Name: Welcome to the world of BL!
Uploaded: 2025-06-19T18:07:18.000Z
Duration: 11 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This time we're at the Tokorozawa Sakura Town here in Tokorozawa City, Saitama Prefecture.

Now that is quite the prominent building, isn't it?

This building that looks like a huge slab of rock coming out of the ground, that is the Kadokawa Culture Museum.

He's famous for his work on the National Stadium.

This is a completely new cultural concept building here in the Tokorozawa Sakura Town.

This whole thing, it combines a library, it combines an art museum, a regular museum, and let's be honest, it's quite the eye-catching landmark building here for the Tokorozawa Sakura Town.

Now it's a museum that is unlike any museum around the world because it's joining a lot of these ideas, different genres across literature and art and natural history.

Today we want to check out the exhibit, BL Evolution, from pioneers to global phenomenon.

So let's not waste any time, let's get inside.

In recent years, BL works have become popular both domestically and internationally, and you can see things that have been shown in novels and manga in dramas and movies.

In this exhibit, you can see people who recently learned about BL through dramas, but didn't know much about it, and people who originally liked BL.

In order for people to enjoy both, we have introduced the three eras of BL, starting with June, which is a female-oriented boys' love magazine that was published in  The fans really enjoyed it.

Even in the voting section at the satellite venue, they said they enjoyed it a lot in the comment section of the main venue.

On the museum's homepage, we have an exhibit page in Japanese, English, Chinese, and Korean.

It's been introduced in great detail, so I hope you can take a look at it.

We also have tweets in English and Chinese on social media and Twitter, so please take a look at that as well.

Some people came to this exhibit and were interested in boys' love for the first time, and there were people who were a little far from boys' love, but wanted to read it again and want to see it again.

I think it would be great if the genre of boys' love continues to get more and more  BL stands for boys' love.

In the 1990s, the culture of boys' love spread dramatically, especially among women, with a boom in the publication of the first BL magazines using that term, boys' love, and then various masterpieces became known throughout the world through movies, dramas, animation, and other medium, and has now become an established entertainment genre.

I mean, I have a lot of manga tattoos and those kind of things.

I mean, mostly mainstream things, One Piece, Dragon Ball, stuff like that.

So this kind of comic, I don't know if you were finding that...

I know that it exists, this kind of genre theme in mangas, but I'm not that familiar with specifically these kind of stories.

It's a story about two men instead of a man and a woman.  So was that kind of surprising to you?

No, because as I told you, I already know that this exists.

And I also saw sometimes fan-made drawings and stuff with more famous characters.

So I know that it exists, but I'm not that familiar specifically with these titles.

And one other question, not about the manga, not about the comic books, but when you saw the building from the outside, what did you think?

I mean, it's mesmerizing, the shapes, the way that it's built, and also this kind of structure in this kind of neighborhood that is more flat and quiet.

My first time coming here, and when I saw the building on the outside, I knew I was intrigued for some kind of nice experience inside.

So I'm hoping you're feeling that same way.

I mean, the history of BL, of course, it goes back a long way.

And the history for the comics to be introduced, it really starts in the 1970s and grows a 1978 and into the 80s.

You can see the history from 1970 until today across this whole wall. 50 years of history of that is pretty incredible.

I mean, it's one thing you can notice being here, seeing these comics from the 1970s already with the artwork just being a much higher quality than you would expect to see from that long ago.

It just gets better as you go down the years.

So we're talking about the L8 leading to this kind of subculture movement, which leads to coupling.

When you hear coupling in English, you might not know exactly what it means, but it's taking two fictional characters from already established manga or comic books and using your own ideas, fans' own ideas, of how they would exist in this world of BL.

A huge boom, and that boom continues today.

And the fan fiction is probably just going to get more and more creative.

It's cool to see the beginning of it and how much it boomed here, especially in the 80s.

So in the 90s was when the word or the term boys' love was actually born.

So before that, it wasn't actually called boys' love.

And this is what happens sometimes in Japan, using the English words and not necessarily using the same meaning that we might think of.

It's a story between the romance of two men or men together.

But this is the first moment where it becomes boys' love, using that word, that terminology in the 90s.

An interesting thing, too, is the side note.

In this museum, in this exhibition, there's a lot of kind of dark spaces.

That's just to protect this original artwork that we can see in this museum.

And one thing you'll probably find only here in Japan is just the overwhelming mix of media that is used, all the way from books, novels, cassette tapes, compact discs, laser discs, all the way up into video games, DVDs, and then, of course, motion pictures.

It's just an incredible array of media that is used for this genre.

And the one thing about the comics here in Japan is they have a little obi kind of at the bottom of the comic.

And it's like a cover in a way, but it gives you an extra reason to want to read that magazine or that comic.

And we can't actually tell you what it says.

You'll need to figure that out for yourself, an experience of yourself.

But boy, does it get right to the point sometimes.

Now, some people might say this is a kind of a small culture or subculture genre.

But you can see behind me this world map.