The Problematic Portrayal of the Yamato Nadeshiko (in Hibi Chouchou)

Before I share my views, I have to tell you that I did enjoy reading some parts of Hibi Chouchou! It is a very light and calming read about a shy boy and a shy girl, and their awkward attempts to communicate with each other are very comedic and heartwarming. That being said, Chouchou is far from being a manga that I can personally commend. While I think the relationship dynamic between the heroine and her love interest is well-enacted, I feel that it sorely fails in the individual character department.

Since the beginning, Suiren upholds her class and her beauty in (and because of) her silence. That in itself sets off many alarm bells in my head. The boys all find her attractive and alluring because she doesn’t speak, because she doesn’t voice her thoughts or her opinions. In stark contrast, they fear the loud and upfront best friend of Suiren.

A woman’s voice is one of her most powerful assets in my opinon – it is her only sure way to let people hear her and understand her, gives her a chance to assert herself instead of being governed by a larger (sometimes patriarchal) force. Suiren is a problematic heroine because she champions the notion of a speechless girl as an ideal and attractive benchmark for a female in highschool.

At this point, I need to clarify that there is a difference being speechless and being quiet. Suiren, unfortunately, falls into the former group. Quiet heroines, such as Sawako from Kimi ni Todoke, are still very much real characters to the reader when the narrative allows us to be privy to their thoughts. Quiet characters are usually defined by their disinterest in speaking, or having difficulty talking because they are too shy or awkward. Despite this, quiet characters endear themselves to us because they allow readers to get to know them in other ways. This may be through their actions or through their thoughts, which readers are usually allowed to share with the protagonist. So we learn more about the quiet character through methods such as this. Chouchou however, portrays Suiren with little to no characterization that we can separate from her beauty and her silence.

One of the types of panels that constantly appear throughout the manga is this – ones where Suiren is drawn without a mouth. You can say that it’s a stylistic choice by the artist, or you can argue that this is a severely disempowering portrayal of the heroine. She has no mouth, she cannot speak her thoughts, it reflects Suiren’s habit of keeping to herself, yet also draws attention to the fact that this habit of hers actually makes her come off as attractive. The fact that she doesn’t talk back, or even talk at all somehow insinuates that she is graceful and elegant, and ultimately makes her eye-catching and beautiful. She is a ‘Yamato Nadeshiko’ character, whose definition is something that greatly upsets me whenever I read it.

“a woman with attributes that were traditionally desirable in Japan from the perspective of male-dominated society” – TvTropes
“ a Japanese term meaning the ‘personification of an idealized Japanese woman’” – Wiki

But what gives anyone the right to dictate who the ‘ideal’ woman is? To classify us into categories as if we were commodities to either be rejected or accepted? To undermine a woman’s identity by compressing her into a label (e.g. the ‘Genki girl’, the ‘Yamato Nadeshiko’, the ‘Tomboy’) is one of the worst things you can do to your female characters. Yes, I understand that most characters do fall into archetypes, especially when they are first introduced. It helps readers understand the character more and identify them against the rest of the cast, but what I truly appreciate is when characters step beyond their stereotypes and grow into their own selves and become incredibly unique and human. Sawako started out classified as (an awkward or more comedic version of) the ‘Yamato Nadeshiko’ archetype as well, but her character has greatly molded and developed over the course of her story. She learns how to be selfish, she learns that she has to stop blaming herself and instead start asserting herself, she finds love not by staring at Kazehaya, but by slowly working her way towards him. Her narrative is a compelling narrative about a young girl coming out of her shell.

Suiren, on the other hand, seems to be a character constructed around the ‘Yamato Nadeshiko’ archetype, instead of a character that falls into the archetype. That is, the author wanted to write a ‘Yamato Nadeshiko’ character, so she made Suiren. It wasn’t the other way around – that Suiren the character came first, and that her resulting traits made her out to be a ‘Yamato Nadeshiko’. Or, more specifically, the Takane no Hana, as mentioned regularly in Chouchou.

Allured by her elegance and her silence, the boys place her on a pedestal and call her ‘Takane no Hana’, they relegate Suiren to something to be cherished or revered, few (if at all) of the males in Chouchou ever refer to Suiren by her real name. They ignore the girl, our heroine, her thoughts and her desires, and instead champion this walking image of the ideal highschool female student and constantly stare at her from afar. It’s unsettling the more you think about it, especially when you realize that the male gaze is so apparent in this manga. They number of times the author draws boys staring at Suiren is too numerous. It’s like she is a display instead of a person.

Suiren’s blank, unreadable face at most points also seems to portray her as a blank canvas. Readers can project whatever they want to on her – they can say that she’s lovesick, or that she’s nonchalant, or that she’s daydreaming. Anything. It underlines the idea of Suiren’s malleability, the instability of her character. Who is this girl? Because we don’t get to see most of her thoughts, even readers are left guessing, and when we guess, we impose our own interpretations onto Suiren, instead of letting Suiren demonstrate just who she is.

And is that really what we want to read when we read shoujo? When we read a story at all? No. I need real and relatable characters, I need women who are themselves first and their stereotypes second or never. I need women who, even if disempowered by patriarchy, overcome them at the end. That is what makes a shoujo satisfying to me, and in seven chapters, Chouchou has only been perpetuating a very unsettling and undermining portrayal of a female character.