From Jusuheru to Jannu: Girl Knights and Christian Witches in the Work of Miuchi Suzue

In the vast and diverse world of manga, war is traditionally considered to be the domain of shōnen manga, or boys’ comics, while shōjo manga, or manga for girls, are perceived as primarily concerned with romance. As Kotani Mari and Saitō Tamaki note, love and war merge in the sentō bishōjo or “battling beauty” motif, in which these traditionally separate themes are combined, allowing identification on the part of different readers and making it a particularly popular and increasingly visible figure in contemporary Japanese popular culture.¹ The sentō bishōjo is a productive trope that spans different genres and appears in boys’ and girls’ manga alike, as well as in their animated versions and related merchandising.

In this article, I want to look at the uses and implications of another figure that, by contrast, appears almost exclusively in shōjo works: the “girl knight.” While battling beauties and girl knights share a number of traits, including their challenge to traditional notions of femininity, they differ in some significant aspects, most importantly, as I will try to demonstrate, in their epistemological approach to, and use of, war/time. I therefore propose to study the peculiar combination of themes of war, time, and cultural and gender identity in the girl knight trope as a means to reflect more broadly on the uses of history in shōjo manga.

In the first part of the article, I will look at the development of the girl knight figure in modern girls’ manga and analyze the way it combines history, parody, and fantasy to subvert conventional notions of reality. In the second part, I will analyze one specific case of subversion of Western history and war/time through the use of the girl-knight figure, specifically Miuchi Suzue’s creative misreading of the legend of Joan of Arc. A canonical author of girls’ manga and very popular among fans in Japan, Miuchi is seldom studied in the West.² Looking at her works will thus allow me to look at the treatment of history and gender in mainstream shōjo manga, a topic that is generally overlooked by critics on both sides of the Pacific, who tend to focus on more radical and experimental (and, undoubtedly, more pleasant-to-read) authors.

Power Leotards and Knights with Ribbons

If in boys’ manga from the late 1950s to the early 1970s casting children in the role of pilots of fighter planes and giant robots functions as a form of empowerment for young readers, girls in these stories generally maintain a passive role, in line with the conventional representation of women and children as symbolic civilian victims of war. From the torments of an adolescent woman hit by atomic radiation in Shirato Sanpei’s Kieyuku shōjo (1957, The vanishing girl) to the death by starvation of little Setsuko in Takahata Isao’s Grave of the Fireflies (1988, Hotaru no haka), in Japanese popular culture, and particularly in boys’ manga, girls are almost invariably portrayed as victims rather than agents of war.

With the evolution from robot manga to the so-called “power suit” stories, where, rather than piloting a giant machine, characters don robot armor that gives them various kinds of powers, the encroachment of technology on the body, among other things, begins to undermine gender differences, and female characters increasingly gain access to active warrior roles. Interestingly, however, compared to their sturdy, armor-like male counterparts, girls’ power suits tend to be tight-fitting, flimsy garments that appear designed to reveal the body rather than shield it, as epitomized by the power leotards worn by the Knight Sabers in Bubblegum Crisis (1987, Baburugamu kuraishisu). As Kotani notes, while being a warrior-like figure, “aggressive as any boy,” a battling girl must also be “a beauty, which configures her in relation to boys’ desires.”³ Accordingly, empowered girls usually have either hyperfeminine, Wonder Woman–like bodies or lolikon-oriented schoolgirl looks. In either case, the subversion of gender roles is accompanied by a high degree of sexualization of the...