Cardcaptor Sakura at 20: The Four Women Behind It and Their Commercial Magic

The Church of CLAMP welcomes you.

Ordinary article

"I've always thought you were great," Wang Xiaoming told Sakura at sunset.

That scene stuck in my head throughout childhood. Only years later, when I watched Cardcaptor Sakura in Japanese, did I learn that the boy was not Wang Xiaoming but Li Syaoran, and that his line was nothing so stilted: he simply said, "I like you." Add the romance from the 8 episodes that were cut when the show first aired on Chinese television, and I finally understood how hard the local stations had worked to get this anime on the air.

Now, to mark 20 years since the Cardcaptor Sakura manga began serialization, CLAMP has launched a new serialized chapter and released an art book. Not long ago they also announced that from April 1, Sakura Kinomoto's birthday, limited-time themed cafés will open one after another across Japan, offering Cardcaptor Sakura food, desserts and décor, and selling limited-edition merchandise.

As a CLAMP fan, my first reaction was "I never thought I'd live to see this day," and I wept with joy. My second thought was: "Ah, those four middle-aged ladies are raking in money again." An art book for 3,600 yen. Well, buy, buy, buy.

This all-female Japanese manga group, whose books have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, is now in its 27th year since its debut. The four women, nearly 50, are as energetic as ever, and keep finding endless new tricks to play with a limited cast of characters. They may not be the artists who did the most for Japanese manga, but with a distinctive style, a large body of work and shrewd business sense, they have undoubtedly shaped several generations.

CLAMP, Born in the Doujinshi Scene

Today CLAMP has just four members: Nanase Ohkawa, Satsuki Igarashi, Tsubaki Nekoi and Mokona. But it began as an all-female doujinshi circle that at its peak had 11 members.

Circles like this were a product of their time. In the 1970s, as photocopying spread, Japanese fan-made works gradually grew into a culture, and Comiket, which would become the most famous fan event of all, was born then. Amateur artists picked up pens and drew manga using existing characters and settings, then published them for money. It was also then that women began to enter the profession of manga artist. Their best-known representatives were another all-female group, the Year 24 Group, and above all Riyoko Ikeda and her famous The Rose of Versailles.

Young women were naturally swept up in this wave of doujinshi and women artists. Igarashi, Nekoi and Mokona had attended the same high school and had been drawing manga since their teens. Ohkawa became their good friend after buying their work. At a doujinshi fair in 1985, wanting their table placed ahead of CLUB/Y, the circle of the well-known doujinshi artist Yun Kouga, they picked a name out of the dictionary and changed their name from "Z Project" to "CLAMP."

CLAMP had many members then, including Tamayo Akiyama and Risa Hijiri; by Ohkawa's recollection, there were 11 at the peak. In 1987 they published their first doujinshi, Shinjuku Pure Love Story. Adapted from Hideyuki Kikuchi's novel The Demon King's Tale, this legendary book is still almost impossible to find on Amazon Japan. CLAMP also drew many of the most popular doujinshi subjects of the day: Saint Seiya, Captain Tsubasa and Legend of the Galactic Heroes. All three had male leads, which made them easy material for fan works aimed at women.

In 1988 they produced their first doujinshi with an original setting, Seiden ~DISCOVERSION~. It became the earliest prototype of RG Veda, their first commercial manga, and the following year they published the RG Veda Masterpiece Collection.

From 1987 to 1990, CLAMP was at its most active in doujinshi. They put out 21 books, including 6 issues of Shoten, their regular original doujinshi. Shoten gave birth to many of CLAMP's later settings, including the CLAMP School series, Tokyo Babylon, Twin Star Detectives and more of RG Veda.

Eventually a Japanese publisher called Shinshokan approached CLAMP and asked them to serialize RG Veda in Wings, its shoujo manga magazine. The group, then four years old, had made its official commercial debut, and as the serialization went on, CLAMP finally settled into the four-woman group it is today.

The Distinctive Style of CLAMP

Even now, when we go back to RG Veda, CLAMP's debut, its distinctive style still draws us in. Indian legend and Buddhist themes remain rare in shoujo manga, and the sweeping setting makes it read more like a fantasy novel set in an invented world. No shoujo manga before RG Veda had ever had so many characters, and in the final volume it killed nearly all of them off. Fatalism, violence rendered as beauty and same-sex love would never get past China's broadcasting regulator today, yet back then they became CLAMP's most striking trademarks.

This may be why Shinshokan picked them. As the Year 24 Group's work slowly went out of fashion, the publisher needed shoujo manga in an entirely new style. Still, Shinshokan did not much trust CLAMP. At first RG Veda appeared only as a one-shot in a special issue of Wings. Even after a strong reader response moved it into the main magazine as a serial, it got far less promotion and support than Dragon Knights, the magazine's flagship at the time. Shinshokan also threatened to suspend the series if its popularity fell.

Also in 1989, CLAMP began serializing Man of Many Faces in Comic Genki, a special issue of Kadokawa Shoten's Monthly Newtype. Warm, funny and built around cute young boys, it showed a CLAMP completely unlike the tragic RG Veda, and it started CLAMP's habit of running several series at once. From then on, CLAMP School became a landmark setting in their manga and the main stage for Duklyon: CLAMP School Defenders and CLAMP School Detectives.

In 1990, at the suggestion of a Wings editor, Tokyo Babylon began serialization. Written as Japan's bubble economy collapsed, it brought something new to shoujo manga: it worked present-day social reality into the story and attacked it. Suicide, corruption, violence and other social ills are bound up with the fates of its three protagonists. The love and hatred (mostly between people of the same sex, of course) between a pair of onmyoji twins, a brother and sister, and a man who poses as a veterinarian but is really an assassin could fill several essays, and in the end one dies at the other's hand. The famous line "cherry blossoms are pink because they drink the blood of the corpses buried beneath them" comes from this manga, and so does the ambiguous confession "I... you," which left countless readers sighing and demanding answers.

The same darkness carried over into X in 1992. Steeped in apocalypse, fate and lovers who destroy each other, X was the peak of CLAMP's early career, with 14 core characters alone. CLAMP's signature motifs took shape here: cherry blossoms, Tokyo Tower, the moon, feathers, chains, magic circles and protective barriers... One beautiful, model-thin character after another makes an entrance, and one after another they die at the hands of CLAMP, the cruel stepmothers. Halfway through, the heroine dies horribly at her own brother's hand, leaving readers marveling that a death could be drawn so beautifully while cursing CLAMP for being so heartless.

Even though they later created Cardcaptor Sakura, a gentle, innocent all-ages manga with a happy ending (well, perhaps the many kinds of love in it keep it from being truly all-ages), the name CLAMP still calls up a gloomy, ornate style.

The ambiguous feelings among its beautiful men are enough to satisfy the most demanding lover of pretty faces and the most seasoned fujoshi, the female fans of boys' love. The sheer detail and the scale of the scenes often leave readers thinking, "Ah, my brain hurts." The brutal plots, which always take a huge turn at some point and are sometimes downright maddening, suggest that fans' love for CLAMP has a masochistic streak. For readers, CLAMP's work is like the title of one of its own series, Legal Drug: you can't stop.

CLAMP, Moving From Publisher to Publisher

Coming out of a doujinshi circle set CLAMP apart from ordinary Japanese manga artists.

Over many years, the Japanese manga industry has settled on its own basic rules. To become a manga artist, you usually start as an assistant to a well-known artist, doing the grunt work, then work your way up, take part in planning, begin original work and finally debut in a manga magazine. Artists usually attach themselves to one well-known publisher and stay for good, and most have only a few famous works.

CLAMP is different. First, in form, CLAMP is a manga group with arguably no precedent and no likely successor: they hire no assistants, and the four members divide every stage of production among themselves. Ohkawa handles planning, direction, scripts and outside business (yes, she can't really draw); Mokona mainly designs the characters and lays out the panels; Nekoi and Igarashi handle mood-setting art such as backgrounds and screentone, though the three often swap and share tasks.

It is hard to imagine what would have happened had they not debuted as a team splitting the work, but taken the old route of becoming assistants. In fact, the division of labor began as a way to save money. At first the four shared a two-bedroom apartment in Tokyo; they needed no meeting room or telephone, and ate, lived and worked together. After their 1989 debut they at one point ran five serials at once, not counting one-shots and collected volumes. That makes them far more diligent than that old rogue Togashi, record-holder for hiatuses. The hunger to make money made them among the most prolific manga artists in Japan, and they have worked with every major publisher.

From Shinshokan to Kadokawa to Kodansha, they have never been willing to stay with one. Part of the reason is that CLAMP's style is versatile enough to suit the different readers of different magazines. For innocent shoujo aimed at younger girls, they have Cardcaptor Sakura and Magic Knight Rayearth; for dark tragedy, RG Veda and X; for comedy and warmth, the CLAMP School series; for supernatural social critique, xxxHOLiC; for gentle, literary fare, Wish; for boys, Angelic Layer; and even, for adult men, Chobits. It is hard to call their work traditional shoujo manga, because it covers too much ground. Apart from adult-only content, CLAMP has tried basically everything.

When Shinshokan did not treat them as they hoped, CLAMP went over to Kadokawa, a larger conglomerate with wider reach. They crafted X for it with such care that the ending of RG Veda, running at the same time, felt rushed. CLAMP had signed with Shinshokan for 10 volumes of RG Veda and could have spent one more volume giving it a better ending. But they evidently chose to put their energy into X and to court Kadokawa.

Kadokawa did not let them down. In August 1996, X was released as a theatrical film. Its 600 million yen box office was the highest that year for an original anime film not based on a TV series. That owed not only to the source material but also to Kadokawa's willingness to spend lavishly: it hired the Japanese supergroup X Japan for the music and the star voice actress Megumi Ogata. When the DVD went on sale the next year, it sold out on pre-orders two months ahead.

However, after Kadokawa grew unhappy with how dark and socially critical X was, and suspended it several times, the strong-willed CLAMP went looking for a new home.

Ohkawa played a key part here. In 1993, while CLAMP was juggling several long-running serials, Kodansha, which focused on shoujo manga for younger readers, approached the already fairly well-known group with a commission. Ohkawa accepted on the spot, and she and the others worked themselves to exhaustion to produce Magic Knight Rayearth. It opened the door to a good relationship between CLAMP and Kodansha, and became CLAMP's first large-scale commercial franchise.

After it ended, in 1996, Cardcaptor Sakura burst onto the scene as its successor and became the work that secured CLAMP's commercial standing. Its heroine, Sakura Kinomoto, was called "the highest-earning elementary schooler," and the merchandise, toys, clothing, anime, music, films and games spun off from her all sold well. Beyond its likable story and cute characters, CLAMP made Sakura a girl who constantly changes outfits, which left plenty of room for merchandise design.

In the end, with Kodansha's push, Chobits became a hit, and CLAMP walked away from Kadokawa for good, halting X on the grounds that it was "unsuited to the way society is developing today" (if it ever resumes, that will be the real "lived to see it" moment). The readers who had followed it so long were left without ever learning how things ended for Kamui and Fuma. Still, in 2006 Kobato began serialization in Newtype, a sign that CLAMP and Kadokawa had made up. CLAMP will never tie itself to a single publisher, and its shrewd way of doing business leaves no room for old grudges.

CLAMP and Their Manga Universe

Like Marvel, once CLAMP had many works and memorable characters, it began sending characters from one work into another, and even built new works this way.

Cameos went back to the Shoten days, before their official debut, when characters from RG Veda appeared in the CLAMP School series. Later, Subaru Sumeragi and Seishirō Sakurazuka of Tokyo Babylon met their final fates in X. In 1994 CLAMP made CLAMP in Wonderland, a 5-minute animated short shown as a special bonus in cinemas in five Japanese cities. This animated music video gathered every popular CLAMP character of the time and delighted fans. Many people in Japan traveled to the host cities just to see those 5 minutes.

Their imagination came fully into view in 2003. Nearly 15 years after its debut, CLAMP tried a bold and highly ambitious experiment: take characters from its existing works and set them in a new world to tell an entirely new story. The result was Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle.

The idea came from Ohkawa, the most business-minded of the four, and in the end they chose two characters from Cardcaptor Sakura, Sakura and Syaoran, as the leads. As Ohkawa explained, it was her favorite CLAMP work, and they also needed one that was both famous and had a happy ending in which the leads came out well. Cardcaptor Sakura was one of very few options.

So rumors flew at the time that Cardcaptor Sakura was getting a sequel. Only after reading it did people realize CLAMP had laid an enormous trap: the characters share names with those in Cardcaptor Sakura, but they are entirely different people. To recover Sakura's lost memories, the heroes travel through countless dimensions, that is, parallel universes. This gave many classic CLAMP characters new stages, and reading Tsubasa makes you want to go back and catch up on everything CLAMP had done before. Tsubasa also shares a world with xxxHOLiC, an eerie manga that had begun serialization a few months earlier, and the two series cross over constantly, down to key character backstories and plot turns. In the end Tsubasa finally links up with Cardcaptor Sakura and closes on a note that is more or less happy for everyone.

This startling design made xxxHOLiC and Tsubasa two works without precedent, and probably without successors, in the history of Japanese manga. In places CLAMP clearly struggled to control so grand a plan: abrupt twists with no setup left readers gaping and unable to accept them (What, this Syaoran is a fake?! What, Sakura is a fake too?!). But the invention itself still shows how powerful CLAMP is at building worlds. Just as impressive is their business sense: Tsubasa alone sold 20 million copies in Japan. Readers were paying not only for Sakura and Syaoran but for every CLAMP character.

In 2006, as they had 12 years earlier, CLAMP made a second CLAMP in Wonderland animated music video, adding the newer characters. We don't know whether they have more plans like this, but we might guess with a little malice: whenever they want to make more money, they will surely come up with something new, just like this new Cardcaptor Sakura serial.

No Longer Just a Group of Manga Artists

Of course, CLAMP does more than shuffle its classic characters. It knows how to use every format to wring the most commercial value out of its work. While we talk every day about the "pan-entertainment ecosystem," CLAMP long ago mastered the rules of that game and how to play it. They are at home in nearly every form of entertainment: manga, anime, games, novels, radio dramas, merchandise and more.

From RG Veda onward, none of CLAMP's works has been just a manga serial. TV and theatrical anime adaptations go without saying; art books and games are also regular territory. After Magic Knight Rayearth began serialization, in 1995 they struck a deal with the Japanese game company Sega to turn it, the first large-scale mecha-battle manga ever to star girls, into a game of the same name, which became the last Sega Saturn title released in the United States.

In 1996 Ohkawa published her own novel, Yumegari, illustrated by Mokona. The next year Wish began serialization; Ohkawa planned a single and a radio-drama CD for it, and also took part in a radio program of the same name. Later, animated clips from Wish ran in major cinemas as trailers before the main feature, further boosting its popularity.

A bigger change came in 2004. After their 15th anniversary, all four members dropped their old pen names. Ageha Ohkawa, Satsuki Igarashi, Mick Nekoi and Mokona Apapa became names of the past, and they stopped being only manga artists. They released CLAMP no Kiseki, a monthly publication that ran for a year, each issue bundled with a figurine. They began designing gachapon capsule toys and accessories, publishing books on the art of the kimono and designing their own trading-card battle game, and their serialized radio programs were collected and released as books and CDs.

They also became hired hands, turning up all over the place, even in projects unrelated to their own work. They did character designs for the well-known anime Code Geass and Mōryō no Hako, designed costumes for the fighting game Tekken 6, and wrote the script for the novel The Witch's Mansion.

On CLAMP's official website you can find their mobile fan club and their online shop, and see the mobile games and dress-up features they designed. Their schedule shows that they now host a weekly radio program on KBS. And of course xxxHOLiC Rei is still being serialized, while the new series that followed Tsubasa's 2009 conclusion ends this month.

In a sense, the four ladies of CLAMP have become entertainers. Honestly, if one day they decided to debut as singers, as Takeshi Konomi, creator of The Prince of Tennis, did, I wouldn't be surprised.

I truly look forward to seeing what magical worlds this all-female group, a product of its era with no precedent and probably no successor, will draw for us next. Even now, when I want to sound deep, I still quote, a little sheepishly, "There are no coincidences in this world, only the inevitable," or recall Sakura's unbeatable magic words: "It's okay, everything will definitely be fine!"

That is how I feel about these four ladies.

Cover image from: www.zerochan.net

Intern reporter Honghui Shao also contributed to this article.