Manga and gender relationships in modern Japan

Résumé du document

Manga is at the core of modern Japan's culture and is a unique product that has neither equivalent nor competitor: this characteristic is largely due to its mixed readership. Indeed, contrary to comics mainly written by male authors and dedicated to the male public, manga devotes a part of itself to female readers, shoujo manga1 being a recognized genre opposed to shounen manga2. This specificity is probably coming from the Japanese conception of gender that radically distinguishes female world from male world and that is therefore unable to conceive non-gender-orientated manga even though reality proves that most of them are read by both boys and girls.

Thus, each gender's world has its own characteristics and their relationship evolves at the same time as the Japanese society modernized itself and as its stereotypes, its ideals and the role it assigns to each gender changed. Being an accurate image of how Japanese society and mentalities has been evolving, manga is therefore reflecting well the specific characteristics of male and female worlds, of the way they interact and build a relationship that has been constantly evolving.

Extraits

[...] Coming closer and moving away, consider the opposite gender as a danger, male and female have sustained ambiguous and constantly evolving relationships. But both shoujo and shounen manga, even the most stereotyped ones, show how they can discover other gender's world by being friends, partners, by helping each other, caring for each other, owing each other mutual respect: this thematic field, although it is most of the time ignored, is effective. Certainly, Great Teacher Onizuka is about a lustful teacher that enters a school in order to charm young female students: but, confronted by the difficult class he is given and that threatens of disrupting the whole school, Onizuka transforms it in closely knit and happy community without seducing a single woman. [...]

[...] Manga: an anthology of global and cultural perspectives. Jean-Marie Bouissou. Manga: Histoire et univers de la bande dessinée. Articles : Emily M. Hurford. Gender and sexuality in shoujo manga: undoing the heteronormative expectations in Utena, Pet shop of horrors and Angel Sanctuary. Adam Greenberg. [...]

[...] they refuse to marry. This constant display of female body is also met in many shounen manga. Thus, in Love Hina, this situation where the hero ends up in a boarding house surrounded by six beautiful young girls is a clear projection of male Japanese teenagers' fantasies. Moreover, the hero's clumsiness often leads to some prurient situations, as when he falls from the window to arrive inopportunely in the girls' bath. In Great Teacher Onizuka, the author plays with teenagers' sex drives, showcasing beautiful women with outrageously generous busts and treating them as superficial and mindless: indeed, Tomoko Nomura, one of the manga's female characters, is recognizable by her large chest and her lack of intelligence, leading to people calling her Toroko, meaning slow in Japanese. [...]

[...] The Academy is ruled by the “Flower a group composed of the most powerful Japanese families' sons that totally control the school. They act by attaching a red card on anybody's locker who make the Flower Four annoyed: once the victim get the card, he will be bullied by the whole school until he leaves it. Hence, both of these examples show how distinct male and female worlds are still by the simple fact that they consider the opposite gender as dangerous and able to harm them Women as sexual objects The persistence of gender distinctions nowadays also reside in the frequent instrumentation of women, considered as sex objects since their relative emancipation. [...]

[...] By the end of the 1990s, both shounen-ai and yaoi had become prominent manga genres Explaining the gay boom The success of boys love with female readership and the fascination with gay men can be interpreted as arising from the derogatory impression Japanese women have of traditional masculinity and male roles. Having lived with the reality of conventionally oppressing gender relationships, female readers want a image of men that they can relate to, approach without feeling threatened, identify with and enjoy. [...]