The Mul-Faceted Universe of Shōjo Manga Thus begins Tōma no shinzō ( トーマの心臓), “The Heart of Thomas,” a shōjo manga ( 少女マンガ), or Japanese girls’ comic, created by female cartoonist HAGIO Moto ( 萩尾望都) in 1974. Just twenty-four years old at the me, Hagio had no way of knowing that she was helping to mold the history of late Tweneth Century Japanese culture. “The Heart of Thomas” is now considered a classic of shōjo manga, a genre poorly understand outside Japan, yet as important to understanding contemporary Japanese women and gender relaons as is any social, cultural, economic, or legal development you could name. One common misconcepon is that shōjo manga were “invented” by TEZUKA Osamu, the so-called “God of Manga,” best known for such works as Astro-Boy 『( 鉄腕アトム』), Kimba the White Lion ( 『ジャングル大 帝』), Buddha (『ブッダ』), and Phoenix (『火の鳥』 ). Tezuka’s 1954 shōjo manga Princess Knight ( 『リボンの 騎士』 ) was indeed an enormously popular and influenal work, but was by no means the first shōjo manga. Simple humor strips for girls had existed since at least the second decade of the Tweneth Century. By the 1930’s, these strips had become increasingly sophiscated, arguably climaxing with MATSUMOTO Katsuji’s 1934 “The Mysterious Clover” ( 松本かつぢ「？ ( なぞ ) のクローバー」 ), a 16-page adventure story featuring a young girl playing a role similar to that of the Scarlet Pimpernel or Zorro. It is important to remember that in the case of Japan, what we now call shōnen manga and shōjo manga magazines evolved from general magazines geared at boys and girls, respecvely. Just as girls and boys were educated separately unl the end of World War II, the magazines they read were also segregated, and though coeducaon is now the norm in Japan, boys’ and girls’ manga magazines remain, with few excepons, disnct, at least superficially. Since these magazines and the manga they included evolved along very different paths, there are marked differences in the two genres of manga. Whereas shōnen manga tend to be acon oriented, shōjo manga tend to focus on human relaonships. Heterosexual romance is of course the most common theme, but friendship and family relaonships also play prominent roles, and there is a whole subgenre of manga, most commonly known today as “boys’ love,” comprised enrely of stories of male homosexual romance, created by female arsts for female readers. The emphasis on relaonships has been prominent since the first simple strips began to appear in the early Tweneth Century, but, while it may be difficult to imagine now, heterosexual romance was rare--indeed, almost taboo--unl the 1960s. In the prewar period, readers of manga were small children who had not yet learned the pleasure of reading text-only ficon and non-ficon. Even aſter the war, when Tezuka had launched a boom in themacally sophiscated “story manga,” it was assumed throughout the 1950s that children would “graduate” from manga by the me they were thirteen or fourteen. And since the heroines of shōjo manga were almost always girls between the ages of ten and twelve, romance occurred only between older supporng characters, such as elder siblings. Whereas manga for boys have always been about acon and humor, shōjo manga have undergone several dramac metamorphoses. Prewar shōjo manga were short humor strips, usually set in the home, neighborhood, or school. The arsts were all men. In the wake of the postwar Tezuka revoluon, however, the creators of shōjo manga were under pressure to create longer, more dramac stories. While some chose to simply create longer humor strips, others turned to popular girls’ novels of the day as a model for melodramac shōjo manga. These manga featured sweet, innocent preteen heroines, torn from the safety of family and tossed from one perilous circumstance to another, unl finally rescued (usually by a kind, handsome young man) and reunited with their families. By the mid 1960s, however, manga were becoming more and more popular, and it was now common for children to connue reading manga well into their teens. These older girls were no longer interested in stories of passive lile damsels in distress. They wanted stories that were relevant to their real lives. It was NISHITANI Yoshiko, one of the few women creang manga in the early 1960s, who gave them what they wanted, and in doing so created the genre that is sll the mainstay of shōjo manga: the school-girl romance. Nishitani’s stories featured teenaged Japanese girls dealing with friendships, family, school, and, yes, falling in love. By the end of the 1960s, manga had developed into a mega-boom. What had been general children’s magazines had gradually transformed into manga magazines. The growth in popularity of these magazines accelerated when publishers, in order to compete with the new medium of television, switched from a monthly format to a weekly format. But the demand for manga could not be met by the arsts of the me. New talent was needed. At the same me, societal atudes towards women had changed. The soluon to the publishers’ problem was obvious. What had been a trickle of women manga arsts in the 1950s and early 1960s became a flood as the decade ended, and aenon soon focused on a vaguely defined group of young arsts who came to be known as the "Fabulous Forty-Niners," because many of them were born in or around 1949. Arsts such as HAGIO Moto, OH’SHIMA Yumiko, and TAKEMIYA Keiko began to experiment with new themes, stories and styles, rejecng the limitaons of tradional definions of the shōjo manga genre and appealing to increasingly older readers. They played with noons of gender and sexuality, adapted such "boys' genres" as science ficon, and explored some of the weighest issues of human existence.