Girl and Boy, Irrupted: Discourse on Youth in Postwar Japan

My paper describes postwar Japanese culture's formulations of youth, as seen in adult magazines versus girls' magazines (shôjo zasshi). In popular discourse, Japanese youth were often depicted in two conflicting ways, as embodied in the shôjo (adolescent girl) and the furyô (the delinquent). In the postwar years, Japan saw the rise of youth countercultures. Conservatives voiced their anxieties over maintaining social order at a time when the country was experiencing radical changes. The discourse on youth is a product of a contradiction embedded in the reconstruction project: how to maintain elements of social values that, even as they had guided a devastating war and needed to be disavowed, had provided a template for social stability that was as necessary as ever after the war. These adult concerns were projected onto the furyô. From the Occupation period to the 1960s, the furyô regularly appeared in mass media as disruptors of social order. From the adult perspective, the furyô was a threat to Japan's postwar success. At the same time, the furyô exuded an air of bravado and liberation. This figure exposed conflicting expectations placed on youth: to respect authority even while staying innocent of the older generation's mistakes in respecting the authorities “too much.” Adopting certain postwar American media images that glamorized sexual and individual struggles, the furyô was everything that the model adolescent girl, the shôjo, was not: nihilistic, anti-establishment, and impulsive; they were criminal, blasé and unsentimental in their sexual predations, with little sense of social ties and obligations as they cavorted in volatile dog-eat-dog zoku (tribes). Despite (and because) the furyô and the shôjo occupied polar ends in popular culture, they became intertwined in the discourse of postwar shôjo zasshi, in stories generated by girl readers and in roundtable discussions.