I attended the Yuriten 2025 event in Osaka a few weeks ago, and my report on it was published yesterday on the Okazu website. Please read it!
It’s the first article I’ve had published on another site in a while, and I was really happy to do some investigative reporting. Yuriten 2025 was not exactly the event I was expecting, but it was also very much an interesting experience. The Yuri fandom in Japan feels a lot different in-person than it does online, in both good ways and bad, and Yuriten 2025 was a great way to dive in there briefly.
Here’s a brief excerpt:
I went with a friend on February 11th, a national holiday. Osaka was absolutely buzzing with activity, but the area around the event was surprisingly quiet. After curry lunch at a nice little cafe, we went to Osaka Space and descended down the stairs to the basement floor event.
Yuriten definitely felt like a low-key affair. With free entry and a very quiet atmosphere, it was almost like a pop-up museum. High-resolution manga prints for a couple dozen series, a guided path through the space, and a place to write a memo for future guests to look on. Everyone was quiet, almost in reverence to the beauty of fictional lesbianism. I had to whisper to my friend anytime I had a comment.
With how museum-like it felt, I’d honestly have loved an actual exhibit with Yuri genre history and some really old magazines on display. But this is more like a showcase of creators and series past and present–it’s run by Village Vanguard (basically the Hot Topic of Japan), and so the goal is definitely to help boost manga sales in a niche but growing genre.
Now that I live in the Kansai area and have been settled in here for a couple years, I’m excited for the future of LGBTQ+-themed events. I want to attend as many as possible, and hopefully promote the cause of lesbianism across the globe!
Yuri Kissaten becoming very popular would be nice, too. Especially with our new Patreon…
Check out some other LGBTQ+ blog posts I’ve written in recent years:
