A I D I A
Investigating BL's Representations of Blackness by Looking at "A Lion Like Country" by Hakase
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Content Warning: discussions of Racist stereotypes, NSFW content sex related below, 18+.
Boys’ Love (BL) is veraciously consuming new tropes, materialities, localities, and nations. Yet, as it travels, endlessly reproduced, translated, and shared (often illegally), permutations abound and a new diversity of people and narratives are being represented to serve the large audience’s demand for more. Boys’ Love is a subgenre of manga (Japanese comics) that depicts male-male homoerotic narratives. The genre began in the 1970s in Japan but has blossomed today transnationally: Thai BL live-action dramas are soaring in popularity, Chinese “danmei” light novels (heavily inspired by BL) top the New York Times best-selling list weekly, and graphic depictions of gratuitous gay sex can be seen on the shelves of small-town Alabama chain bookstores. Further, “boys love media has been positively reshaping the imaginary and real worlds of its fans in Asia and beyond. And it shows no signs of stopping.” However, BL’s origins from the 1970s come from predominantly straight, Japanese women authors writing for straight women consumers. Blasting into the present, this industry in Japan is incredibly lucrative with all major book retailers showcasing BL titles on their main displays. However, there is a striking diversity of readers even within Japan due to BL’s popularity and subsequent passionate fan communities. Yet, it is hard to dispute the claim that BL is going global given the sheer increase of consumption and success of BL in all its permutations in Asia and Euramerica. As BL has gone abroad many new genres in East Asia have been inspired and taken narrative and visual tropes from Japanese BL. This is seen in China through danmei and also many BL titles in Korean comics (manhwa). However, outside of East Asia there are thousands of fanartists and authors of fanfiction producing works based off of these original texts for fan audiences. Also, with BL having such a large international fanbase, large communities of fans translate these works illegally into their native language to enable more engagement with BL. Amidst this increased consumption, BL is described as going global to signify its increasing presence in Asia and Euramerica, and to say there are no signs of stopping implies that BL will increasingly proliferate into new markets, spaces, and times. Yet, what of Africa?
If BL’s feminist-utopic project (check out this article for more on this, one of my favs) celebrates and includes different reader’s desires, places outside of the Global North need to be considered in the way they are represented in BL. (check out this article here for more on this) Simultaneously, a comprehensive understanding of fans' reception, subsequent usage, and response, from places in the likes of South America and Africa, need to be investigated to see if BL can actually continue to spread the world over. This is a difficult task. Due to the historic “othering” of these places through colonization from the metropoles of the Global North, reduced economic opportunities/development for many nations, and the subsequent lessened access to the internet, libraries, and archives to support the consumption of media, evaluating the ways reception of BL fan communities is manifest in these places is exceedingly difficult. However, there are several instances of African individuals being represented by Japanese authors, animators, and mangakas in the frames of anime and the pages of manga that can help us understand the way representations of Africa in anime and manga reiterate or resist inequitable global power systems.
Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1990) is an episodic anime that depicts a Kenyan girl in a speculatively fabulated late nineteenth-century Paris. She is visiting Paris to attend a world fair which infamously utilized Euromerican colonial power to ethnographically platform racist exhibitions of non-Western cultures by using real human subjects. (See mithcells exhibitionary order). Yet, in Nadia, Nadia “is an African subject living in Paris, and a product of international Japanese commodity circulation.” Also, Nadia’s character serves to demonstrate what Deborah Elizabeth Whaley calls “empire in movement, that is, how empire travels to affirm and disrupt imperial or colonialist domination. The work here is to consider the consequences and possibilities of bearing the burden of colonialist fantasy and postcolonial liberation on the body of an imagined African girl.” I take up this same venture in investigating these dualities in the visual and sequential representations of Luca from A Lion-Like Country.
Specifically, how do colonial fantasies get maintained, shouldered, ellucidated or challenged in the representations of Luca from A Lion-Like Country? A Lion-Like Country (2020) is, similar to Nadia, a BL manga that depicts a Kenyan youth interacting with a non-African subject as the main love interest. Yet, this Kenyan character is from the nomadic ethnic minority of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania, the Maasai. The two main characters are Luca who is a Maasai high school exchange student and Makoto, an animal-loving Japanese high schooler. Makoto’s family is hosting Luca as an exchange student and on their first night both Luca and Makoto identify a romantic connection. From here, a BL-esque fantastically quick and raunchy love story unfolds. The first few chapters follow Luca’s experience going to Makoto’s Japanese high school. Then, in the final chapters of the work, readers see Makoto a few years later in college joining Luca on a study-abroad trip to Southern Kenya to continue his relationship with Luca, meet Luca’s family, better understand Maasai culture, and further his studies as a veterinary student.
Like Nadia, Luca’s character is excessively exoticized as representative of an African “Other” to create an intoxicating narrative for Japanese readers. More than that, Luca’s character also upholds stereotypes about Black people in Japan as well as misleading descriptions of Maasai culture (namely in him having a penis piercing). I will be following Whaley’s excellent work in critiquing Nadia to similarly investigate A Lion-Like Country’s depiction of African characters in sequential art. How does this work reiterate harmful stereotypes of Black men for a Japanese audience? How do these stereotypes reiterate Whaley’s ideas of “empire in movement” as Luca’s character embodies colonial fantasies of the “Other” while also being a site of resistance to these oversimplifying visual agendas? Ultimately, I investigate a Lion-Like Country to begin a conversation about whether and how Boys’ Love is going global. Is Boys’ Love capable of celebrating difference in a way that does not reiterate harmful forms of stereotype to enable an increasingly diverse fan community overseas?
When Makoto first hears from his mom that he and his family are going to be taking care of a Maasai-Kenyan exchange student, a common trope of the Maasai as a faceless fierce masculine warrior next to a roaring lion is drawn (Fig. 1). The Maasai are often represented as being surrounded by lions or other animals because their traditional ways of life as a nomadic and herding culture look to an international gaze to be a “pre-modern” lifestyle. Yet, due to this alternative lifestyle, the specter of Maasai people is often used in Kenyan tourist art as well for Kenyan artists to dwell on imagined ideas of what life was like in Kenya for all Kenyans pre-colonization. Other theorists have also discussed how Maasai symbolizes to the foreign buyer (often tourists from Euramerica) the “noble primitive” and local buyers as “[Kenyans from] long ago.” Here, in Figure 1, Makoto’s mother seems to be reiterating the common trope of a fantastical primitive warrior coming into their home. Makoto then begins to do research on the Maasai and further learns more specifics of their language, where they live, and some of their traditional beliefs like fighting lions as a rite of passage; he concludes that “the world sure can be different huh” (Fig.1), stressing how Makoto would struggle to be a warrior and cannot envision living like the Maasai. However, once Makoto meets Luca these differences are negotiated.
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Even these ideas of being “from long ago” embodied by local Kenyan artists are challenged as Luca is depicted as an urbanite from Nairobi. He has learned to speak excellent Japanese, predominantly lives in the city, while still maintaining his cultural identity as Maasai, and showing photos of his life in Nairobi of his friends wearing fashionable streetwear on his smartphone. This speaks to contemporary life for many Maasai people as they have faced significant changes to their traditional ways of life due to urbanization, globalization, and being subject to national law in Kenya and Tanzania. This was most recently seen in 2022 with the Tanzanian government’s active attempts to displace Maasai people from their ancestral homeland by using methods like tear gas and live ammunition. This specific event and violent attempts of displacement were meant to take the land and create a private luxury hunting reserve. This is only one example of a history of changes to Maasai ways of life. Maasai agricultural practices are drastically changing: now, the Maasai increasingly practice crop farming rather than their past practices of nomadic cattle grazing and nomadic agricultural practices. Many of the water sources needed to raise cattle have become inaccessible due to private land development. Importantly, Luca demonstrates how Maasai are not a monolithic embodiment of a fantastical “pre-modern” past, but rather each Maasai is a unique negotiation of contemporary ways of being at the intersection of the nation-state, international standards and enforcement of ecological practices, and various nature and national parks in Kenya which restrict Maasai people’s ability to move over large amounts of land to successfully raise cattle.
While A Lion-Like Country does resist international and Kenyan ideas of the Maasai being confined to a historic past, the work takes some Maasai beliefs and extorts them to further exoticize Luca as a sexual subject. The Maasai are known to perform both male and female circumcision as a part of the coming-of-age ritual and both men and women wear large ear piercings. Yet, in A Lion-Like Country these practices are pseudo combined. In Makoto and Luca’s first sexual encounter, Makoto discovers that Luca has a penis piercing, immediately asking if it is “a tribe specific piercing? Like a traditional one.” To which Luca responds, “Is that what you think… yeah.” Luca implies that it was a personal choice and leans into Makoto’s ignorance of Maasai piercing customs (which do not include genital piercing). Luca though does not explain further, and readers are left with a lack of understanding why this high school student has a penis piercing.
Maybe this is a personal choice and does not need any further discussion. We do know Luca to be a fashionable youth who is into the latest trends, but I am very suspect of this decision as it is unlike anything else I have seen in BL before. At worst, this combination of Maasai traditional customs that have been vaguely distilled as a plot point to fuel Luca and Makoto’s first sexual encounter is low effort and serves to further exoticize Luca as different without providing any background information that would encourage readers to understand his actions. Rather, he is treated as a sexual object of difference to please the audience’s fantastical reading experience.
Interestingly, as described above, this combination of the traditional practice of piercing made me notice the process of exoticization: how characters are made different from the norm in order to fetishize them or make them exotic. In a more reparative reading of the text, I think it is possible for readers to come to a similar realization of how this manga and writing Black characters is already influenced by the greater histories of exoticizing Black subjects. Further, we as readers come to see the process by which characters become exoticized named for us. Luca acknowledges his penis piercing as just another fashion decision, shrugging it off and kind of laughing at the fact that Luca would boil this decision down to his ethnicity. In many ways we see Makoto become the average Japanese reader who may boil all aspects of Luca’s identity down to his ethnic background rather than his personal decisions and styles of beauty. Relatably, Luca scoffs at this occurrence, which happens all the time in the average Japanese high school for foreign students.
To continue, this is not the only instance of Luca’s physical traits fitting into common racist stereotypes of African individuals. Throughout this first sexual encounter and even when they first meet Makoto describes Luka as big. Also, Makoto exclaims in their first sexual encounter how big Luca’s penis is. This trope of Black men having a large penis is another example of hurtful enactments of othering Black men’s bodies into some sort of gratuitous spectacle for viewers. It also fits into the above comment about making readers aware of the process of exoticization. These tropes about Black characters are such low effort stereotypes that have been done to death in the American context it is hard to not think the author is trying to get us to understand how Black characters are perceived in Japanese society and the stereotypes they face.
Other common tropes about Black men are also present throughout the story. When Luca is going to school at Makoto’s high school, students exclaim how great he is at basketball and how high he can jump. There is even a scene where he is surrounded by Japanese students asking him questions that show their ignorance of Kenya and also embodiment of racist tropes like “Do you like track and field?” These combinations of “othering” Luca from his Japanese schoolmates through invoking common racist tropes of Black men serve to commodify and simply articulate Luca’s difference (and Blackness) to viewers. These tropes and racist stereotypes students say to Luca may simultaneously objectify Luca’s Blackness to allow readers to remain comfortable in their racial stereotypes or it might make viewers aware of the process of exoticizing Black characters and subjects using these popular stereotypes.
The way Luca’s character is rendered, specifically his hair texture, shows Luca’s hairstyle subscribing to Anglo-Japanese beauty standards of wavy hair rather than coarse locs. One fan of the manga commented on Vyvymanga’s comment section (where I accessed A Lion-like Country digitally) below the work but had one critique: “I loved this!! The only thing I could ask from this manga is that I wish he had Ethnic hair instead of wavy hair 😭 other than that I was twirling my hair and kicking my feet the whole time.” When Makoto and Luca first meet and the faceless Maasai warrior shown in figure 1, Luca’s hair has more clearly defined locs. Yet, as the narrative progresses his hair increasingly changes to resemble, almost identically, Makoto’s hair texture (compare fig.4, fig.5, and fig. 6). This change could be as simple as the mangaka (the writer and artist of the manga) not wanting to put forth the effort to keep Luca’s hair consistent. There is no evidence of Luca changing his hair in the panels and this erasure of hair texture is not as innocuous in impact as a lack of effort from the mangaka. Black hair has undergone rigorous attempts of silencing and obscuring in Western societies with various schools and public institutions banning dreadlocks explicitly. Other forms of racial othering described Black people’s hair as inferior to whites because of differing hair textures.
This makes accurately drawing, taking time and energy, and care in the rendering of Black hair a beneficial task that resists these current and past forms of erasing Black beauty. Drawing Black hair in its diverse styles and its many potentialities has many generative possibilities for artists. From a basic Google search, there are countless videos of artists explaining how to render Black hair. The ignorance of non-Black artists in rendering Black characters echoes historically intentional acts of ignorance and silencing of Black forms of beauty and style. Also, the depictions of Luca’s hair with clearly defined locs are coincidentally closest to the moment of evoking the stereotype of the Maasai racial “other” mentioned previously (fig.1). However, as Luca becomes more visualized throughout the novel his hair increasingly becomes more rendered like White or Japanese characters in manga. His hair at the very end most similarly evokes the style of popular Chinese “danmei” hairstyles (fig.5 and 6). Overall, maybe this lack of care in rendering Luca’s hair further demonstrates the ways the mangaka of this work was not interested in representing African subjects by talking to African artists, with care, or knowledge about common racial stereotypes. Rather, the work upholds methods of othering African subjects for readers' entertainment.
On the other hand, from my personal experience being White and moving to Japan, I continuously make efforts to make my hair fit into the beauty standards of Japanese society. I try to make my hair look more Japanese, aka straight but invariably I can never quite achieve this no matter the amount of product I put in my hair. I empathize with Luca’s transformation. Either the mangaka got lazy in the rendering of the hair or this is a subtle allusion to the process that many immigrants go through of shaping their bodies to fit the new cultural norms (I am thinking of my friend’s experience coming to Japan for five weeks and always brushing her hair due to a new found sense of body dysmorphia in comparison to the society around her). This would have been cleared up with a few panel aside to show Luca styling his hair to fit the beauty standards but instead we are left as readers to wonder if this is the mangaka being lazy or trying to draw attention to how immigrants change themselves visually to fit into their new location.
However, this turning of Black hair into more Anglo-Japanese hair characteristics does fall in line with histories of Black erasure. It echoes Whaley’s discussion of Black characters from Kenya: “For Black characters in sequential art, Kenya as a site of origin is a popular racial and international trope, perhaps because it allows illustrators and animators to depict tribal characteristics that are starkly African and therefore different from Anglo characters, yet with intermittent “refined” Anglo features, such as lighter-hued eyes and loosely curled or straight hair, that are associated with and seen in North and East Africa.” These tribal characteristics are present in the invocation of the Maasai as a faceless warrior (fig.1) but also in the way hair is rendered in A Lion-Like Country (fig.4,5, and 6). The use of “loosely curled or straight hair” in A Lion-like Country clearly demonstrates Whaley’s point. The international trope of the Maasai and also Kenya’s savannah is invoked but the presence of these Anglo-characteristics allows both differences to be mobilized, while also mobilizing sameness (of these dominant beauty standards). This is done to not upset or potentially ostracize international readers with the visualization of Black characters.
To Whaley’s point, on the cover of the manga, Luca is rendered with blue eyes (fig. 7). These actions enable international and Japanese readers from the Global North to simultaneously observe racial difference while seeing familiar physical characteristics that enable readers to not be challenged in their exclusionary beauty standards. These “refined” Anglo features serve to sneak in white-centered forms of beauty. Regarding the depiction of Nadia from Nadia: Secret of Clear Blue Water, Whaley describes how “fans report that Anno and his collaborators wanted to illustrate Nadia with coarse, curly hair, but conceded that if she was too conspicuously Black, Japanese and international audiences might not relate to the character.” BL authors similarly understand the presence of a non-Japanese audience in the making of their work. In virtually all doujinshi (self-made and published works of manga) BL authors put, in both English and Japanese, a warning not to redistribute the contents of the work without the permission of the author. This is an apt warning in consideration that A Lion-Like Country’s English translation has amassed ninety-three thousand views just on the site I access the work from. This is not including the several other websites that have unofficial English translations with the most popular, according to its own view counter, reaching over one million views.
Arguably, A Lion-like Country’s combination of characters from differing backgrounds enables more viewers to identify with the character, thereby, generating more potential revenue and income if the work were to be officially translated into foreign languages and published. However, I suspect that a reason it has not is due to these questionable tropes utilized that I think would be criticized among American BL readers.
This combination of Anglo/Japanese/Black characteristics into a more general “Other” does create a visually ambiguous main character who can enable differing outcomes when African fans receive these images; “ethnic identification appears more fluid and contingent in the world of anime, where fairy-themed, anamorphic, or animated characters, rather than human bodies, portray the main protagonists.” Amongst this suspension of disbelief of readers and viewers of manga and anime in regards to race, caring and effortful renderings of non-Japanese and Euromerican characters would be a meaningful first step in working towards ridding BL of racist forms of visualizing characters.
Whaley describes how Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water “is also colonialist in its visual and at times narrative execution, making Nadia’s transpacific and mysterious African identity as much of a matter of sexualized spectacle as it is a matter of subjectivity and representation in the larger field of sequential art.” Similarly, A Lion-Like Country inaccurately portrays Makoto’s Maasai identity and leaves Japanese racist stereotypes about Kenyan people unchecked and uncontested. Similarly, in the context of BL, the African identity of Makoto becomes a “sexualized spectacle” to try and make A Lion-Like Country popular among BL readers. Yet, what does this commodifying, limited, and non-humanizing depiction of an African person in BL mean for the idea of BL going global?
In regards to Japanese fans, readers may even become educated about the ways Black subjects are racialized, stereotyped, and exoticized in Japanese society by reading this narrative. The moments where Luca is seen as only a Black, Maasai man, rather than a fashionable teen: Makoto when discussing his penis piercing, or when Luca’s Japanese classmates assume he can jump very high and has a large penis–demonstrate to viewers the many stereotypes Black immigrants face in Japan. Further, the mangaka elucidating the very process Black subjects get stereotyped and othered within the text may train readers to notice when there are power dynamics of exoticization occurring with the manga or media they consume.
These hurtful and flattened depictions of Africa in BL are not conducive to greater nurturing of people’s differences, yet African viewers are almost certainly familiar with navigating inaccurate, hurtful, and limited depictions of Africa from abroad. Due to this experience among African fans, they might be able to still love, appreciate, and engage these works while contesting the limited Global North’s vocabulary of misrepresenting African subjects as a foreign “Other.” Here, fans could appreciate the new diversity of characters shown in a Lion-Like Country and contest these limited/damaging depictions through disidentification. “Enacting constrained agencies in the tight spaces of mainstream representation, minoritarian subjects do not have the luxury to ignore the hail of visibility but instead are tasked with strategically and artfully making do with the detritus of sensationalisms, misrepresentations, misrecognitions, and absences that constitute the normative public sphere. Disidentification is when ways of working with, in spite of, in resistance to, and with ironic attachment to dominant ideologies and representations.” Potential fans of BL in Africa could utilize strategies of disidentification in engaging with a Lion-Like Country’s depictions of Africa and “strategically and artfully” use various depictions of Africa to empower themselves and their fan communities.
Also, anime and manga have a unique ability (potentially through their drawn stylistic qualities) to facilitate identification among fans of diverse racial backgrounds. Scholar Ami Shirong Lu provides empirical evidence of this hypothesis and marketing strategy. “In her study on racial identification and anime characters, Lu concludes that while Japanese animators claim their characters are ethnically Japanese, Caucasian audiences view the same characters as white. Latino and Black viewers, comparatively, see the ambiguity of characters as an opportunity to imagine their own ethnic identities as having a place within the anime world.” While there are opportunities for fans to resist dominant limited racist visual tropes and depictions in anime and BL, if BL wants to continue BL’s feminist-utopic project of inclusion and celebrations of different reader’s desires in Japan and abroad, BL Japanese authors will need to investigate their work for the ways it embodies hurtful, non-caring, tropes and representations of subjects not from the non-Global North and seek to do serious, committed work with non-Japanese subjects to render, for example, Maasai people with care, to create an international (not just in Euramerica and Japan) BL fan community that serves all of its loving readers.
Let me know your thoughts! Email: aidia.pink@proton.me Last Updated 9/21/2025
Sources:
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Lu, Amy Shirong. “What Race Do They Represent and Does Mine Have Anything to Do With It? Perceived Racial Categories of Anime Characters.” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4, no. 2 (July 2009): 169–90.
McLelland, Mark J., and Rio Otomo. “Politics of Utopia: Fantasy, Pornography, and Boys Love.” Essay. In Boys Love Manga and beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan, 141–52. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2016.
Welker, James. Queer Transfigurations: Boys love media in Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2023.
Whaley, Deborah Elizabeth. Black women in sequence: Re-inking comics, graphic novels, and Anime. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016.
Zender, Benjamin. “What Might Be Bullets, Fireworks, or Balloons: Repertoires of More than Survival in Cassils’s 103 Shots and Lyle Ashton Harris and Thomas Allen Harris’s Brotherhood, Crossroads and Etcetera 1994.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 6, no. 1 (2019): 106–16.