I believe I wrote something on this LJ about the topic before, but it’s been a long time and I can’t remember. Maybe it was someone else’s LJ.

The folks at Pseudome posted up an interesting article of Matt Thorn’s. Matt is pretty well known – he’s an associate professor at Kyoto Seika University, and has been studying shoujo manga for over 20 years. He’s an avid fan, and there is no better person to talk to than him about shoujo manga in general, but I was surprised to see him lambast contemporary shoujo manga (or rather, shoujo manga editors) in the way he did.

Now, I’ve never been a huge fan of shoujo manga – I grew up reading and liking my “DragonBall Z”. I didn’t start reading shoujo manga in earnest until I was in my 20s, and by then I was too old for alot of 80s and 90s shoujo; even the critically acclaimed shoujo manga of the past few years. “NANA” bored the bejesus out of me. “Fruit Baskets” was cute and uninteresting. Nodame, from “Nodame Cantabile”, is a talented dimwit. But whether I like the stories or not, it doesn’t change my respect for shoujo as an institute. Nowhere else in the world would you find a cultural phenomenon as dedicated to women’s entertainment as shoujo manga and it’s offshoots. So I felt genuine sadness when I heard the news of “Margaret”, one of the oldest shoujo magazines around, struggling with low sales and cancellations.

This is a matter of grave concern. Weekly and biweekly magazines are the life-blood of the manga industry – how well they sell and what stories they carry can influence the direction of the industry. Most manga magazines have suffered a drop in sales since the early 90s, including front-runner “Shounen Jump”, but then shounen magazines have always outsold shoujo magazines. “Shounen Jump” may not sell 6 million copies anymore, but it’s not losing any readers. Instead, they’ve been gaining readers, mostly female. This isn’t a big surprise to someone who grew up reading shounen, but from the sales of the shoujo magazines, it seems that girls are either abandoning them to read shounen, or abandoning manga altogether. This has been happening for quite a while, and it’s the cause for alot of debate. We all know shounen is unapologetically aimed at boys, just like shoujo is unapologetically aimed at girls. Why is it that shounen is gaining girl readers, whereas shoujo hardly ever attracts male readers.

I have several theories for that, and one of them is that shounen is no longer unapologetically aimed at boys. It hasn’t been aimed purely at boys for a long time, and you can clearly see the delineations should you compare a 70s “Shounen Jump” with a contemporary one. The drawing styles have completely changed, for one. No more thick-eyebrows gekiga, rough edged art. There are less simpering, idiotic female characters. There is often romance, and large ensemble casts. And most of all, there are alot of pretty boys – bishounen and biseinen that only used to be found in shoujo. In other worlds, shounen manga has consciously become more gender-neutral in its appeal, by appropriating what used to make shoujo manga appealing to girls. If you were a girl and you weren’t all that INTO girly-romance, you’re just as likely to read shounen manga with cute male leads than you would read shoujo. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the shounen audience. Shoujo to this day has not done anything to attract a male audience, but if it tries, we’ll all end up with this unisex of an androgynous teen manga look.

The second reason for the rise of the female shounen readership may be the yaoi doujinshi subculture. Girls like to draw dishy young men in bed with other dishy young men, and the shounen magazines offer a very good selection of dishy young men for this purpose. “Prince of Tennis” comes to mind – it’s definately a shounen sports manga, but take one look at the (many) male characters in it, and you know the yaoi fans have descended on this title long ago. This is good enough reason for the yaoi fans to want to read “Prince of Tennis”, no matter how bad it is, and I guess some of this fuels the shounen magazine readerships. Certainly, professionally-drawn “Boys Love” has also been a sizeable part of the shoujo market since the 90s, but I don’t think it has much to do with the doujinshi market. As far as I can tell, girls buy BL manga, but they don’t draw doujinshi based on them. In fact, the most popular doujinshi tend to be based on existing shounen series.

Some people suggested the reason for this is because shounen manga often has larger casts than shoujo. This can’t possibly be true, because while “Prince of Tennis” has a large ensemble casts, other targets of yaoi artists have very small male casts. I take some recent Taiwanese yaoi doujinshi as an example. Taiwanese doujinshi has the advantage of being very attuned to what the Japanese doujinshi market is doing, and so they act accordingly. Thanks to Poshua bringing stacks of Taiwanese yaoi doujinshi into the workplace, it’s now possible to figure out a timeline for the popularly of certain shounen series. A few years ago, it was “Harry Potter” (yaoi doujinshi artists don’t necessarily work from manga, and they also do original work). Then came a huge wave of “Prince of Tennis”, and when everyone got bored with that, along came a stack of “Full Metal Alchemist”. Currently, the yaoi of the month is “Death Note” (or was, 2 months ago). The last two are particularly telling. “FMA” has only a hand-full of bishounen, a fraction of “Prince of Tennis”, while “Death Note” has only TWO yaoi-worthy males (and one of them looks like a freak). The fact that there are endless scenes of these same two guys in sexual situations shows that yaoi doujinshi artists aren’t attracted to shounen because of ensemble casts. The size of the cast has no bearing on who they choose to put into bed together. The qualities required seem to be based mostly on popularity in general society.

So does that spell doom for shoujo? Ofcourse not. As Matt said in his article, shoujo may currently be crippled by bad stories and formula plots, but there’s plenty of room for improvement. In the 70s, shoujo was mainly know for it’s innovation and its willingness to push boundaries – now, it just needs another dose of reactionary politics. Who knows what the future may hold? As Matt said, young Japanese are now more politically-minded than their parent’s generation, and if the editors know how to capitalise on that, they may win back their old readership. Only time will tell. I, for one, don’t want to see the market merge into something androgynous just to appeal to both sexes. There are advantages to appealing to only one gender, and you’re able to do things that you won’t if you were working in a mixed environment. And the existence of shoujo in the first place proves you can make money out of it too.