Shōjo Modernity: Gender, Sexuality, and Health in the Girls’ Media of Early 20th-Century Japan

This paper explores girlhood as a critical site for interrogating gender and sexuality in early twentieth-century Japan. Adolescent girls first became visible as a social group in the 1910s and ‘20s, when the rise of a “new middle class” led to the rapid increase of middle-class daughters entering secondary schools. According to imperial degree, they were to study the skills necessary to become “Good Wives, Wise Mothers.” Meanwhile girls’ increased literacy opened a new market for magazines aimed specifically at girls. These magazines encouraged reader participation through columns for fiction, poetry, illustration, and letters; thus girls actively participated in their own identity-making. One notable element of their distinctive popular culture, called shōjo culture by historians, was its celebration of romances between older schoolgirls and their underclassmen, a practice that was widespread at girls’ schools. During this same period, however, influential works of European sexology were translated and circulated among a layman audience for the first time. Sexology espoused the theory that homosexual acts engendered physiological change, eventually making homosexuals not only unwilling but physically unable to reproduce. Homosexuality therefore threatened Japan’s reproductive future, and conflicted directly with the state’s reproductive gender ideology of “Good Wife, Wise Mother.”

In this context, schoolgirl romances came to be increasingly problematized, to the point that some girls’ schools in Tokyo forbade different grades from having recess at the same time. However, shōjo culture resisted this new epistemology. The best-loved stories published in girls’ magazines continued to be those centering same-sex romance, and letters from readers expressed confusion over why educators and parents sought to curtail their behavior. By focusing on girls’ celebration of homoeroticism in media aimed at adolescent girls, I explore the potential of girlhood as an alternative gendered identity to the state orthodoxy of motherhood.