No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Escaping into a Fantasy World: Escapism, Exoticism, and How Japanese Shojo Manga Links to Pyongyang Girls?
The satellite TV revolution in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the early 1990s precipitated the proliferation of foreign media broadcasts. Japanese anime dubbed into Arabic became the most-watched content in Emirati households, a trend that continues to date because the Japanese entertainment and digital media industry offers youngsters easy access to and diverse options for anime. This paper provides an overview and analysis of the growing popularity of anime fandoms in the UAE to ascertain the level of commitment, involvement and the moral perceptions of Emirati fans vis-ร -vis Japanese pop culture. A focus group discussion was conducted in a leading UAE university among the otaku or aficionados of Japanese anime (males and females). The participant responses offered comprehensive insights into the fandom trends of the region and articulated interesting opinions on Japanese pop culture and digital media accessibility. Notably, the findings of this study suggested that the enthusiasm of this fan following is often obstructed rather than celebrated and thus cannot achieve its potential. Therefore, the study finally contemplates how Emirati otaku and their practices may be better supported in UAE.
Gender bending has been a staple of the medium of shลjo manga, Japanese girlsโ comics, as best exemplified by cross-dressing โgirl knightโ characters and โBoys Loveโ stories, whose plots focus on romance between effeminate beautiful young men. The imaginary space created through the representation of these figures shares many traits in common with another typical feature of shลjo comics, namely their exoticisation of Europe. Both have been used as simultaneously escapist and subversive strategies, as a refuge from contemporary social norms and a platform for critical reflection. In this article, I aim to problematise our understanding of the connection between gender bending and exoticism in shลjo manga through an analysis of the representation of one specific aspect of European culture โ namely, the Christian religion โ in the genre of Boys Love manga.
This essay sketches a connection between Rose of Versailles (Berusaiyu no bara, 1972), Ikeda Riyoko's shรดjo (girlsโ) manga set in Versailles, and artist Murakami Takashi's 2010 exhibition at the Chรขteau de Versailles and in its gardens. In doing so, it suggests that the exhibition be viewed in terms of the nesting of one imaginary land (Japan) inside another (France), positing a new interpretive framework for thinking about Murakami's work as a commentary on cultural exchange.
We might expect that a writer who was openly lesbian in 1920s Japan would automatically quality as a โbad girl.โ Yoshiya Nobuko (1896โ1973) in many senses questions such an assumption. She prolifically created novels for serialization in newspapers and womenโs magazines from the 1910s to the 1970s, and throughout most of her writing life she lived with a female partner Monma Chiyo, and this became widely known. It would seem likely that her fiction would defy the gender norms of her time and extol bad girls of various sorts. Yet the female characters of her girlsโ fiction and romance novels exhibit hyper-typical images of โgood girlโ femininity rather than subvert them, and critics frequently describe her writing style as flowery (bibunchล). On the surface at least, her descriptions of pure and clean girls and women hardly overturn stereotypes and ideals of girlishness or feminine virtue. However, Yoshiyaโs celebration of ultra-feminine virtue and emotional intensity did work as a criticism of and resistance against gender norms and the family system during her lifetime, and her writings help to complicate our sense of what resistance or badness might be. In particular, Yoshiya used the flexibility of fiction to construct alternative gender expectations in a way that could appeal to a broad range of readers of various sexualities and genders.
Italian society after World War II was profoundly affected by the culture of glamour that encouraged mass consumption. This culture drew heavily on images and desires created by the American film industry, and it would not have arisen in the absence of American glamour. Over time, however, Italian glamour acquired some important indigenous features, which were economically beneficial for Italy in boosting exports and tourism. Through most of the Cold War, the perceived glamour of Rome captured in the film La Dolce Vita made the city a cosmopolitan crossroads for the rich and famous. Nevertheless, in contrast to the United States, which was the avatar of glamour, Italy did not develop domestic glamour in the full sense of the term.
Historically, many great comic books have existed in cultures all over the world. It may be, however, that in Japan the popularity of manga (comics) and its impact on visual popular culture and society are more significant than in any other culture. In contrast to the United States, where comic books are only for children or collectors, in Japan manga influences all of Japanese society, from preschoolers to adults. Its influence appears throughout Japan in commercials on TV, in advertisements, on billboards, and even in school textbooks.1 But Japanese manga is no longer just a phenomenon of visual pop culture in Japan. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the popularity of Japanese manga has spread worldwide through comic books, animation, and merchandise. But despite manga's popularity, not many people really understand its significance, its worldwide popularity, its appeal for children, and its difference from American comics. One of the major characteristics of manga is that it has split into boys' (shลnen) and girls' (shลjo) comics. Regardless of the subject depicted in the story, the main theme of boys' manga is how the heroes become men by protecting women, family, country, or the earth from enemies. The theme of girls' manga is how love triumphs by overcoming obstacles. These generalizations are true to a certain extent; however, the theme of girls' manga has been changing in response to the changing roles of women in the still male-dominated Japanese society.
Since World War II, the role and the value of shojo manga have become significant in Japan, reflecting girls' and women's desires and dreams. In its subjects and expressions, manga reflects female aesthetics and fulfills female dreams. To explore the role of visual pop culture that impacts U.S. society through the phenomenon of manga in Japan, I created a touring exhibition in the United States to introduce manga's value and contribution to visual culture and society with a special emphasis on shojo manga.
The exhibition Girls' Power! Shojo Manga! has two purposes: to examine the worldwide phenomenon of Japanese comics and to develop the media and visual literacy of teachers, students, and the community. These purposes will be accomplished through this touring exhibition and symposia on the cultural and historical backgrounds of this Japanese visual popular culture that exerts such an influence on U.S. society. The exhibition's goal is to examine the treatment of gender roles in shojo manga and to examine how shลjo mangaka (girls' manga artists) have contributed to the development of a unique style of visual expression in their narratives, a contribution seldom discussed in the world of Japanese comics. This is the first touring exhibition of girls' comics that includes a discussion of gender issues in manga. The exhibition is intended to open minds to the value of visual popular culture.
More than two hundred artworks created by twenty-three renowned shลjo mangaka are introduced chronologically in three major generations over the last sixty years: the dawn of modern shojo manga (postwar-1960s), the development of modern shojo manga (1960s-1980s), and the new generation of modern shojo manga (1980s-present). The medium reflects the evolution of the social roles of Japanese girls and women during this period. The exhibition also documents how the visual composition of manga mirrors developments in Japanese aesthetics.2
Exhibition catalog of Girl Power! Shojo Manga! Image from Versailles no bara (The Rose of Versailles).
In general, shลjo mangaka create manga for girls and women; however, these comic artists are not always female. Most shojo manga in the 1930s and 1940s were created by male mangaka. Four of them (Tezuka Osamu, Chiba Tetsuya, Ishinomori Shลtarล, and Matsumoto Leiji) were major contributors to the development of contemporary shojo manga in this early period, although they are now well known for their hit manga and animation for boys and men.3 The most notable among them is Tezuka Osamu (1928-1989), who is often called the father of modern Japanese manga.
A versatile artist, he wrote both boys' and girls' manga...
The 2004 film Shimotsuma monogatari (Shimotsuma story; translated in English as Kamikaze Girls) opens with a voiceover. It longingly describes an era long derided, when not neglected, for its vulgarity and excess: the rococo court life of eighteenth-century Versailles (Figure 1). The 2002 novel, on which Shimotsuma monogatari is based, embraces the rococo, using the very terms French philosopher Denis Diderot had employed two centuries earlier. Then, Diderot had spurned the paintings of Franรงois Boucher by saying they feature only "elegance, cloying sweetness, fantastic gallantry, coquetry, virtuosity, change, brilliance, made-up skin tones, and lewdness." Anticlassical and pro-rococo to the core, Shimotsuma monogatari tells the story of two girls: Momoko, a hyperindividualist rococo-phile, and Ichigo, a biker girl who travels with a pack, who form an unlikely friendship in a less-than-idyllic countryside in millennial Japan. In this article, I want to trace the path of the baroque and rococo aesthetics in postwar Japanese subculture. I do so by using the film and novel versions of Shimotsuma monogatari interchangeably, with some additional passages of the novel that offer art-historical meditations on the resemblances between subcultures. My goal is to suggest how and why the 1970s emergence of shลjo manga (girls' comics) as well as the millennial street fashion of gothic Lolitas featured in Shimotsuma monogatari, reprise the logic of the rococo, the hallmark of the seventeenthโto-eighteenth-century "consumer revolution" that provided women an entry into the marketplace during the transition from a feudal to a bourgeois regime. How does a baroque or rococo aesthetic provide an exemplary interface for entering the market of adulthood in the 1970s and in the millennial world?
The two characters in Shimotsuma monogatari meet through an eBay-like online market. Despite their polarized identities, they discover they both long to get out of the provinces, inhabited by real cows and a hapless bourgeoisie of superstore bargain hunters. In a nod to the most hallowed tropes of the "coming-of-age" novel, independence and social mobility, they move to the metropole and find their fortune by marketing artisanal items of rococo embroidery to an upscale boutique, where Momoko falls in love with the storeowner, and Ichigo becomes a star model. The tropes of "self-discovery" and adult subjectivity found through love are typical of shลjo manga and the young adult genre known as light novels, including Takemoto's Shimotsuma monogatari. What is less typical is that every sort of relationship in the novel and filmโexcept the bonds of the biker gang and Momoko's care for her elderly grandmotherโis entirely enabled and resolved through the market, from the cementing of the girls' friendship to the discovery of true love through the handmade bonnet.
A scene from the introductory reverie of Shimotsuma monogatari (2004, Kamikaze Girls), with Nakashima Tetsuya, Kyoko Fukada, Anna Tsuchiya, and Nobara Takemoto.
Shimotsuma monogatari's move from country to city, connected to the coming-of-age narrative in the context of feminine solidarity cemented through the market, is staggeringly different than the rococo we see in the first subculture to popularize Frenchness in association with independence and autonomy, the manga Rose of Versailles (Berusaiyu no bara). The rococo first appeared in this wildly popular manga, serialized in eighty-two chapters between 1972 and 1973 in the weekly girls' magazine Margaret. The "rose" is a metaphor referring to the strangeness of fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette when she is sent from the Hapsburg court in 1769 to marry the young dauphin, the future Louis XIV, and prevent war from breaking out between France and Austria. The manga series tracks Marie's rise and fall at court against the backdrop of the French Revolution. Ikeda adds a second, fictional character, Oscar, to dramatize an emergent politics of solidarity that catalyzes as the Revolution looms. As a narrative, Rose of Versailles dramatizes the ideology of postwar social realism in the nationalist version advocated by the JCP (Japanese Communist Party). That is to say, despite, or alongside, Rose of Versailles's dynamic and exuberant formal articulation and its pioneering "bubble" language of character consciousness, the manga is structured by...
This article revisits a 2001 publication by Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz, entitled Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction. The author takes the chance to ask some pertinent questions about the role of fantasy in the reading lives of the young.
Girl Reading Girl provides the first overview of the cultural significance of girls and reading in modern and contemporary Japan with emphasis on the processes involved when girls read about other girls. The collection examines the reading practices of real life girls from differing social backgrounds throughout the twentieth century while a number of chapters also consider how fictional girls read attention is given to the diverse cultural representations of the girl, or shรดjo, who are the objects of the reading desires of Japanโs real life and fictional girls. These representations appear in various genres, including prose fiction, such as Yoshiya Nobukoโs Flower Stories and Takemoto Nobaraโs Kamikaze Girls, and manga, such as Yoshida Akimiโs The Cherry Orchard. This volume presents the work of pioneering women scholars in the field of girl studies including translations of a ground-breaking essay by Honda Masuko on reading girls and Kawasaki Kenkoโs response to prejudicial masculine critiques of best-selling novelist, Yoshimoto Banana. Other topics range from the reception of Anne of Green Gables in Japan to girls who write and read male homoerotic narratives.
This essay recognises the power of reading and intertextuality (embedding texts within texts) in fiction targeted at girls and young women.
Fantasy: The liberation of imagination
- R Mathews
Mathews, R. (2012). Fantasy: The liberation of imagination. Routledge.
Fame, Flashdance, and Fantasies of Achievement
- A Mcrobbie
McRobbie, A. (1990). "Fame, Flashdance, and Fantasies of Achievement." In J. Gaines and C.
Fantasy and Escapism. Canadian Children's Literature/Littรฉrature canadienne pour la jeunesse
- R Nichols
Nichols, R. (1976). Fantasy and Escapism. Canadian Children's Literature/Littรฉrature canadienne
pour la jeunesse, 20-20.
Ballet and Girl Culture
- J Peers
Peers, J. (2008). "Ballet and Girl Culture." In M. Mitchell and J. Reid-Walsh (eds) Girl Culture: An
EncyclopediaI, Vol. 1, pp. 73-84. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Other worlds: The fantasy genre
- J H Timmerman
Timmerman, J. H. (1983). Other worlds: The fantasy genre. Ohio: Bowling Green University
Popular Press.
A Note on Glamour. Fashion Theory
- E Wilson
Wilson, E. (2007). A Note on Glamour. Fashion Theory, 11(1), pp.95-108.
UDON Entertainment Announces The Rose Of Versailles
- Online
- Comicon
ONLINE SOURCES
COMICON. (2020). UDON Entertainment Announces The Rose Of Versailles: Volume 1
The Holiday Cure: Elizabeth McGrath's Incurable Disorder Pop Up & Signing
- L Derrick
Derrick, L. (2020). The Holiday Cure: Elizabeth McGrath's Incurable Disorder Pop Up & Signing.