Girls Return Home: Portrayal of Femininity in Popular Japanese Girls’ Manga and Anime Texts during the 1990s in Hana yori Dango and Fruits Basket

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Notes

¹Two drama series were produced in Taiwan, from 2001, under the title Meteor Garden. Additionally, the four male characters (F4) featured in the Taiwanese drama maintain their popularentertainer status inTaiwan under the same group name.

²Anime adapted from manga series may sometimes differ in narrative content – which may highlight violence that was not depicted in the original manga (as in the case of Fruits Basket). However, the overall portrayal of idealised femininity does not change very much when manga is cross-produced into anime (Hana yori Dango is identical in terms of narrative content). All the images provided in this paper are from the anime series.

³According to the Tokyopop website, the official US distributor of the series, Fruits Basket is the top grossing shōjo manga title sold in the US. Furthermore, among the USA Today 150 Best-Selling Books Database, Fruits Basket ranked at #93 in 2005 and #96 in April, 2006.

⁴Although shōjo manga includes male authorship and readership, it is still considered less acceptable for a male to openly associate himself with the female genre in Japan.

⁵Napier's analysis focuses on Urusei Yatsura, Oh My Goddess and Video Girl Ai, none of which were produced for the shōjo audience.

⁶A study by Mary Grigsby fails to mention the targeted age-group for Nakayoshi readership, which is considered an introductory magazine to manga for pre-adolescent girls. As Schodt states, if the female readership of manga ranges from five to eighteen years old (35), then Nakayoshi is aimed at five years and upwards.

⁷At the time of writing, only the anime series was completed. Although Akito is revealed to be a female at the end of the manga series, she is portrayed as a male throughout the anime series. Thus, I will refer to Akito as a male. However, after the manga series was completed in 2006, I feel strongly that the twist of the narrative only further confirms my analysis on gender as performance.

⁸Kano explains that since theater performance in Japan was related to the male domain, they also took up performing ‘female’ roles. Kano notes that ‘prostitution continued to be associated with the theater, with the male actors available as sexual partners for male patrons, but the practice of onnagata eventually led to the development of a stylised art and made idealised femininity something that was represented by men’ (Kano 2001:5).

1. The Japanese names in this paper follow the Japanese order, which is family name first.