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Finished February 19th, 2025.]
My first full read of 2025 is done! As mentioned, I would like to do a write-up on everything I read this year: so today, I bring you my review of Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan (2012) by Deborah Shamoon. This book is a reread for me; I read it some time during 2016, and I think it was one of the major catalysts for shoujo culture becoming one of—if not my most—intense special interest. When I read it back then, my thoughts on it were quite polarized. Has my opinion gotten better or worse? Well, ah, to be frank…in some ways, yes, my opinion is little better. For the most part—no. I think it has somehow gotten rather worse, especially the harder I think on it; so, let’s dive in.
Introduction
Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan (from here on out Passionate Friendship) is a book about precisely what it sounds like it’s about; but, I imagine, what it sounds like it’s about is only particularly apparent to a certain kind of person. What is “girls’ culture” exactly, and what does that mean in Japan specifically?
As Shamoon states, girls’ culture, or shoujo bunka is “a discreet discourse on the social construction of girlhood” (p. 1). Adolescence is a social construct: “The concept of adolescence, and particularly female adolescence, is one of the hallmarks of modern industrialized nations, which encourage girls to delay marriage, childbearing, or entering the workforce, usually to receive higher education” (p. 2). Generally speaking, historically there was not really a transitionary period between adulthood and childhood; as alluded to, only modern industrialized nations could afford to have a large class of almost-adults who were not contributing directly to society. While the trope of rampant child marriage and the like in history is nonsense (in many societies historically, the average age of marriage or childbirth was in the late teens to early twenties; young by our standards, but hardly children), it is true that people often entered adulthood in a fairly abrupt fashion, and there was rarely “teen culture” as we think of it now.
Girls’ culture in Japan began to emerge in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century; “in the pre-war [pre-WWII] period, a girl [female child] became a [shoujo] [cultural identity] by attending an all-girls secondary school and by reading girls’ magazines (Imada 5), in other words, through a process of enculturation through [shoujo] bunka, which was created among girls in higher schools, mainly attended by daughters of the new urban middle and upper classes” (p. 2). (Note: Shamoon writes “shoujo” with a macron, but since this font doesn’t have that, I’m using the more normative—in casual writing—“ou” to render the word; so, I’m only replacing the word with a different spelling. I will also be doing this for other words with the macron). In other words, it consisted of the culture—and especially media culture—of the new social class of adolescent girls. While the context that birthed Japanese girls' culture as such has changed drastically (coed schools are the norm, manga magazines have subsumed literary magazines as the media nexus, etc), there’s still a remarkable link between the present and the past, which is much of what this book is about.
Shamoon never elaborates on why this matters, but I have some suggestions. In a broader sense, what I dub “shoujo culture”—combining the English and Japanese terms—has actually had a pervasive cultural impact; especially in Japan, of course, but also in the United States and elsewhere. Much has been written on the influence of kawaii culture, for example—this has its origins in shoujo culture. (And, indeed—homegrown American equivalents of kawaii culture also often have their origins in American girls’ culture, although I believe this to be a much less pervasive and cohesive entity compared to shoujo culture). Anime and manga are becoming an enormous facet of the American media landscape, often subsuming our domestic media among the youth—this, too, has been much touched by shoujo culture. It can be quite illuminating for anyone with an interest in Japanese culture or pop culture more broadly to learn about.
For myself, there’s the simple fact that so many of my favorite artists were shoujo artists, some of my favorite pieces of fiction were shoujo, many of my interests have their origins in shoujo culture—or my interests have some kind of deep manifestation within it (perhaps this statement will make more sense as we go along). Maybe it seems frivolous, but it is something I care about quite a lot and find very interesting.
( ...... )
Finished February 19th, 2025.]My first full read of 2025 is done! As mentioned, I would like to do a write-up on everything I read this year: so today, I bring you my review of Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan (2012) by Deborah Shamoon. This book is a reread for me; I read it some time during 2016, and I think it was one of the major catalysts for shoujo culture becoming one of—if not my most—intense special interest. When I read it back then, my thoughts on it were quite polarized. Has my opinion gotten better or worse? Well, ah, to be frank…in some ways, yes, my opinion is little better. For the most part—no. I think it has somehow gotten rather worse, especially the harder I think on it; so, let’s dive in.
Introduction
Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan (from here on out Passionate Friendship) is a book about precisely what it sounds like it’s about; but, I imagine, what it sounds like it’s about is only particularly apparent to a certain kind of person. What is “girls’ culture” exactly, and what does that mean in Japan specifically?
As Shamoon states, girls’ culture, or shoujo bunka is “a discreet discourse on the social construction of girlhood” (p. 1). Adolescence is a social construct: “The concept of adolescence, and particularly female adolescence, is one of the hallmarks of modern industrialized nations, which encourage girls to delay marriage, childbearing, or entering the workforce, usually to receive higher education” (p. 2). Generally speaking, historically there was not really a transitionary period between adulthood and childhood; as alluded to, only modern industrialized nations could afford to have a large class of almost-adults who were not contributing directly to society. While the trope of rampant child marriage and the like in history is nonsense (in many societies historically, the average age of marriage or childbirth was in the late teens to early twenties; young by our standards, but hardly children), it is true that people often entered adulthood in a fairly abrupt fashion, and there was rarely “teen culture” as we think of it now.
Girls’ culture in Japan began to emerge in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century; “in the pre-war [pre-WWII] period, a girl [female child] became a [shoujo] [cultural identity] by attending an all-girls secondary school and by reading girls’ magazines (Imada 5), in other words, through a process of enculturation through [shoujo] bunka, which was created among girls in higher schools, mainly attended by daughters of the new urban middle and upper classes” (p. 2). (Note: Shamoon writes “shoujo” with a macron, but since this font doesn’t have that, I’m using the more normative—in casual writing—“ou” to render the word; so, I’m only replacing the word with a different spelling. I will also be doing this for other words with the macron). In other words, it consisted of the culture—and especially media culture—of the new social class of adolescent girls. While the context that birthed Japanese girls' culture as such has changed drastically (coed schools are the norm, manga magazines have subsumed literary magazines as the media nexus, etc), there’s still a remarkable link between the present and the past, which is much of what this book is about.
Shamoon never elaborates on why this matters, but I have some suggestions. In a broader sense, what I dub “shoujo culture”—combining the English and Japanese terms—has actually had a pervasive cultural impact; especially in Japan, of course, but also in the United States and elsewhere. Much has been written on the influence of kawaii culture, for example—this has its origins in shoujo culture. (And, indeed—homegrown American equivalents of kawaii culture also often have their origins in American girls’ culture, although I believe this to be a much less pervasive and cohesive entity compared to shoujo culture). Anime and manga are becoming an enormous facet of the American media landscape, often subsuming our domestic media among the youth—this, too, has been much touched by shoujo culture. It can be quite illuminating for anyone with an interest in Japanese culture or pop culture more broadly to learn about.
For myself, there’s the simple fact that so many of my favorite artists were shoujo artists, some of my favorite pieces of fiction were shoujo, many of my interests have their origins in shoujo culture—or my interests have some kind of deep manifestation within it (perhaps this statement will make more sense as we go along). Maybe it seems frivolous, but it is something I care about quite a lot and find very interesting.
( ...... )
