Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shōjo Manga

Notes

151 notes Chapter 1. The heart of the Matter 1. Due to the competitive nature of the publishing industry and the generosity of those who spoke with me at length about shōjo manga and their own careers, I have used pseudonyms and other discretions throughout this manuscript to ensure anonymity. Discussions with manga scholars whose works are published are exceptions to this rule. 2. Much of the affective labor performed in today’s economy is considered women’s work, sometimes referred to as “care work.” Following Hochschild’s groundbreaking work on emotional labor (1983), feminist scholars have theorized the dual social and material implications of women’s unpaid reproductive work within the home and traced the roots of reproductive labor into the labor market. Care capital articulates the not-just-material work involved in caregiving, acknowledging that today such work is increasingly done outside of the home and even across global borders, within both the formal and informal economy (Aguilar and Lacsamana 2004, Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002, Hochschild 2000). In the context of Japan, Miriam Silverberg’s analysis of the café girl in early twentieth-century Japan characterizes her work and the moral anxiety that surrounded it as a kind of affective labor, one that flirts with prostitution (2006, 92). 3. Fan fiction is that written by fans about the characters they love—e.g., Star Trek, anime, etc. Cosplay is the practice of dressing up as a favorite character . For insightful analyses of these phenomena, see, respectively, Jenkins 1992 and Napier 2005. 4. The term gyaru is clearly from the English word “gal.” Because kogyaru is typically written in katakana, there is debate about whether the ko stands for “small” or comes from the kō (high) from kōkō (high school) (Kinsella 2002, 230; Miller 2004, 228). Chapter 5 examines the relationship between shōjo manga and kogyaru directly. 5. Enjo kōsai, translated as “assisted dating,” refers to the practice of schoolgirls giving their time and, sometimes, sexual favors to older men in exchange for money. Enjo kōsai emerged as a social concern in the early 1990s, receiving much attention from the media, the government, scholars, and parents alike. Likewise, during the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, fears about the 152 Notes to Pages 10–12 plummeting birthrate were manifest in a flurry of discussions about “parasite singles.” This less than flattering nomenclature refers to young women who postpone marriage and child rearing or who opt out altogether, characterizing them as lazy girls living with their parents rent free, spending all their money in the city with friends (Yamada 1999). 6. To complicate matters further, manga are also referred to as komikkusu (comics) in Japan. While komikkusu clearly retains some of its Western origins, the terms are used interchangeably both by the publishing industry and in common parlance. For the sake of consistency and clarity, I have chosen to use the word “manga” to refer to Japanese comics and “comics” to refer to U.S. comics. 7. Throughout this book I have altered the standard style for citing books and magazines slightly in order to clarify when I am talking about a manga magazine title and when a manga series. Thus, even though most manga become books and their titles should be italicized, I will keep them in parentheses to distinguish them from manga magazine titles for readers unfamiliar with the vagaries of the manga world. 8. Even within these main publishers there are a few other, hard to categorize shōjo manga magazines. Petit Flower, now Flowers (Shogakukan), Chorus (Shueisha), BE LOVE, and Kiss (Kodansha) are all marketed as shōjo manga rather than ladies’ comics but target readers in their early twenties and older. 9. Sarah Frederick’s and Barbara Sato’s respective work on women’s magazines in the early twentieth century provide salient historical precedents for the discussion of shōjo manga throughout this book (Frederick 2006, Sato 2003). In particular, Frederick theorizes the relationship between readers and editors in women’s magazines in the 1920s, and my research serves as an in situ account of quite similar dynamics within the pages of shōjo manga magazines and within the walls of the shōjo manga publishing industry today (Frederick 2006). 10. Outside of the big mainstream publishing houses there are many that specialize primarily in manga. Hakusensha, one of the publishing houses this book focuses on, is one such exception. However, the bulk of the genre is produced within...