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Girl Power Fuels Manga Boom in U.S., an article on the New York Times website caught my eye this evening. Manga is becoming big business here in the US, and it seems like some of these companies are discovering that 50% of their potential market is girls. From the article:

Manga often celebrates strong female characters in adventure yarns or stories focusing on love and relationships.

…

“Manga is bringing back the very same subjects, but with a twist, a 21st-century Japanese sensibility,” she said. “The girls are cute, they’re never insulting, and they never have big breasts,” Ms. Robbins said, referring to the overly endowed young women drawn in superhero comics.

…

“Swan,” a 1979 coming-of-age story about a ballerina, is one of the titles that Mr. Nee is most excited about. The series was so popular in Japan that enrollment in ballet schools rose. “We’ve been stunned about how well young female readers respond to this title,” he said. “They’re finding it just as fresh as when it was introduced in Japan.”

This article brought to mind an article I had read from the Mainichi Daily News Waiwai column a few weeks ago called Smells like little girl spirit in raunchy manga. Contrast these sweet old comics like “Swan” that they are dusting off and introducing to American girls to the reality of girls’ manga in present day Japan.

Tokyo housewife Yoshimi says she got the fright of her life when she had a look at the type of manga her 12-year-old daughter was reading.

…

What Yoshimi saw on those pages of that manga was a young schoolgirl, her uniform ripped open to bare her breasts and cords binding her to all limbs were extended. Behind the girl stood a boy of about the same age who was rubbing between her legs and inducing a look of sheer ecstasy on her face. The boy turned to the girl and said, “You still haven’t come yet, right?” and sent his probing fingers driving even deeper into the girl’s welcoming recesses.

Steamy stuff even for adult magazines for grown men or women, but totally startling considering they were actually found in a shojo manga, one that deliberately targets girls in their early teen years.

…

“Manga for teenage girls are becoming increasingly raunchy. There’re about 30 shojo manga on the market. Those following a particular storyline for several issues are still in the majority, the number of manga dealing with sex themes started to grow rapidly about three years ago,” shojo manga expert Yayoi Kobayashi tells Sunday Mainichi, adding that topics once even taboo among adults, think of incest and pack rape, pop up in little’ girl’s comics. “You’ve got to think that theses comics are being read by girls who perhaps a year earlier hadn’t even begun budding breasts and they’re now reading stuff like, in one manga for instance, finding a young boy to ‘train’ and turn into a sex toy. It even made me feel sick.”

Manga is a huge business in Japan, and the variety of manga that gets produced is mind-boggling. When I was waiting for my girlfriend to get her haircut one day in a salon, I started reading a manga about some gourmet guy and the story revolved around the politics of importing American rice into Japan. If you had mentioned girls’ manga to me before I would have thought of elegantly drawn male homosexual love stories that some of the exchange students who studied with me at Waseda University had a facination with.

I doubt we’ll ever see some of the more interesting girls’ manga come to the US because of the majority views on sexuality here. But if one was worried about the possible effect on girls by this kind of manga, they only need to remember:

“Cool girls are already out with their boyfriends having sex and couldn’t give a damn about manga,” a third-year junior high schoolgirl from Kanagawa Prefecture says. “Just sitting there reading a manga is proof that the girl is not cool, which naturally means she hasn’t got a boyfriend and isn’t having sex. Rather than being worried (by shojo manga), parents should feel at ease.”

This entry was posted on Monday, December 27th, 2004 at 10:15 pm and is filed under News, Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.