleep and wake up to the same thing all over again, you stop for some companionship.
Japan’s lucrative high school dating business is like many kinds of sex work. Young women keep men company, except they work dressed as schoolgirls. Unlike Western fantasies of the sexy schoolgirl (à la Britney Spears in “Baby One More Time”), there are few plunging necklines or midriffs. Some girls even wear blazers.
So, why are men in Tokyo buying time with girls in school regulation uniforms? In interviews with The Washington Post reporter, Anna Fifield , men explain themselves. One middle-aged man says, “It’s easy to talk to these girls.” Another explains, “They look so cute. The uniforms make them look one and a half times cuter than they actually are.”
And that’s what this is all really about: Cuteness. We throw ‘cute’ around like it means nothing and everything. Dogs are so cute, so is that skirt, babies are so cute we could just eat them up! But to literary critic Sianne Ngai, ‘cute’ speaks to something more specific. In an interview with Cabinet, Ngai explained, “Cuteness is also a commodity aesthetic, with close ties to the pleasures of domesticity and easy consumption.” But more importantly, “Cuteness is a way of aestheticizing powerlessness.”
It’s powerlessness that makes girls in uniform “one and a half times cuter than they actually are,” and so easy to be with in the eyes of tired businessmen. Kazue Muta, a sociology professor at Osaka University explained to Fifield, “the young and seemingly innocent are valuable and more alluring.” The uniform, in all its cute powerlessness, takes away the threat of an experienced woman who could reject these men. The uniform helps girls perform a kind of innocence, purity. Amplified by Japan’s age of consent—a shocking-to-Westerners thirteen—the business often recruits real schoolgirls. One of the managers of a high school dating business explained to Fifield, “If there are two sixteen-year-old girls, and one’s at school and one’s not, customers will always choose the one who’s at school.”
How regulated this line of sex work should be is highly debated. Fifield interviewed leaders of non-profits trying to abolish the business—they compare it to child prostitution. She also interviewed the working schoolgirls themselves who defend the work. One girl named Mio told Fifield, “I feel accepted and needed, and I don’t have these feelings otherwise.” Mio’s interview goes on, “ she described a home life where her parents hate each other, and she hates them. ‘I wish I could stop. I might be able to stop it if I don’t feel lonely anymore.’”
The only aspect of the business that goes undebated is where to place the blame. As sociologist Muta explained to Fifield, “Even if ordinary Japanese consider the practice deviant, they place the blame on the girls.” Lawmakers work on the same principle, banning the schoolgirl from working and giving her curfews, but rarely penalize the men who buy her time. Analyzing the power dynamics of the business isn’t very sexy.
That type of powerlessness is less cute.
*
In season one of Sailor Moon the villain was Queen Beryl. She and her minions stole the energy of young women to fuel themselves. They lured young women to their traps and drained them into sunken bodies. But always to the rescue were the Sailor Senshi. Sailor Moon bursts in and announces, “I’m the pretty sailor soldier of love and justice, Sailor Moon. In the name of the moon, I will punish you!” They make sure each girl returns home safe. Those girls wake up the next day, just as innocent, only to be tricked again.
*
Junior year, my mom wore me down and I let her lower my hem. Or rather, I came home one weekend, and she was already stitching and unstitching. But the fold of the old hem was stubborn. It left a line of light grey my mom could never iron out.
Wearing the uniform, in school or out in Toronto, meant navigating all kinds of gazes. Older women behind me on escalators, telling me to pull my skirt down. Teachers watching our hems and warning against bright bras that might show under our white shirts. “Be mindful, we have male teachers. Don’t make them uncomfortable.” Older men—“So, are you seventeen for another whole year or are you turning eighteen in a month?”—blend together, the same faceless older man in my periphery. The only man I can still picture stopped me as I was about to cross the street.
The schoolgirl uniform in Toronto always felt like it was designed to be seen. In Taipei, I never wore a uniform, but I saw them everywhere. Taiwanese public-school uniforms— unlike uniformed private schools in Canada or even schools in Japan—are equalizers before they’re ever status symbols or ‘outfits.’ This is all to say, there was a specific anxiety to walking around Toronto. At times, it felt like I was supposed to talk to strangers or had somehow invited them, like it was all just part of what it meant to be young and visible.
So, when I heard, “I love your outfit!” I turned.
He was young, had a wide, lop-sided smile.
“What’s your favorite anime?” He asked.
“I loved Sailor Moon as a kid, still do.”
To him, this was a basic answer, but I stand by it. Sailor Moon is still at least one of my favorite Magical Girl animes. Part of it is nostalgia, but it’s also just such a good story. Sailor Moon was one of the first major Magical Girl Warrior stories, an important subgenre to the larger Magical Girl world. I love watching these girls discover their powers and each other, to have their uniforms be markers of warriors.
Standing there talking to him, even though there was no instinct to leave, no obvious signal of danger, I felt stupid. It was everything my mom, teachers, and Ying told me not to do. It doesn’t matter whether someone seems creepy or not, there’s always risk in talking to an older man who feels the need to approach a schoolgirl. But it felt normal, if not just a bit awkward. And then, he asked, “Where are you coming from?”
“I’m just on my way home from school.” Hearing that, his cheeks went red, and he went back to his coffee. Later, hanging the sailor top with all the others, I realized why he said “outfit.” He thought I was cosplaying as a magical schoolgirl.
I’d been mistaken for Asian tropes before. On French exchange, I was Long Duk Dong from 16 Candles —an ugly, foreign thing. Unlike that time, though, I didn’t hate being a magical Asian schoolgirl. As powerless as the uniform can be, when I imagine it now—the uniforms laying on the bodies of all the Asian schoolgirls out there—it feels like a symbol of something more.
When your youth is marked so clearly, by a crisp sailor collar and the deep pleats of your skirt, everyone feels like they deserve a piece of it, of you. Like your youth is theirs to claim, preserve—yours to share. And it’s tiring and violating, deeply embarrassing.
Like your youth is theirs to claim, preserve—yours to share. And it’s tiring and violating, deeply embarrassing. I can still feel the flush in my cheeks from when older women asked me to tug my skirt down. I can still feel how my legs tensed at the faceless older man in my periphery. I can still feel the odd pang of betrayal at catching my mom, stitching and unstitching, without my permission. But it was still comforting to have that clear marker of my youth, a clear visual that I still had time to grow up, that I was still coming of age.
*
Back in 2017, Japan saw a rise in syphilis that was especially high amongst young women. This created not only a public health problem, but a PR problem. How do you even begin this conversation in a society that ties the worth of young women to their ‘purity?’ How can syphilis awareness be more digestible, light and cute?
The government’s answer was Sailor Moon .
Vice reported on how the government used her image to sugar-coat the taboo nature of a syphilis outbreak. They printed her on shiny pink informational pamphlets, posters, and condoms. The Director of Infectious Diseases explained how Sailor Moon’s female empowerment and LGBTQ+ appeal made everyone feel included, and made this conversation feel safe. They even borrowed her rally cry, “If you don’t get tested, I’ll punish you!”
*
Bright white socks are hard to forget. They blink in my mind, like white spots lingering in my vision from bad flash photography. I stayed up late reading more on all the young Asian women who posed for Araki. I never managed to track down the woman in white socks, but instead I found KaoRi.
KaoRi posed in Araki’s work for over a decade. The Museum of Sex’s retrospective reignited people’s interest in her. She wrote a blog post to set the record straight. Translated by writer Alisa Yamasaki, KaoRi dissects the power imbalance Araki held over her. He never fairly compensated her for her work, dismissed her unease at nude photoshoots, and used her name without her written consent.
A young aspiring artist and dancer at the time, KaoRi wasn’t sure if any of this was normal, and had no idea how to advocate for herself. And how could she have known? Araki’s whole career is built off the fantasy of submissive East Asian women. He poses them, regulates them, decides how much space they’re allowed to take up. As KaoRi dissects it, to work for Araki often meant submitting to him. In KaoRi’s own words—
“I sacrificed myself by being polite.”
*
I feel like I oversimplified what makes a Magical Schoolgirl. There’s an important distinction at the end of that tvtropes.org article, “A girl who can use magic is not necessarily a Magical Girl in the sense of the trope or genre.” It’s debatable where the line ends and starts, but here are just a few things I’ve noticed.
Many, if not all, Magical Girls keep their powers a secret from most of the people in their lives, namely, their family. This means their family life often feels like an incidental, background aspect of their lives.
Magical Girls often have a love interest who’s an older man (in the original manga, Sailor Moon, a fourteen-year-old middle schooler, falls for Tuxedo Mask, a seventeen-year old college student. This is very tame by manga/anime standards).
The isolation of keeping her magical life secret, means Magical Girls often shoulder emotional trauma and labor alone.
*
Whenever I don’t feel like writing, I avoid it by fact-checking details. Sick of writing this essay, I texted my friend Michelle to ask if she remembers which Taiwanese channel, specifically, broadcasted all those Magical Girl shows. Michelle searches with me online and this, inevitably, turns into us just watching clips of Magical Girls ( Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch ).
Night turns into dawn and we’re still poring over these shows. At this point, it’s become one of those nerdy conversations that don’t make any real sense (is it more problematic that this Magical Girl loved her teacher, or that this one was into that villain?). At some point, I become coherent again, and ask, why were we ever allowed to watch these shows? We never found definitive confirmation of which station it was, exactly.
*
In the season one finale, all of Sailor Moon’s friends die protecting her. Their bodies, twisted and broken and still in uniform, are left on the battleground. As Sailor Moon makes it to the final fight alone, she thinks about how much this journey and the friendship of all the girls has matured her. Sailor Moon started out as a naïve, clumsy, regular schoolgirl. But each of her friends has made her smarter, more cunning, more resilient.
Sailor Moon dies, vanquishing evil and thanking her friends one last time. Somewhere between death and whatever comes next, Sailor Moon becomes Usagi Tsukino, a tired fourteen-year-old girl. Her eyes shut, her body lifeless, Usagi wishes for her ordinary life back, “When I wake up in the morning, a pure white curtain of lace rustling in the breeze, the cuckoo clock in the room says it’s seven o’clock, and Mom’s voice says, ‘you’ll be late if you don’t get up!’ I’m still half asleep, and I think ‘please let me sleep for three more minutes’ . . . The crepes we’d all eat on the way home. We’d gaze dreamily at a party dress in a show window. The little things bring such joy and I’m happy. I wish I could go back to that kind of normal life.” And her wish comes true. Usagi wakes up and she’s late for school, everything wiped from her memory. She passes all her Sailor Senshi friends, but they’re just strangers. She’s innocent as ever, only to soon transform, fight, and die again.
Somewhere between death and whatever comes next, Sailor Moon becomes Usagi Tsukino, a tired fourteen-year-old girl. The Asian schoolgirl grows up with us, for us. Yet, she’s always so young, adorable, never aging. Just when she grows too old, the story restarts. The show is rebooted, new girls are hired, freshmen enter high school. Her world is too cute for anything truly bad to ever happen. If something bad threatens to happen, she takes care of it for us. She keeps us company, sitting with old men in cafés and performing on the TV screens of kids. When we’re in her company, her world, no trauma feels irreversible.
*
2019 was my last year as a teenager, the last of my Asian schoolgirl days. Really, they ended when I graduated high school. But turning twenty is the real end because during the late-night “research” session with Michelle, I made an admission, “I find it hard to enjoy these shows, like, in earnest anymore.” White socks, businessmen in Tokyo, and skirt hems pulse and fester at the back of my mind. Still, Magical Asian Schoolgirls are a comfort for me. I don’t think I’ll ever outgrow it completely.
When I let myself be dramatic and self-indulgent, I wish to go back and pause at the precipice of growing up. But then, I remember how it feels to be told to tug my skirt down and wear only neutral bras. I remember how cloying it feels to be polite all the time while everyone tells me what to wear, how to act. And it’s freeing now to wear whatever I want. I can walk around and not wear a symbol of inexperience, innocence.
Besides, the best part of the uniform was always taking it off. Unzipping the skirt, rolling down the knee socks, I’d inspect the marks it left on me. Indents the socks left that circled just under my knees, the red ring around my waist. After graduation, I took off the uniform for the last time and watched the marks disappear.
