Sailor Moon Has Been Fighting for 25 Years. What's Keeping It Alive?

“In the name of the moon, I'll punish you” carries a whole generation's childhood — the perfect fusion of girlish dreams and heroic fantasy.

“The mightiest woman warrior.”

That's the tagline in the trailer for Wonder Woman, which opens in Japan on August 25. The trailer's narrator is Kotono Mitsuishi, the voice actress who played Usagi Tsukino in the Sailor Moon anime. Japanese media ran with the line “beautiful woman warrior teams up with beautiful girl warrior” — and as it happens, 2017 also marks Sailor Moon's 25th anniversary.

Wonder Woman, who first appeared in 1941, was the first female superhero in comics history. Sailor Moon, which began serialization half a century later, opened up a whole new category in Japanese manga — the fighting pretty girl — and for the first time let a shōjo manga heroine defend the Earth the way a shōnen manga hero would.

Nobody expected that Usagi Tsukino, a middle schooler handed the job of saving the world, would become one of the characters who reshaped the Japanese animation industry. The 18-volume Sailor Moon manga has sold 12 million copies, and translated editions in 17 languages have sold another 7 million.

The line “In the name of the moon, I'll punish you” became a childhood memory for an entire generation. The endless stream of Sailor Moon merchandise still coming out today knows its fans well: it has to stir up memories and feed the girlish longing, without causing embarrassment.

Sailor Moon has used its 25th birthday to launch a run of brand tie-ins, including a compact powder and primer with Shiseido's makeup line Maquillage, and necklaces, earrings and wallets with Anna Sui.

So what has kept it alive?

It Opened Up a New Category in Japanese Manga — and a New Market

Sailor Moon's creator, Naoko Takeuchi, had been submitting short manga to the shōjo magazine Nakayoshi since high school, and had won the magazine's rookie manga prize. In the summer of 1991 she drew the short story Codename: Sailor V for Nakayoshi's sister magazine RunRun — the direct precursor to Sailor Moon.

Codename: Sailor V already sketches the outline of what became Sailor Moon: a middle-school girl meets a cat and gains the power to protect the Earth. Takeuchi was a fairly popular newcomer at the time, so Nakayoshi asked her to expand the short story into a serialized one.

Wouldn't it be dull if only one pretty-girl hero guarded the Earth? So the once-solitary Sailor Moon joined up with friends to form a league of heroes, much like The Avengers. But Takeuchi's inspiration wasn't American comics — it was the tokusatsu, or special-effects, shows she loved. Ultraman, the tokusatsu series everyone knows, runs on the same “team up and fight monsters” model.

Takeuchi poured more than that into the manga. Born into a family of gem dealers, she had handled gemstones since childhood, so the brooches on the characters' clothes and the jewels on their wands weren't drawn at random — every one of them has a real-world basis.

In 1992, the Sailor Moon manga began its official run in Nakayoshi. Usagi Tsukino, an ordinary middle schooler with middling grades and a habit of crying, meets a talking black cat named Luna one day, and from then on can transform into the warrior Sailor Moon. Fighting battle after battle to defend the Earth, she meets the other Sailor Guardians — Ami Mizuno, Rei Hino and the rest.

When Sailor Moon started in the early 1990s, the Japanese shōjo manga market faced a crisis it had never seen before. Through the 1980s, shōnen manga had steadily added romantic-comedy elements and its male characters had grown better-looking; shōnen manga, entering its golden age, was siphoning off shōjo manga's most loyal female readers.

Take Nakayoshi, the magazine that ran Sailor Moon. Its monthly circulation was 1.6 million copies in 1977 and had slipped to 1.2 million by 1982. In April 1989, Japan introduced a consumption tax for the first time, and plenty of readers saving money simply stopped buying manga magazines. Sales had never looked worse.

But in the second year of Sailor Moon's run, Nakayoshi's circulation hit a record 2.05 million copies, and Takeuchi won the 17th Kodansha Manga Award.

A few months after the manga started, Sailor Moon was quickly made into an anime and aired on TV Asahi, and the craze swept from manga into animation. Of the 50 highest-rated anime in Japan in the 1990s, only three were adapted from shōjo manga — and two of those were Sailor Moon.

Neon Genesis Evangelion, which arrived in 1995, is usually treated as the marker of Japanese animation's move into full commercialization. But it's fair to say Japanese animators first tried developing and mining an IP with Sailor Moon.

Over the five years the Sailor Moon anime aired, from 1992 to 1997, Bandai put out 1,200 different pieces of related merchandise, for total sales of 100 billion yen. Sailor Moon R figures sold 1 million units within nine months of release; in June 1993, 500,000 Moon Sticks sold out; and by March 2001, the various Sailor Moon transformation devices had sold 2.8 million units.

The 18-volume Sailor Moon manga sold 12 million copies, and translated editions in 17 languages sold another 7 million.

A manga author generally takes 10% of manga sales as royalties, and 1-5% of merchandise sales also goes to the original creator. When a manga is adapted into an anime, a musical or anything else, the creator takes another cut. Sailor Moon vaulted Takeuchi into the ranks of the high-earning manga artists.

In 1997, the Sailor Moon manga and anime ended at the same time. Much like Usagi and Tuxedo Mask's happily-ever-after, Takeuchi married fellow manga artist Yoshihiro Togashi in 1999 and gradually dropped out of fans' sight; the two are often jokingly called the highest-earning manga-artist couple.

She surfaces now and then to serialize an essay-style manga, or works as an assistant drawing for her husband. Takeuchi may have left the business, but fans still follow her every move.

“In the Name of the Moon, I'll Punish You” — and What It Meant

What's hardest to forget about Sailor Moon now is probably the dazzling transformation scene in every episode, and that line: “I will, in the name of the moon, punish you.”

Before Sailor Moon, Japanese shōjo manga mostly drew the heroine's everyday romances, while female leads in shōnen manga were mostly flattened into goddess figures. In Sailor Moon, the heroine's guardian planet is the moon, and she can act in the moon's name to destroy evil. The pretty girl was no longer a naive, sweet thing to be protected.

In building the manga, Takeuchi drew on many elements that had appeared in other anime and manga before. But stacking them together let her create a fighting-pretty-girl manga unlike anything before it.

Transformation is one of Sailor Moon's biggest draws: an ordinary high school girl becomes a beautiful, powerful warrior through a transformation pen, a transformation wand or any of a dozen other devices.

The Japanese economy grew fast through the 1980s, and women gradually entered the workforce. In 1985 the government passed the Equal Employment Opportunity Law to push for equality at work between men and women. The next year Japan got its first female party leader, Takako Doi. The 1980s also produced idol after idol — Seiko Matsuda, Akina Nakamori and Kyoko Koizumi marked the peak of Showa idol culture, and they still carry the youth of a generation of Japanese.

The wish to become a more beautiful, more accomplished version of yourself, projected onto anime, becomes the transformation trope. The most famous case is Magical Angel Creamy Mami, in which an ordinary elementary schooler turns into a sweet-voiced idol. But 1980s transformation anime mostly stopped at becoming beautiful, so Takeuchi added fighting to Sailor Moon.

Sailor Moon wasn't in fact the first manga with a fighting girl in it. Osamu Tezuka's classic Princess Knight and the classic shōjo manga The Rose of Versailles had both used the idea. But here is the biggest difference: the girls no longer had to dress as men to fight. They could battle the forces of darkness in pretty sailor uniforms and high heels.

Takeuchi showed women who were beautiful and strong at once. In the world of Sailor Moon, sweet and cool are no longer opposites, and girls found the ideal self they had been looking for.

More important, Takeuchi drew Usagi growing up. Usagi was an ordinary middle schooler, like you and me; handed the job of guarding the Earth, she was frightened, she cried, she doubted what she could do — but she grew, step by step, and readers saw themselves in her.

As a shōjo manga, Sailor Moon didn't skip the romance either: the male lead, Tuxedo Mask, is Sailor Moon's lover in both her past life and this one. It's formulaic, but Tuxedo Mask, always turning up to save Sailor Moon at the last moment, became a lot of girls' first love.

Late in the manga Usagi marries Mamoru Chiba and has a daughter, Chibiusa, taking on a new identity as a mother. What's interesting is that almost no manga of the same type has used the becoming-a-mother idea since — more than 20 years on, Takeuchi's choice still counts as ahead of its time.

Another Version of Sailor Moon

In 2011, the three rights holders of the 1990s Sailor Moon — Kodansha, Toei Animation and Bandai — sat down again to discuss whether they could remake the anime for the series' 20th anniversary. The following year they announced Sailor Moon Crystal, with the record label King Records and Niconico's parent company Dwango added as new partners.

Other influential anime had been remade before. In 2013, to mark Slam Dunk's 20th anniversary, it was remastered in high definition and aired on television. But the new Sailor Moon was a remake in the full sense: the entire production team was replaced, and of the voice cast only Kotono Mitsuishi, the voice of Usagi Tsukino, stayed.

When the new character designs were revealed, Japanese readers and viewers argued hard about them. “Where did the old anime's soft, round art style go? Why does everyone have a pointy chin now?” Against: “Manga purists would tell you this is what faithful actually looks like — this is how the Sailor Guardians looked in Takeuchi's original.”

When Toei Animation made the old Sailor Moon, it softened Takeuchi's somewhat severe, pointy-chinned girls into round-faced ones better suited to the cute aesthetic of the 1990s. Because the old anime and the manga came out almost simultaneously, the anime also carried a fair amount of original material, so the new version is closer to the source in both plot and art.

That split the Sailor Moon fandom into two camps, one loyal to the old anime and one to the manga — which meant the new Sailor Moon enjoyed a built-in supply of argument before it had even premiered.

More important, as one of the first anime to test commercialization and succeed wildly at it, Sailor Moon has a deep base of buy-everything fans that other classic anime simply don't.

The women's magazine ROLA launched in August 2013 and ran interviews with Takeuchi in its first three issues. ROLA pitched itself at “women around 28” — which in 2013 meant people born in 1985, who had been watching Sailor Moon since elementary school.

“Carnivorous bookish women” is how ROLA's editor-in-chief, Nagahiro Kawakami, described those core readers. “They're hungry for the things they like. When it's something they love, they won't spare money or effort.” Judging by the commercial results of the new Sailor Moon, the producers read them right.

To guarantee talk, the new Sailor Moon went online first and to television later. In July 2014 it premiered on Niconico, and viewers curious about how different the new version would be paid for memberships to watch it early. Eight months later it finally started airing on TV stations across Japan.

In 2016, the third season ran on Tokyo MX and other stations. That meant that from its 2014 debut onward, new Sailor Moon material reached audiences every single year.

Toei Animation producer Yu Kamiki said in a 2014 interview that the hardest part of making the new Sailor Moon was “passing the new Sailor Moon on to the old fans.” Take the all-important transformation scenes: the team spent a lot of production time balancing nostalgia against novelty. “We wanted it to feel different from the old version, and to make a new version that people who loved the old one would definitely want to watch.”

In other words, younger viewers had already been written out of the new Sailor Moon's target audience. That also made the show look more like a pretext for a nonstop flow of merchandise and brand tie-ins. When word got out in 2015 that a third season was coming, some online comments were sharp: “Was there even a second season?” and “Another nostalgia anime made for middle-aged uncles and aunties.”

In May 2017, the new Sailor Moon teamed up with GU on a line of tees, jeans and bags. The online store sold out in seconds and lines formed outside physical stores. One thing stood out about the buyers: a lot of them were teenagers.

But Fril Lab, a site that tracks how young people spend, found that they were buying the GU items for reasons that had nothing to do with the new Sailor Moon.

A shoulder bag shaped like Luna the cat, a tee printed with Luna in dreamy unicorn colors — these were exactly the kind of fashion Japanese teenagers liked. And GU's low prices sat well within a student's budget. Many of the young people in the rush weren't fans of the new Sailor Moon at all; they just thought the cat was cute. “I've never watched Sailor Moon. I only know the main character and that cat.”

“I Like Designs You Can't Tell Are Anime Merchandise at a Glance”

The new Sailor Moon is both separate from the old one and tightly bound to it. The work itself got a lukewarm reception, but its commercial value reached heights the original never touched.

When the old anime aired, its loyal fans were Japanese women born in the 1980s and 90s. More than 20 years later, those girls have become mothers or working women, and they are naturally the people most willing to spend on Sailor Moon tie-in goods.

Nakayoshi, which serialized the manga, reached a circulation of 2 million copies in the 1990s, and about 5% of its readers were male — so the producers once assumed those male readers would also be a major consumer group for the new Sailor Moon.

To the producers' surprise, the other big group of buyers turned out not to be otaku men but casual female fans. As students, these women had read a bit of manga and watched a bit of anime, but they drifted away from that world as they grew up. The new Sailor Moon woke up their memories of being young.

Die-hard fans and casual fans alike now have enough money to support what they love — and every one of Sailor Moon's tie-ins is tailored to exactly that.

The merchandise collaborations began with one of the rights holders, Bandai. In 2013 Bandai turned Usagi's compact transformation device into an actual compact powder: the makeup case girls had dreamed of as children, made real, at 4,000 yen (about 240 yuan). The easy price made it sell 10 times better than Bandai expected.

Bandai heard back from buyers: “It's so cute I'm embarrassed to use it in public,” and “The case takes up too much room in my makeup bag.” Sailor Moon fans in their 20s and 30s wanted merchandise that was cute and carried their memories, but it also had to be useful and good-looking, with the anime signals turned down.

In 2016 Bandai released a new generation of the Sailor Moon compact, in more restrained colors and, per fan suggestions, a slimmer case. “I like designs you can't tell are anime merchandise at a glance. If someone in the know spots it, you can start a conversation,” one fan of the compact told the Sankei Shimbun.

After the rights holders' own merchandise went over well, Sailor Moon began trying brand tie-ins. The second hit came from a collaboration with the Japanese lingerie brand Peach John.

For reasons much like the compact's, Sailor Moon fans had all imagined, to one degree or another, wearing their favorite character's sailor uniform. Matching Sailor Moon underwear and pajamas came out in two rounds, in 2014 and 2015. An ad with Haruna Kojima, a popular AKB48 member, in Sailor Moon underwear got people talking at the time — even if the result looked rather close to cosplay.

From its 20th anniversary to its 25th, Sailor Moon's brand tie-ins have kept coming.

Some of the tie-ins built around Sailor Moon's 25th anniversary in 2017

March

A bag with Samantha Vega, a homegrown brand Japanese young women like. The bag had Luna ears and became nearly impossible to get.

April

A compact powder and primer with Shiseido's makeup brand Maquillage

May

A line of items with GU

June

Necklaces, earrings, wallets and other items with Anna Sui

And that's only a partial highlight reel. With more than half of 2017 still to run, you could safely predict more unannounced collaborations waiting for Sailor Moon fans to buy, buy, buy.

Sailor Moon even has its own fan club. Joining gets you the right to buy limited-edition merchandise, as long as you pay the 5,500-yen (about 330 yuan) membership fee. Celebrity fan clubs are ordinary in Japan, but one for a single anime is rare.

Slam Dunk did also work with Nike when its 20th-anniversary HD remaster came out, putting scenes of Hanamichi Sakuragi playing basketball onto sneakers. But in the depth and breadth of its partnerships, Slam Dunk — which worked only with Nike — comes nowhere near Sailor Moon.

You can feel Sailor Moon in every one of these collaboration products: the girlish longing of childhood gets satisfied, and you never feel the embarrassment of carrying cheap anime junk. The prices are all reasonable, well within reach of an audience in its 20s and 30s. SuperGroupies made heels with Puella Magi Madoka Magica; JINS made eyeglass frames with Touken Ranbu. Starting with the new Sailor Moon, this kind of tie-in — closely read against what buyers actually want, useful, sensibly priced — has spread through the Japanese anime business.

Sailor Moon's 25th anniversary also lands in a society with fewer children and more old people, where women's sense of independence keeps rising. In 2016, Tokyo got its first female governor, Yuriko Koike. The share of women working rose sharply: among 25- to 29-year-olds, from 41.4% in 1975 to 79.3% in 2012, and among 30- to 34-year-olds, from 43% to 70.8%.

Women aged 25 to 34 are exactly the girls who grew up on Sailor Moon. They went from middle schoolers to working women fighting in the office — beautiful and independent like Usagi and her friends — and using the new Sailor Moon's merchandise let them live out a hero's dream in real life too.

But the new Sailor Moon — merchandise selling briskly, reviews middling — also exposes an awkward fact: the Japanese animation industry today doesn't have enough new ideas.

Space Battleship Yamato, one of Japan's founding anime, was remade as Space Battleship Yamato 2199. Dragon Ball Z was re-edited into Dragon Ball Kai, then followed by the currently airing Dragon Ball Super. More and more classic anime are turning up in front of audiences a second time.

It is much harder now for Japanese animation to recoup production costs by selling Blu-rays and DVDs the way it used to. To move discs, many producers resort to stuffing in raffle tickets for meet-and-greets with voice actors. With no way to know how many new fans will pay up, producers can at least project from past sales figures — and remaking an old anime also cuts costs to the bone. Reviving classic IP over and over is purely a last resort.

But who knows how much longer an IP like Sailor Moon can keep its life going.

Cover image via masimaro