In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 C h aP T Er On E The Heart of the Matter Gender, Intimacy, and Consumption in the Production of Shōjo Manga When I grew up, in the countryside, there weren’t as many dramas and things like there are now and manga really was the most important thing for the girls in my school; it provided us with a waku waku [thrilling or exciting] life. We passed manga back and forth and talked about it; it was fun and important to us, so I really wanted to provide that same kind of waku waku feeling to others, particularly girls outside of Tokyo. —Interview with Sōda Naoko, 2001 On a sunny afternoon in the spring of 2001, in a conference room on an upper floor of a Tokyo office building, Sōda Naoko and I discussed the ins and outs of editing shōjo manga, from deadline details, to shopping for survey prizes, to brainstorming with artists on a new story.1 Much of the two years that I spent in Tokyo researching the shōjo manga industry was organized around such encounters, across tables scattered with colorful shōjo manga magazines. Shōjo manga is manga for girls. This is apparent through the abundance of pastel and glitter, hearts and stars, and doe-eyed cuties that populate the pages of most shōjo manga magazines; it also peppered many of my conversations with editors, artists, and scholars about the history, aesthetics, and production of shōjo manga magazines in Japan. In fact, in the manga industry , titles, magazines, and even publishing house divisions are all organized by gender. Thus, gender is at the heart of shōjo manga. Discussions about the genre overflowed with adjectives describing what girls dream about, highlighting concepts of emotion, intimacy, and community—doki doki mono (things that make your heart race). Suda Junichiro, a young editor working his way up the corporate ladder, commented to me, “Shōjo manga is not just entertainment; it is less game, toy, and media mix oriented than shōnen manga [boys’ manga]. For girls, shōjo manga is not entertainment and escape, but love and exploring the range of human relationships and 2 Chapter 1 emotions.” Veteran editor Yamaguchi Akira similarly mused, “They [girls] like to think about people’s hearts. Girls that age [fourth through sixth grade] like to read about human relations, boys and girls, and friendship. They are trying to understand their own abilities and gain confidence in relationships . For them we write stories about their hopes and dreams, things that are important to them.” Ningen kankei (human relations) was one of the key terms editors, artists, and scholars used to describe the themes in shōjo manga to me, along with friendship (yūjō), love, and romance (ren’ai). Following their lead, I use the term ningen kankei to frame the notions of interior life, friendship, family relations, and romance that dominate the pages of shōjo manga. This notion of ningen kankei brings together two of the defining features of this book—anthropology and shōjo sensibilities. Translated as human relations, ningen kankei is defined as (1) person-to-person association or interaction within society; (2) relations between individuals including a correspondence of emotions; and (3) the number one workplace complaint (Shinmura 1998). Here we encounter emotion and intimacy in the very definition of human relations, as it is about people relating in groups. As the study of humankind, anthropology is fundamentally concerned with the ways that people relate to each other within society. Thus, in this ethnographic account of the shōjo manga industry, I attend to the relations between people, within the workplace itself, within the pages of shōjo manga magazines, and within shōjo manga stories. As the epigraph that opens this chapter highlights, I begin with the voices of the creators of shōjo manga—editors and artists. Sōda’s personal narrative exemplifies the relationships that frame this ethnography of the industry. By focusing on the human relations (ningen kankei) at work in the production of manga at multiple levels (text, magazines, personnel, and industry), I examine the concrete ways that shōjo manga reflects, refracts, and fabricates constructions of gender, consumption, and intimacy. Through an analysis of the extra-manga content of shōjo manga magazines, such as readers’ pages and artists’ contests, as well as representations of gender and sexuality in shōjo manga at the turn of the millennium, I argue...

Share