Introduction: Girls' Aesthetics

Notes Introduction: Girls’ Aesthetics 1. In Japanese names, family names come before given names. I follow this order in this book, except for individuals who publish their writings in English. 2. To be precise, it started as shō nen-ai manga. The differences between shō nen-ai manga and BL manga are detailed in Chapter 2. 3. Adult males were granted suffrage in 1925. 4. The postwar constitution of Japan declares eternal renunciation of war, and the Self-Defense Forces are supposed to only defend the Japanese land and people in cases of foreign attack. However, their status is ambivalent, demonstrated in their involvement in the Gulf and Iraq Wars, for example. For more discussions on the Self-Defense Forces, see Chapter 3. 5. I translated all of the Japanese titles except those that were previously translated into English. 6. See Driscoll’s book Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory (2002). 7. The term “lesbian” started to be used in Japan in the 1950s. At this early stage, it was pronounced “resubian,” not “rezubian” like it is now. This is because, as Akaeda Kanako reports based on her extensive archival research, the term was initially introduced in relation to French culture and the terms lesbien and lesbienne (2014: 138–42). 8. For more details, see Miyadai Shinji’s Choice of Girls in School Uniform: After Ten Years (Seifuku shō jo tachi no sentaku, After 10 Years) (2006) and Sharon Kinsella’s Schoolgirls, Money and Rebellion in Japan (2014). In the 1990s, the mass media started to report widely that female high-school students were involved in prostitution or other forms of sex business with middle-aged men as their clients, but these forms of sex business in fact emerged earlier, in the 1980s. As Miyadai explains, the modern, gender-segregated educa- tional system resulted in the emergence of the idea of female high-school students as a “sex brand” (Miyadai 2006: 131) because they evoke the image of sexually innocent female students who have mature bodies and yet whose sexuality is surveilled and protected by schools. I acknowledge that resistant girls’ aesthetics also embrace this image of sexually innocent schoolgirls. However, as explained in the Introduction, the meaning of sexual innocence is different in girls’ aesthetics. Therefore, for the pur- poses of this book, the female high-school students in the sex business are not considered to be “girls.” 9. Driscoll distinguishes between what she calls “feminine adolescence” and “female adolescence,” but it is beyond the scope of this introductory chapter to explain the differences. 181 182 Notes 10. Yet, the term “girl” still seems to have negative connotations, as pointed out by Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris in their book A Good Night Out for the Girls: Popular Feminisms in Contemporary Theatre and Performance (2013: 2). The mainstream theatre aimed at women is promoted as “a good night out for the girls” in the British media. One of the reasons for this is that the sentimentality evoked in these shows is associated not with mature womanhood, but with girlhood. 11. These English titles are given by Aoyama and Hartley to the excerpts from Honda’s and Kawasaki’s books, and therefore there are no original Japanese titles I can provide here. But the former is from Honda’s Children as Different Cultures, mentioned above, and the latter is from Kawasaki’s Fine Days for Girls (Shō jo biyori) (1990). 12. In Women Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women’s Writing (2006), edited by Rebecca Copeland. 13. She is the daughter of the late Tsuka Kō hei, a resident Korean (zainichi Korean) and renowned playwright. 14. The performance does not have a particular title, but it is included in its 2002 video work, Mission/K. 1 Girls’ Time, Girls’ Space 1. In Japan, the period of a pregnancy is counted from the time of concep- tion, and therefore lasts ten, not nine, months. 2. SEIKO is a Japanese company that produces wristwatches and clocks. 3. English translation by Nobuko Anan and Franklin Chang is available in the programme of the Tate film Shū ji Terayama: Who Can Say That We Should Not Live Like Dogs? (2012). 4. However, Terayama was familiar and sympathized with girls’ culture, or what I call “girls’ aesthetics” in this monograph, in his earlier career. With renowned illustrator Uno Akira (also known as Uno Aquirax), he contrib- uted to a book series, For Ladies (Foa rediisu), which targeted girls, despite its title, in the mid 1960s until he founded his theatre company, Tenjō Sajiki, in 1967. Uno and Konno Yū ichi, the editor of Yasō , an important subcultural magazine for those with girlie sensibilities, describe this shift on Terayama’s part as one from the lyrical world of girls to the world of theatre with material bodies (Uno and Konno 2013: 36). Hagio Moto, a girls’ manga artist who will be mentioned in this chapter and discussed in more detail in the next chapter, also worked with Terayama for this series (Hagio 2011: 105–7). The series was published by Shinshokan from 1965 to 1981. 5. The Meiji Period is from 1868 to 1912. 6. However, as Koyama Shizuko elucidates, in theory there was supposed to be no hierarchical relationship between women and men in the “good wife, wise mother” ideology. Both parties were supposed to belong to the category of the people of Japan, a status achieved through different, but equally valuable, contributions to the nation. Nevertheless, as Koyama Notes 183 also indicates, in reality women were apparently secondary to men because, even though the former were in charge of homemaking and the education of children, they were dependent on the latter financially (Koyama 1991: 55–7). 7. The magazine Kawamura looked at is Female Learning World (Jogaku sekai), and this was not specifically categorized as a girls’ magazine. It was a “women’s magazine,” but it was also read by schoolgirls (Imada 2007: 19). 8. However, girls’ aesthetics in the modern period did not always exclude the poor, lower-class female youth, such as servants in wealthy house- holds. They could identify themselves with the imagined community of girls through participating in the communications taking place in read- ers’ columns (Watanabe 2007: 309). It should also be noted that middle- class status in modern Japan was more precarious due to fewer social support services (for example, unemployment insurance began in 1947). Therefore, as Watanabe Shū ko writes, the status of the social category of girls was rather fragile; a girl’s status could easily fall with the death or illness of her father (2007: 305). 9. Even when she is working part-time, as long as her annual earnings are less than 1,300,000 yen (about £7,300 as of March 2015), her duty to con- tribute to a pension is waived. Moreover, when a wife’s annual income is less than 1,030,000 yen (about £5,800 as of March 2015), her husband can receive a preferential rate for his income tax. 10. In an increasingly aging society with a low birth rate, the debates over the change in the pension system have been ongoing, but as of 2015 no change has yet been implemented. 11. The Year 24 Group is not a self-organized group. It is a label used to cat- egorize female artists who started their careers around this time and con- tributed to the development of content and visual aspects of girls’ manga. 12. Snow Child demonstrates another trait of girls’ aesthetics to be explored in the next chapter, namely, the longing for an androgynous body in order to imaginatively disregard female material bodies. The girl protagonist of Snow Child is disguised as a boy. 13. Japanese theatre and the sex business have a long intertwined history. For example, kabuki began in 1603 with female performers, but it was later banned by the government due to the involvement of the performers with prostitution. After it was banned, adolescent boys performed kabuki until it was banned again in the mid seventeenth century due to prostitution. It finally settled on adult men as performers. 14. Here, I agree with Harry Harootunian’s argument that modernity was a phenomenon shared across the globe. He critiques the “time-lag” theory, which presumes that there was a correct model of modernity, that of the West, followed by other, “less developed” nations. He also rejects the idea of “alternative modernities,” which some have argued that these “less developed” nations experienced, because it presumes “exceptionalism and uniqueness” (2000: xvi). Rather, he calls our attention to the “co- existence” of the modern experiences: “[W]hatever and however a society 184 Notes develops, it is simply taking place at the same time as other modernities” (2000: xvi). “What co-eval suggests,” he explains, “is contemporaneity yet the possibility of difference” (2000: xvii). 15. Participants came from six countries (Japan, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia) and from different fields such as traditional and contemporary theatre, dance, and music. Although the script was originally written in Japanese, it was translated into four languages (English, Chinese, Indonesian, Thai) for the multilingual production (Hata 1997: 17–18). 16. Dreamtime in Morishita Studios was directed by Ong, and Kishida partici- pated in the production as general advisor. For details, see my PhD disser- tation, Playing with America: Parody and Mimesis in Contemporary Japanese Women’s Performance (University of California, 2009). 17. She thus defines the symbolic more narrowly than Lacan, who means by the symbolic the broader system of signification, even the culture in general.

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