The Beginning of Despair: Aggressive Retsuko and the Sanrioization of Women’s ‘Transgressive Rage’

Abstract

In 2016, Sanrio debuted a series of shorts featuring Retsuko, a cute lesser panda with a penchant for bursts of death-metal infused violent rage. The shorts, eventually transformed into a full show on Netflix, were a comedic look at Retsuko’s anger at unfair treatment in the Japanese workplace, casting a critical eye on issues of sexism, harassment, and overwork. But while Retsuko has been explicitly positioned as counter cultural, what does it mean to be transgressive and Sanrio? This paper analyzes this question from a cross-disciplinary perspective, drawing on critical feminist studies, rage studies, media studies, and sociolinguistics. Approaching the framing, content, and speech of Retsuko throughout her media appearances, we argue that while Retsuko is certainly critical of contemporary Japan, her transgression is ultimately limited, with any potential paths to freedom or rebellion hampered by a corporate system that reabsorbs transgressive behavior and sells it back to customers, closing off the potential to imagine new ways of being.

Keywords:

• Sanrio
• Sociolinguistics
• Rage Studies
• Media Studies
• Aggretsuko
• Japan
• Japanese

Introduction

A young, bright eyed, and bushy tailed animated red panda walks through a park. Cherry blossom petals fall around her as she informs the viewer that she is a brand-new university graduate off to her first day at work, looking forward to a bright future filled with hopes and dreams. Just moments later, however, she trips and sprains her ankle, and a look of anger crosses her face. A death metal soundtrack kicks in, the once-sweet face screams ‘RAGE!!!’, and the phrase ‘The beginning of despair (zetsubō no hajimari)’ flashes across the screen, hinting that this panda’s future may not be as bright as it seemed.

Aggretsuko, known as Aguresshibu Retsuko (‘Aggressive Retsuko’) in Japanese, is a Sanrio media franchise centered around Retsuko, a red panda attempting to navigate life as an ‘Office Lady’ (OL) in contemporary Japan. Invented only as part of an in-company contest, the character became an unexpected global hit, with her juxtaposition of a cute-yet-cynical OL persona and a raging, death-metal-singing ‘aggressive’ identity making Aggretsuko at once humorous and thought provoking. Images of Retsuko ‘enraged’, with her eyes shining, sharp teeth and claws, and pummeling death metal music background overturn the typical image of a Sanrio character—cute, sweet, and ultimately harmless—creating what appears on initial viewing to be deeply transgressive behavior raging against the corporate machine.

Here we must ask, what does it mean for something to be transgressive? Chris Jenks describes transgression as ‘conduct which breaks rules or exceeds boundaries’ (Jenks 2003, 3) and posits that by examining that which is deemed ‘transgressive’ we can make visible the boundaries of the systems in which we live. As Jenks states, ‘it is only by having a strong sense of the “together” that we can begin to understand and account for that which is outside, at the margins, or, indeed, that which defies the consensus’ (6). In queer and feminist studies, transgressive practices are considered acts which have subversive potential to ‘displace the dominant’ (Glick 2000, 24), but must also be considered within institutionalized power relations. As Elisa Glick reminds us, according to the work of Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler no act within itself is ‘inherently subversive’ (27). Instead, behaviors that threaten to disrupt or destabilize oppressive systems—including overt displays of female anger—can therefore be considered ‘transgressive’. Indeed, as Joanne Gottlieb and Gayle Wald argue in their reassessment of the subversive power of music subcultures, ‘in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, as well as in the dominant culture, anger has largely been understood as an all-male terrain’ (1994, 254). As a consequence, the act of a woman entering this terrain of rage (especially publicly) in itself can be considered subversive, although, as Gottlieb and Wald agree, it is also ‘potentially both promising and problematic’ (251). So in the case of Aggretsuko, having the heroine enter multiple traditionally male arenas—corporate Japan, death metal, and open expressions of anger—thereby has the potential to expose the boundaries of these terrains.

Indeed, apparent transgression is a key part of Retsuko’s official and independent promotion both inside and outside Japan. An Oricon interview with a Sanrio PR representative calls Retsuko ‘itan’ (2018), a word which can mean ‘heretical’, ‘maverick’, or ‘transgressive’, while Livedoor refers to her as an ‘itanji’ (Livedoor 2018), literally an ‘itan child’. In fact, the word ‘itan’ is so closely linked to Retsuko that a cursory Google search for ‘sanrio kyarakutā itan’ (Sanrio character itan) places Retsuko as the first and dominant result (see Figure 1). In English language media, The New York Times similarly described Retsuko as ‘akin to the antihero characters of prestige television’ with a ‘anti-capitalist sheen’ (Hess 2017, C1), and The Japan Times analyzed the show as exploring ‘the crushing truths of the modern workplace and the angst of being a cog in the capitalist machine’ (St Michel 2022). But does this appearance or even assertion of transgression actually mean Retsuko is a transgressive character? Is Sanrio truly criticizing the corporate culture that has allowed them to thrive? Or are there limits to Retsuko’s transgression which reveal problems in the way that we think about women and the modes of transgression mass media endorse as available to them?

Figure 1. Retsuko is the first and primary result when searching ‘sanrio kyarakutā itan’ in 2023.

In the current paper, we analyze Aggretsuko’s peculiar positioning as a Sanrio product that rails against the corporate world, and investigate what it means when transgressive behavior by women is commodified. To do so, we employ a cross-disciplinary approach utilizing cultural, media, textual, and linguistic analysis to examine if Aggretsuko actually offers women new images of social being within the Japanese media landscape, merely applies the trappings of transgression, or sits somewhere in between, probing the concept of ‘Sanrio transgression’ within multiple frames. However, while this means that each section engages with Aggretsuko by intervening in distinct dialogues, the combination is not haphazard. The current study arose out of conversations about Aggretsuko we had as fans, wherein we each mentioned that we were independently designing research projects about the show after noting that it communicated in novel ways with watershed papers from our respective fields. We decided to combine our studies when these discussions lead us to realize that all of our individual analytical approaches were taking distinct paths to the same conclusion: while Aggretsuko breaks numerous Sanrio traditions, it also perpetuates gendered ideologies in the service of the company that created it, with Retsuko’s ‘transgressive’ rage sympathizing with women’s struggles but endorsing few new avenues for female identities, speech, and representation in contemporary Japan. We will break down these findings across the following sections, taking a brief detour first to provide more detailed background into Aggretsuko and why Retsuko stands out within Sanrio’s stable of characters to date.

Death metal, kyara, and kawaii: Aggretsuko in the Sanrio empire

Retsuko was created in 2015 by the artist ‘Yeti’ for Sanrio, a company known for products focusing on the kawaii segment of Japanese popular culture (Sanrio 2021). Retsuko first gained public attention between 2016 and 2018, when she became the star of 100 minute-long shorts produced by the animation company Fanworks. The success of these shorts, which included some international attention through unofficial English dubbing and pirating, lead to Netflix creating a longer-form show (approximately 15-minute episodes) known in English as Aggretsuko. The show debuted in 2018, and concluded with its fifth season in 2023.

Both the Aggretsuko shorts and show can be broadly read as comedy programs which parody ‘trendy dramas’ that depict life for Japan’s ‘office ladies’, and critique frustrations with work life in contemporary Japan. In most TBS episodes, stories follow a sort of template: Retsuko is shown enduring some sort of workplace irritation ‘until she can no longer hold back her anger’ (TBS 2016). At this point, a kanji for ‘rage’ (烈, retsu) glows on her forehead, and she bursts into a flurry of death metal singing which violently denounces or critiques the source of her frustration (Netflix 2019). That said, although Aggretsuko regularly touches on weighty yet unfortunately familiar topics for office workers like power harassment, sexual harassment, loneliness, and overwork, the shorts apply a ‘comedic touch’ (TBS 2016) as a whole, being filled with gags and visual puns (e.g., a reptilian boss who literally licks Retsuko while talking down to her, playing on dual meanings of the verb ‘nameru’).

Once Aggretsuko was picked up by Netflix, the fundamental themes remained central, but increased detail was given to the characters in Retsuko’s world, and certain details were altered significantly. Most prominently, Retsuko’s death metal singing shifts from a surreal and comedic break from reality, wherein other characters do not notice Retsuko screaming right next to them, to an actual habit. Retsuko now escapes to karaoke parlors, her mind, or even bathroom stalls to sing, with a specific karaoke booth in particular serving as a major and semi-magical set piece in all seasons. Another major change is that as the seasons progress, the death metal aspect is played down gradually. For instance, while Season 4 opens with a death voice scream, there is no further death voice singing until the eighth episode, while in the shorts brief death metal singing was expected in each episode, with its absence being a source of humor (e.g., an episode where Retsuko tries to scream but is too sick). Throughout all incarnations, however, the foundation of the media franchise is still based upon humorous contrast: a cute, friendly lesser panda in a conservative blue uniform, and a screaming beast denouncing horrors of the Japanese workplace through a musical genre known for embracing violations of ‘nearly every conceivable social rule governing taste’ (Halnon 2006, 34).

Depending on the angle of analysis, Aggretsuko can therefore be seen as either a continuation or rejection of established Sanrio practices. On the one hand, Aggretsuko aligns with Sanrio’s traditional ‘marketing motif’ (McVeigh 2000, 230) of developing a ‘media mix’ centered around cute¹ characters who ‘circulate through capitalist realms of exchange and social relations of consumption’ (Yano 2013, 12) in both domestic and international markets (Gough and Lee 2020; Steinberg 2012; Yano 2013). Cuteness has been a captivating and influential subject of research in academia across multiple fields, with attention going beyond issues of mere aesthetics to examine the cultural, social, and psychological dimensions of the concept of kawaii in Japanese society and beyond. For example, scholars have explored how kawaii has become a prominent aspect of Japanese popular culture discourses, how it intersects with cultural norms and values, and how it has been commodified and exported internationally (e.g., Allison 2004; Burdelski and Mitsuhashi 2010; Nittono 2016). When not bursting into fits of rage, Retsuko certainly fits within prior discussions of both kawaii design and commodification, as she is short, fluffy, and has the somewhat ‘dysmorphic’ (Gough and Lee 2020, para. 6) proportions common to Sanrio’s kawaii designs. Even Retsuko’s movements are calculated to highlight cuteness, as she often winks, skips, or tilts her head in a disarming manner as she looks directly into the camera.

The show’s overarching attention to the annoyances of women office workers likewise continues Sanrio’s primary, although not exclusive, targeting of ‘females from “tweens to young adults”’ (Yano 2011, 24). And while Hello Kitty, unlike Retsuko, has never called her employer a ‘shitty boss’ (kuso jōshi), even the show’s theme of discontent with work culture broadly fits within Sanrio’s recognized model of producing content that does not ‘so much create desire as respond to consumer wishes’ (Yano 2013, 101). Indeed, Retsuko’s gripes about work undoubtedly echo the 2013 Sanrio character Gudetama, a lazy, depressed egg whose lack of motivation responds to previously extant ‘Japanese discourses of both millennial work attitudes and perceptions of mental health’ (Bonnah 2019, 188). Whether Gudetama is transgressive is a question beyond the scope of this paper, but a character who rejects the ethos of ‘productivity’ in favor of a radical path of laziness minimally shows that Sanrio has a growing history of experimenting with traditional notions of kawaii.

However, as we mentioned in the introduction, Retsuko is unlike other Sanrio characters in being explicitly marketed as transgressive and subversive. Moreover, the specifics of this potential transgression are clear, as Retsuko is one of the few Sanrio characters equipped with a detailed backstory and identity (Gough and Lee 2020; Yano 2013). Devoted fans might know the names of Hello Kitty’s family, and the personality of characters like Gudetama are fleshed out through animated shorts. But fans of Retsuko can engage with the character at a deeper level, learning the minutia of her small apartment, daily routines, thought patterns, personal and professional relationships, neuroses, and even drinking habits. Hello Kitty has certainly never been shown eating and drinking away her sorrows on a lonely Christmas Eve, or passed out drunk on an unmade bed surrounded by half-eaten snacks. Promotional materials also directly position Retsuko as transgressive in a manner absent from other Sanrio media, as seen when the official English Aggressive Retsuko Twitter account retweeted Retsuko screaming ‘Screw you capitalism!’ in a scene from the Netflix English dub (Figure 2).²

Figure 2. Retsuko says ‘Screw you capitalism!’ in the English subtitles.

Retsuko also avoids the ‘expressionless face’ (Bonnah 2019, 204) common to Sanrio characters in their media mixes which end up ‘evoking a particular blankness that can subsequently become or reflect all things’ (Yano 2013, 21), employ ‘large, expressive, yet vaguely blank eyes’ (Steinberg 2012, 191), or provide a ‘mouthless countenance [that works as a] sounding board to synchronize with the mood of [the] viewer’ (Yano 2011, 30). Retsuko instead wears her emotions on her sleeve, drawing the viewer to sympathize with her struggles, tears, moments of frustration, and, eventually, explosions of extreme rage. Here we see Retsuko ostensibly pushing back against Sanrio’s ‘cute, cuddly, non-aggressive look’ (Teodorescu 2021, 60) as she bares her claws, sticks out her tongue, and her eyes transform into bright white globes wrapped in sharp, black designs evocative of the ‘corpse paint’ of black metal stage shows (Hagen and In 2014; Sellheim 2016).

This is not to say that empathetic viewers do not still find Retsuko cute! Rather, our point is that Retsuko’s anger minimally challenges stereotyped understandings of the borders of cute itself. Certainly, claws, fangs, and burning rage depart from Kinsella’s (1995, 220) pioneering work on kawaii, where the word is defined as signifying childlike qualities, celebrating sweetness, innocence, purity, simplicity, authenticity, gentleness, vulnerability, fragility, and inexperience in both social behavior and physical appearance. Spikes, flames, kanji for ‘rage’, and screams of shine! (‘die’) also clearly even depart from kawaii’s historical etymologies, wherein the form kawayushi, originally meaning ‘pitiful/unbearable’, evolved to reflecting a desire to ‘care for’ or protect in the Meiji period (Kindaichi and Kokubo 2014).

Finally, and most obviously, Retsuko is the first Sanrio character to engage with death metal, an ‘abrasive and uncompromising’ (Strum 2015, 14) genre associated with anti-social posturing and ‘transgressive art’ (Kirner-Ludwig and Wohlfarth 2018, 405). To be clear, transgressive musical genres themselves are not foreign to Sanrio. The company has dressed Hello Kitty in punk clothing, and introduced characters with punk/goth inspirations like Bad Badtz-Maru, Kuromi, or Yoshikitty. But Retsuko is the brand’s first character that directly engages with a cultural space known for regularly flirting with images of gore, occultism, and even extreme sexual violence (Kahn-Harris 2003; Kirner-Ludwig and Wohlfarth 2018; Shadrack 2017). There is a large gap, for instance, between drawing a cat in a studded jacket, and depicting a lesser panda explicitly interested in a genre famous for song titles like Cannibal Corpse’s ‘Fucked with a Knife’ – a track referenced in no less than a half-dozen academic discussions around censorship, feminism, how women engage with extreme metal, and the purpose of depictions of violence in the genre (Hill 2016; Hill and Savigny 2019; James 2009; Phillipov 2012; Shadrack 2017; Vasan 2011, 2016). Indeed, due to ‘sexist ideas about what kinds of music and instruments are suitable for women’ (Hill 2023, 146) and historic understandings of extreme metal’s transgression as specifically ‘assertive, masculinist response’ (Hoad 2023, 160), which involves the ‘degradation’ of traits ‘linked to femininity’ (Hill 2016, 290), women’s engagement with extreme metal is often a socially transgressive act itself. Through depicting Retsuko as not just wearing the clothing of a transgressive scene but actually finding self-actualization via participating in it, Sanrio thereby presents an acceptance of what are minimally non-conventional hobbies and behavioral norms – both for its characters and for Japanese ‘office ladies’ at large.

In short, Retsuko is important for both her global popularity and her fairly novel design within Sanrio’s stable. Retsuko is certainly a cute character who serves as the focus of an anime media mix, with her image spread across the anime, various merchandise, and even spin-off manga as reflecting ‘a system of communication between media forms and the centrality of the character within postwar Japanese visual culture’ (Steinberg 2012, 201). But she is also directly engaged in social critique, given a complex story viewers can follow, and positioned as engaging in transgressive behaviors and subcultures. So, what are we to make of Retsuko as a Sanrio product? Is this an act of cute which is subversive, creating ‘fertile ground for shedding light on various dominant narratives in the public sphere while questioning their legitimacy’ (Teodorescu 2021, 58)? Or, is the character superficially transgressive in a manner that ‘cannot really challenge the power structure but, rather, often appears to conform to it’ (Madge 1998, 172)? Using combined lenses of critical feminist studies, rage studies, media studies, and sociolinguistics, across the next three sections we will analyze Aggretsuko from distinct perspectives. Across these three approaches, we ultimately argue that although Aggretsuko welcomes and encourages some forms of gender and social norm transgression, this ‘Sanrio-ized transgression’ works to perpetuate the many ideologies it appears to challenge on the surface, welcoming Retsuko’s resistance only as long as it ultimately supports hegemonic narratives of gender and adulthood in Japan.

Workplace dramas, workplace anger

Aggretsuko joins a long line of programs in the Japanese mediascape that focus on the life of Japanese working women. Indeed, many have noted an increase in representations of working women in Japanese popular media in the past few decades as women have increasingly moved into the corporate sphere. Peter Matanle, Kuniko Ishiguro, and Leo McCann, for instance, argue that in the case of manga that depict working women, the gendered workplace is now a defining characteristic of Japan’s national political economic space, resulting in storytelling focusing on ‘the ritualistic subordination of the strong female in the service of male “work”’ (Matanle, Ishiguro, and McCann 2014, 484). While shifts in gender roles in Japanese society can be traced through almost all Japanese popular culture, for the purpose of this study we believe Aggretsuko is most strongly in dialogue with the workplace television dramas of the 1990s and 2000s, in particular the popular 1998 Fuji TV series Shomuni (Power Office Girls). Most blatantly, Retsuko’s OL uniform bears a particularly striking resemblance to the uniforms worn by the OL in Shomuni (see Figure 3), but there are also major overlaps in story and theming as well. Shomuni tells the story of a group of OL at a major corporation, relegated to dull and menial work such as fixing lightbulbs and changing toilet rolls in Section 2 of the General Affairs Department (‘shomu ni’). This posting serves as a kind of unofficial punishment for slights against the company, but more often than not the shomuni staff, most typically women, have actually been the victims of sexism or discrimination.

Figure 3. Shomuni OL uniforms compared with Retsuko’s.

Like Aggretsuko, Shomuni explicitly questions the corporate grind. The lead character, Tsuboi Chinatsu (played by Esumi Makiko in a role that made her a star), is famous for extorting ‘You don’t exist to serve your company or your male colleagues; it is they who exist to serve you. What matters is that you have fun; the rest is irrelevant’. In other words—work is not the place for women to find self-actualization, but it can be a place to consider your identity. Gabriella Lukács (2010, 2013) argues that Japanese workplace dramas like Shomuni were born out of a time in which marketing discourses began encouraging self-centeredness. Such self-centeredness, however, was only made possible by the transition of women into the professional workforce in the mid-1980s. As Alisa Freedman explains, the protagonists of 1980s and 1990s Japanese dramas therefore ‘enact fantasies about female professionals while depicting real issues facing the generations they represent’ (2018, 48). This is not to say that dramas portrayed work as place for assured self-actualization, as ‘viewers may not want to be these characters, but perhaps they can see aspects of themselves in them or aspire to their confidence and coolness’ (48). Shows like Shomuni therefore have instead long served as a barometer for understanding women’s lives and dreams in Japan, and as a lens through which to consider women’s disenchantment, disenfranchisement, and frustration with the status quo. Indeed, as Freedman argues, trendy dramas argue that ‘because women can never achieve all they desire, they should be happy with their current situations’ (57), serving as an empathetic ‘barometer of the emotional impact of historical change’ (48). In short, while women in the mid-1980s were encouraged through workplace TV dramas to become focussed on their careers and more self-centred, the conclusion often was, and still is, they will never be able to achieve all their dreams and should instead learn to enjoy the (new) lives they have.

Lukács therefore takes particularly pragmatic approach to the study of television dramas featuring female characters, arguing that these shows go beyond the portrayal of dreams. Instead, they mark ‘an important milestone in the processes of neoliberal labor mobilization […as they] acclimated workers to a recessionary economy in which employers demanded more commitment for less pay and even less job security’ (2013, 223). This shift occurred in the wake of Japan’s 1985 Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL), a law which made it legally possible (if practically challenging) for women to work in the same jobs as men. Inoue describes the discourse surrounding this time as a period when:

women’s happiness, sense of fulfillment, and aspirations came to be the concern of government agencies, employers, women’s advocates, media commentators, public intellectuals, and informed individual women themselves—all of which constituted a complex public sphere around the issue of women, women’s welfare, gender equity, and the EEOL (2013, 201).

The issue of women’s welfare was not one that the government or corporations were willing to shoulder, however, despite their supposed concern. Inequalities extant in the workplace prior to the EEOL were left largely unaddressed, as the law and programs surrounding it served to transform ‘the responsible subject from the employer to female workers themselves’ (202). Today, Aggretsuko operates in a similar fashion, despite over two decades of time having passed. The post-bubble, ongoing economic downturn, ‘precarious Japan’ (Allison 2013) era is still one in which many Japanese women struggle to find joy in the workplace, let alone equal treatment, satisfaction, and self-actualization, and Aggretsuko depicts the frustrations resulting from the contemporary neoliberal Japanese workplace. In contrast to Tsuboi Chinatsu of Shomuni though, who encouraged viewers to find fun in even the most mundane, Retsuko channels her disillusionment with corporate life into frustration and fiery rage.

In their 2005 volume Bad Girls of Japan, Miller and Bardsley argue that particular icons of deviancy are created ‘to capture a particular historical moment’ (Miller and Jan 2005, xi). They describe these icons, including controversial female photographers, gang members, and even brand-savvy women indulging in luxury consumption, as ‘visibly transgressive’ as ‘they direct attention to the borders of propriety even as they threaten to alter them’ (1), and possess the ability to make being ‘bad’ look like a lot of fun. In moving from advising women to find fun in the face of unfair treatment to encouraging them to embrace their rage, Retsuko certainly can be said to join this long line of transgressive icons, newly endorsing a previously unsupported solution to a now decades-old problem. At the same time, however, Aggretsuko demonstrates that threatening to push boundaries and the ability to actually do so are two very different things.

Firstly, while there is a clearly universality in tropes that has enabled the show’s international success, there is also a voyeuristic aspect. Particularly for international audiences lacking the intertextual viewing experience which links Aggretsuko to prior ‘OL drama’ that ‘mobilize viewers into new neoliberal labor regimes’ (Lukács 2010, 150), the show leads them to witness sexism and discrimination in a stereotypically (if animated) Japanese workplace, reinforcing ‘a typically Orientalist’ view of Japan as ‘inscrutable or weird’ (Bonnah 2019, 189). The difference between corporate workplaces, however, is not as stark as international audiences may believe. Condescending views of women and their emotions are common themes that emerges in popular culture around the world. As Angela McRobbie writes of the UK context, ‘the media and popular culture find reason to be both titillated and entertained by self-destructive young women, who speak out their pain loudly, and yet whose rage appears to be illegible’ (McRobbie 2008, 115). Female anger, women’s rage, and the reasons behind it are, as McRobbie describes, treated as though they are ‘illegible’ in patriarchal societies. Rather than operating as a force for social change, open expressions of rage on the part of women are instead viewed as inappropriate, transgressing social boundaries, or as mere entertainment. Retsuko’s outlet of death metal is a case in point, as instead of shedding light on the improvements that need to be made in the contemporary Japanese corporate world, the anger Retsuko expresses is packaged and sold in the form of cute characters and humorous stories. Indeed, drawing on the work of McRobbie, Sarah Banet-Weiser explains how ‘because female rage is taboo, it is often channelled into something that can contain it, lessen its force, trivialize it—and, well, takes the “rage” out of it’ (Banet-Weiser 2018). Aggretsuko pulls back the curtain on the realities of work for many women in Japan, but the only thing that is revealed to be behind the curtain is increased profit margins for Sanrio—a major Japanese corporation itself.

Secondly, Retsuko has, like many viewers, been promised the dream of neoliberal Japan, but quickly confronts the reality that the gender equality promised by 1985s Equal Employment Equality Law was ‘a powerful apparatus that prepared women to liberate—and govern—themselves as subjects in a post-Fordist neoliberal political economy’ (Inoue 2013, 200). Twenty years on from Shomuni, Aggretsuko again shows that equality in the workplace, meaningful careers for young women, and a meaningful life itself remains out of reach for many. The only difference this time is that the main character is allowed to express some anger, as long as she does so in private and then returns to work after. The neoliberal turn has therefore not benefited Retsuko, but instead exploits her enthusiasm and excitement about joining the workforce to the point at which her only outlet is the furious, violent death metal that spews forth in moments of frustration.

So does Retsuko’s anger and death metal expressions of frustration make her a transgressive character in the history of OL media? To some extent, certainly. Like Tsuboi Chinatsu in Shomuni, Retsuko is afforded a way to (briefly) express her true feelings—a circuit breaker of sorts—and her regular aggressive refusals to find happiness in the mundane and sharp-tongued mockery of her workplace’s dull, frustrating, and/or abusive elements are something rarely portrayed sympathetically by Japanese mass media products, or promoted by their female protagonists. Nonetheless, we must remember that Sanrio could be described as representing the neoliberal Japanese economy itself. While Retsuko is allowed to scream truth to power in the karaoke booth, the bathroom stall, a party where everyone else is passed-out drunk, or her mind, potentially inciting passionate sympathy from the viewer, Sanrio does not offer the lesser panda alternative career paths or methods of public self-actualization. Rather, as our next section shows, no matter what adventures Retsuko’s frustration takes her on, the only dream Sanrio ultimately permits is the corporate grind.

Lost in the Passive-Aggressive-transgressive dilemma

Now that we have discussed Aggretsuko within the broader media landscape of OL dramas, we turn to discussing the show itself. In both nationalistic nihonjinron (‘theories/discussions about the Japanese’) and Orientalist discourses, a division between honne (‘inner/private thoughts’) and tatemae (‘outer/public displays’) is deemed to be of paramount importance in Japanese culture (Doi 1972). While any assertion that these concepts are exclusively Japanese, or shared by a majority of Japanese people, has long been rejected by scholars of contemporary Japan (see: Kowner and Befu 2015), there is no question that the dilemma between honne and tatemae is an extremely common trope in Japanese fiction. Indeed, media is a place where traditional ideologies about language and gender are regularly perpetuated in contemporary Japan (Hambleton 2011; Nakamura 2013), and Retsuko’s outbreaks of death metal singing continue these tropes, presenting Retsuko’s rage as a way to confront the constant dilemma between her honne and tatemae as a young, powerless employee expected to take on highly gendered and underappreciated work (e.g,. serving tea, making copies, upskilling her boss to use a computer). While she is not necessarily happy about it (honne), she routinely conducts the miscellaneous work out of tatemae to maintain collegiality and order. One potential reason for the success for Aggretsuko is therefore because the basic conflict within each storyline is familiar to many people in Japan, with the difference between Retsuko’s ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ expressions continuing a cultural trope and discourse seen throughout many media products, social dialogues, and corporate practices (Allison 2011; Tanaka 2011).

For example, longing for a romantic heteronormative relationship is, as in other mainstream Japanese dramas targeting young adult audiences, a recurring theme for Retsuko and other single characters in the show. As example plot points, Retsuko meets a temporary partner through gōkon (a casual matchmaking party) and has colleagues who found their wives via the practice; Gori, a female executive, designs her own dating app; Retsuko and her friend Tsunoda end up spending large amounts of money on a digital boyfriend in a fictional game; and Retsuko struggles across seasons with multiple different workplace romances. In these scenes we also see clear places where the trope of honne/tatemae clashing is reiterated, with the show blending the frustration of work and the frustration of outside life across multiple contexts in a way familiar to fans of Japanese media.

One key example comes from Retsuko’s interest in another red panda named Resasuke. In Season 1 of the Netflix show, Retsuko meets Resasuke at a gōkon, and they end up developing a relationship across the season. Just like getting her first job, the relationship initially makes Retsuko extremely happy. However, Resasuke is romantically inexperienced and seems rather indifferent about dating Retsuko. Believing she’s nevertheless in love, Retsuko spends most of the season tolerating problems such as Resasuke making Retsuko walk all day in her new heels, or not taking initiative about making plans, viewing marriage as a potential escape from the misery of work. Ultimately though, Retsuko accumulates frustrations over the obvious difference in emotional investment between her and Resasuke, and ultimately explodes in front of him by singing out her unhappiness in the form of a death metal song. Resasuke’s bland response of ‘you’re really good, don’t mind me, just keep singing’ signals the relationship’s end, as Retsuko’s confession of her inner feelings is mostly ignored. These sorts of explosions of rage which vent common frustrations at male partners’ behaviors throughout the show are, of course, why both English and Japanese media have analyzed Retsuko as a feminist character (e.g., CNN Japan 2017; Plata 2018). But Retsuko’s rage provides only freedom from a bad relationship, not from the mundanity of her life. A few minutes after awaking from her ‘dream’ relationship she’s back at work, being called a koshikake (a ‘sitter’, an abusive term for employees treated as though they are just warming seats until they transfer/leave/get married) by her boss and criticized for stapling company documents in the ‘wrong’ way.

A similar situation occurs in Season 2, where Retsuko’s mother regularly pressures Retsuko into a series of omiai (‘matchmaking meetings’). As a stereotyped Japanese parent with an unmarried adult daughter, Retsuko’s mother’s obstinate endorsement is backed up by concerns over Retsuko’s age (25) and her seemingly futureless career path. Despite Retsuko’s resistance, she is ultimately pressured into going on omiai dates, finding little joy in the men she meets. Later in the season though, Retsuko starts a voluntary relationship with Tadano, a successful IT entrepreneur she meets at a driving school. Retsuko sincerely enjoys spending time with Tadano at first, and begins to focus on their relationship in ways that impact her work. Tadano, being financially well-off and opposed to conventional work structures, even encourages Retsuko to leave her job and to stay with him so she can do whatever she wants. After a while though, Retsuko finds points of disagreement with Tadano, especially in his transgressive positioning that marriage is a meaningless institution, ultimately leaving him in the end. While on paper quite different from Retsuko’s relationship with Resasuke, the conclusion is more or less the same. Retsuko’s adventure does not lead to alterations to her lifestyle, or her stepping out on her own. Rather, once again, at the end of season she goes back to work.

This same pattern is then repeated in the following seasons: in Season 3, Retsuko starts a singing career as part of an underground death-metal-pop-idol group (reflecting real-world bands like Babymetal, see: Kennedy 2021) as a side job, and achieves moderate success. Her fame ends suddenly though when a dangerous fan starts stalking Retsuko, and attacks her on the street with a knife. Luckily, she evades physical harm, but leaves her side job and goes back to work like before. While a transgressive hobby is therefore endorsed early on, the season ends by emphasizing the security of the same environment Retsuko began to find joy and self-actualization in escaping. In Season 4, Retsuko’s company begins undertaking corporate fraud under new leadership, and Retsuko ultimately works to return the company to its prior state – the very one she spent three prior seasons attempting to escape. In the show’s final season, we again see discourses that support Retsuko in pushing back against traditional dialogues: most prominently, Retsuko moves in with a partner before marrying and acts as the primary breadwinner, and then eventually ventures into politics, screaming metal slogans for the ‘Rage Party’ which expresses dissatisfaction with contemporary Japanese work and society. However, despite her efforts, Retsuko ultimately loses the election and returns to her familiar life as an office worker. As the series closes, it is even her male partner, rather than Retsuko, shown entering a new workplace.

In the above summary, we see that Retsuko’s seemingly transgressive behavior of violating the common media trope of suppressing her honne and embracing tatemae is never actually ratified. Breaking up with Resasuke through death metal outrage, leaving a billionaire boyfriend due to a mismatch in values, gaining fame as an underground death metal singing idol, and running for office as a dark-horse candidate while financially supporting one’s boyfriend can all appear as non-compliance to long-established national gender ideologies. But these behaviors are connected to an understanding that Retsuko is first and foremost a low-ranked everyday office worker who will return to her original workplace when the adventure is over. Indeed, over time coworkers that were introduced as sexist and abusive villains, such as Retsuko’s chauvinist boss Ton, are even re-presented as allies, potentially raising questions of whether Retsuko’s rage was ever justified or if she just needed to endure and search for the ‘good’ in a bad situation.

Just like in Shomuni then, Aggretsuko promotes work as something which should be put up with, endorsing complaints about the neoliberal workplace but not solutions via alternative lifestyles or careers. Thus, while Retsuko may appear, especially with her death voice performances which index a ‘brutal’ (Birnie-Smith and Robertson 2021, 49) identity, to deviate from established Japanese norms and media tropes, she essentially is constantly reminding the viewers that her ‘happy ending’ is always to remain in the very structure that she ostensibly cannot stand. All in all, while Retsuko and her death voice are presented as flouting the honne/tatemae trope, this can be considered more of a passive aggressive behavior than a transgressive one, as her honne only comes out in restricted spaces like the karaoke box, the underground concert, or the brief climactic event at the final episode of a season, and is always resolved when she returns to the corporate grind. Sanrio commodifies Retsuko by framing her under the relatable storylines and behaviors accepted within the concept of cultural nationalism which aims to create, protect, or strengthen cultural identities to revitalize the national community (rather than endorse new identities and ways of being), a phenomenon which most often occurs when the community is deemed to be deficient, insufficient, or threatened (Yoshino 2005). Indeed, as our next section shows, this process is even visible not just in what Retsuko says and does, but the very words she is given to do so.

The language of Retsuko’s rage

As our final piece of evidence of how Retsuko’s ‘Sanrio-ized transgression’ often ultimately perpetuates ideologies it resists on paper, we now turn to the character’s use of language. Japanese media is well recognized as a site where writers use specific language features to make characters ‘identifiable with subgroups to which they belong according to certain expectations based on linguistic ideology’ (Hiramoto 2013, 51–52). This is not to say media simply perpetuates what ‘is’. Rather, Japanese media often represents speech using traditional indices (markers) of gender and intersectional identities, perpetuating representations that are in fact ‘distinctive from [the] linguistic practice of the groups of people assumed to use those varieties’ (Nakamura 2014, 24; see also: SturtzSreetharan 2006). Japanese media therefore frequently serves as a place for understanding which forms of language are presented as acceptable, ideal, or normative in Japan, providing insights into what people think ‘should be’ rather than what ‘is’.

As we shall see, Aggretsuko fits within this general trend of using social forms to ‘index certain personas and the practices associated with those personas’ (Unser-Schutz 2020, 338) in a stereotyped manner. For instance, the sentence-final forms noyo, wayo, and wane, often typecast as markers of upper-class, refined, or older women’s speech (see Dahlberg-Dodd 2020; Inoue 2003; Kinsui 2003; Ueno 2006), are only used in the show by women older than Retsuko. Likewise, Retsuko’s chauvinistic boss prefers the first-person pronoun ore traditionally associated with traits like ‘toughness, vulgarity and heterosexual desirability’ (Suzuki 2020, 229), while younger and friendlier male characters around Retsuko’s age use more polite ‘male’ pronouns like boku in the office, along with the -su ending linked to a form of close, masculine politeness (Nakamura 2020).

As the show’s primary character, however, Retsuko herself unsurprisingly does not stick to a single speech style, employing a range of styles across a range of contexts. To examine how these varying language forms index Retsuko’s identity performances throughout the show, and in doing so further understand the transgression the character is allowed, we analyzed the 2,884 distinct sentences produced by Retsuko across the initial 100 Fanworks shorts and first three seasons of the Netflix show.³ This includes all fully-formed sentences (ending in a verb or copular verb), but excludes speech that is cut off midway (including sentences that trail off in ∼te form, unless casual requests), and interjections like e? (‘eh?’) or ano (‘um’). These sentences were then each coded to note the presence/absence of honorifics (keigo), vulgarities, utterance-final morphology conjugation (see next paragraph), and distinct pronouns and sentence-final particles. All utterances were also coded for context of use, especially the character(s) with whom Retsuko was speaking.

Our first point of analysis is grammatical endings, a key focus of research on language Japanese media across many studies to date (e.g., multiple studies in Cook and Shibamoto-Smith 2018). Table 1 shows the number of sentences Retsuko produces to distinct interlocuter groups across three sentence-final grammatical forms: the ‘casual’ or ‘plain’ form, the ‘polite’ distal or desu/masu style, and the ‘honorific’ keigo style. The table is organized from characters or contexts which receive the highest use of keigo and ‘polite’ desu/masu forms from Retsuko to those which receive the lowest.

Table 1. A comparison of sentence-final endings used by Retsuko.

		Plain	Polite	Keigo	Total
Polite form preferred	Bosses	47 (21.08%)	156 (69.95%)	20 (8.97%)	223
	Strangers	31 (26.49%)	78 (66.67%)	8 (6.84%)	117
	Kabae	17 (26.56%)	47 (73.44%)	0 (0.0%)	64
	Washimi & Gori	98 (38.43%)	154 (60.39%)	3 (1.18%)	255
Plain form preferred	Boyfriends	128 (79.5%)	31 (19.26%)	2 (1.24%)	161
	Friends/Co-Workers (same age)	468 (88.64%)	57 (10.79%)	3 (0.57%)	528
	Self-Talk	674 (90.83%)	67 (9.03%)	1 (0.14%)	742
	Friends/Co-Workers (younger)	215 (91.1%)	21 (8.9%)	0 (0.0%)	236
	Death Voice	466 (95.67%)	21 (4.31%)	0 (0.0%)	487
	Family Members	94 (97.92%)	1 (1.04%)	1 (1.04%)	96

As Table 1 shows, the grammatical register of Retsuko’s utterances varies strongly in relation to social distance and age. Retsuko uses the desu/masu form stereotypically ‘considered to mark a formal level of speech’ (SturtzSreetharan 2006, 74) as the norm for her superiors, people who she does not know (e.g., customers, strangers, store employees), and people older than her, with differences in amount of polite form reflecting differences in these relationships. For example, Kabae is an older employee at Retsuko’s company who works in the same department. While friendly with Retsuko and not her work superior, the two rarely socialize outside of work. As a result, despite that the characters Washimi and Gori are actually senior to Retsuko in age and status in the company, since they also associate with Retsuko as friends outside of the office they receive more casual forms than Kabae, but far more polite forms than Retsuko’s ‘non-superior’ friends.

Importantly then, no character group in Aggretsuko only receives one speech style from Retsuko. Retsuko’s speech style instead also shows clear influence from the purpose of the speech act itself. For instance, Retsuko jumps from plain form to polite form as a ‘defensive counter’ (Brown 2013, 174) in response to her friend accusing her of wasting money on a virtual boyfriend game, and examples of ‘sarcastic politeness’ (Brown 2013) are likewise fairly common. A key case from the otherwise plain-form ‘death voice’ style comes from a scene where Retsuko is critiqued by a superior for not putting a chabashira (a floating tea stalk seen as a sign of good luck (Matsubara 1994)) into the tea she prepares. Her rage initially appears in plain form, but ends with a parodic ‘polite’ acknowledgement of her lack of awareness (bolded in Excerpt 1).

Excerpt 1

Death voice:  Ondo! Kaori! Soshite chabashira! Naruhodo nē! Naruhodo nē!

       Hashira! Hā hā naruhodo hashira!

       Sore ni wa kizukimasendeshita!

       Heat! Smell! Lucky tea stalk! Oh, of course! Oh, of course!

       Tea stalk! Ahaha of course the tea stalk!

       I didn’t realize that!

In short, Retsuko’s use of language throughout her life and work align with sociolinguistic studies of real Japanese workplaces, such as in Cook and Shibamoto-Smith (2018) Japanese at Work, and the script writers clearly treat register forms as important and are aware that their meaning or appropriateness depends on multiple factors within the context of any interaction. The use of the plain form as a base for ‘death voice’ is therefore not a matter of chance, but something designed intentionally to position the speech style as distinct and/or ‘metal’ and therefore outside of normative interactions (except those with Retsuko’s mother, who regularly serves as a source of conflict).

Of course, as any register involves ‘a repertoire of speech forms’ (Agha 2005, 45), the production of ‘death voice’ is not created through grammatical conjugation alone. When entering ‘death voice’ Retsuko also avoids forms otherwise common in her ‘non-metal’ plain-form speech. One clear example comes from the (non-)use of specific sentence-final particles and conjunctions within the ‘death-voice’ style: Table 2 contrasts sentence-final speech forms across the 1772 utterances made by Retsuko in ‘normal’ plain form against the 487 she makes in ‘death voice’, focusing on items noted in research on gendered language in Japanese media by researchers like Hiramoto (2013), SturtzSreetharan (2004), and Unser-Schutz (2015). Note that ∼nē refers to a rough variant of the negative ending ∼nai, while ∼ē refers to a similar altered form of positive adjectives ending in ∼i, as in katai becoming katē (both ‘hard’).

Table 2. The percentage of times a given form appears in Retsuko’s plain form sentences.

Sentence Final Forms	‘Normal’ Plain Form Utterances (/1772)	Death Voice Utterances (/487)
yo	98 (5.53%)	14 (2.87%)
ne	67 (3.78%)	9 (1.84%)
yone	32 (1.81)	0 (0%)
wa	4 (0.22%)	16 (3.28%)
zo	0 (0%)	2 (0.41%)
kai	0 (0%)	4 (0.82%)
∼nē	6 (0.34%)	62 (12.73%)
∼ē	2 (0.11%)	13 (2.66%)
plain imperatives	7 (0.39%)	40 (8.21%)

When speaking in ‘polite’ or ‘honorific’ registers, Retsuko avoids all the forms in Table 2 except the gender ‘neutral’ (Hiramoto 2013, 61) sentence-final particles yo, ne, and yone (44, 43, and 27 respective uses, together appearing in 18% of all desu/masu utterances), as the other forms are normally treated as markedly non-polite or grammatically impossible in polite speech. When speaking in ‘normal’ (non-death voice) plain form, Retsuko continues to use yo, ne, and yone (found collectively across around 11% of total utterances), but also sometimes incorporates indexes of rough, coarse, and/or masculine speech. For instance, she produces six (0.34% of utterances) uses of the ‘strongly masculine’ (Hiramoto 2013, 59) ∼nē negation (e.g., shiranē over shiranai for ‘I don’t know’) and seven utterances in the imperative form (e.g., ie yo for ‘say it!’ instead of itte yo). The contexts that are shown to allow these forms are restricted, however, as they only appear when Retsuko is thinking to herself or speaking to her close friends.

Retsuko’s plain-form speech therefore mirrors her ‘polite’ speech, excepting a slight allowance for indexes of coarseness in highly intimate contexts. Once Retsuko enters ‘death voice’ though, she more frequently utilizes moderately/strongly masculine/coarse (see: Fraser 2008; Hiramoto 2013; SturtzSreetharan 2004; Unser-Schutz 2015) forms like plain imperatives, the interrogative markers ka/kai, the ∼nē variant of the negative ∼nai, and the SFP zo. The negative ∼nē ending appears especially important in Retsuko’s metal register, going from appearing in 6 out of 1772 (0.34%) utterances in plain form speech to 62 of 487 (12.73%) utterances in death voice via statements like ‘tanondenē wa, kono zangyō (I didn’t ask for this overtime)’ or ‘temē ga eranda fuku wa kinē (I won’t wear the clothes you chose)’. Death voice utterances similarly incorporate vulgar words like ‘kuso’ (‘shit’, 2 tokens), or variants stereotypically ‘considered to be used mainly by men with their close friends/intimates’ (SturtzSreetharan 2006, 73) like ‘kuu’ (‘eat’, 11 tokens) which are otherwise absent in Retsuko’s speech. There are also changes in how some particles are used: non-death voice Retsuko uses the interrogative ka 16 times, but always in a reflexive manner (e.g., ‘sōka’ for ‘is that so’) or in hortative statements (e.g., ‘ikōka’ for ‘shall we go’), while the 22 uses in death voice are instead all accusative (e.g., ‘sore ga omaera no shizentai ka’ (‘is that what you call your natural form!?’).

The use of the particle wa is also of note: in most literature on Japanese, wa is generally discussed as a ‘stereotypically feminine’ (Maree 2003, 1) marker of softness or weak affect. However, intonation changes allow wa to also index a more masculine associated form (although no men in Aggretsuko use it) which at times marks aggressive affect (Kitagawa 1977; SturtzSreetharan 2006; Unser-Schutz 2015). Retsuko’s uses of wa appear to match this aggressive style regardless of which context they appear in. For instance, ‘normal’ plain form utterances like ‘kono kaisha bashī tto yamete yaru wa (I’ll slam down my resignation letter)’ and death-voice growls like ‘nozonde nē wa, konna zangyō! (I didn’t ask for this overtime) both utilize wa in aggressive statements. While therefore not restricted to death voice, the overall frequency of this aggressive wa does increase greatly in that context, jumping from appearing in 0.23% of Retsuko’s plain form utterances to 3.28% of her death voice ones.

Finally, it is important to attend to the Retsuko’s uses of pronouns, as they are ‘one of the most salient features in the Japanese language’ (Hiramoto and Asahi 2013, 21). As Table 3 shows, only Retsuko’s death voice register incorporates second-person pronouns like omae(ra), temē, and kisama which can index ‘abuse’ (Armour 2010, 453). Importantly though, these potentially insulting second-person pronouns are all regularly used by male characters in day-to-day life in the show (often but not always in a more friendly manner), including during conversations at work. Retsuko instead has to go into a special speech register, one usually performed where - or as though - no one can hear her, to use them. She also never gains access to any rougher or masculine coded first-person pronouns. Retsuko instead uses watashi as a default even during acts of extreme rage, a pronoun stereotypically treated as polite and either gender neutral or slightly feminine. Indeed, the only time Retsuko is able to produce a rougher pronoun is actually during a statement in the desu/masu register, with one use of ore appearing while Retsuko is parodying the dialogue of her male boss.

Table 3. Pronouns used across Retsuko’s three main registers.

	1PPs		2PPs
	watashi	ore	anta	aitsu	omaera	temē	kisama
Polite	35	1	0	0	0	0	0
Plain	143	0	1	1	0	0	0
Death voice	19	0	0	0	13	9	2

Taking these features together, we can say that ‘death voice’ does allow Retsuko to transgress some stereotypes of women’s speech within both Japan and the local norms of the show. In particular, Retsuko gains access to vulgar shortenings and indexes of aggressive and/or masculine-coded speech. However, just like how the transgressive register these forms appear in is often unheard or shut off into limited spaces, Retsuko’s language never goes too far in transgressing gendered social ideologies, as even within moments of extreme rage she must still include polite and/or feminine coded forms like watashi. Even her aggressive and potentially transgressive use of a stereotypically masculine/assertive wa is gendered in the space of the show, as no male characters produce the particle in any context. At Retsuko’s angriest, when manifesting her interest in a genre known for songs like ‘Hammer Smashed Face’, ‘Vomited Anal Tract’, and ‘Of Dark Blood and Fucking’, her choice of linguistic forms therefore ends up being no more extreme than the vocabulary that men in her office can access during their casual speech. While a male co-worker can grumble ‘ore wa yaru ze’ (‘I’ll do it’) at almost any time, Retsuko’s most ‘metal’ performance of her deepest rage is a ‘watashi wa […] yaru wa/zo’ (‘I’ll do it’). In this way, Retsuko’s speech mirrors our findings of Aggretsuko as both a Japanese depiction of women’s rage at work and a media product of its own. Her death voice certainly pushes against some idealized norms of women’s speech in Japan, but only within limits, and never without reinforcing some barriers of traditional Japanese gender ideologies.

Rage, repression, and red pandas: Understanding ‘Sanrio-ized’ transgression

Across this paper, we have analyzed Aggretsuko as part of the Japanese mediascape centering around women and the workplace, as a product in and of itself, and as a host for language ideologies. While each section drew on different discourses present throughout the study of Japanese media, all were centered around the same goal: to better understand the production of what we called ‘Sanrio transgression’. As part of this larger goal, we explored how Aggretsuko fits within a long history of media commodification of women’s transgressive behavior in Japan, engages with major discourse in Japanese media and culture, and both perpetuates and resists major linguistic ideologies common in Japanese media.

Through these analyses, our most important finding was that even when applying quite different theoretical lenses and data to understanding Sanrio’s production of transgression in Aggretsuko, the conclusions were always the same. On the one hand, Aggretsuko does represent a departure from certain established media tropes and norms, or even established Sanrio techniques for producing ‘kawaii catharsis’ (Bonnah 2019, 2). Retsuko is regularly and empathetically shown as expressing rage at work, bosses, inattentive partners, cash-sucking video games, and all manner of social ills, and is at times given some ‘new’ vocabulary to do so. It is here that the program’s transgression is clearest, as it stands out among both Sanrio products and many prior Japanese representations of women at work to date in presenting rage, anger, and even a love of extreme metal as justified responses for struggling against sexism and inequality in contemporary Japan.

On the other hand though, we also always found that Retsuko’s rage remained limited and gendered in ways that perpetuate many traditional Japanese ideologies. Retsuko’s rage against the corporate order is limited to specific spaces, specific individuals, and specific linguistic forms, and only allowed for brief periods. Once she’s done raging, the OL dutifully returns to work. So while Retsuko is certainly allowed to articulate her frustrations more bluntly (and with more sympathy) than the protagonists of prior OL dramas, she ultimately still must put up with the same abuse as women from decades before. Retsuko can experiment with exciting job ventures and jet-setting romantic partners, but only if she eventually returns to the very corporation she wanted to leave. She can scream hate at the world through language and music historically linked to the brutal, anti-social, and masculine, but only if she uses polite first-person pronouns and avoids the sentence-final ze. And the viewer can watch these struggles and cheer as Retsuko yells ‘screw you capitalism’ into a microphone in her death voice, but only after they pay their Netflix subscription fee. In short, Retsuko herself is less subversive than presented in discourse about the show because she is ultimately unable to achieve independence, self-actualization, or freedom from a capitalistic/sexist system that exploits her labor. Instead, the Sanrio-ized transgression of Aggretsuko endorses a little rebellion, but only if you’re sure to go back to work when you are done.

Ultimately, Aggretsuko is therefore particularly interesting as a clear attempt on the part of Sanrio to commodify a type of non-threatening transgression or rebellion, creating a media mix that engages with critical interests across multiple fields interested in Japanese media. The Retsuko character undoubtedly shows Sanrio continuing to expand the boundaries of ‘cute’, as well as the behaviors they allow their characters to perform, but fails to provide any promotion of ways of being which pose a real challenge to - or freedom from - the institutions and social pressures that Sanrio recognizes as making Retsuko miserable. Is Retsuko in many ways distinct for a Sanrio character? Certainly. Is her messaging transgressive within the mainstream Japanese mediascape? Much less so, with Retsuko doing more to expand understandings of what a Sanrio character can be than of how people can potentially escape dissatisfaction with the status quo of contemporary Japan.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wesley C. Robertson

Wes Robertson is a Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies and Chair of the Discipline of Languages & Cultures at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He specializes in Japanese sociolinguistics, with an emphasis on written variation and subcultural language use. He also operates a living dictionary of Japanese slang terms at https://wesleycrobertson.wordpress.com/, and cohosts the ethnographic podcast Lingua Brutallica.

Alexandra Hambleton

Mie Hiramoto (she/they) is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, with particular interests in language, gender and sexuality, contact linguistics as well as media discourse.

Mie Hiramoto

Alexandra Hambleton is an Associate Professor in the College of Liberal Arts, Tsuda University. Her research focuses on contemporary Japan with a particular interest in media, gender, and sexuality.

Notes

1 We use ‘cute’ here as a translation of the Japanese kawaii, as distinctions between them are not highly relevant to the current paper. See Gough and Lee (2020) for more nuanced examinations of kawaii as distinct from ‘cute’.

2 Yatterareru kaaaa! (‘We’re being tricked!’ or ‘Cannot take it any more!’) in the original Japanese.

3 Data collection and coding for this section was completed before the fourth and fifth seasons were produced. The later seasons were scanned for departures from the norms described here though, and none were noted.