This collaborative book explores the artistic and aesthetic development of shojo, or girl, manga and discusses the significance of both shojo manga and the concept of shojo, or girl culture. It features contributions from manga critics, educators, and researchers from both manga’s home country of Japan and abroad, looking at shojo and shojo manga’s influence both locally and globally. Finally, it presents original interviews of shojo manga-ka, or artists, who discuss their work and their views on this distinct type of popular visual culture.

This collaborative book explores the artistic and aesthetic development of shojo, or girl, manga and discusses the significance of both shojo manga and the concept of shojo, or girl culture. It features contributions from manga critics, educators, and researchers from both manga’s home country of Japan and abroad, looking at shojo and shojo manga’s influence both locally and globally. Finally, it presents original interviews of shojo manga-ka, or artists, who discuss their work and their views on this distinct type of popular visual culture.

Why are some things cute, and others not? What happens to our brains when we see something cute? And how did cuteness go global, from Hello Kitty to Disney characters? Cuteness is an area where culture and biology get tangled up. Seeing a cute animal triggers some of the most powerful psychological instincts we have - the ones that elicit our care and protection - but there is a deeper story behind the broad appeal of Japanese cats and saccharine greetings cards. Joshua Paul Dale, a pioneer in the burgeoning field of cuteness studies, explains how the cute aesthetic spread around the globe, from pop brands to Lolita fashion, kids' cartoons and the unstoppable rise of Hello Kitty. Irresistible delves into the surprisingly ancient origins of Japan's kawaii culture, and uncovers the cross-cultural pollination of the globalised world. If adorable things really do rewire our brains, it can help answer some of the biggest questions we have about our evolutionary history and the mysterious origins of animal domestication. This is the fascinating cultural history of cuteness, and a revealing look at how our most powerful psychological impulses have remade global style and culture.

Since the 2000s, the Japanese word shōjo has gained global currency, accompanying the transcultural spread of other popular Japanese media such as manga and anime. The term refers to both a character type specifically, as well as commercial genres marketed to female audiences more generally. Through its diverse chapters this edited collection introduces the two main currents of shōjo research: on the one hand, historical investigations of Japan’s modern girl culture and its representations, informed by Japanese-studies and gender-studies concerns; on the other hand, explorations of the transcultural performativity of shōjo as a crafted concept and affect-prone code, shaped by media studies, genre theory, and fan-culture research. While acknowledging that shōjo has mediated multiple discourses throughout the twentieth century—discourses on Japan and its modernity, consumption and consumerism, non-hegemonic gender, and also technology—this volume shifts the focus to shōjo mediations, stretching from media by and for actual girls, to shōjo as media. As a result, the Japan-derived concept, while still situated, begins to offer possibilities for broader conceptualizations of girlness within the contemporary global digital mediascape.

This Companion is a comprehensive examination of the varied ways in which gender issues manifest throughout culture in Japan, using a range of international perspectives to examine private and public constructions of identity, as well as gender- and sexuality-inflected cultural production. The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture features both new work and updated accounts of classic scholarship, providing a go-to reference work for contemporary scholarship on gender in Japanese culture. The volume is interdisciplinary in scope, with chapters drawing from a range of perspectives, fields, and disciplines, including anthropology, art history, history, law, linguistics, literature, media and cultural studies, politics, and sociology. This reflects the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of the dual focal points of this volume—gender and culture—and the ways in which these themes infuse a range of disciplines and subfields. In this volume, Jennifer Coates, Lucy Fraser, and Mark Pendleton have brought together an essential guide to experiences of gender in Japanese culture today—perfect for students, scholars, and anyone else interested in Japan, culture, gender studies, and beyond.

Art can be used in education to assist in engagement, comprehension, and literacy. For years, comics and graphic novels have been written off as simple sources of entertainment. However, comics and graphic novels have tremendous value when utilized in the classroom as unique texts that can be approached philosophically and cognitively. Exploring Comics and Graphic Novels in the Classroom highlights voices from a number of disciplines in education, showcasing research and practice using both popular and lesser-known examples of comics across time in terms of publishing history and across geographic contexts. It explores comics from multiple viewpoints to share the efficacy of these texts in descriptive, narrative, and empirical ways. Covering topics such as intersectional identity representation, sequential visual art, and critical analysis, this premier reference source is a dynamic resource for educational administrators, teacher educators, preservice teachers, faculty of both K-12 and higher education, librarians, teaching artists, researchers, and academicians.

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.

Nominee for the 2021 Eisner Awards Best Academic/Scholarly Work In the twenty-first century, the field of comics studies has exploded. Scholarship on graphic novels, comic books, comic strips, webcomics, manga, and all forms of comic art has grown at a dizzying pace, with new publications, institutions, and courses springing up everywhere. The field crosses disciplinary and cultural borders and brings together myriad traditions. Comics Studies: A Guidebook offers a rich but concise introduction to this multifaceted field, authored by leading experts in multiple disciplines. It opens diverse entryways to comics studies, including history, form, audiences, genre, and cultural, industrial, and economic contexts. An invaluable one-stop resource for veteran and new comics scholars alike, this guidebook represents the state of the art in contemporary comics scholarship.

The Routledge Handbook of Japanese Media is a comprehensive study of the key contemporary issues and scholarly discussions around Japanese media. Covering a wide variety of forms and types from newspapers, television and fi lm, to music, manga and social media, this book examines the role of the media in shaping Japanese society from the Meiji era’s intense engagement with Western culture to our current period of rapid digital innovation. Featuring the work of an international team of scholars, the handbook is divided into five thematic sections: The historical background of the Japanese media from the Meiji Restoration to the immediate postwar era. Japan’s national and political identity imagined and negotiated through diff erent aspects of the media, including Japan’s ‘lost decade’ of the 1990s and today’s ‘post- Fukushima’ society. The representation of Japanese identities, including race, gender and sexuality, in contemporary media. The role of Japanese media in everyday life. The Japanese media in a broader global context. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book will be of use to students and scholars of Japanese culture and society, Asian media and Japanese popular culture.

The phenomenon of 'Cool Japan' is one of the distinctive features of global popular culture of the millennial age. A History of Popular Culture in Japan provides the first historical and analytical overview of popular culture in Japan from its origins in the 17th century to the present day, using it to explore broader themes of conflict, power and meaning in Japanese history. E. Taylor Atkins shows how Japan was one of the earliest sites for the development of mass-produced, market-oriented cultural products consumed by urban middle and working classes. From traditional monochrome ink painting, court literature and poetry to anime, manga and J-Pop, popular culture was pivotal in the rise of Japanese nationalism, imperialism, militarism and economic development, and to the present day plays a central role in Japanese identity. With updated historiography throughout, this fully revised second edition features: - A new chapter on popular culture in the Edo period - An expanded section on pre-Tokugawa culture - More discussion on recent pop culture phenomena such as TV game shows, cuteness and J-Pop - 10 new images - A new glossary of terms including kanji This improved edition is a vital resource for students of Japanese cultural history wishing to gain a deeper understanding of Japan's contributions to global cultural heritage.