The Moé Manifesto

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The Moé Manifesto Page 3

by Patrick W. Galbraith


  IMI MOYA

  but before the Second World War,

  Y YAF

  OOFY

  Japanese print media targeting

  SESTTER

  boys was fi lled with images of ex-

  UROCCOU

  tremely feminine masculinity. A

  good example is the work of Taka--

  batake Kasho, who was a popular

  illustrator from the 1910s to the

  1930s. Though these are prewar

  images, they resonate with the

  Takabatak

  T

  e K

  contemporary shojo manga that

  asho’s beautiful b

  eautiful boys

  oy

  FROM SOCIAL MOVEMENTS TO SHOJO MANGA

  MOE_1_24_29.indd 25

  13/2/14 9:45 AM

  26

  feature beautiful boy charac-

  ters. Nor are they dissimilar

  to the kinds of illustrations

  you get in “boys’ love” manga.

  But at the time, these images

  represented the strong young

  men of a proud military na-

  tion, and before 1945 you

  would often see this type of

  character in war scenes. After

  1945, shonen manga (manga

  for boys) didn’t feature many

  war scenes, but when you

  get to the 1970s, you have

  popular shonen manga about

  school gangs and martial arts,

  a world of bodily violence. Or

  you have stories about giant

  robots, a world of mechanical

  violence.

  PG: What was it like in Japan

  Takabatak

  T k b t

  e K

  k

  asho’s b

  K sh ’s beautiful b

  tif l boys

  s

  in the 1970s?

  I MUSEUM

  IK: In the 1960s there had been huge social movements in Japan OYA YF against wars in Asia and our security treaty with America. After OY

  ES

  a decade of demonstrations and protests, the student movement T

  URO

  died off, leaving a sense of fatigue on the political left. Going C

  into the 1970s, there was a sense that young men had run out of steam—even their manga weren’t that interesting. On the other hand, girls’ culture started to expand rapidly. Con sumer culture was on the rise, and with it so-called cute culture ( kawaii bunka)—Hello Kitty and fancy goods. This was also a time when shojo manga was really maturing. Women such as Oshima Yumiko, Hagio Moto, Takemiya Keiko, and Yamagishi Ryoko were all creating manga at this time. The early 1970s was the peak of ITO KIMIO

  MOE_1_24_29.indd 26

  13/2/14 9:45 AM

  27

  the shojo manga scene in Japan, overshadowing anything going on in shonen manga.

  PG: I understand that you were reading shojo manga, too.

  IK: Right. Shojo manga provided an outlet for my anxieties about gender at the time. I was probably also critical of the macho world depicted in shonen manga. My unease with gender norms drew me to genres targeting female readers such as “boys’ love”

  by writers such as Hagio Moto. There were a few others around me in the student movement also reading shojo manga, but it is a fact that most of society thought w

  y

  g

  e were strang

  ge. More men,

  The 1

  The

  Th 960s

  0s

  960

  0 : a

  decade of pro

  decad

  f pro-

  test in Japan

  test

  apan

  A

  SHINSENSHF

  OY

  EST

  UROC

  FROM SOCIAL MOVEMENTS TO

  OCI

  IAL MOVEMENTS TO SHOJO

  SHO

  MANGA

  JO

  O MANGA

  MOE_1_24_29.indd 27

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  28

  mostly college students, started reading shojo manga a little later.

  It wasn’t that big of a trend, but they were reading Mutsu A-ko, who writes manga with a feminine touch ( otomechikku), all about romance and everyday life, rather than the epic adventures you’d get in shonen manga. Men were searching for alternatives and this is one of the things they found.

  PG: You recall being isolated and

  d

  thought of as strange, but you

  weren’t alone in read ing shojo

  manga. Harada Teruo, the fi rst

  president of the Comic Market,

  N

  Tokyo’s twice-yearly gathering

  UKAKAG

  for pro du cers of fanzines, was

  O

  /SH

  a huge fan of Hagio Moto. In

  IOGA

  fact, he participated in the fan

  H

  TOO

  production of an animated

  M579

  version of her manga November

  1

  ©O

  Gymnasium that was screened

  at the fi rst Comic Market in

  SHINZO

  NA

  1975. Many of the contributors

  MOH

  to the legendary fanzine

  T

  Meikyu were into shojo manga.

  Author Otsuka Eiji wrote a

  book about the premiums

  Hagio Moto wrote “b

  given away with shojo manga

  oys’ love” manga

  magazines. Why do you think that so

  many men were into it?

  IK: Girls’ culture was more interesting. Immediately after the Second World War, boys’ culture was far more abundant and diverse in Japan. From the 1970s, however, the amount of shojo manga increased dramatically as girls found a place for themselves in the new consumer culture. Boys and men started to borrow from them as they searched for their own place in a changing society.

  ITO KIMIO

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  29

  PG: How would you position otaku in this larger fi eld?

  IK: One of the hallmarks of today’s consumer society is that people maintain a certain amount of distance from each other while using popular culture to mediate interactions and make friends.

  Otaku—the hardcore fans of manga and anime who appeared in the 1970s—are an example of this dynamic. Looking at this issue from a gender studies perspective, otaku are those boys and men who are attracted to the bright colors of girls’ culture and reject the monotone of adult male culture. But otaku maintain physical distance from the opposite sex and instead they form intimate relationships with fi ctional characters from manga and anime.

  Otaku are said to have a “two-dimensional complex” ( nijigen konpurekkusu), meaning that they prefer fi ctional characters over real women. To me, this culture of maintaining a distance from the human body and idolizing fi ctional characters connects to what we now call moé.

  PG: So can you clarify your defi nition of moé?

  IK: Moé is a feeling for two-dimensional entities. One doesn’t have to risk getting hurt in a relationship with a fi ctional character, and can also control the character. Otaku are not good at navigating relationships with real women, but they can manage fi ctional women.

  PG: And would you argue that this is a more general phenomenon in the world today?

  IK: Something similar can be observed in societies where people spend more time interacting with media and technology than they spend interacting with people. Moé almost seems like a mi-gration into the two-dimensional world. The physical body is left behind, and along with it what it used to mean to be a man in relation to women. This seems like anoth
er example of seeking an alternative to masculinity, but instead of just reading shojo manga as the young men of my generation did, these men are actually entering into relationships with characters from shojo manga.

  FROM SOCIAL MOVEMENTS TO SHOJO MANGA

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  Interview with

  Kotani Mari

  NNA

  CHUM SZT

  FRI

  Kotani Mari, born in 1958, is a Japanese sci-fi critic and one of the founders of the Japanese Association of

  Feminist Science Fiction. Her books, Seibo Evangelion Y

  (Evangelion as the immaculate virgin), published in 1997, and B

  PH

  Techno-gothic, published in 2005, put forward a feminist per-RAGOT

  spective on popular culture. In this interview, Kotani recalls O

  PH

  her own experiences in the early Japanese sci-fi fan com -

  munity and suggests that men labeled otaku are similar to women because they are marginalized in society.

  MOE MANIFESTO

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  Memories of Youth

  A Feminist Perspective on Otaku

  Patrick W. Galbraith (PG): How did

  you fi rst develop an interest in

  feminism?

  Kotani Mari (KM): I was confronted

  by the preferential treatment of

  men when I worked in a company

  in my twenties. It didn’t matter in

  school, where we were all basi-

  cally equal and distinguished by

  .

  grades, but in the company men

  DT, L

  were getting the good posts and

  USEO

  being promoted faster. In addi-

  H

  ZINE

  tion to this, everyone was telling

  AGA

  me to get married. I graduated

  M

  Seibo Evangelion

  ©

  from a college of science with a

  degree to practice pharmacology, thinking this would be a life-long career, but when I entered the world of work I was shocked at the pressure I felt to abandon that path. This heightened my awareness of gender issues at a time when feminist ideas were gaining ground in Japan.

  PG: You also brought feminism and gender critiques to discussions of popular culture.

  KM: I am a fan of sci-fi , an otaku, and I often get together with other sci-fi fans to talk about our interests. In these discussions, I can see that there’s a gap between the way men and women read sci-fi , because of the gap in their experiences of the world.

  MEMORIES OF YOUTH

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  32

  Women tend to focus on characters and human relationships, while men focus on robots, special effects, technology, and monsters. The genre of manga for girls, shojo manga, focuses on character psychology and relationships, and girls grow up reading these stories. Female manga artist Hagio Moto creates sci-fi manga that women enjoy because she basically just brings the interests of the shojo manga reader to her sci-fi stories. Hagio is known for her sensitivity to issues of gender, and in addition to writing sci-fi , she was one of the pioneers of “boys’ love” manga, which girls were crazy about in the 1970s. Some boys liked them too—especially the intelligent ones.

  PG: You describe yourself as an otaku. What does that mean?

  KM: When I got into sci-fi , the word otaku was not widely used, and it was not used in a positive way. It referred more to collectors, like someone who has every item in a collection and keeps lists and catalogs of the items. Sci-fi fans would have meetings to discuss particular works, and there were people with outstanding knowledge who were capable of making insightful comments.

  They were called sci-fi maniacs, and were especially respected.

  Others were called sci-fi fans, because they were enthusiastic, but not as deep. The word otaku was sort of a negative assess-ment of collectors that had access to materials but were not able to talk about sci-fi in an interesting way. They were strange and a little annoying. Eventually, however, all fans of certain forms of popular culture, especially manga and anime, came to be known as otaku. That is usually how people use the term today.

  PG: In your writing about the gender dynamics of otaku culture you have compared otaku to women. Can you explain what you mean?

  KM: I did not mean that otaku are women, just that they are not ordinary men. In Japan, ordinary men adhere to the ideals of so-called salaryman society—in which men graduate from a university, enter a company, get married, buy a house, have children, KOTANI MARI

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  TD.

  AN, LKU

  AKGOH

  © S

  Sci-fi fans often catalog

  fi fans often catalog kaiju

  MEMORIES OF YOUTH

  MOE_2_30-37.indd 33

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  34

  send their sons to university, and expect to receive a pension and be taken care of by their wives

  when they retire. Otaku are the outsiders of salaryman society; they do not adhere to

  these gender norms. In the 1970s and 1980s,

  the range of behavior acceptable for men and

  women was relatively narrow. In those de-

  cades, otaku were seen as dropouts or

  troublemakers. In the article you refer

  to, I made the point that both women

  and otaku were marginalized by sala-

  ryman society during this era. The

  situation changed, however,

  in the 1990s, when gender

  norms loosened.

  PG: Some have said that

  since the anime Neon Gen-

  esis Evangelion fi rst aired in

  EM

  1995, male fans have been more inter-

  A

  NON

  ested in characters and character rela-

  Y B

  tions. [See Honda Toru, page 119 and

  TIONA

  TR

  Azuma Hiroki, page 175.] Such otaku

  SU

  ILL

  are said to be into moé. What is your

  opinion on this?

  KM: I don’t think that moé represents a dramatic break in the male approach to

  fantasy. I think that male otaku treat characters the same way that they treat any

  other object of their attention—they try to

  master them by memorizing information

  about them, whether they are fans of kaiju

  (monsters from special effects movies and TV

  shows), idol chasers, or otaku who are into manga and anime characters. The equivalents of moé KOTANI MARI

  MOE_2_30-37.indd 34

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  EMA

  NONY BS

  TIONA

  TRSU

  ILL

  A kaiju reimagined as cute girl

  characters when I was younger were kaiju and robots. There are many different kaiju in special-effects TV shows and fi lms, and fans of my generation were devoted to cataloging them. To me, it seems like kaiju have been replaced with fi ctional girl characters from manga, anime, and games, whose details are cataloged by male fans in the same way. Whether you are dissecting a kaiju or breaking down a character design to isolate the discrete moé elements, the basic impulse is the same. Boys and men also do this with robots and with idols.

  PG: Are you suggesting that idols are much the same as fi ctional characters?

  KM: I don’t really see much difference between idols and fi ctional characters. An idol exists only in the media and is distant from real women. Like fans that worship images of idols, moé otaku a
re not committing to the real girl, but rather the fi ctional girl character. I think that moé is the phenomenon of directing your desires toward media images. Producers modify MEMORIES OF YOUTH

  MOE_2_30-37.indd 35

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  36

  media images of women according to what consumers like. The NAPA

  feedback loop has tightened considerably, and these images are J

  TION

  now extremely sophisticated. Moé characters respond to very IA

  SOC

  specifi c fantasies in a way that reality cannot. You could say that S AIL

  these images of women are independent of reality.

  A

  NT

  WI TYS

  PG: What do you think of the focus on youthfulness, which exTER

  tends from idols to fi ctional characters, and seems to be a cen-COU

  tral tenet of moé culture?

  KM: The period of life regarded as most valuable in Japan is from middle school to high school. This is the period of adolescence, of youth, that is the most pure. The world seems to be so full of promise, you know? Everyone has hopes and dreams, which they have not yet compromised by joining the institutional culture of the salaryman society. Two things seem universal. One, this is the time when people start to fall in love, and two, everyone is wearing a school uniform.

  o

  rm. The uniform is r

  The uniform i

  eall

  s r

  y ambigu-

  eally ambigu-

  ous in Japan. Wearing a uniform is all a

  o

  bout standar

  rm is all a

  dization,

  bout standar

  of

  dization, of

  course, but at the same time the uniform is tied to this period the uniform is tied to this period

  of personal awakening in our li

  r l v

  i es.

  v

  Ev

  es.

  er

  Ev y

  er one

  y

  feels something about the

  uniform that they wore

  and saw others wear every

  day. Also, the uniform is

  only worn in middle school

  and high school. There are

  no uniforms in elementary

  schools or universities. So,

  the uniform is worn only

  between the ages of thirteen

  and eighteen, an age at which

  one’s experiences are so in-

  tense that the image of a young

 

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