Seductive innocents, beautiful friends: Representations of teenage girls in modern Japanese fiction and film

The character of the teenage girl, or shojo , has been a pervasive image in modern Japanese literature, film, television, and manga throughout the twentieth century. The shojo character emerged in the highbrow literature of the Meiji period (1868--1912) as an appealing but threatening sexual partner for men and since then has continued to appear in both literature and film. It was not until the 1970s that a genre by and for girls themselves, and with mainstream cultural impact, appeared in the form of shojo manga, or teenage girls' comics. By analyzing representative works across genres and media, I trace the development of the patriarchal image of the threatening shojo that gained cultural currency in highbrow literature, and then circulated to popular culture in films and popular novels. I also examine the concurrent development of shojo bunka (girl culture) in girls' magazines and comic books, which created a private discourse of girlhood that continues to the present.; The patriarchal discourse of the shojo begins with the earliest modern Japanese novels, and continues to feature prominently in both high and low cultures. The first three chapters form one genealogy across high and low cultures in which the shojo appears as an object of male fascination and anxiety, in novels and films of the late nineteenth century to the present. In contrast to these male-directed images, the fourth and fifth chapters explore the shojo image as it is represented to, and by, the girls themselves in girls' magazines in the 1920s and 30s, and in girls' comics (shojo manga) beginning in the 1970s. Shojo manga, which has become one of the primary sites of cultural production in contemporary Japan, provides powerful, compelling images of girls free of the constraints of male anxiety. The image of the shojo as she appears in shojo manga has risen from low culture to challenge and perhaps eventually supplant the male-directed shojo image born in Meiji Japan.