Women's Manga in Asia and Beyond

Uniting Different Cultures and Identities

Fusami Ogi, Rebecca Suter, Kazumi Nagaike, John A. Lent, Fusami Ogi, Rebecca Suter, Kazumi Nagaike, John A. Lent

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783319972299
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

Women's Manga in Asia and Beyond offers a variety of perspectives on women's manga and the nature, scope, and significance of the relationship between women and comics/manga, both globally as well as locally. Based on the activities since 2009 of the Women's MANGA Research Project in Asia (WMRPA), the edited volume elucidates social and historical aspects of the Asian wave of manga from ever-broader perspectives of transnationalization and glocalization. With a specific focus on women's direct roles in manga creation, it illustrates how the globalization of manga has united different cultures and identities, focusing on networks of women creators and readerships.

Taking an Asian regional approach combined with investigations of non-Asian cultures which have felt manga's impact, the book details manga's shift to a global medium, developing, uniting, and involving increasing numbers of participants worldwide. Unveiling diverse Asian identities and showing ways to unite them, the contributors to this volume recognize the overlaps and unique trends that emerge as a result.

Section II

Transnationalization/Glocalization in Women and Shōjo Manga

This section focuses on using women’s manga in a transnational perspective, focusing on a range of different ways in which the label “shōjo manga” has performed an important role in the development of women’s comics beyond the Japanese context. Through a series of close readings of individual case studies from both Japan and Asia, the chapters in this section highlight how the label of shōjo manga functioned as a catalyzer for the creation of a new expressive space for women authors.

Tracing the representation of Asia in Japanese girls’ comics from the 1960 to the present, Fusami Ogi identifies three distinct and interconnected phases. In the early period, shōjo manga’s interest centers on the exoticization and feminization of Europe, often the Europe of the past, as exemplified by the proliferation of the trope of the princess. In this phase, Asia is notably absent, and even Japanese characters are portrayed as European-looking, with a drawing style that de-Asianizes them. Shōjo manga of the 1970s begins to complicate this picture, portraying Asian and mixed-race characters and Asian and transnational settings in a similar fantastical narrative and visual style. In the 1980s, in manga directed at an older demographic of women (ladies’ comics), more realistic portrayals of daily life in Asia begin to appear.

Tracing this history allows Ogi to present a poignant analysis of a series of works published in the 1990s and 2000s by young female authors from Southeast Asia, demonstrating that they use the conventions of shōjo manga to portray Asian culture in a complex, transnational, and glocalized perspective.

The next chapter introduces another complicating factor in the relationship between shōjo manga and Asia, namely, the representation of Australia as both proximate (“Asian”) and distant (“Western”) in Japanese girls’ comics. Focusing in particular on one case study, Yumiko Igarashi’s Georgie!, Suter shows how Australia, initially presented as an object of exotic fascination, comes to stand for nature, simplicity, and working-class values in contrast with the sophisticated, cold, and corrupt world of aristocratic England. This is representative of a broader trend in shōjo manga’s representation of Australia as a third space that Suter calls “near West,” a foreign space that is neither Euroamerican nor Japanese, neither self nor Other, and thus offers us a more nuanced vision of shōjo manga’s mechanisms of identification, projection, and exoticization of its cultural Others.

In the following chapter, Yukari Yoshihara analyzes adaptations of the works of Shakespeare, embodiments of the Western high culture, done by Japanese female manga artists with more or less explicit feminist agendas. Yoshihara argues that the resulting hybridization makes it possible for female artists to raise dissident voices against the Western elite authority of Shakespeare and expand the possibilities of manga, transgressing the boundaries between high culture and low culture, the West and the Rest, the authentic and the imitative.

Through a close reading of a number of different texts, Yoshihara demonstrates how by reinventing Shakespeare, a male artist mostly writing to glorify male heroes (in his tragedies) and to contain female protagonists within the boundaries dictated by heterosexist and patriarchal ideology of romantic love (in his comedies) into shōjo manga style, Japanese female manga artists create a world where “unfeminine” female characters can voice their own point of view and where sisterly bonds between women are preferred rather than male homosocial bonds.

The theme of “sisterly bonds” is central also to the next chapter, by Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto, that focuses on the Belgian comic book series Yoko Tsuno , by Roger Leloup. Tracing the evolution of the series and its heroine, a Japanese engineer living in Belgium, from its inception to today from a gender studies perspective, through a combination of textual and visual analysis and ethnographic research on the readership, Bauwens-Sugimoto examines the changing representation of “Japaneseness” and “femininity” in the comic and its reception by (mostly male) Belgian readers.

Connecting the representation of the character of Yoko Tsuno as an unconventional powerful heroine to the importance given to female friendship/solidarity in the stories, Bauwens-Sugimoto is able to show how she is not portrayed in the stereotypical fashion of masculinized female superheroes who are “one of the boys” but rather as a genuinely new model of social and gender norms. The chapter thus shows how Franco-Belgian comics confront issues long dealt with in the world of manga (where as shown by other chapters in this collection, female artists, readers, and characters have been valued since the 1970s), and how this leads readers of all genders to appreciate strong female characters who are not specifically designed to cater to the male gaze.

Similarly focused on female heroines that are symbols of unconventional femininity, in this case those of Katsuji Matsumoto’s early shōjo manga, Ryan Holmberg’s chapter offers greater historical depth to our understanding of the trope of the Japanese tomboy by tracing its origins to the prewar period. Putting into critical perspective the conventional narrative that sees the origin of shōjo manga style in the 1920s magazine illustrations called jojōga (lyrical pictures), that portrayed delicate, conventionally feminine idealized young women, Holmberg shows that Matsumoto drew girls’ manga in a number of different styles and relied on a wider range of sources for inspiration, such as the works of Walt Disney and the media discourse on the moga (modern girl), that provided more powerful, less conventionally feminine models.

Analyzing Matsumoto’s tomboy characters like Kurumi-chan and Clover allows Holmberg to complicate our understanding of the relationship between prewar and postwar girls’ manga, and to construct a more nuanced picture of the “shōjo manga label” that is central to this section of the book. The chapter thus constitutes both an effective conclusion for the section and a transition to the following section, examining in detail the work of Asian women cartoonists and the way they critically engaged with the label of “shōjo manga.”

© The Author(s) 2019

Fusami Ogi, Rebecca Suter, Kazumi Nagaike and John A. Lent (eds.)Women’s Manga in Asia and BeyondPalgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novelshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97229-9_7

Begin Abstract

7. How Women’s Manga Has Performed the Image of ASIAs, Globally and Locally

Fusami Ogi¹

(1)

Department of English, Chikushi Jogakuen University, Dazaifu, Fukuoka, Japan

Fusami Ogi

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, manga turned into a global phenomenon, accepted by different cultures beyond Japan and inspiring non-Japanese participants. This expanded the scope of women’s manga; since many cultures did not have a special market for female readers, one of the results of the globalization of women’s manga had been to highlight the absence of women readers and authors in the field of comics, and to contribute to the production of a space for female participants in world comics.

At the same time, we should acknowledge another serious and fatal locus of absence, namely, Asia. More so than other genres of Japanese comics, women’s manga has seemingly erased Asia from its representational universe. As is well known, feminized European appearance became one of the special features of the so-called shōjo manga style .¹ Even when the narrative is set in Asia, it often betrays its setting by making every ideal character look Caucasian, with long legs, round eyes, and a blond curly hairstyle.

As famously noted by Keiko Takemiya, Asia was an untouchable arena for many authors of shōjo manga in the 1970s.² In this chapter, I will challenge this assumption by relying on the term “Asias” as used by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her Other Asias, where she observes that Asia, even though the name is laden with history and cultural politics, is not a place and that it cannot produce a naturalized homogeneous “identity,” and therefore we must pluralize it.³

This chapter will explore Asian images that Japanese shōjo manga has historically employed as a genre, and consider how they exclude and include Asia by relying on the broader categories of the global and the local. In the first half of the chapter, I focus on an analysis of Asian images in early shōjo manga works, starting with the 1960s. In the second half of the chapter, I examine the works of a new generation of manga artists in the 2000s and explore the label of shōjo manga in its transnational context.

Feminization and Europeanization in Early Shōjo Manga

Having analyzed the representations of shōjo manga for 20 years, I have often noted that two images are crucial. They...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Section I
• Section II
• Section III
• Back Matter