For those of us who don’t read Japanese, the Mainichi Daily News Wai Wai column is a great way to sample the trashier aspects of the Land of the Rising Sun, as they present translations of articles from popular magazines. This article, drawn from the women’s magazine Josei Jishin, focuses on female otaku, who now call themselves otome (“maidens”) and have staked out their own small section of Tokyo, an alley full of comics shops that specialize in shonen-ai (boys love). (Hence the haltingly alliterative headline “Geek girls read into new gender roles with gay guys’ manga.”)
An interesting aspect of this tale is the popularity of doujinshi, fan-drawn manga that often use characters from established manga.
“I’d say there’s less of the visual appeal of manga targeting younger readers, but a feature of the business is the large number of women who find the relationships between the characters enjoyable,” Otome Road’s Okuma tells Josei Jishin.
“Many of the manga are sort of like sidebar stories for the real characters they’re copying. Many of the characters build up a real devoted following, and the most popular characters are nearly always really passive types.”
I find that last comment, about the most popular characters being passive, intriguing. I haven’t read any doujinshi, but it does lead me to wonder whether Japanese women are getting fed up with wimpy characters and are taking matters into their own hands. It seems like Otome Road would be fertile ground for slash fiction as well.
(On a side note, perhaps I was too quick to describe Josei Jishin as “trashy,” as one website describes it as “Weekly magazine for women who are in pursuit of peacefulness and truthfulness.” As opposed to U.S. women’s magazines, which are all about finding just the right shade of eyeshadow (sigh). Apparently in Japan, the search for tranquility doesn’t preclude neon cover art and celebrity news.)
