AMINE AND MANGA

Shōjo manga and Ladies' Comics from 1975 to today
In the following decades (1975-present), shōjo manga continued to develop stylistically while simultaneously evolving different but overlapping subgenres.Major subgenres have included romance, superheroines, and "Ladies Comics" (in Japanese, redisu レディース, redikomi レヂィーコミ, and josei 女性 じょせい), whose boundaries are sometimes indistinguishable from each other and from shōnen manga.

In modern shōjo manga romance, love is a major theme set into emotionally intense narratives of self-realization. Japanese manga/anime critic Eri Izawa defines romance as symbolizing "the emotional, the grand, the epic; the taste of heroism, fantastic adventure, and the melancholy; passionate love, personal struggle, and eternal longing" set into imaginative, individualistic, and passionate narrative frameworks. These romances are sometimes long narratives that can deal with distinguishing between false and true love, coping with sexual intercourse, and growing up in a complex world, themes inherited by subsequent animated versions of the story. These "coming of age" or bildungsroman themes occur in both shōjo and shōnen manga.

In the bildungsroman, the protagonist must deal with adversity and conflict, and examples in shōjo manga of romantic conflict are common. They include Miwa Ueda's Peach Girl, Fuyumi Soryo's Mars, and, for mature readers, Moyoco Anno's Happy Mania, Yayoi Ogawa's Tramps Like Us, and Ai Yazawa's Nana.In another shōjo manga bildungsroman narrative device, the young heroine is transported to an alien place or time where she meets strangers and must survive on her own (including Hagio Moto's They Were Eleven, Kyoko Hikawa's From Far Away, Yû Watase's Fushigi Yûgi: The Mysterious Play, and Chiho Saito's The World Exists For Me).

Yet another such device involves meeting unusual or strange people and beings, for example, Natsuki Takaya's Fruits Basket—one of the most popular shōjo manga in the United States—whose orphaned heroine Tohru must survive living in the woods in a house filled with people who can transform into the animals of the Chinese zodiac. In Harako Iida's Crescent Moon, heroine Mahiru meets a group of supernatural beings, finally to discover that she herself too has a supernatural ancestry when she and a young tengu demon fall in love.

With the superheroines, shōjo manga continued to break away from neo-Confucianist norms of female meekness and obedience.Naoko Takeuchi's Sailor Moon (Bishōjo Senshi Sēramūn: "Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon") is a sustained, 18-volume narrative about a group of young heroines simultaneously heroic and introspective, active and emotional, dutiful and ambitious.The combination proved extremely successful, and Sailor Moon became internationally popular in both manga and anime formats. Another example is CLAMP's Magic Knight Rayearth, whose three young heroines, Hikaru, Umi, and Fuu, are magically transported to the world of Cephiro to become armed magical warriors in the service of saving Cephiro from internal and external enemies.

The superheroine subgenre also extensively developed the notion of teams (sentai) of girls working together, like the Sailor Senshi in Sailor Moon, the Magic Knights in Magic Knight Rayearth, and the Mew Mew girls from Mia Ikumi's Tokyo Mew Mew. By today, the superheroine narrative template has been widely used and parodied within the shōjo manga tradition (e.g., Nao Yazawa's Wedding Peach and Hyper Rune by Tamayo Akiyama) and outside that tradition, e.g., in bishōjo comedies like Kanan's Galaxy Angel.

In the mid-1980s and thereafter, as girls who had read shōjo manga as teenagers matured and entered the job market, shōjo manga elaborated subgenres directed at women in their 20s and 30s. This "Ladies Comic" or redisu-josei subgenre has dealt with themes of young adulthood: jobs, the emotions and problems of sexual intercourse, and friendships or love among women.

Redisu manga retains many of the narrative stylistics of shōjo manga but has been drawn by and written for adult women. Redisu manga and art has been often, but not always, sexually explicit, but sexuality has characteristically been set into complex narratives of pleasure and erotic arousal combined with emotional risk. Examples include Ryō Ramiya's Luminous Girls, Masako Watanabe's Kinpeibai and the work of Shungicu Uchida Another subgenre of shōjo-redisu manga deals with emotional and sexual relationships among women (akogare and yuri), in work by Erica Sakurazawa, Ebine Yamaji, and Chiho Saito. Other subgenres of shōjo-redisu manga have also developed, e.g., fashion (oshare) manga, like Ai Yazawa's Paradise Kiss and horror-vampire-gothic manga, like Matsuri Hino's Vampire Knight,Kaori Yuki's Cain Saga, and Mitsukazu Mihara's DOLL, which interact with street fashions, costume play ("cosplay"), J-Pop music, and goth subcultures in complex ways.

By the start of the 21st century, manga for women and girls thus represented a broad spectrum of material for pre- and early teenagers to material for adult women.


Shōnen, seinen, and seijin manga
Manga for male readers can be characterized in different ways. One is by the age of its intended audience: boys up to 18 years old (shōnen manga) and young men 18- to 30-years old (seinen manga). Another approach is by content, including action-adventure often involving male heroes, slapstick humor, themes of honor, and sometimes explicit sexuality. Japanese uses different kanji for two closely allied meanings of "seinen"—青年 for "youth, young man" and 成年 for "adult, majority"—the second referring to sexually overt manga aimed at grown men and also called seijin ("adult," 成人) manga. Shōnen, seinen, and seijin manga share many features in common.

Boys and young men were among the earliest readers of manga after World War II. From the 1950s on, shōnen manga focused on topics thought to interest the archetypical boy: sci-tech subjects like robots and space travel, and heroic action-adventure. Shōnen and seinen manga narratives often portray challenges to the protagonist’s abilities, skills, and maturity, stressing self-perfection, austere self-discipline, sacrifice in the cause of duty, and honorable service to society, community, family, and friends.

Manga with solitary costumed superheroes like Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man did not become popular as a shōnen genre. An exception is Kia Asamiya's Batman: Child of Dreams, released in the U.S. by DC Comics and in Japan by Kodansha. However, lone heroes occur in Takao Saito's Golgo 13 and Koike and Kojima's Lone Wolf and Cub. Golgo 13 is about an assassin who puts his skills to the service of world peace and other social goals, and Ogami Itto, the swordsman-hero of Lone Wolf and Cub, is a widower caring for his son Daigoro while he seeks vengeance against his wife's murderers. However, Golgo and Itto remain men throughout and neither hero ever displays superpowers. Instead, these stories "journey into the hearts and minds of men" by remaining on the plane of human psychology and motivation.

Many shōnen manga have science fiction and technology themes. Early examples in the robot subgenre included Tezuka’s Astro Boy (see above) and Fujiko F. Fujio’s 1969 Doraemon, about a robot cat and the boy he lives with, which was aimed at younger boys. The robot theme evolved extensively, from Mitsuteru Yokoyama's 1956 Tetsujin 28-go to later, more complex stories where the protagonist must not only defeat enemies, but learn to master himself and cooperate with the mecha he controls. Thus, in Neon Genesis Evangelion by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, Shinji struggles against the enemy and against his father, and in Vision of Escaflowne by Katsu Aki, Van not only makes war against Dornkirk’s empire but must deal with his complex feelings for Hitomi, the heroine.

Sports themes are also popular in manga for male readers.These stories stress self-discipline, depicting not only the excitement of sports competition but also character traits the hero needs to transcend his limitations and to triumph. Examples include boxing (Tetsuya Chiba’s 1968-1973 Tomorrow's Joe and Rumiko Takahashi's 1987 One-Pound Gospel and basketball (Takehiko Inoue’s 1990 Slam Dunk

Supernatural settings have been another source of action-adventure plots in shõnen and some shõjo manga in which the hero must master challenges. Sometimes the protagonist fails, as in Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's Death Note, where protagonist Light Yagami receives a notebook from a Death God (shinigami) that kills anyone whose name is written in it, and, in a shōjo manga example, Hakase Mizuki's The Demon Ororon, whose protagonist abandons his demonic kingship of Hell to live and die on earth Sometimes the protagonist himself is supernatural, like Kohta Hirano's Hellsing, whose vampire hero Alucard battles reborn Nazis hellbent on conquering England, but the hero may also be (or was) human, battling an ever-escalating series of supernatural enemies (Hiromu Arakawa's Full Metal Alchemist, Nobuyuki Anzai's Flame of Recca, and Tite Kubo's Bleach).

Military action-adventure stories set in the modern world, for example, about World War II, remained under suspicion of glorifying Japan’s Imperial history and have not become a significant part of the shōnen manga repertoire. Nonetheless, stories about fantasy or historical military adventure were not stigmatized, and manga about heroic warriors and martial artists have been extremely popular. Some are serious dramas, like Sanpei Shirato's The Legend of Kamui and Rurouni Kenshin by Nobuhiro Watsuki, but others contain strongly humorous elements, like Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball.

Although stories about modern war and its weapons do exist, they deal as much or more with the psychological and moral problems of war as they do with sheer shoot-'em-up adventure. Examples include Seiho Takizawa's Who Fighter, a retelling of Joseph Conrad's story Heart of Darkness about a renegade Japanese colonel set in World War II Burma, Kaiji Kawaguchi's The Silent Service, about a Japanese nuclear submarine, and Motofumi Kobayashi's Apocalypse Meow, about the Vietnam War told in talking animal format. Other battle and fight-oriented manga are complex stories of criminal and espionage conspiracies to be overcome by the protagonist, such as City Hunter by Hojo Tsukasa, Fist of the North Star by Tetsuo Hara, and in the shōjo manga From Eroica with Love by Yasuko Aoike, a long-running crime-espionage story combining adventure, action, and humor (and another example of how these themes occur across genres).

For manga critics Koji Aihara and Kentaro Takekuma, such battle stories endlessly repeat the same mindless themes of violence, which they sardonically label the "Shonen Manga Plot Shish Kebob", where fights follow fights like meat skewered on a stick. Other commentators suggest that fight sequences and violence in comics serve as a social outlet for otherwise dangerous impulses. Shōnen manga and its extreme warriorship have been parodied, for example, in Mine Yoshizaki's screwball comedy Sgt. Frog (Keroro Gunso), about a platoon of slacker alien frogs who invade the Earth and end up free-loading off the Hinata family in Tokyo.


Sex and women's roles in manga for males
In early shōnen manga, men and boys played all the major roles, with women and girls having only auxiliary places as sisters, mothers, and occasionally girlfriends. Of the nine cyborgs in Shotaro Ishinomori's 1964 Cyborg 009, only one is female, and she soon vanishes from the action. Some recent shōnen manga virtually omit women, e.g., the martial arts story Baki the Grappler by Itagaki Keisuke and the supernatural fantasy Sand Land by Akira Toriyama. However, by the 1980s, girls and women began to play increasingly important roles in shōnen manga, for example, Toriyama's 1980 Dr. Slump, whose main character is the mischievous and powerful girl robot Arale Norimaki.

The role of girls and women in manga for male readers has evolved considerably since Arale. One class is the pretty girl (bishōjo). Sometimes the woman is unattainable, but she is always an object of the hero's emotional and sexual interest, like Belldandy from Oh My Goddess! by Kosuke Fujishima and Shao-lin from Guardian Angel Getten by Minene Sakurano. In other stories, the hero is surrounded by such girls and women, as in Negima by Ken Akamatsu and Hanaukyo Maid Team by Morishige. The male protagonist does not always succeed in forming a relationship with the woman, for example when Bright Honda and Aimi Komori fail to bond in Shadow Lady by Masakazu Katsura. In other cases, a successful couple's sexual activities are depicted or implied, like Outlanders by Johji Manabe. In still other cases, the initially naive and immature hero grows up to become a man by learning how to deal and live with women emotionally and sexually, like Yota in Video Girl Ai by Masakazu Katsura, Train Man in Train Man: Densha Otoko by Hidenori Hara, and Makoto in Futari Ecchi by Katsu Aki. In poruno- and eromanga (seijin manga), often called hentai manga in the U.S., a sexual relationship is taken for granted and depicted explicitly, as in work by Toshiki Yui and in Were-Slut by Jiro Chiba and Slut Girl by Isutoshi. The result is a range of depictions of boys and men from naive to very experienced sexually.

Heavily armed female warriors (sentō bishōjo) represent another class of girls and women in manga for male readers. Some sentō bishōjo are battle cyborgs, like Alita from Battle Angel Alita by Yukito Kishiro, Motoko Kusanagi from Masamune Shirow's Ghost in the Shell, and Chise from Shin Takahashi's Saikano. Others are human, like Attim M-Zak from Hiroyuki Utatane's Seraphic Feather, Johji Manabe's Karula Olzen from Drakuun, and Alita Forland (Falis) from Sekihiko Inui's Murder Princess.

With the relaxation of censorship in Japan after the early 1990s, a wide variety of explicitly drawn sexual themes appeared in manga intended for male readers that correspondingly occur in English translations. These depictions range from mild partial nudity through implied and explicit sexual intercourse through bondage and sadomasochism (SM), zoophilia (bestiality), incest, and rape. In some cases, rape and lust murder themes came to the forefront, as in Urotsukidoji by Toshio Maeda and Blue Catalyst from 1994 by Kei Taniguchi, but these extreme themes are not commonplace in either untranslated or translated manga.


Gekiga
Main article: Gekiga
Gekiga literally means "drama pictures" and refers to a form of aesthetic realism in manga. Gekiga style drawing is emotionally dark, often starkly realistic, sometimes very violent, and focuses on the day-in, day-out grim realities of life, often drawn in gritty and unpretty fashions. Gekiga arose in the late 1950s and 1960s partly from left-wing student and working class political activism and partly from the aesthetic dissatisfaction of young manga artists like Yoshihiro Tatsumi with existing manga. Examples include Sampei Shirato's 1959-1962 Chronicles of a Ninja's Military Accomplishments (Ninja Bugeichō), the story of Kagemaru, the leader of a peasant rebellion in the 1500s, which dealt directly with oppression and class struggle, and Hiroshi Hirata's Satsuma Gishiden, about uprisings against the Tokugawa shogunate.

As the social protest of these early years waned, gekiga shifted in meaning towards socially conscious, mature drama and towards the avant-garde.Examples include Koike and Kojima's Lone Wolf and Cub and Akira, an apocalyptic tale of motorcycle gangs, street war, and inexplicable transformations of the children of a future Tokyo. Another example is Osamu Tezuka's 1976 manga MW, a bitter story of the aftermath of the storage and possibly deliberate release of poison gas by U.S. armed forces based in Okinawa years after World War II. Gekiga and the social consciousness it embodies remain alive in modern-day manga. An example is Ikebukuro West Gate Park from 2001 by Ira Ishida and Sena Aritou, a story of street thugs, rape, and vengeance set on the social margins of the wealthy Ikebukuro district of Tokyo.