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Mikage is Utena’s trainer and antagonist in the Black Rose arc. When alive, he is named professor Nemuro and wears purple. When dead he wears blue.
See design - costumes - Hades - Black Rose arc - Mikage’s duel.
See the Black Rose arc, especially the events for the past thread of events, when Mikage was alive as Professor Nemuro, and the current thread, when he is dead and sets up duels for Utena. Dead Mikage is the ruler of his underworld and corresponds to Hades.
From Akio’s point of view, Mikage is there to train Utena’s power of miracles and make it strong enough to be worth stealing. From Mikage’s point of view, he wants to defeat Utena so that he can kill Anthy the Rose Bride and replace her with Mamiya. It’s ironic in multiple ways. For one, Anthy is playing Mamiya, so the two are the same person. For another, the real Mamiya is already dead himself, and Mikage doesn’t know it. By the time Utena meets Mikage, he is long dead. The blue uniform says that Mikage is an illusion.
Death is a key symbol in Utena as a whole, and the Black Rose arc nails it in. Death is the only eternity; to die (literally or metaphorically) is to achieve eternity and be in stasis—and vice versa. The students are in coffins, metaphorically dead in the timeless Academy. Akio’s goal is to become eternal—to bring the stasis of eternal patriarchy to the world. When Mikage burns his building, he and the 100 boys become literally dead.
Akio gains power from the dead, and dead Mikage is one of his sources of power. The power of the patriarchy is its legitimacy, that is, people’s acceptance of its stories. A person’s story ends when they die and becomes eternal, in a sense. A major theme is the cultural revision of past stories to make them fit preconceptions. In Utena, because of that kind of revision, a person’s story becomes more powerful when they die. Better fitting the story to the audience’s expectations makes it more believable. Utena does not fit expectations; on the surface, it is unreal and unbelievable. That is the point. The past with its accumulation of stories is more powerful than the present, when the stories haven’t been regularized yet. The Black Rose arc is about the power of the past, and how it is greater than the power of the present that we saw in the Student Council arc.
When we see Mikage alive, we are not seeing a flashback to true events; some points are inconsistent and not all can be true. We are not seeing Mikage’s memory; the dead do not remember anything. We are seeing the story of Mikage. The story is not true history. Probably much of it is true, but it has altered (or been altered).
Mikage appears when he is dead because his story has power. It is the same reason that Dios appears, even though he is fictional and is said to be dead. And see Ruka’s arc. Utena is about the power of stories, and its characters represent aspects of that power. The way I think of it is that Akio (the patriarchy) invokes Mikage’s patriarchal story, and what we see on the screen represents how Utena and others in the arc interact with his story: Utena learns from it even as she rejects him. Her story is ultimately more powerful than his, but she faces duelists who fell under his power.
When Utena first passes by Mikage’s building, in episode 14 at the start of the Black Rose, Miki tells her about the past fire and the boys who died in it. He doesn’t mention Mikage (or professor Nemuro). That is the invocation of the story (more precisely, it is how the story is transmitted to Utena). At the end of the arc in episode 23, Utena and Miki pass by the building again, and Miki says that nobody died in the fire but no records remain. The story is withdrawn and forgotten.
Compared to Akio. Mikage stands compared and opposed to Akio: Akio in his high tower is Zeus in Olympus, the home of the gods, and is associated with power; Mikage in his deep lair is Hades in the underworld, the home of the dead, and is associated with death. Both are at the end of the world—or it would be better to say, both live near the edge of the world. Both are attached to Christian religious metaphors. Both hit on every human being in sight.
Compared to Utena. Mikage is also compared and opposed to Utena: Both have pink hair, are tied to Anthy, and choose boku as their pronoun (a humble choice for Dios and Mikage, a bold choice for Utena). Both are ambidextrous in duels. Mikage wants to kill Anthy (and replace her with Anthy playing a different role), Utena wants to save Anthy. Mikage is insightful, cynical, manipulative, and fails at love (he can’t even mention it, and denies his desires quietly). He is opposed to Utena who is oblivious, honest, loves individual freedom, and has love troubles (and denies her desires loudly, for much of the series) but does anything but fail.
Ice and fire. Mikage is associated with both ice and fire: The unmelting snow on the steps (signifying his cold heart and his wish for stasis), and the fire to cremate the failed duelist boys (and the fire of the candles that he uses to burn his building and kill them in the first place). It may not be a coincidence that ice and fire are the two most common ways the world is imagined to end. It is definitely not a coincidence that ice and fire are opposites. It is Akio who convinces Mikage to burn his building. Fire is associated with the Christian hell, a related underworld. Fire represents destruction and death, which are changes that ironically bring stasis: Using fire, Mikage hopes or believes, will bring ice.
Professor Nemuro. Before he dies, Mikage is called professor Nemuro. Older Tokiko still calls him that when she returns to the Academy. I think it’s likely that in life he was a university professor, not an Academy student. His story has been altered for Akio’s purposes.
We don’t know, but there are three pieces of evidence. 1. He uses a microfilm reader. He lived before the personal computer era. Microfilm came into wide use in the 1930s, so that’s his earliest likely era. 2. His crew of 100 “special” boys is all male. That’s the extreme sex ratio; it’s very different from what we see at Ohtori Academy and suggests a more patriarchal time. 3. Tokiko left when Mikage was alive, and returned decades older. It suggests that Mikage lived only a few decades earlier—say, in the 1970s or 1960s. But time is wonky at the Academy, so I consider this the weakest bit of evidence.
In life, Mikage was professor Nemuro, so he was in higher education. Historically, higher education in Japan strictly excluded women. That only changed in 1947, during the U.S. occupation, with new education laws and a more liberal atmosphere (the militaristic society was overturned). And the rate of women going to college or university was low for a long time.
I looked up the histories of most women’s universities in Japan. Many have founding dates before 1947. But in every case I checked, the school was formerly something lesser and only became an institute of higher education after 1947. One started as a sewing school—you get the idea.
Maybe there’s something in the show to nail it down better, but this is all I saw. I think Mikage’s most likely date of death would be late 1930s through early 1950s. There’s no mention of the war, which might suggest an earlier time, but then again Mikage’s story has been altered, and maybe that aspect was edited out. There’s nothing to firmly rule out a later date as suggested by Tokiko’s age when she returns. It just seems somewhat less likely because excluding all girls from the teams would have been noticeable and inefficient. But under Akio it’s possible; maybe he only wanted researchers who were “on his side.” It’s even possible that Mikage lived much earlier and the hints of a later date are edits to his story or are due to the confused time at the Academy. Nothing is firm.
Older Tokiko’s arrival comes with a hint that could be interpreted as meaning that she is dead herself. If so, Mikage might be from earlier than I suppose.
Tokiko. Tokiko was appointed from above and has a position of some power. Mikage seems to have lived in an era when women were not allowed that much power—certainly not in an academic context. It suggests why he is so uncomfortable when visiting her house.
Jay Scott <jay@satirist.org>
first posted 25 July 2024
updated 27 September 2025