Ooku: A Gender Revolution?

 Introduction: Or Why This Took So Damn Long

About a year ago I was commissioned to write a report on the 2023 Ooku anime with insights coming from my new transgender status. Since this was a big deal, I considered writing such an important gender manifesto to be a crucial task, and spent a lot of time reading gender theory and living my trans life to try and put together a Grand Theory of Gender to analyze it with.

At the same time however, I learned something about being trans. I think it was early on, reading the observations in the book Nevada by Imogen Binnie or maybe even Whipping Girl by Julia Serano. It is now widely known that the Matrix is intended as trans allegory. The first movie can be easily read through this lens, of discovering the true self you were denied all along and the feeling of coming into the power of being your true self. So you kind of get this inflated idea that you will be the Gender Messiah, where your insights from HRT will let you bridge the gap between genders that have befuddled all that have come before you.

The Matrix sequels never had the staying power of the original, but there's a key scene that sticks out. Neo meets the Architect, a program that appears as an older man. And his reaction upon seeing Neo is, "Oh, it's one of you chosen ones again." And this really hits with the trans metaphor. All of your brilliant insights on Gender and Being Trans you figure out in that first month of HRT? Yeah, dude, everyone had that figured out in the 1950s, if not earlier. You're probably not actually going to bring the Unified Field Theory of gender to the table. You're probably just going to rehash stuff people quoted in Harry Benjamin's The Transsexual Phenomenon said in their aw, shucks Jimmy Stewart style in the 1950s.

So I can't really deliver on my original idea that I could bring original insights on gender from my experience, sadly.

However, this past year has been a real lesson in the politics of gender from real world events. Predictions I had about American politics, based on my idea of capitalism being king, and amongst capitalism, the defense industry being the prime mover: Lessons basically forged by the American left for decades as the JFK assassination led into to Vietnam, have proven utterly wanting. It turns out that the capitalist state being the committee for the management of the common interest of the bourgeoisie is not quite accurate. There's a lot more gender and rape culture than Marx ever predicted. Systems premised on domination persist because people like the domination part better than the profit part.

So taking all of this information, both personal and political into account, let me gather thoughts on Ooku.

The Manga

I remember when Viz licensed Ooku. I was interested in the concept, male feminist as I was, but I was hung up on the premise. A plague called the "redface pox" hit the male population of Japan, reducing their number. This essentially leads to a female shogun and a harem of men, the eponymous Ooku, the inner harem of the shogun. I was intrigued by the premise but I was hung up on the realism of this. Would men being weaker really lead to a gender switch of this type? The idea that patriarchy ultimately rests on a foundation of brute physical force is a common idea. However, this ultimately doesn't matter much in the scheme of things. The whole point of Ooku is the gender switch, not the mechanisms that bring it about. However, my hangups on the realism of this basically put off my reading the series, so I came into the anime basically new to the series, although the premise was well known to me.

The Anime

The Ooku anime came out in 2023, covering basically a single arc, with limited animation, adapting a historical feminist josei manga, into Netflix jail. The series seems like it was set up to fail. However, the strength of the source material means it has its boosters. While the manga covers the history of the entire Tokugawa Shogunate, aside from an introductory episode that has the characters uncovering the hidden history, the anime focuses on female shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu.

This makes a lot of sense, because Tokugawa Iemitsu, the third shogun in the Tokugawa line, essentially formalized the Tokugawa Shogunate for the entire Edo period, running essentially from 1600 until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. It was an incredibly stable system that lasted for centuries. Amongst the most famous elements are the sakoku or "closed country" system, in which trade with Europeans were essentially banned except for a small Dutch trading post, and the "sankin kotai" system, which was a complex hostage system where rival feudal lords had to keep a residence, and their families, in the capital of Edo. Iemitsu formalized the shogunate. And in the alternate version of Ooku, fem-Iemitsu formalized the shogunate and Ooku system. The premise of Ooku is that these shogun were all women, and yet their historical roles were largely the same.

The Meiji Restoration

The Opium Wars with England humiliated China, the great middle kingdom and source of all major culture for much of the East. So when America came knocking with the arrival of admiral Perry in 1854, Japan was scared of imperial predation. There was the idea that Japan had to become an imperial power like the West in order to survive. Now to some degree this is a convenient story, as it gave Japanese samurai classes new license to start wars that they had wanted all along, but there's a basic idea of "we have to become like them in order to survive". And so my analysis of Ooku centers around almost a gendered idea of the Meiji Restoration. In an early episode, there is a meeting between the shogun and foreign powers, and the pretense that Japan is a normal patriarchy is upheld. If it were known that Japan's men were weak due to disease, Japan could once again become open to foreign predation. So it seems the basic premise of Ooku is, what if women essentially upheld the patriarchy for a time to keep up appearances, and keep Japan safe. This is essentially the lens through which I viewed the series. Because the gender switch in Ooku doesn't lead to liberation at all, but rather a reversal of the patriarchal system of domination, just under new management.

Judith Butler

For all the talk of gender ideology, Butler is very difficult to understand. For all the talk, you know that absolutely no one has actually read their work, because it makes your head hurt! Butler's key point is that gender is beneath everything. It is the ideology that sexes bodies to begin with, an assumption at the root of everything, which is something very hard for me to wrap my head around. But the key idea is there are no innate characteristics, but basically an ideology of learned behaviors. The gender swap of Ooku essentially reinforces this. Women are easily able to take over male roles, and men can easily become feminized. Seeing the weak, disempowered men of the Ooku reduced to gossip and backbiting is really clarifying. The root behaviors aren't even unusual among men today, but in this specific gendered context of being in a harem makes them seem so petty and womanly. What would otherwise seem a principled stand for honor seems like petty backbiting. And this is the point, really. The gender ideology at the root of our interpretations codes behavior with gendered meaning. Seeing the dominance and submission script flipped with genders really illustrates how deep our gendered interpretations go, even when we consciously know better.

Persistence of Power

Ooku focuses on the Shogun, the military dictator of Japan. This is not a story focused on how gender imbalance affects the common people of Japan, although that is touched on. Women's role in labor and management increases as men become too weak for strenuous labor, but the focus is still on power, and the reproduction of power. Maintenance of the Shogunate itself is key for Iemitsu. If women have to be empowered to maintain the shogunate, power comes first, so women can be used to maintain the structures of power. Reproduction of the structures of power comes first, both for daimyo (feudal lords) and an heir for the shogunate itself.

But why? There have been a lot of theories for the rise and persistence of patriarchy. Engels famously described the "world historic defeat of the female sex" when communal property became hereditary property passed through the patriline. Perhaps the necessity of maintaining feudal property is the power that holds the domination systems together even when women come to rule.

In terms of Foucaldian biopolitics, the importance of the male gender when it comes to reproduction takes newfound prominence. Men are basically pimped out to women to provide heirs. Men become more sexually valuable than women due to their scarcity. But the reproductive logic remains essentially the same. A property line for farms and domains seems to remains key. Perhaps this all goes back to the predatory European powers lurking just offscreen in my Meiji comparison. If Japan were to abolish its feudal systems and collectivize, would Japan just become prey for other, more patriarchal power systems waiting to swoop in and seize the land?

Power For Its Own Sake

If there's any lesson I have learned from watching the past year of global politics, there seems to be an appeal for brute force in an almost Nietzschean way. Nietzsche theorized that a "will to power" was a fundamental rule of reality, or life itself. Because there are people who do not behave like this, its utility as a fundamental, metaphysical description of reality seems weak. But there definitely seems to be a toxic masculine will to power that has been communicated throughout history. A logical point for the story of Ooku itself would be Confucianism. The master/slave male/female parent/child power dynamic of Confucianism would have been fundamental to the people who live in Ooku's time. If the biological roles of gender failed due to disease, it seems logical that the social systems upholding Confucian power relations would persist and reproduce themselves regardless of sex. Since gender is beneath sex, sex can be bent to its will. If women are needed to reproduce the shogunate, reproduce feudalism, and reproduce a Confucian power system, sex itself can be found to be flexible.

The Meaning of Ooku

What makes Ooku interesting is all of the ways the individual characters are aware of the flimsiness of all of this. Characters like Yoshimune, Mizuno, Iemitsu, and Arikoto remain human and intelligible to us despite their reversed roles. As has been observed by many, power imposes its own restrictions and logic, and despite their understandable circumstances, Ooku suggests that the ultimate result of a secret, female dominated shogunate is a shogunate that is ultimately, functionally the same as one dominated by men. Women can rule in secret, and while this may sometimes benefit these individual women, the ultimate effect is a shogunate that is structurally and functionally the same as a male one. This is not a conclusion that I think will take many people by surprise, in the end. But the value in watching Ooku is seeing the human face of this transformation, and thinking about what actions we can take to keep from reproducing systems that control us.