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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Shamoon, Deborah. Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls' Culture in Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2012.
Main Argument: To understand the appeal of shojo manga, it is necessary to understand its cultural history; specifically, shojo manga as it flowered in the 1970s builds on and was strongly influenced by the discursive tropes and community practices of prewar (school)girls' culture and in particular as that culture was constituted and represented via girls' magazines.
Historiographical Engagement: Shamoon has read a lot of manga scholarship, particularly in Japanese; Ôtsuka Eiji, Fujimoto Yukari, and Yokomori Rika crop up with some frequency. So do many of the notable English-language scholars on manga, and Gregory M. Pflugfelder plays a key role at times. Jennifer Robertson (Takarazuka) also comes up frequently, but almost always as someone whose analysis is wrong-headed at best.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples The schoolgirl is a modern figure who emerged in Japan at the beginning of the Meiji period, and who immediately became the target of what Shamoon calls a "patriarchal discourse" that simultaneously found the shojo both attractive and repellent--a symbol of modernity and also a threat to the family and the state (which were by the mid-Meiji period taken as isomorphic). Postwar female feminist writers do not participate in this patriarchal discourse of concern, but have nonetheless paid scant attention to prewar girls' culture. Shamoon argues that to understand postwar girls' culture and shojo manga, it is necessary to consider transwar continuities.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This book considers the emergence of the shojo at the same time as the emergence of the discourse of "spiritual love (ren'ai)" in the early Meiji period. Shamoon discusses three novels of the period (Ukigumo by Futabata Shimei, Yabu no uguisu by Miyake Kaho, and Futon by Tayama Katai) and argues that these novels enact the struggle between the Edo paradigm of iro (lust) and Meiji ren'ai and the latter's eventual victory, as well as its pitfalls: the problem in these novels "shifted more explicitly to maintaining the chastity of the shojo while praising her appeal" (27). As Shamoon notes, this is not a new strategy; "this same power play, of sexualizing teenage girls then punishing them for acting on their sexuality, of celebrating both their fascination and their threat, continues throughout the twentieth century, rediscovered by each generation and hailed as a new problem" (28).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter examines prewar girls' culture from 1910-37, which Shamoon argues "coopted the discourse of of spiritual love" to describe the passionate friendships that girls formed with each other and which was institutionalized through girls' magazines, which created a private, closed world and used reader-submitted content and girls' language to speak directly to their readership. "S-relationships," as these friendships were known, were accepted as normal given certain conditions, namely within the context of a larger homosocial group such as an all-girls' school and only as long as both girls presented as feminine. Moreover, the sameness of both parties in the relationship was part of their allure, since sameness was presumably non-threatening. Shamoon analyzes the novel Otome no minato, ghostwritten for Kawabata Yasunari by Nakazato Tsuneko, as a paradigmatic S-relationship text before discussing the participatory culture of girls' magazines, most especially Shojo no tomo, which "helped to form an imagined community of girls by encouraging reader-generated content and interactivity" (48), including reader meet-ups, writing contests, and sections in which readers addressed each other directly.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter examines the narrative and visual aesthetics of prewar girls' magazines, focusing on the artists Takehisa Yumeji, Takabatake Kashô, and Nakahara Jun'ichi, and on the novelist Yoshiya Nobuko. The artists, particularly Kashô, elaborated a style that fused commercial and fine art as well as Western and Japanese aesthetics; "the features of their illustrations, specifically, the lyrical, wistful tone, the tendency toward sameness and matched pairs of girls, and the exaggeration of the eye all became standard motifs in girls' magazines and were picked up later by postwar shojo manga" (69-70). Meanwhile, the "lyricism, emotion, and orality" of Yoshiya's prose style "would provide a model for years to come of ways to express the passions of teenage girlhood that were not only acceptable to authority figures, but also aesthetically pleasing to the girls themselves" (80-81).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter discusses the formation of postwar shojo manga from 1950-69. Shamoon defines its key features as weekly or monthly magazine publication of exclusively comics for girls, predominance of female artists and close relationships with fans, "a tendency toward homogenizer romance or an aesthetic of sameness in romantic pairs, and a distinctive visual aesthetic marked not only by large eyes but also emotive, decorative, and nonrepresentational layouts" (82). Shamoon convincingly debunks the idea that Tezuka Osamu founded shojo manga, instead correctly pointing out that the visual style of shojo manga was developed by artists working in the tradition of Nakahara Jun'ichi, and that many of the features of Tezuka's Ribon no kishi in fact derive from the Takarazuka Revue. The artist Takahashi Makoto also contributed a distinct innovation in the 1950s and early 1960s, when girls' magazines carried a mixture of comics, fashion, and celebrity articles, by introducing the "three row overlay" or "full-boy portrait." Shamoon notes that Takahashi and other artists were able to be so innovative because they were working so far out the mainstream, and quotes Takemiya Keiko to the effect that any and all rules could be broken if creators' work proved popular with readers. Shojo manga thus became something of a private world.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples The final chapter, "The Revolution in 1970s Shojo Manga" more or less does what it says on the town by looking at Hagio Moto's Heart of Thomas and Ikeda Riyoko's Rose of Versailles, both of whom were members of the "Showa 24 Group," born in 1949 who revolutionized the genre. Not coincidentally, the work of Hagio Moto and Takemiya Keiko (both of whom were openly influenced by Hermann Hesse) also led to the development of boys' love as a genre, which Shamoon argues represents, especially in Heart of Thomas, "the triumph of spiritual love." Even in Berubara, however, the heterosexual romance is consummated only when the two partners physically resemble each other (the prewar ideal of sameness) and when the male partner is dependent on the female partner. As Shamoon succinctly puts it, "Ikeda avoids the 'love trap' by inverting it" (136). Moreover, Shamoon notes that the persistence of gender switching and homogender romance tropes suggests that equality remains a problem for female readers and creators of shojo manga, but that furthermore, "the shojo manga discourse on love and sex…is limited by the genre from which it developed" (136).
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Shamoon ends the book with a brief meditation on what might be termed the "complicity" of shojo manga and girls' culture with patriarchal structures and social control, noting that despite that "the creation of a private, interactive, creative space was nonetheless empowering for girls" (137) and that however much feminists celebrate the bad girls, the bad girl is not a figure who is legible without attention being paid to the good or the ordinary girls from whom she is different.
Critical assessment: This is a good book overall, but I have some quibbles about several aspects of Shamoon's argument. The first is that (and as a historian, this is at least to some extent my disciplinary bias showing) the book needs far more historical context and that many of her statements require expansion or more nuanced expression. In particular, although she has read Gregory M. Pflugfelder's Cartographies of Desire and his essay on S-relationships in girls' culture, Shamoon shows a frustrating inattention to the nuances of Pflugfelder's conclusions, as when she asserts flatly that there was no such thing as a "homosexual identity" in interwar Japan. Reading Pflugfelder attentively shows this to not have been the case, although the caveat that male/male sexuality and female/female sexuality, despite having been subsumed in 20thC Japan under the same category of dôseiai for the first time, are not and were not entirely equivalent still stands.
I appreciate Shamoon's fundamental tack in this book, which is to insist that a contemporary (American?) lesbian identity should not be read back into girls' culture in 20thC Japan, but her focus on the normality of S-relationships in the prewar period, and her reading of the switch to portraying male/male homosexual relationships in shojo manga in the 1970s as merely flipping the gender of S-relationships to allow for more explicit discussion of sexuality, begins to seem reductive, if not repressive, as she continues to deny the possibility of homosexuality in their readers. More insistence on the unbridgeable gap between discourse and reality would have helped here. Disappointingly, Shamoon also repeats the tired--and incorrect--claim that slash fiction is enjoyed only by heterosexual women, and also claims that boys' love is totally normal. Part of Shamoon's problem is that she apparently draws almost exclusively on a very old work of fan studies, Constance Penley's NASA/Trek, which was published in 1996 and which does not represent the current state of the field. I would also submit, however, that there is something queer in women of whatever sexual orientation reading obsessively about rather explicit male/male homosexual relationships, whether or not the depiction of those relationships is "real," and that eliding that queerness or the possibility of queerness in their readership is frankly insulting. The figure of the fujoshi, furthermore, who has recently emerged as a threat--a young woman who does not have a heterosexual relationship and who reads boys' love obsessively--shows that boys' love is not entirely normative in Japan, even if it is sold and produced with greater openness. Shamoon could have avoided some of these problems by policing the boundaries of her study better; it seems likely that boys' love has evolved as a genre since its emergence in the 1970s and that subsuming it into shojo manga is untenable as an analytical stance. Finally, saying that the often frankly pornographic boys' love manga should be considered under the rubric of "spiritual love (ren'ai)" seems to take that term beyond its breaking point. I also have to question her translation of ren'ai as "spiritual love" in the first place--I mostly see it rendered "love" in historiography, though this may be a disciplinary difference.
All that being said, I very much appreciate the genealogy Shamoon uncovers and the approach she takes overall, and not least her taking the discourse of girls' culture seriously on its own terms. More manga studies should follow her example of contextualizing the discussion in its own time and place.
Further reading: Leonie R. Stickland, Gender Gymnastics: Performing and Consuming Japan's Takarazuka Revue
Meta notes: Girls and what they are interested in matter. Also, I want to see Takarazuka again.
Main Argument: To understand the appeal of shojo manga, it is necessary to understand its cultural history; specifically, shojo manga as it flowered in the 1970s builds on and was strongly influenced by the discursive tropes and community practices of prewar (school)girls' culture and in particular as that culture was constituted and represented via girls' magazines.
Historiographical Engagement: Shamoon has read a lot of manga scholarship, particularly in Japanese; Ôtsuka Eiji, Fujimoto Yukari, and Yokomori Rika crop up with some frequency. So do many of the notable English-language scholars on manga, and Gregory M. Pflugfelder plays a key role at times. Jennifer Robertson (Takarazuka) also comes up frequently, but almost always as someone whose analysis is wrong-headed at best.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples The schoolgirl is a modern figure who emerged in Japan at the beginning of the Meiji period, and who immediately became the target of what Shamoon calls a "patriarchal discourse" that simultaneously found the shojo both attractive and repellent--a symbol of modernity and also a threat to the family and the state (which were by the mid-Meiji period taken as isomorphic). Postwar female feminist writers do not participate in this patriarchal discourse of concern, but have nonetheless paid scant attention to prewar girls' culture. Shamoon argues that to understand postwar girls' culture and shojo manga, it is necessary to consider transwar continuities.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This book considers the emergence of the shojo at the same time as the emergence of the discourse of "spiritual love (ren'ai)" in the early Meiji period. Shamoon discusses three novels of the period (Ukigumo by Futabata Shimei, Yabu no uguisu by Miyake Kaho, and Futon by Tayama Katai) and argues that these novels enact the struggle between the Edo paradigm of iro (lust) and Meiji ren'ai and the latter's eventual victory, as well as its pitfalls: the problem in these novels "shifted more explicitly to maintaining the chastity of the shojo while praising her appeal" (27). As Shamoon notes, this is not a new strategy; "this same power play, of sexualizing teenage girls then punishing them for acting on their sexuality, of celebrating both their fascination and their threat, continues throughout the twentieth century, rediscovered by each generation and hailed as a new problem" (28).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter examines prewar girls' culture from 1910-37, which Shamoon argues "coopted the discourse of of spiritual love" to describe the passionate friendships that girls formed with each other and which was institutionalized through girls' magazines, which created a private, closed world and used reader-submitted content and girls' language to speak directly to their readership. "S-relationships," as these friendships were known, were accepted as normal given certain conditions, namely within the context of a larger homosocial group such as an all-girls' school and only as long as both girls presented as feminine. Moreover, the sameness of both parties in the relationship was part of their allure, since sameness was presumably non-threatening. Shamoon analyzes the novel Otome no minato, ghostwritten for Kawabata Yasunari by Nakazato Tsuneko, as a paradigmatic S-relationship text before discussing the participatory culture of girls' magazines, most especially Shojo no tomo, which "helped to form an imagined community of girls by encouraging reader-generated content and interactivity" (48), including reader meet-ups, writing contests, and sections in which readers addressed each other directly.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter examines the narrative and visual aesthetics of prewar girls' magazines, focusing on the artists Takehisa Yumeji, Takabatake Kashô, and Nakahara Jun'ichi, and on the novelist Yoshiya Nobuko. The artists, particularly Kashô, elaborated a style that fused commercial and fine art as well as Western and Japanese aesthetics; "the features of their illustrations, specifically, the lyrical, wistful tone, the tendency toward sameness and matched pairs of girls, and the exaggeration of the eye all became standard motifs in girls' magazines and were picked up later by postwar shojo manga" (69-70). Meanwhile, the "lyricism, emotion, and orality" of Yoshiya's prose style "would provide a model for years to come of ways to express the passions of teenage girlhood that were not only acceptable to authority figures, but also aesthetically pleasing to the girls themselves" (80-81).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter discusses the formation of postwar shojo manga from 1950-69. Shamoon defines its key features as weekly or monthly magazine publication of exclusively comics for girls, predominance of female artists and close relationships with fans, "a tendency toward homogenizer romance or an aesthetic of sameness in romantic pairs, and a distinctive visual aesthetic marked not only by large eyes but also emotive, decorative, and nonrepresentational layouts" (82). Shamoon convincingly debunks the idea that Tezuka Osamu founded shojo manga, instead correctly pointing out that the visual style of shojo manga was developed by artists working in the tradition of Nakahara Jun'ichi, and that many of the features of Tezuka's Ribon no kishi in fact derive from the Takarazuka Revue. The artist Takahashi Makoto also contributed a distinct innovation in the 1950s and early 1960s, when girls' magazines carried a mixture of comics, fashion, and celebrity articles, by introducing the "three row overlay" or "full-boy portrait." Shamoon notes that Takahashi and other artists were able to be so innovative because they were working so far out the mainstream, and quotes Takemiya Keiko to the effect that any and all rules could be broken if creators' work proved popular with readers. Shojo manga thus became something of a private world.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples The final chapter, "The Revolution in 1970s Shojo Manga" more or less does what it says on the town by looking at Hagio Moto's Heart of Thomas and Ikeda Riyoko's Rose of Versailles, both of whom were members of the "Showa 24 Group," born in 1949 who revolutionized the genre. Not coincidentally, the work of Hagio Moto and Takemiya Keiko (both of whom were openly influenced by Hermann Hesse) also led to the development of boys' love as a genre, which Shamoon argues represents, especially in Heart of Thomas, "the triumph of spiritual love." Even in Berubara, however, the heterosexual romance is consummated only when the two partners physically resemble each other (the prewar ideal of sameness) and when the male partner is dependent on the female partner. As Shamoon succinctly puts it, "Ikeda avoids the 'love trap' by inverting it" (136). Moreover, Shamoon notes that the persistence of gender switching and homogender romance tropes suggests that equality remains a problem for female readers and creators of shojo manga, but that furthermore, "the shojo manga discourse on love and sex…is limited by the genre from which it developed" (136).
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Shamoon ends the book with a brief meditation on what might be termed the "complicity" of shojo manga and girls' culture with patriarchal structures and social control, noting that despite that "the creation of a private, interactive, creative space was nonetheless empowering for girls" (137) and that however much feminists celebrate the bad girls, the bad girl is not a figure who is legible without attention being paid to the good or the ordinary girls from whom she is different.
Critical assessment: This is a good book overall, but I have some quibbles about several aspects of Shamoon's argument. The first is that (and as a historian, this is at least to some extent my disciplinary bias showing) the book needs far more historical context and that many of her statements require expansion or more nuanced expression. In particular, although she has read Gregory M. Pflugfelder's Cartographies of Desire and his essay on S-relationships in girls' culture, Shamoon shows a frustrating inattention to the nuances of Pflugfelder's conclusions, as when she asserts flatly that there was no such thing as a "homosexual identity" in interwar Japan. Reading Pflugfelder attentively shows this to not have been the case, although the caveat that male/male sexuality and female/female sexuality, despite having been subsumed in 20thC Japan under the same category of dôseiai for the first time, are not and were not entirely equivalent still stands.
I appreciate Shamoon's fundamental tack in this book, which is to insist that a contemporary (American?) lesbian identity should not be read back into girls' culture in 20thC Japan, but her focus on the normality of S-relationships in the prewar period, and her reading of the switch to portraying male/male homosexual relationships in shojo manga in the 1970s as merely flipping the gender of S-relationships to allow for more explicit discussion of sexuality, begins to seem reductive, if not repressive, as she continues to deny the possibility of homosexuality in their readers. More insistence on the unbridgeable gap between discourse and reality would have helped here. Disappointingly, Shamoon also repeats the tired--and incorrect--claim that slash fiction is enjoyed only by heterosexual women, and also claims that boys' love is totally normal. Part of Shamoon's problem is that she apparently draws almost exclusively on a very old work of fan studies, Constance Penley's NASA/Trek, which was published in 1996 and which does not represent the current state of the field. I would also submit, however, that there is something queer in women of whatever sexual orientation reading obsessively about rather explicit male/male homosexual relationships, whether or not the depiction of those relationships is "real," and that eliding that queerness or the possibility of queerness in their readership is frankly insulting. The figure of the fujoshi, furthermore, who has recently emerged as a threat--a young woman who does not have a heterosexual relationship and who reads boys' love obsessively--shows that boys' love is not entirely normative in Japan, even if it is sold and produced with greater openness. Shamoon could have avoided some of these problems by policing the boundaries of her study better; it seems likely that boys' love has evolved as a genre since its emergence in the 1970s and that subsuming it into shojo manga is untenable as an analytical stance. Finally, saying that the often frankly pornographic boys' love manga should be considered under the rubric of "spiritual love (ren'ai)" seems to take that term beyond its breaking point. I also have to question her translation of ren'ai as "spiritual love" in the first place--I mostly see it rendered "love" in historiography, though this may be a disciplinary difference.
All that being said, I very much appreciate the genealogy Shamoon uncovers and the approach she takes overall, and not least her taking the discourse of girls' culture seriously on its own terms. More manga studies should follow her example of contextualizing the discussion in its own time and place.
Further reading: Leonie R. Stickland, Gender Gymnastics: Performing and Consuming Japan's Takarazuka Revue
Meta notes: Girls and what they are interested in matter. Also, I want to see Takarazuka again.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-11 16:59 (UTC)Ha. And, ha. I'd suspected this, but good to get confirmation. And good to get more information on the transwar continuities.
I've been interested, recently, in tracking down some of the S-relationship ur-texts like Otome no minato -- looks like Yoshiya Nobuko is another to add to the list. (Goes off to check Aozora ... )
ETA: Oh, wait, she was already near the top of the list, I'd just forgotten the name. (And, no, died way too late for Aozora, ah well.)
---L.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-12 21:25 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-12 22:28 (UTC)---L.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-13 17:53 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-13 20:01 (UTC)