The Rise and Fall of “Shôjo”

Meiji Period girls magazines

I’ve been thinking about (and reading about) the word “shôjo” lately. That may sound odd, since I’ve been studying shôjo manga for two decades, but lately I’ve been thinking about the word itself and how it is used. The word itself has been used in Japan for centuries, but it didn’t really become “popular,” it seems, until the turn of the century, which is to say the latter Meiji Period. You can read more about the word on the Wikipedia article I’ve been helping to edit. But since the 1950s, the use of the word in colloquial Japanese had declined to the point where now it is used basically as an adjective for a genre of manga and fiction, and also as a “news/legal” word that is rarely used in daily conversation. For a while, though, it was all the rage. I recently finished reading a great little novel by Nobuko Yoshiya from 1939 titled Otome Techô (“A Maiden’s Handbook”), and she must use the word no fewer than once every ten pages or so.

Newest issue of Shôjo Comic

But what really came as a shock to me was the realization that, unless I’m overlooking something, the word “shôjo” now appears in the title of just one girls’ magazine, Shôjo Comic. There are two other extant girls’ magazines (Bessatsu Friend and BetsuComi) that used to include the word “shôjo” in the title, but the one dropped “shôjo” in 1984, and the other dropped it in 2002.

Shôjo Kakumei--If I showed you the content, I could be arrested

Ironically, the last newly-created magazine to include the word in the title was Shôjo Kakumei (“Girls’ Revolution”), which was an “erotic” (I would say “pornographic”) manga magazine geared at teens, and founded in 1998. (Just imagine how quickly an American publisher trying to publish such a magazine would end up behind bars.) But the revolution did not last, and the magazine disappeared in 2004. Another irony is that the last hold-out, Shôjo Comic, which was once commonly read by elementary-school girls, has also become increasingly erotic in content, so much so that the popular weekly magazine Shûkan Bunshun published an article in its May 31, 2007 issue titled “Be Careful! Shôjo Comic‘s Incredible Sexual Content: ‘Incest,’ ‘Outdoor Sex,’ ‘Discipline Play,’ Manga Read By Elementary School Children”.

July 1917 issue of Shin Shôjo (New Girl)

“Shôjo” used to have connotations of purity, education, intelligence, gentleness, modernity, a hint of melancholy, and maybe even a touch of the magical. It was “romantic,” but not in the “girl meets boy” sense. (If anything, it was in the “girl meets girl” sense.) Along with the word jogakusei (“female student”), it was the embodiment of the school-age girl before the end of World War II. It was probably mixed-sex education that killed the “shôjo.” Whether that death was a good or bad thing is not something I’m going to go into today, but I suspect it was a mix of both.

So I got to thinking about the use of the word “shôjo” in girls’ magazine titles, and did some digging. Geek that I am, I naturally collected my findings into a graph and a timeline. I found 36 magazines published between 1902 (when the first girls’ magazine was created) and 2008 that include the word “shôjo” in the title. I’ve probably missed some, but if I have, they are obscure and short-lived.

First, the timeline. Since it covers more than a century, it’s obviously quite large. Click on the image below to see a 768 x 11623 pixel version.

Girls' magazines with the word "shôjo" in the title, 1902 - 2008

Here’s a PDF version.

And here’s a graph of the number of girls’ magazines/periodicals with the word “shôjo” in the title over the same period of time.

Number of periodicals with

And here’s a PDF of the graph.

May 1931 issue of Shôjo no Tomo

The “shôjo” peak is in the late 1910s and the 1920s. As you can see from the timeline, though, this is largely due to publishers trying to jump on the shôjo magazine bandwagon. Most of the magazines created during this period folded in less than a year. But throughout this period there were a handful of bestsellers, most notably Shôjo no Tomo (“Girls’ Friend”, 1908 – 1955), Shôjo Club (“Girls’ Club”, 1923 – 1962), and Shôjo Gahô (“Girls’ Illustrated”, 1912 – 1942). (Keep in mind that I am only talking about magazines with “shôjo” in the title. There were other popular girls’ magazines, such as Reijokai. (Don’t ask me to translate that one.) Shôjo no Tomo in particular is remarkable not just for its popularity and quality, but for the fact that it holds the record for the longest running girls’ magazine in Japanese history (47 years).

January 1956 issue of Shojo Book

There is a drastic plunge in the last years of World War II, due to censorship, a shortage of paper, and general poverty. Only Shôjo no Tomo and Shôjo Club survived the war (though just barely; by 1945 they were shadows of their former selves). The stylish Shôjo Gahô might have hung in there, too, if it hadn’t been forcibly merged with its greatest rival, Shôjo no Tomo, by the military government in 1942.

August 25, 1963 issue of Shôjo Friend

After the war, we see another spike. This also makes sense. Censorship was (largely) lifted under the Occupation Government and the economy was gradually improving, so it’s only natural that publishers would try to pick up where they left off, and to the publishers, “shôjo” was still the natural term to use. But here again we see a bunch of magazines that folded within five years. Throughout the 1950s, the word “shôjo” seems to have lost the potency it once enjoyed, and was now being used simply to identify a magazine as being for girls. Publishers began to try to distinguish new magazines from the pack, while at the same time identifying them as “feminine,” by choosing titles such as Margaret (from the French “marguerite”, which is what the Japanese call a daisy). By the 1970s, publishers pretty much stopped including the word in the titles of new girls’ magazines. Now it seems all but extinct.

But I have a feeling it will come back again someday.

Perhaps with a bit of nostalgic irony.

References:

http://www.kikuyo-lib.jp/08_menu.htm

http://www.oya-bunko.or.jp/soukan/cdzasshim.htm

http://www.oya-bunko.or.jp/soukan/cdzasshit2.htm

http://www.oya-bunko.or.jp/soukan/cdzasshit3.htm

http://www.iiclo.or.jp/

http://www.sugoroku.net/history/taisyo3.html

I also relied on this fantastic little book.