Introduction: Representing Youth and Gender in Japanese Popular Culture

Abstract

This special issue evolved from a panel on “Youth, Gender, and Power in Japanese Popular Culture” at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference in 2017. While the original panel focused closely on girls’ culture in Japan, engaging particularly with media representations of the “shōjo” (girl), our commitment to interrogating the networks of power around female-gendered youth in Japanese popular culture led us to wider considerations of the category of “youth.” The articles in this issue present new ways of reading a variety of images of girls and young women in Japanese popular culture, from 1940s films and 1950s pulp magazines to twenty-first-century shōjo manga, paying particular attention to the issue of representation and its often-conflicted relationship with lived experience. Examining the interrelation of youth and gender is a timely concern. In Japan, young people are raising their voices with increasing regularity and persuasive force on issues as varied as nuclear power, climate change, and sexual harassment. “Youthquake,” the term coined by Diana Vreeland in 1965 to describe the influence of youth on popular culture, recently returned to popular attention as the Oxford English Dictionary’s “Word of the Year” for 2017, suggesting that widening youth influence on popular discourse is a global