Exploring the " spirits " in shoujo culture – Anime and the bishounen trope (2025)

Mythological identity, demons, gods and the modern world – and at their intersection, the bishounen (" pretty boy ") appears. Yet, when the pretty boy descends from a grotesque imaginary to the contemporary convergence culture (Jenkins, 2006), a new trope is formed. This paper proposes to analyze the bishounen, specifically the supernatural kind, as a new form of aesthetic in the Japanese popular culture, mainly concerning a feminine audience (the shoujo culture or girl/lady culture), an aesthetic which supports the consumerist kawaii or cute culture. Drawing from the idea that the figure of the demon (yokai) is an embodiment of a certain cultural moment – of a time, a feeling, and a place (Foster, 2008), I will consider the " demonic " bishounen the embodiment of the shoujo imaginary, where tradition, cuteness and technology collide. With a focus on Japanese animation series like Kamisama Kiss (2012, 2015) or Inu x Boku Secret Service (2012), but also referencing their source material (the manga volumes), this paper will, also, articulate the new representations of " spirits " , while analyzing how remediation (Bolter and Grusin, 1999) functions in the animated and comic mediums, so as to further create and recreate the bishounen as the product of both cute culture and girl culture.

The Beautiful Shōnen of the Deep and Moonless Night: The Boyish Aesthetic in Modern Japan

The German Journal on Contemporary Asia, 2018

Men increasingly define themselves through the management of their bodies in today’s media-driven society, and bodily ideals operate as a major point of cultural reference —influencing men’s perceptions of their own bodies, and indeed their self-identities. One of the dominant modes of ideal male beauty in contemporary Japan, as embodied by many of the country’s male actors, models, and celebrities, differs from the generalized Western ideal of muscularity; being slender, shōnen-like (boyish), and predominantly kawaii (cute) are in vogue. These clean-cut, boyish demeanors, I argue, visually allude to a type of male identity that is situated in a liminal realm between boyhood and manhood, embodied not only by adolescent boys but also by young men in that timescape between “adolescence” and what some societies see as manhood. The primary aim of this article is to examine a particular sector of the significance of this male beauty in contemporary Japanese popular culture —namely the bishōnen, the beautiful boy positioned between child and adult. While the term bishōnen has been used extensively in its literal sense —any beautiful young man, in studies of the aesthetic imagination of Japanese boyhood —it is much more than just a genre label; it denotes a critical concept and an imagined figure of the boy. This article examines bishōnen as a cultural imagination, a complex ideal of boyish identity in Japanese popular culture, and argues that the way bishōnen is perceived and conceptualized calls into question the widely assumed equation of human beauty with sexual desire — pointing to the potential of bishōnen beauty to be appreciated purely on an aesthetic level.

Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime (review)

Monumenta Nipponica, 2009

Japanese visual culture: explorations in the world of manga and anime

Choice Reviews Online, 2008

Cuteness as Counterculture in Anthropomorphic Japanese Animation

Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theory, Media, 2021

Big eyes, flying tanukis, talking teddy bears, angry red pandas, and the list carries on. Anthropomorphic characters laugh and cry, search for retribution, fight evil magicians, try to stop experiments, fall in love, or just struggle with work while reenacting our human emotions on the big screen; usually, in the Japanese animation context, in kawaii or “cute” form. Although the aesthetics and use of kawaii has gained its place in the mainstream consumption of Japanese popular culture as “pure,” “childlike,” or “adorable,” this artistic and narrative device has a long history of both consumption and subversion when exposed as empty, superficial, and flawed. In this paper, I propose critically exploring the “cuteness” or kawaii tradition in Japanese animation, as a site of resistance and a form of counterculture. Through a close reading of such animated series as Aggretsuko (2018), BNA: Brand New Animal (2020) or Dorohedoro (2020), I argue that their anthropomorphic characters and disturbing narratives transgress once more into the realm of the opposite. Sharon Kinsella highlights cute style as “anti-social,” and a means to escape real life (1995). I pose the question: can it function as a form of social, ideological and political critique? Scott McCloud’s concept of iconic abstraction (1994) becomes then instrumental in analyzing these characters through the effects of the non-human representation in comic books, as a form of drawing attention to the essential “meaning” of that representation. I further argue that the Japanese animations above shed light on the dominant narratives in the public sphere while questioning their legitimacy, thus transforming kawaii in a subversive mechanism.

Kawaii Aesthetics from Japan to Europe: Theory of the Japanese “Cute” and Transcultural Adoption of Its Styles in Italian and French Comics Production and Commodified Culture Goods

Arts

Gender Bending and Exoticism in Japanese Girls’ Comics

“Japanese Postmodernism, Anime and Culture Hybridations: An Occidentalist Aesthetic Study of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure”

International Journal of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences Studies, 2021

This article is an aesthetic and historical analysis of the consciousness of identity, culture and art in Japan from its period of change from the Tokugawa era to the Meiji era, as well as the stage of World War II and the Postwar. The postmodern aesthetics of Japanese anime focuses on a constant cultural hybridization between the West and the East, where the notion of what defines part of Japanese culture is the result of an interaction of literary, cinematic, musical and cultural aesthetic motifs and tropes of the Western world.

Shōjo Across Media: Exploring "Girl" Practices in Contemporary Japan ed. by Jaqueline Berndt et al

Journal of Japanese Studies, 2021

Reality Bonsai : Animism and science-fiction as a blueprint for media art in contemporary Japan

2018

Spirits, Modern Monsters and Saving the World: Re-defining Traditional Japanese Culture in Millennial Anime Film