What girls like and what girls (should) want: an ethnography of the shōjo manga industry

With Straight from the Heart, Jennifer Prough brings us beyond the manga success story and behind the scenes of shōjo manga; conducted in the heart of its production process, her ethnographic research illustrates how shōjo manga is heavily shaped by gender norms and expectations. During her fieldwork within the top four shōjo manga publishing houses, Jennifer Prough conducted seventy interviews with a wide range of publishing industry personnel, artists and scholars. Although a foreigner researcher, she differentiates herself from most non-Japanese academic writings on manga that tend to highlight aspects that are different from Western comic traditions and to focus on adult content. Jennifer Prough’s research originality is to investigate shōjo sensibilities through the affective labor provided by both editors and artists, that consistently use the phrase ‘what girls like’ to define what shōjo manga is and to explain how it is produced.

Gendered division of work Chapter 2 traces the history of the shōjo manga genre within the context of the publishing industry in postwar Japan. Although shōjo manga is only one subgenre, the author strongly argues in favor of its study since it has influenced both manga itself and girls’ culture since the end of World War II, while the manga publishing industry has become the backbone of contemporary popular culture in Japan, supplying stories for television, movies, video games, etc. It was in the 1950s and 1960s that the distinctive genres of shōjo and shonen manga really began to take shape, with Tezuka Osamu’s Ribbon no kishi (1953) considered as the first epic adventure for girls. Each of the publishers covered by the study has a manga sector that includes at least a shōjo manga and shonen manga division, and each shōjo and shonen manga division is segmented into several sections corresponding to target age. But there is also a blatantly gendered and generational division of labor within the shōjo manga industry (chapter 4). The creative process is seen by editors as a negotiation (p.95) between editors and artists. Business decisions are made by male editors (typically older than artists) and the creativity involved in drawing manga is expected from female artists (mostly in their late teens to late twenties). Building manga community If shōjo manga are filled with serialized manga, they are supplemented by a range of games, prizes, information and ‘tie-ins’ to toys, anime and video games that are analyzed in chapter 3. Actually, the raison d’etre of all manga magazines is to sample manga so as to evaluate what will sell more books, character goods, anime, etc. But the industry has placed an emphasis on ningen kankei (intimacy) and community through its magazines (p.13). Through the business of making and marketing manga, there is an interplay between readers and the magazines themselves. The participatory aspects of manga magazines encourage the reader to do much more than simply buy and read manga (p.87). The inclusion of supplements and mail order goods requires girls to buy their own copy of the magazine rather than share with friends. Besides, community is fabricated through participation and the cultivation of readers not just as consumers, but as potential artists (p.87). So, in shōjo manga, girls are raised to be both consumers and readers, and readers are raised to be artists who will create manga. This notion of encouraging readers to participate in the manga magazines speaks to what Henry Jenkins has called “affective economies.” Shōjo manga, enjo kōsai and kogyari Lastly, Straight from the Heart analyzes the relationship between shōjo manga and representations of girls’ sexuality. Although depictions of sex now proliferate in shōjo manga, its content has been utterly innocent for a long time. But after the cute and sexy turn shōjo manga took in the 1980s, during the next decade it became interlocked with the national view of the schoolgirl as sexually and materially deviant and the symbol for the feminization and infantilization of postmodern Japan (p.10). In chapter 5 (comically named “Material Gals”), Jennifer Prough provides a case study of Gals!, a typical shōjo manga since the bulk of the narrative is about high school girls’ everyday life. Through this case, the author investigates various forms of after-school sex work, such as enjo kōsai (that can be translated as ‘assisted dating’ and that refers to the practice of schoolgirls giving their time and sometimes sexual favors to older men in exchange of money) and the moral panic that surrounded it. According to Jennifer Prough, enjo kōsai, although inextricably linked to the increasing difficulties in keeping up the lifestyle of the 1980s with the recession (p.119), can be analyzed as examples of girls’ desire for and creation of a sense of sexual self-determination that was implicitly viewed as a form of sub-cultural resistance on the part of girls – while the loss of morals on the part of the nation’s businessmen, husbands and fathers was never blamed. Conclusion Shōjo manga are well understood from the view of three expressions: “what girls want”, “what girls should want”, and “what will sell”, each one is as productive as descriptive (p.128). Jennifer Prough’s meticulous ethnography of shōjo manga industry is to be praised, since, in conversation with media anthropology, gender studies, and manga studies, she provides a case study of how affect is created, manipulated and experienced by those who produce it. Straight from the Heart will be of great interest to scholars of popular culture, Japanese studies and gender studies.

Gwenola Ricordeau, Université Lille I, (gwenola.ricordeau@univ-lille1.fr)