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Coates, J. orcid.org/0000-0003-4326-1481 (Cover date: 2018) Introduction: Representing
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https://doi.org/10.1353/jwj.2018.0007
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Introduction: Representing Youth and Gender in Japanese Popular Culture
Jennifer Coates
This special issue evolved from a panel on “Youth, Gender, and Power in Japanese
Popular Culture” at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference in 2017.
While the original panel focused closely on girls’ culture in Japan, engaging particularly with
media representations of the “sh jo” (girl), our commitment to interrogating the networks of
power around female-gendered youth in Japanese popular culture led us to wider
considerations of the category of “youth.” The articles in this issue present new ways of
reading a variety of images of girls and young women in Japanese popular culture, from
1940s films and 1950s pulp magazines to twenty-first-century sh jo manga, paying particular
attention to the issue of representation and its often-conflicted relationship with lived
experience.
Examining the interrelation of youth and gender is a timely concern. In Japan, young
people are raising their voices with increasing regularity and persuasive force on issues as
varied as nuclear power, climate change, and sexual harassment. “Youthquake,” the term
coined by Diana Vreeland in 1965 to describe the influence of youth on popular culture,
recently returned to popular attention as the Oxford English Dictionary’s “Word of the Year”
for 2017, suggesting that widening youth influence on popular discourse is a global rather
than area-specific development. This issue of the U.S.¬Japan Women’s Journal considers
both how we approach the representation of girls and young women in Japanese popular
culture and how we evaluate young people’s access to and participation in the creation of
media forms in postwar Japan. We do so in order to grapple with questions of agency and
appropriation in youth influence on popular media.
By approaching some stereotypical and stereotyped female groups from new
directions, we offer a fresh view on much-discussed youth figures. We argue that many
young characters in Japanese popular culture, as well as many young people who consume
their images, demonstrate varying degrees of agency within complicated regimes of power, in
which they both win and lose, stepping in and out of positions of power and
disempowerment. We engage critically with the question of what counts as power, taking
seriously Lawrence Grossberg’s (1988) proposition that “empowerment need not deny the
possibility of disempowerment, or of forms of empowerment that are oppressive” (187). Yet
Grossberg reminds us that “people must find something positive in the forms of popular
culture that they celebrate” (187). The contributions in this issue engage with consumers’
love-hate relationships to certain popular cultural productions and with similar relationships
depicted within popular cultural productions themselves. The articles all feature examples of
female media consumers engaging with characters and storylines that they actively dislike, or
find troubling. Yet the engagement itself is also experienced as enjoyable in other ways.
That we enjoy images that might harm us as individuals, and society in general, causes
feelings of ambivalence.
The articles in this issue address these issues from various perspectives, media
representations, and historical contexts. Through investigating how young gendered bodies
and identities have been shaped by popular media discourses and representations, we argue
for a more nuanced conceptualization of both the powers afforded to youth and the powers to
which they are subjected. Jennifer Coates problematizes the stereotype of the young person
as a mindless consumer by considering what happens when young women are shut out of or
discouraged from actively consuming media texts, here, popular films of the 1940s and early
1950s. Irene Gonzáles-López analyzes the representation of panpan in popular films, novels,
and the kasutori culture of the 1940s and 1950s to explore how young women navigated the
fraught landscape of sex and agency after the war. By examining images of sweets such as
cakes, cookies, and parfaits in texts by manga artists Hagio Moto (b. 1949) and Yoshinaga
Fumi (b. 1971) Grace Ting traces an “unremarkable history of sh jo manga” to suggest that
feminist scholars of Japanese girls’ culture have largely avoided emphasizing conventional
femininities, focusing instead on the subversive qualities of the genre’s rejection of gender
and sexual norms. By contrast, Ting’s intervention raises possibilities for feminist
perspectives that allow for both pleasure and critique in the everyday consumption of sh jo
manga. While Gonzáles-López analyzes the discrepancy between panpans’ lived experiences
of suffering and their titillating popular culture portrayals, Coates and Ting show how
cinema audiences and readers of sh jo manga sought to escape these contradictions,
concluding that girls and young women are rarely outside the reach of formative power
structures that underlie the production of popular culture. Finally, Lucy Fraser and her
students’ thoughtful translation of Ogi Fusami’s 2010 chapter “Beyond Borders: Sh jo
Manga and Gender” (<Ekky suru> sh jo manga to jend ) from Manga wa ekky suru!
Beyond Borders: The Transnational Power of Manga (edited by Ogi Fusami, Ichiki Masashi,
Motohama Hidehiko) interrogates a major power in Japanese visual culture—the imagined
“West”—through a historical overview of sh jo manga.
Our shared concern can be understood through the famous feminist injunction
encapsulated in Marian Wright Edelman’s phrase: “You can’t be what you can’t see.”
Edelman was most recently quoted in Miss Representation, a 2011 documentary film directed
by Jennifer Siebel Newsom on the power structures at play in female representation;
iterations of her evocative phrasing also resonate in her writing for the Children’s Defense
Fund (Edelman 2015). Edelman and Newsom’s understanding of representation as formative
in circumscribing our understanding of human potential runs through the scholarship
presented here; at the same time, it demands an urgent response beyond the capacity of one
single scholar. We hope that our articles will become part of a wider conversation on the
intersections of youth, gender, and power in Japanese popular media representations.
Works cited
Edelman, Marian Wright. 2015. “It’s Hard to Be What You Can’t See.” The Child Watch
Column, Children’s Defense Fund. https://www.childrensdefense.org/child-watch-
columns/health/2015/its-hard-to-be-what-you-cant-see/ (accessed ________).
Grossberg, Lawrence. 1988. “Putting Pop Back into Postmodernism.” In Universal
Abandonment: The Politics of Postmodernism, edited by Andrew Ross, 167-190.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Newsom, Jennifer Siebel, director. 2011. Miss Representation. San Francisco: The
Representation Project.
