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| ISBN-13: | 9781478006299 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/06/2019 |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
SEEKING AN ALTERNATIVE
"Male" Shojo Fans since the 1970s
As groundwork for the discussion of "otaku" and the struggle for imagination in Japan, this chapter focuses on male engagement with shojo (for girls) manga and shojo (girl) characters in manga and anime from the 1970s to the early 1980s. It is well known that shojo manga underwent a renaissance in the 1970s (Thorn 2001; Suzuki 2011; Shamoon 2012), when female artists such as Hagio Moto, Takemiya Keiko, and Oshima Yumiko began to experiment with speculative fiction, poetics, the grammar of comics, depictions of psychological conflict, and sexuality. What is less known is that men were also attracted to works by these and other shojo artists in the 1970s. The existence, let alone motivation, of male shojo fans seems sketchy at best. When mention is made of them, their attraction to shojo is often understood as a crude desire to "deflower" (Mackie 2010, 200). Discussion of male shojo fans typically comes with critique of lolicon, or the "Lolita complex," which conjures mental images of creepy older men lusting after little girls. So certain are some critics that they know the meaning of lolicon that they comfortably gloss it as part of the "normalization of a wide range of pedophilic and misogynistic ideas" and "men's sexual abuse and objectification of girls" (Norma 2015, 85). To stop circulation and harm, one is told to consider refusing to translate related material, and perhaps even burning it (86). As "lolicon" has become a keyword in global criticism of manga, anime, and games from Japan, activists and academics alike seem confident in passing judgment. Indeed, when I presented on lolicon at an international conference in the summer of 2017, and made the rather modest proposal that researchers explore what it means to manga/anime fans in Japan, a member of the audience asked incredulously, "What more do we need to know?"
If one can avoid thinking about lolicon in the familiar terms of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955) and Russell Trainer's The Lolita Complex (1966), and instead attempt to understand the word as it was used among manga/anime fans from the 1970s to the early 1980s, an often-obscure phenomenon begins to come into focus. Consider that Akagi Akira, a manga editor and critic, connects what came to be known as lolicon not to sexual desire for little girls but rather attraction to "cuteness" (kawai-rashisa) and "girl-ness" (shojo-sei) in manga and anime (Akagi 1993, 230–31). Further, as articulated by Nagayama Kaoru, a manga editor and critic, the spirit of lolicon was not "I like girls" but rather "I like cute things" (Nagayama 2014, 83). As Nagayama sees it, "the cute movement" (kawaii undo) came out of growing up with weekly manga magazines and television anime, which gave rise to desire for manga/anime-style cute characters. Akagi, Nagayama, and other Japanese critics argue that lolicon refers to a desire for "manga-like" (manga-ppoi) or "anime-like" (anime-ppoi) characters, for "cuteness" (kawai-rashisa), "roundness" (marukkosa), and the "two-dimensional" (nijigen) as opposed to "real." The orientation of the cute movement, of lolicon, was not toward the girl per se, but rather the shojo, or girl character, and the bishojo, or cute girl character, specifically.
This chapter adds to the story of the cute movement the dynamic of men consuming and producing shojo manga and characters, which is a phenomenon of crossing gender/genre lines. If, as manga editor and critic Fujita Hisashi suggests, " 'cute' = shojo manga-like" (Fujita 1989, 127), then it is clear from the proliferation of cute in manga and anime that the boundaries between shojo and genres for men are increasingly blurred. In fact, the bishojo character emerged out of responses to and appropriations of shojo manga and characters, and evolved in collaborations between male and female artists across gender/genre lines. Diverse participation in the cute movement, and the shifting gender identities and sexualities of those involved, not only disrupts overly simplistic discourse about lolicon and men desiring to deflower girls but also raises the possibility of men seeking an alternative to hegemonic forms of masculinity and media and finding it in shojo manga and characters (Ueno 1989, 131–32). More broadly, this movement and responses to it throw into relief, on the one hand, the imagined excesses and perversions associated with "male" shojo fans, and, on the other, the struggle to imagine and create alternative social worlds. At this conjuncture appeared the figure of the "otaku," which is discussed in chapter 2, building on the understanding developed here.
Seeking an Alternative
Despite massive social and economic changes that have led to more opportunities for women and transforming relations between the sexes, Ito Kimio, a pioneer of men's studies, notes that expectations for men remain stubbornly rigid in Japan (Ito Kimio 2005, 149–51). To a certain extent, Ito's concerns stem from his own struggles with masculinity, which date back to at least the early 1970s. At the time, Ito was a student at Kyoto University involved in the movement against the political arrangement that made Japan an accomplice to the United States and its wars in East Asia. Ito found himself uncomfortable with not only his adult male role models — the salaryman, professor, and bureaucrat, for example — but also with the machismo of others in the movement, who wore military-inspired garb and engaged in sometimes violent standoffs with authorities on the street. It was a kind of masculinity familiar from popular media, as well, which was increasingly alienating for the young man (Galbraith 2014, 26).
Seeking an alternative, Ito began to read shojo manga. In his essay "When a 'Male' Reads Shojo Manga," Ito recalls those days: "I began to seriously read shojo manga at the beginning of the 1970s, right in the middle of the aftermath of the explosion of counterculture and in the continuing wave of political youth rebellion. ... In that period, I was reading the manga magazine Shojo Margaret every week as well as the supplementary edition of Shojo Friend and the magazines Nakayoshi, Ribon, and I bought every monthly I could lay my hands on, my favorite being the supplementary edition of Seventeen" (Ito Kimio 2010, 171–72). Looking back, Ito connects his intense attraction to shojo manga and growing discomfort with masculinity: "In the last phase of the countercultural wave, when I was feeling a kind of alienation from the so-called male culture, shojo manga offered me the opportunity to reconsider masculinity and to critically review the present situation of gender. ... My encounter with shojo manga has been of great importance to me. I suppose it has brought about one of the starting points for my research into masculinity" (175–76). In shojo manga, specifically stories about male-male romance and relationships, a subgenre called "boys love" pioneered by Hagio Moto and Takemiya Keiko, Ito gained access to what he describes as a "minority" view:
Having always been put into the margins, the minority is forced to face itself. To be excluded from the mainstream generates various feelings of alienation and discrimination. The majority though does not become aware of its own majority-ness, unless something extraordinary happens. ... In a certain sense it is through the circuit of shojo manga that I have been able to reflect upon male-dominated society from a male point of view. Above all, it was of great importance to me that the development of shojo manga at the beginning of the 1970s started with boys' love stories, because the marginal male/homosexual perspective (as opposed to the heterosexual majority of society) turned my eyes to the indifference of the social majority hidden in gender and sexuality. (Ito Kimio 2010, 176)
In moving to the margins with and through shojo manga, Ito gained a minority view, or, to rephrase somewhat, he moved away from the majority or mainstream to see things that he had not as a "heterosexual male." He was thus able not only to critique hegemonic masculinity but also to think differently as a man. With and through shojo manga, Ito came to problematize his own position. It is for this reason that Ito puts "male" into scare quotes when he refers to himself as a reader of shojo manga.
What Ito describes in his engagement with shojo manga is remarkably similar to what others present as a survival strategy of queer youth. In her essay "Queer and Now," theorist Eve Sedgwick notes that many queer youth share the memory of attaching to cultural objects that did not match up with the dominant codes available to them. "We needed for there to be sites where the meanings didn't line up tidily with each other," Sedgwick explains, "and we learned to invest in those sites with fascination and love" (Sedgwick 1993, 3). Sedgwick is astute in appreciating that these objects, which "became a prime resource for survival" (3), can be drawn from popular media and material culture. While this seems to speak to Ito's experience, he notably did not identify as gay but rather as a queer person attracted to shojo manga, which did not match up with the dominant codes of masculinity available to him. This is even more striking given Ito's attraction to boys love manga, which features romance and relationships between "male" characters that typically do not identify as gay (Akatsuka 2010, 167). With and through such shojo manga, Ito gained access to an "open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically" (Sedgwick 1993, 8). Hence the questioning of Ito's position as a "male" reader of shojo manga, which opens into other possibilities.
While Ito remembers being essentially alone, there were in fact many others like him. In a self-published book, sociologist Yoshimoto Taimatsu reports interviewing men who read boys love (BL) manga and yaoi, or fanzines focusing on boys love, in the 1970s. Among other things, the men said, "BL was salvation for me. And I think that it would be the same for a lot of men in contemporary Japan"; "BL/yaoi was a tool that my generation ... could use to liberate ourselves from the pretense that we were tough guys"; "I was really saved by [the magazine] June and by yaoi, which offered me a new perspective on accepting [myself] being a passive man"; "I started getting the idea that men can enjoy specific texts, like yaoi, that were originally made by and for women, in order to live with less stress and psychological pressure" (translated in Nagaike 2015, 193–94). Much of this resonates with Ito, which suggests a larger phenomenon of men seeking an alternative. In Japan in the 1970s, new forms of shojo manga offering alternative views of gender and sexuality became part of the survival strategy of queer youth that felt alienated by hegemonic masculinity and related institutions (Suzuki 2011, 59–61).
This was not limited to boys love manga, either. Later in the decade, Ito reports witnessing other men reading shojo manga by Mutsu A-ko (Galbraith 2014, 27–28), who has not received the same critical praise as revolutionaries such as Hagio and Takemiya, but rather produced "girly" (otome-chikku) stories about romance and everyday life. As with Ito and boys love manga, one can see among Mutsu fans a move to the margin away from the masculine, mainstream, or majority. For Ito, in both cases, the interest in shojo "started from a small sense of discomfort towards the contemporaneous male-dominated society" (Ito Kimio 2010, 177). In a personal interview, Ito expanded on this to argue that the turn toward shojo manga was part of a larger one toward girls' culture and cuteness in Japan (Galbraith 2014, 28–29). Shojo fans, Ito elucidates, "managed to preserve their own space by enjoying the commodified world through their own point of view, or by manipulating the commodified objects of consumption and adopting them to their own needs" (Ito Kimio 2010, 174). On the one hand, attracted to shojo manga and characters, men began to consume across gender/genre lines. On the other hand, they began producing their own shojo manga and characters, or rather bishojo manga and characters, in dialogue and collaboration with female artists. Space was opened for men to share responses to (bi)shojo manga and characters. Alternative social worlds were imagined and created. This is the story of "male" shojo fans seeking an alternative in Japan.
The Comic Market
In the early 1970s, Harada Teruo (aka Shimotsuki Takanaka) was a student at Wako University in the suburbs of Tokyo. He was born in 1951, the same year as Ito Kimio, and, like Ito, was a reader of shojo manga. This is not entirely surprising, given the impact of Hagio, Takemiya, and Oshima. "In the early 1970s when these female artists were working," Harada recalls, "even male fans got caught up in the boom, and each artist had fan clubs across the country" (Shimotsuki 2008, 12). Critics recall that, at the time, anyone who was a manga fan read shojo manga (Nagayama 2014, 56, 233–34). For his part, however, Harada was unaware of this larger phenomenon when he first encountered Hagio's work in COM magazine in 1971. He writes evocatively of the moment when "a university student on the verge of adulthood, who knew nothing of the 'shojo mind' (shojo no shinsei), was ensnared by it" (Shimotsuki 2008, 45). Following this exposure, Harada — again, like Ito — became fanatical in his pursuit of what seemed to him a singular interest. He bought Bessatsu Shojo Comic and other magazines in which Hagio published, and sought out her work at new and used bookstores. In this way, reading Bessatsu Shojo Comic, Harada stumbled onto Hagio's "November Gymnasium" (11 gatsu no gimunajiumu, 1971), a groundbreaking work in the shojo manga subgenre of boys love. Overwhelmed with emotion, Harada was completely hooked, absorbed in shojo manga and drawn into its world (Shimotsuki 2008, 46).
It was not until the following year, in July 1972, that Harada discovered he was not alone. He relays the happenings of a fateful night at the First Japan Manga Festival, which he spent in the company of fellow fans:
A bunch of manga fans were in the same room talking and the topic turned to Hagio Moto's works. As soon as it did, men began to reveal that they, too, were Hagio fans. I did the same, and things got very lively. One man showed me a massive collection of Hagio works that he had cut out of magazines. I was truly surprised to meet fans who were passionate to that degree. It was the first time that I met Matsuda Shin'taro, who I learned was a Hagio fan just like me, and I ended up promising him that we would make our own fan club. (Shimotsuki 2008, 62)
That fan club, Moto no Tomo, connected Harada with not only Matsuda but also others across the country. Among them was Y-jo, representative of the Postwar Shojo Manga History Research Group, and Yonezawa Yoshihiro, who came from Kumamoto to Tokyo to enroll in Meiji University. In 1973, Harada published his first fanzine, which was dedicated to Hagio and brought him into contact with even more fans. Against the backdrop of Hagio's The Poe Family (Poe no ichizoku, 1972–76) earning her a larger following of female fans, at the Second Japan Manga Festival in August 1973, Harada remembers spending the night at a hotel where he and others held a "meeting for men only to discuss shojo manga" (Shimotsuki 2008, 68). In November 1973, Harada and his friends published another fanzine devoted to shojo manga.
Gaining momentum and drawing others in, Harada's passionate pursuit of shojo manga yielded spectacular results. In 1973, inspired by techniques of "still animation," Harada began to float the idea of producing an animated version of Hagio's "November Gymnasium." To complete this "fan letter in visual form" (Shimotsuki 2008, 92), Harada enlisted the help of the Wako University manga club, and tapped into the network of his fan club and publications. Composed of four hundred drawings and running forty-five minutes, the finished animation was screened in Shibuya, Tokyo, in 1974. In no time, universities and high schools were requesting screenings, and Harada was happy to oblige (Shimotsuki 2008, 20, 97). Interest in shojo manga was building, as can be deduced from not only the screenings but also the Shojo Manga Festival held in Yokohama in 1974. The following year, in April 1975, Harada joined Yonezawa Yoshihiro, Aniwa Jun, and others to form Labyrinth (Meikyu), a group that produced a legendary series of fanzines focusing on manga criticism, with heavy emphasis on shojo manga. Yonezawa, for example, used materials collected by contacts such as Y-jo to write articles on shojo manga history, which would later become the book Postwar Shojo Manga History (Sengo shojo manga shi, 1980). Others turned a critical lens on themes such as light and darkness in Hagio's works, and Harada contributed a parody of The Poe Family.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Dedication / Acknowledgments ixIntroduction. "Otaku" and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan 1
1. Seeking an Alternative: "Male Sōjo Fans since the 1970s 20
2. "Otaku" Research and Reality Problems 49
3. Moe: An Affective Response to Fictional Characters 76
4. Akihabara: "Otaku" and Contested Imaginaries in Japan 127
5. Maid Cafés: Relations with Fictional and Real Others in Spaces Between 184
Conclusion. Eshi 100: The Politics of Japanese, "Otaku," Popular Culture in Akihabara and Beyond 227
Notes 261
Bibliography 289
Index 311
What People are Saying About This
“In this tremendous book, Patrick W. Galbraith brings to life the relatively unknown world of Japanese popular culture. His voice shines throughout thoughtful interviews, detailed ethnography, sensitive portraits of people characterized as ‘otaku,’ and nuanced readings of videogames and interactive fiction. An impressive contribution to the field of manga and anime studies.”
“This book offers nothing less than a thorough rethinking of normative sexuality and alternative sexualities through the figure of the otaku and their practices. It's everything that the fields of Japan studies, queer theory, and media history need at this moment. A virtually flawless and captivating read.”