Anime and Humor

The singer is Mayo Suzukaze, who specialized as a Otokoyaku (woman performing male characters) as part of the Takarazuka Revue. This clip is from 1988, when she was in the Moon Troupe.

Takarazuka began in the mid 1910s, but it wasn’t the kind of edgy counter-culture “challenging gender norms” drag show we’d imagine today. That isn’t to say it didn’t mean something along those lines to some performers and attendees - in fact, it clearly did! But overall in society, it sounds like that wasn’t how it was viewed publicly. It was more of an ornamental “male representations that look more pretty” thing. That notion is more like gender ambivalence, so I’m not quite sure whether it fits the modern label of “drag” or not.

You can access a full text about the history of Takarazuka Kagekidan on JSTOR with a free account. Only 17 pages long! It also describes the evolving relationship between Western and Japanese cultural understandings of gender and media. A Rick roll in Japanese, though it carries a very different meaning to modern internet users, is so fitting to encapsulate this kind of novelty experience in the 80s!

Today, the Takarazuka Sky Stage is still operational. You can catch live performances throughout Japan!

Bit of a tangent now: Takarazuka is also well known for its incredibly successful performances of The Rose of Versailles beginning in 1974, based on the original literary work (1972-1973).

In the following few years, we’d get the classic anime. And in 2025, audiences around the world got the movie.

⭐ VOCALOID KARAOKE ⭐

Yotsubaaa 🍀💚🌻

ITS THEM THEY SANG CHICAGO AAAAAA