Since the turn of the millennium the Japanese word shōjo has gained currency on a global scale, accompanying the transcultural consumption of manga (graphic narratives) and anime (animated TV series and movies), as well as the spread of associated fan-cultural practices. In recent use, shōjo refers on the one hand to commercial genres marketed to female audiences—shōjo manga (girls’ comics) to begin with—and on the other hand to a character type, which may appear in entertaining graphic narratives, non-narrative games, or branding campaigns: the cute adolescent girl. While Japanese writings still show an inclination to conflate this character type with real-life girls, whether as agents or objects of desire, in actuality, shōjo does not signify real girls as such, but “a crafted concept,” as Masafumi Monden puts it in his contribution to this volume (which does not rule out the possibility that real girls apply it, or have it applied, to themselves). It is against this backdrop that the present volume re-approaches the already well-studied shōjo, foregrounding the mediations which have both engendered and engaged it.
“Girl” as Performative Practice
During the first half of the twentieth century the prolonged phase between childhood and marriage for girls of the urban middle and upper classes had shaped shōjo as a social category. Shōjo marked the young woman’s “transitional state between the social roles of child and wife or mother” 1 and as such a liminality or in-betweenness. In prewar Japan, modern media addressed to an adult and predominantly patriarchal public had given rise to shōjo discourse. 2 Through entertaining media targeted at and employed by female adolescents—magazines containing illustrated girls’ novels ( shōjo shōsetsu), among other things, and later shōjo manga—this discourse became part of girls’ culture: at least in part, girls twisted what was marketed to them into their own subculture. While inextricably linked to school education, the term shōjo designated out-of-school activities, 3 first and foremost, the participation in an imagined community of girl magazine readers. By engaging in such practices real-life girls became shōjo, according to literary scholars Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley. 4 The magazine-induced formation of an exclusive and safe space of kindred spirits culminated in postwar shōjo manga discourse, as the writings by manga critic Yukari Fujimoto evince. 5
But from the 1990s onwards shōjo underwent a significant shift. Already in 1991, Sumiko Yokokawa, a scholar of children’s literature, had pointed out that the non-contradictory unity of girl and “girl” under the term shōjo was becoming obsolete, and that the same name started to assume a different meaning. 6 Shōjo changed from being employed by girls (and women) as a reference point for affiliation, to providing a stock of aesthetic conventions and narrative tropes, a whole “shōjo-scape” in Monden’s words. This pool of girlhood signifiers has proved to be expedient for differently gendered users and various usages, even among girls. In early twenty-first century Japan, shōjo operates as a code, one which women themselves increasingly remove from use as social representation. Today, shōjo is not anymore confined to straightforward representation; it probably never was. As Heather Warren-Crow puts it in her ground-breaking monograph Girlhood and the Plastic Image (2014), “Girlhood is itself a practice, a performative process.” 7 Indeed, girl culture has often been associated with role-playing and masquerade, escapism, and the indulgence in fantasy, preferably in relation to non-reproductive sexuality. Furthermore, indicative of performativity is the fact that the girl has been identified by modern patriarchy as a “‘not-quite-female’ female,” 8 embodying “less a state of being than a state of becoming,” 9 which modern critics regarded as a lack of autonomy, accountability, and agency.
While shōjo is already spreading beyond Japan—not only in the technical sense that analog and digital networks have made it possible for Japanese “contents” to expand globally—the word itself still evokes a sense of locality, namely Japanese particularity. Dedicated fans of manga and anime, Japanese critics, and non-Japanese mediators of Japanese culture alike have conceived of shōjo as a specifically Japanese discourse, investigating its rise under the conditions of twentieth-century Japan. 10 While this is of continuing importance, the fact that shōjo has entered the lexicon of non-Japanese users in recent years cannot be traced back to a successful unidirectional export from Japan. It is clearly related to a more general, transcultural “embrace of girlishness” 11 within the contemporary digital mediascape. With regard to the attributes of the digital image—malleability, transmediation, and openness to change—Warren-Crow asserts this transculturality as follows:
While the Japanese shōjo and the Western adolescent girl are not exactly symmetrical concepts, the capacity of each to embody transformation and potential […] is exactly what allows them to be evacuated of their more nationally and culturally specific meanings. 12
The present volume approaches shōjo from the perspective of media rather than (Japanese) culture to complement the so far prevalent and often history-oriented focus on cultural specifics, social representation, and actual girls. Equal emphasis is put on transcultural commonalities, non-representational enjoyment, and girl characters, or more precisely character types arisen from the manga-derived shōjo-scape, such as beautiful boys ( bishōnen ), and cute girls ( bishōjo ). 13 While acknowledging that shōjo has mediated a multitude of discourses throughout the twentieth century—discourses on Japan and its modernity, consumption and consumerism, non-hegemonic gender, and also technology 14 —this volume seeks to raise awareness of shōjo mediations, stretching from media for and by actual girls to shōjo—the performatively practiced and conventionalized sign or image, that evokes certain affects—as media.
Through its diverse chapters, this volume provides an overall picture of what shōjo research has accomplished so far, and on which avenues it might proceed in the future. Some of the chapters focus on girls and young women in modern Japan and how they have been positioned as a social entity in the name of shōjo, a model of identity, or selfhood, shaped by patriarchal society and men’s desire, but also formed by girls themselves, swaying between resistance and conformity as all subcultures do. In line with the majority of previous research, which has been informed by Japanese-studies and gender-studies concerns, 15 these chapters are ...