How Haruka Tenoh Gave My Life New Meaning

I have often said that there has never been a doubt in my mind that I am bisexual. I knew from the very beginning. In early elementary school, I had crushes on both boys and girls. I never questioned it, and it never confused me.

I also knew I was a boy. (Which is a whole other thing that I get into over at my blog in Why I Don't Like the Pronoun Question. Please allow ads if you click the link. Thank you.) But as I got older, and puberty hit, I realized I was something other than just a boy or just a girl. And it was both confusing and frustrating. There was the way I saw myself and how I wanted to be, and what the rest of the world saw and expected of me.

Enter Sailor Moon. I mostly grew up in the 1990s, so the anime I saw on TV was often changed in translation and censored. And it wasn't enough! So I went online to find more. I downloaded fan translations of manga (Japanese comic books) and episodes of anime (Japanese animation).

I learned very quickly that the way that gender and sexuality are treated in Japan are very different from in the United States, where I grew up (and still live). Characters that would have been understood to be gay in Japan were given a gender swap when translated into English. Yes, there were gay characters even in media aimed at children.

In Sailor Moon, a magical girl series that first came out in 1991, the character Zoisite was changed from a man into a woman when the TV series was brought to North America. I guess American kids just weren't ready for two men to have affection for one another. (Insert massive eye roll.)

If you were active in the online fandom, you were well aware of Zoisite's gender reassignment. You were also aware that later in the series, after what had been released in North America, there were—(drum roll please)—lesbians. And not only lesbians, but one of them was femme! And one of them was (or seemed to be) gender fluid! (I am not going to get into the Starlights here.)

Haruka Tenoh, or Sailor Uranus, was always designed to be in a romantic same-sex relationship. I use "same-sex" rather than "same-gender" because Haruka's actual gender is in question. The series creator, Naoko Takeuchi, was inspired by Takarazuka Revue, an all-female Japanese musical theatre troupe in which women play all of the roles, including men. The actors themselves are divided, some specializing in female roles (musumeyaku) and others in male (otokoyaku). Haruka was modeled on the otokoyaku, who often present as masculine in public as well as on stage by cutting their hair short and using masculine language. Everyone knows the otokoyaku "aren't" men, but they do take on that male role, which places them in a kind of gray area between genders.

Haruka is definitely in a gray area when it comes to gender. While her friends refer to her as a woman and use she/her, the public refer to her in masculine terms and use he/him. (This is actually less pronounced in Japanese than it is in English, but it still seems to hold true in the original language and is translated thus in English.) Haruka never corrects anyone when they assume a gender for her.

While a student, she wears a boy's uniform, slacks instead of a skirt. She wears her hair cut short, and her voice is pitched low. She flirts with Usagi and Minako, calling them "kitten," when they first meet. The two girls think she is a boy, and she doesn't correct them. When they do learn that she is "in fact" a girl, she reacts with a shrug. Haruka is Haruka.

Haruka became my idol. If I had to be a girl, I wanted to be that girl. The one who dressed in masculine clothes, spoke roughly but charmingly, and confused people on "what" I was. Haruka was my first cosplay when I went to Otakon after freshman year of college. And boy did I ever get a lot of attention! Girls came running up to me for hugs and to pose with me in photos from across the convention hall. It was great!

When I went to Japan for a semester of study in 2003, I had short blond hair, and I dressed mostly in "unisex" cut T-shirts and khakis. Khakis were popular at the time in the US and seen as gender neutral clothing that could be dressed up or down. I took them with me to Japan because while washing machines in the dorm were free, dryers cost money, and I did not have much money. There was a drying room where we could hang our wet laundry that was also free. I am very particular about texture, and jeans that have been airdried may as well have transformed into sandpaper. Cotton airdries pretty well, so I brought all-cotton khakis with me, most of which zipped off at the knee into shorts to be extra versatile. (Why do they not make these anymore? They were so convenient!)

What I did not know is that in Japan (in 2003), only men wore khakis. Only men had short hair. Without realizing it, I was like an otokoyaku. And Japanese people seemed pretty chill with it. Whether or not I was a man or a woman didn't seem to concern people in Japan like it did in the US. When I shopped for men's clothes at the plaza, it was explained to me that I was in the men's section, but when I said I understood, the salespeople shrugged and left. In the US, I might receive dirty looks or pointed comments that the women's department was over there.

I should mention that I did have privilege as a foreigner, but I also noticed that I was often treated differently than the more femme women around me. Not the same as the men, but still different, like I was in a gray area. When I inadvertently adopted a more masculine form of speech or sat in a way that was inappropriate for women, I was told it was ok because I was me. (Not by my sensei, but by friends and other peers.)

In the US, we like to place people in boxes and think that we know everything about them because of this one assumption. This is completely ridiculous. Japan likes to categorize things too, but there seem to be more categories, or at least a better understanding that things could be different. Haruka was a character in a children's TV show, so a person like her was obviously something that children/preteens were meant to understand.

Haruka and Michiru's relationship was understood without being spelled out. The writers certainly didn't go to the lengths that North American ones did when the later seasons were eventually translated, and the word "cousin" was shoved into every sentence. "Wow, what great cousins! Those two are the most cousinest cousins I've ever seen. I wish I had a cousin like that!" Apparently Haruka and Michiru exuded so much cousin-ness that other characters could smell it on them before even being introduced. Which didn't work. After the characters debuted on US TV, my friend's little sister ran to her mother yelling, "There are lesbians in Sailor Moon!" Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "kissing cousins."

My experiences with Japanese culture and characters like Haruka, Utena from Revolutionary Girl Utena, as well as femme male characters from Sailor Moon, Fushigi Yuugi, and my favorite bands like Malice Mizer and Noir Fleurir, gave me a lot to consider about my own gender and how I wanted to be seen in the world.

I still tend to wear my hair short, though not necessarily in a Haruka-esque way. Sometimes my clothing is decidedly feminine, using my male Jrock idols as inspiration, or leans toward masculine, like the otokoyaku. When people assume my gender, I don't correct them. There is just too much to explain, and I am not sure I have found the right word for it anyway. I currently use non-binary, and my pronouns are not set. I have previously used bigender, to go with bisexual, and on rare occasions genderqueer.

But if I could look like anyone in the world, it would be Haruka. She's just so damn suave!