The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 73, No. 1 (February) 2014: 143–164.
© The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2013 doi:10.1017/S0021911813001708
Magic, Shōjo, and Metamorphosis: Magical Girl
Anime and the Challenges of Changing Gender
Identities in Japanese Society
KUMIKO SAITO
The magical girl, a popular genre of Japanese television animation, has provided female
ideals for young girls since the 1960s. Three waves in the genre history are outlined, with
a focus on how female hero figures reflect the shifting ideas of gender roles in society. It is
argued that the genre developed in close connection to the culture of shōjo (female adolescence) as an antithesis to adulthood, in which women are expected to undertake domestic
duties. The paper then incorporates contexts for male-oriented fan culture of shōjo and
anime aesthetics that emerged in the 1980s. The recent tendencies for gender bending
and genre crossing raise critical questions about the spread of the magical girl trope as
cute power. It is concluded that the magical girl genre encompasses contesting values
of gender, and thus the genre’s empowerment fantasy has developed symbiotically with
traditional gender norms in society.
I
MAGES OF JAPANESE WOMEN
have drastically changed during the global spread of Japanese media since World War II, from subservient wives and geishas in kimonos to a
large variety of female characters emerging from the increasingly accessible market of
Japanese popular culture where innovative technology and fetish visual culture intersect.
Today, the prominence of fighting female characters, most visible in the relatively unrealistic side of Japanese media culture, such as anime, manga, and video games, generates a
new stereotype of Japanese women—although they are “Japanese” only so far as their
putative origin is Japan. The difficulty of approaching these new venues of popular
culture lies in their art of “misrepresentation,” that is, flat and exaggerated visual
styles, fantastic storylines, and, most importantly, their general disjunction from real-life
women in Japanese society. Whereas interpretive links between female characters and
women, well established in feminist studies of film and literature, remain essential
resources for understanding functions of gender in text, this new phase of pop culture
challenges established scholarly approaches to studies of the relationship between
media and society.
One of the most striking gaps between Japanese women and female characters in
Japanese popular visuals can be observed in how the underrepresentation of “real”
women, as reported in statistics and confirmed by common stereotypes, is contrasted
to visual representations where empowered female heroes effortlessly surpass men in
Kumiko Saito (kumikos@bgsu.edu) is Adjunct Faculty of Japanese at Bowling Green State University.
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Kumiko Saito
physical power and social status.1 One of the key elements that largely helped spread
these contradictory images of Japanese culture is the “magical girl,” a well-established
genre that has grown and birthed offshoots in its half-century-long history in Japan’s television market.
Magical girl animation, called mahō shōjo and majokko anime in Japan, is a mainstay
of television animation programming that distinctly targets female prepubescent viewers.
The conventions of the magical girl genre, especially the elaborate description of metamorphosis that enables an ordinary girl to turn into a supergirl, have been widely imitated
across various genres and media categories. The success of Sailor Moon in the North
American market triggered the first wave of cute female-hero action programs, such as
Powerpuff Girls (1998–2005) and Totally Spies (2001–present), in the United States
and Europe (Loos 2000, 1–2). The ages, genders, and nationalities of anime viewers
have increasingly diversified to the degree that one cannot infer types of audience
from the content of anime.
The basic definition of the genre, however, has remained mostly unchanged. While
Western concepts of “genre” may entice people to define the magical girl based on plots
and settings, the most practical way to identify this category is primarily by means of its
business structure. Many of Japan’s anime programs for children are founded on toy marketing that capitalizes on gender-divided sales of character merchandise and gadgets used
by characters in television programs. Unlike the United States and some European
countries, where advertising directed at children is seen as highly problematic, it is
best to consider Japanese magical girl anime as twenty-five-minute advertisements for
toy merchandise. Japan’s outdated production system of animation necessitates approximately a $10,000 deficit out of a $100,000 budget per episode, and the financial gap is
barely turned into profit through sales of copyrighted goods (Tada 2002, 81). Some of
the most notable examples are the alliance of Bandai and Sunrise Studio’s Gundam
series (1979–present) as well as Bandai’s investment in magical girl anime, such as the
Sailor Moon series (Bishōjo senshi Sērāmūn, 1992–97) and the Precure series (Purikyua,
2004–present). The magical girl genre’s backbone consists of the marketing strategy to
exploit viewer interest specific to a certain gender and age group, mainly girls between
four and nine, judging from the targeted ages of the magical girl toy merchandise. The
careful exploitation of feminine and masculine ideals in children’s television programs
has established gender as perhaps the most powerful and conspicuous ideological tool
1
The 2009 Gender Gap Index shows Japan ranked only 101st among 134 countries in the level of
women’s empowerment, juxtaposed by Senegal and Malaysia, while other industrial nations rank at
the top (Hausmann, Tyson, and Zahidi 2009). Japanese women’s labor participation and political
representation have been exceptionally low in the global scale for a country that far exceeds the
average in the level of women’s education and health care (Chiavacci 2005; Inglehart and Norris
2003). Despite an equal-employment law passed in 1986, many Japanese companies continue
with separate gender tracks for men and women that presume female workers’ retirement at the
time of marriage or first pregnancy. Working and educated women tend to delay marriage, while
many mothers continue to regard their employment as a threat to childrearing (Amano 1997; Holloway et al. 2006; Nomaguchi 2006; K. Suzuki 1996). Whereas women’s participation rate in labor
has gradually increased, this seeming success is mostly attributed to the growing trend of women
delaying marriage and childbearing (Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training 2007; Japan
Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2009).
Magic, Shōjo, and Metamorphosis
145
that defines and classifies media culture for children (M. Saito 1998, 10). Despite its seemingly unoriginal and repetitive story lines typical of television programs for children, the
magical girl genre has been an active site of contesting ideas surrounding gender roles
and identities.
In public discourse, the general definition of the magical girl anime tends to
solely focus on the content. Largely influenced by Tōei Studio productions in the
1960s and 1970s, mahō shōjo as a genre signifies (usually serial television) anime
programs in which a nine- to fourteen-year-old ordinary girl accidentally acquires
supernatural power; majokko suggests the alternative setting that the female protagonist’s superhuman power derives from her pedigree as a princess of a magical
kingdom or a similar scenario. In either pattern, the plot often revolves around
the way she wields her power to save people from a threat while maintaining her
secret identity. She frequently uses magical empowerment gadgets, such as wands
and accessories (to be sold as toys), often accompanied by little animal pets (to be
sold as toys).
Despite its firm visibility and popularity in Japanese society, the magical girl has been
mostly neglected. The existing few scholarly works can be divided between two basic
theoretical applications: feminist politics and emergent studies of fan culture. In feminist
studies, female characters are often regarded as reflections or ideal models of actual
women. This interpretive link invites the argument that strong female characters in
anime evidence women’s empowerment in recent Japanese society. Susan Napier
(2005, 33) argues, for example, that “[p]opular youth-oriented anime series such as the
1980s Cutey Honey and the 1990s Sailor Moon show images of powerful young
women (albeit highly sexualized in the case of Cutey Honey) that anticipate genuine,
although small, changes in women’s empowerment over the last two decades and certainly suggest alternatives to the notion of Japanese women as passive and domesticated.”
Kotani Mari (2006, 165–69) examines Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997) as a recent
example of girls’ anime that possibly subverts gender norms and conventional sexual politics for women. These arguments tend to identify transformation, a common device that
changes the female protagonist from a mediocre girl to a cute warrior, as an identity transcendence that undermines fixed traditional gender roles. Although these are attractive
claims, the major problem of the premise lies in how difficult it is to hypothesize such
reflexive connections between women’s gender roles and the popularity of fighting
female heroes.
Some scholars question whether the magical girls are really empowered. Napier
repeatedly insists on the empowering effect of Cutey Honey’s transformation, yet
finally concludes that the eroticism and nudity emphasized in the transformation of
Cutey Honey “sends mixed messages” (Napier 2005, 75). A more critical analysis is
presented in Anne Allison’s discussion of Sailor Moon, in which she defines the
battle heroine as “a self-indulgent pursuer of fantasies and dreams through consumption of merchandise” (Allison 2006, 130). While male superheroes, like the
Power Rangers, transform to change their body into a weapon to serve a higher goal,
“the process [of a girl hero’s transformation] is more a ‘makeover’ than a ‘power-up’”
(138). From a Japanese feminist perspective, Saito Minako (1998, 41) points out
that children’s television programs reinforce fixed gender roles functioning in
actual society, thereby teaching girls to become a good daughter at home and a good
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Kumiko Saito
OL2 at work. She argues that the female protagonist in the magical girl genre reconfirms
the values of femininity, which teaches girls to envision marriage and domestic life as a
desirable goal once they have passed the adolescent stage. Compared to female heroes
who are cute juvenile girls, Saito continues, women in the enemy force, whether in
magical girl programs or the Power Rangers series, are adult women wearing heavy
makeup and obsessed with careerism: they are, simply put, the women who failed to
be a wife or a mother. According to these arguments, the seemingly empowered girl
heroes in anime covertly teach girls to pursue fashion, romance, and consumption
until marriage and, once married, to stay at home as a good wife and mother.
A contrasting strand of theories stems from a few cutting-edge pop culture criticisms
that deal with fan viewers in Japan known as otaku. Otaku is a term that originated in the
early 1980s wave of subcultures that marked a new type of fan consumers. These fans
actively seek comprehensive knowledge and often have erotic fantasies about visual and
textual products, thereby differentiating themselves from “normal” consumers. Saito
Tamaki (2000, 258–59) proposes the idea that anime and manga are produced and consumed within an imagined autonomous world of representations detached from what
we generally recognize as reality. Accordingly, the abundance of eroticism and violence
in anime, for example, does not necessarily result from a projection of consumers’ (or producers’) desire, but rather from representations of sexuality created and consumed in their
own self-enclosed economy of desire. Saito further suggests that sexuality in anime, disengaged from sexual desire in reality, helps constitute the sense of reality in the fantastic text.
In a similar milieu, Azuma Hiroki (2007, 184) argues that, unlike old-fashioned viewing
practices in which viewers find meanings in stories and characters, otaku fans rearrange
elements of story and character into fragmented data at surface-level small narratives.
This model also assumes that the self-propelled network of representations is detached
from objects of representation: that is, flat cuties in visual text produce a system of
desire independent of the desire for women in three-dimensional reality. These
approaches suggest that the current form of fandom surrounding anime-style female characters necessitates the consumers’ indifference or unresponsiveness to reality. It is further
possible that unoriginal fetish cute girls are endlessly produced and consumed so as to
sustain the ideological wall between “real life” and the utopia of character fetishism.
The two theoretical frameworks above clearly collide in one respect. On the one
hand, feminist theories commonly examine how visual text embodies (or disembodies)
women, with emphasis on how children learn gender roles in Japanese society. On the
other hand, fan culture theories primarily examine adult male fan activity that endorses
the alienating effect between representation and reality. This essay adds a historical perspective based on simple and orthodox academic principles that state that a genre or
concept forms through complicated historical processes and individual texts. The
advent of the magical girl genre in the 1960s neatly overlaps with the history of television
in Japan. Countless television series have been released since television became a standard in home electronics, yet the aforementioned two frameworks respectively cover a
limited range of viewership and textual examples. A historical look at the genre presents
2
“OL” is a Japanese word that stands for “office lady,” which refers to female office workers off the
career track whose tasks often include serving tea and making photocopies.
Magic, Shōjo, and Metamorphosis
147
a new facet to discrepancies between the two theories. The following discussion is divided
into three eras corresponding to the periodization of the genre’s development, which are
the 1960s–70s (Showa 40s), the 1980s (50s to the end of Showa), and the 1990s to the
present (Heisei era). This layering of the genre history corresponds to the vicissitude
of the entire anime industry identified by the same three waves (Tsugata 2004, 151–52).
Introducing a historical perspective alone, however, fails to explain the current condition of the magical girl industry. The dual context of magical girl anime, as children’s
programs that convey messages about gender roles reflecting standardized social
norms and as a stand-alone vortex of representations operated by visual fetishism of
young female bodies, may respectively belong to the two different eras of the 1960s to
the 1980s, but today the genre has grown to easily incorporate both contexts and
beyond. In fact, Tōei’s contemporary magical girl productions target both girls
between four and nine years old and men between nineteen and thirty years old.3 As
the anime market itself adopts new technologies for distributing moving images to potential customers in niche markets, the visual text’s messages are becoming increasingly
ambivalent. Representations of magical girls today present contradictory messages and
thereby serve to mend various fissures of values in society.
This paradoxical function of the genre should not be confused with the polysemic
reception of the text by viewers. The magical girl as a genre consciously takes advantage
of the oxymoronic rhetoric of “magic,” a semantic tool that provides different, often
opposite, meanings about women’s duties, power, and sexuality. It is not an exaggeration
to say that the genre’s progress corresponds to the development of the visual and narrative rhetoric that skillfully encompasses the conservative agenda of the genre. In this
essay, I will argue that the complicit relationship of opposing messages serves as a functional gear of the larger social mechanism that generates and reconfirms conventional
gender norms and heterosexuality.
GENDERED ROLE MODELS FOR GIRLS: 1960S–70S TŌEI PRODUCTIONS
Japan’s first television animation programs known as “TV manga” appeared in 1962–
63 and were followed by the rushed release of more than ten animation programs per
year, but none featured a female protagonist until the late 1960s. Tōei Studio, which
extended its range of production to children’s animation while its primary business in
the film industry stagnated due to the rise of television, produced the first heroine
anime, which essentially became the first magical girl anime, Sally the Witch (Mahōtsukai
Sarı̄, 1966–68), soon followed by Secret Akko-chan (Himitsu no Akko-chan, 1969–70).
Both stories were written by two of the most popular writers of boys’ manga in the
day, respectively Yokoyama Mitsuteru and Akatsuka Fujio. Without any actual precursor,
the major elements in settings and characters were borrowed from live-action television
programs that were already proven successful among a young female audience, especially
the American situation comedy Bewitched (1964–72).
3
The information was taken from the advertising posters of the first Precure series published in
2004. While Tōei does not publicly announce the main viewer targets of the Precure series, it
holds events for young viewers and adult fans separately by setting age limits for admission.
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The 1960s “witch” housewife theme waned quickly in the United States, but various
cultural symbolisms of magic smoothly translated into the Japanese climate, leading to
Japan’s four-decade-long obsession with the magical girl. Bewitched incorporated the
concept of magic as female power to be renounced after marriage, thereby providing
“a discursive site in which feminism (as female power) and femininity has been negotiated” (Moseley 2002, 403) in the dawning of America’s feminist era. Japan’s magical
girls represented a similar impasse of fitting into female domesticity, continued to fascinate Japanese society, and came to define the magical girl genre. In direct contrast to the
American heroines Samantha and Jeannie, however, whose strife arose from the antagonism between magic (as power) and the traditional gender role as wife or fiancée, the
magical girl’s dilemma usually lies between female adulthood and the juvenile female
stage prior to marriage, called shōjo. In other words, the magical girl narratives often
revolve around the magical freedom of adolescence prior to the gendered stage of marriage and motherhood, suggesting the difficulty of imagining elements of power and defiance beyond the point of marriage. In fact, these programs were broadcast exactly when
the rate of love-based marriage started to surpass that of miai (arranged marriage),4
which implies that the magical girl anime, founded on the strict ideological division
between shōjo and wife/mother, may have been an anxious reaction to the emergent
phase of romance.
The two classics of the genre, Sally and Akko-chan, embody many of the social
expectations for women in Japan’s era of high economic growth. Yumeno Sally is originally a crown princess of a magic kingdom, who descends to the human world when
she is deeply fascinated by human girls of her age. In order to become the queen of
the magic kingdom, she must stay in the magic world, but as a young, active girl, she
chooses to explore friendship with her classmates and learn various customs and social
codes in the human society. Her stay in an ordinary suburban Japanese community is
approved under the condition that she returns to the kingdom if her identity is revealed.
The most notable themes in the program are the humanizing process of Sally, an alien to
the human world, and her learning of the limits residing in the power of magic. Throughout the series, moral messages predominate, which can range from the question of
humanism beyond the reach of magic to good manners, justice, willingness to help
others, and friendship. Most episodes are fringed with the presence of Sally’s father,
who seems to persistently observe his daughter’s behavior through a magic mirror,
often censoring Sally’s interactions with boys. The relationship between Sally and her
parents faithfully reflects a traditional patriarchal family model consisting of an authoritarian father whose values are the law, a gentle mother who obeys her husband’s orders
yet secretly helps her daughter, and a daughter who learns to become a good daughter by
realizing her father’s wishes and imitating her mother (M. Saito 1998, 41).
Even though the ability to control physical law and human mind clearly indicates a
form of empowerment, the symbolic function of magic leads in the opposite direction.
Sally’s freedom exists in the human world where magic is denied, or at least proven
useless for truly human goals (say, moral learning and enlightenment), whereas the
4
According to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (2010), the inversion process occurred between 1965 and 1969, with approximately 45 percent arranged marriages
and 49 percent love-based marriages.
Magic, Shōjo, and Metamorphosis
149
magical world represents the patriarchal home to which she must return after an interim
period of freedom in the human community. Sally’s life resembles a moratorium, a postponement of taking up her domestic duties as a married woman in the magical kingdom.
The final episode highlights this underlying theme by stressing Sally’s desire to stay in the
human world against her devoir to enter the market of marriage. Forced to return home,
Sally appeals for an extension of her stay, which is granted under the condition that she
exceeds her male rival in the final exams at school. Sally loses the academic game against
the boy, soon followed by incidents that force her to reveal her identity and return home.
Sally’s predicament mirrors familiar conditions of schoolgirls in the prewar era, which
is known as the culture of shōjo. About the rush to found girls’ magazines around 1910,
Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase (2003, 727) points out that this new term and concept “shōjo”
referred to “the mental state to which girls of this age are prone which makes them want
to temporarily take leave of reality and becoming other than what they are.” The fantasy
world of the magical girl creates an escapist world where girly daydreaming is turned into
a narrative of power, not unlike stories by Yoshiya Nobuko (1896–1973), who created the
world of shōjo with “flowery language and the sentimental narrative tone” (Dollase 2003,
728). This early magical girl series inherits the classical dilemma of shōjo, whose creative
escapism in adolescent same-sex fantasy also works as a form of resistance to patriarchal
society and compulsory heterosexuality (M. Suzuki 2006, 582–83). The irony of magic for
this first magical girl is the duality of magical power: she has the freedom to resist patriarchal society through magical empowerment only so far as the same magic forces her to
quit the adolescent stage and reclaim her biological heritage as a princess, a wife, and a
mother. The symbolic implication of empowerment and resistance in the magical girl
setting paradoxically reaffirms the existing system of marriage and home-making
through adjournment of gender imposition.
Akko-chan altered many components of the setting and gadgets employed in Sally,
yet sustained the gendered symbolisms of magic. It dismissed Sally’s unrealistic setting
that the heroine is a crown princess of the magic kingdom, instead centering the story
on an ordinary Japanese girl without any supernatural power endowed by birth. She
gains the magical power when the spirit of her mirror appears and awards her a
magical compact mirror that enables transformation. She uses transformation to help
her community members, such as saving friends from bullies and helping to solve domestic problems. The compact mirror modeled as toy merchandise became an impetus for
the marketing method of later magical girl titles.
Whereas Sally presented slapstick mishaps caused by a Caucasian-looking alien princess in her struggle to settle in a Japanese community, Akko-chan not only employed
Japanese settings in the heroine’s character and appearance, but also added presumably
traditional Japanese tastes of melodrama by adapting ideas and plots from postwar
culture of hahamono (mother genre). Hahamono is generally understood as a film
genre of cheesy melodrama that thematizes hardship and self-sacrifice of a mother
fated to adversities. This genre peaked in the chaotic postwar environment of the early
1950s, when the maternal legitimacy among different mothers (biological, foster, and
in-law) and the decline of the paternal authority were called into question (Minaguchi
2005, 113). Yonezawa (2007, 1:137) observes that many manga writers (mostly males
from the Tezuka generation) applied genre conventions of shōjo shōsetsu, which was a
modification of hahamono melodrama into girls’ fiction and manga that apotheosizes
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Kumiko Saito
Figure 1. Akko-chan’s transformation using the compact mirror
suggests both the freedom of girlhood and the destined path to female
adulthood (Tōei Animation 2010).
the shōjo figure. Yonezawa further points out that the shōjo-ness of the heroine was represented as visual cues, such as cuteness (kawai-sa) characterized by slim limbs and big,
round eyes “like a doll in a picture” (1:137). In this respect, Oshiyama (2007, 87) also
argues that the popularity of the hahamono style in early shōjo manga owes much to
the visual staging of the girl’s purity and beauty against the backdrop of foredoomed calamity. Akko-chan crystallized these idealisms of shōjo as a quintessence of beautiful girlhood destined to perish soon (see figure 1).
The combination of magical empowerment and shōjo-ness framed by the doomed
nature of transient girlhood naturally created ambivalent messages in Akko-chan as
well. In the societal milieu in which Japan was undergoing the politically turbulent era
of Marxist student movements at the largest scale in the postwar era, Akko-chan’s superhuman ability to transform into anyone (or anything) is quite revolutionary, implying a
sense of women’s liberation. Despite this potential, her metamorphic ability never threatens gender models, as she typically dreams of becoming a princess, a bride, or a female
teacher she respects. The use of magic is also largely limited to humanitarian community
services in town. Akko-chan’s symbolic task throughout the series focuses on how to steer
her power to serve her friends and family, leading to the final episode in which she relinquishes magic to save her father. Akko-chan embraces the cross-generic mismatch
between the radical idea of empowering a girl with superhuman ability and the hahamono sentimentalism idealizing women’s self-sacrifice. All in all, the new setting
adopted in this series, that a mediocre girl accidentally gains magic, became a useful
mechanism for the underlying theme that the heroine is foredoomed to say farewell to
magic in the end. This rhetorical device transforms latent power of the amorphous girl
into the reappreciation of traditional gender norms by equating magic with shōjo-hood
to be given up at a certain stage.
Magic, Shōjo, and Metamorphosis
151
These two programs, as well as many of their successors, adapt ideological models of
gender from prewar and postwar periods, a rather conservative approach against the
potentially subversive symbolism of magic in the era of the women’s liberation movement. The meaning of magic encompasses contesting ideas of what women can and
should do, which are split between the adolescent freedom from social restrictions and
the compulsory path leading to female domestic work and community service. The key
component of the genre is the transience of life as a magical girl, which endorses the
premise that the magical power is condoned as far as it is merely an interim period for
enjoying shōjo-ness before undertaking female duties. The almost total absence of the
heroine’s serious pursuit of romance or any self-awareness of sexuality further strengthens the idea that being a magical girl is a temporary phase of gender vacuum. These early
magical girl programs embody antagonisms between traditional gender expectations and
emerging concepts of women’s power. But unlike American counterparts in which power
and femininity were negotiated through female adulthood, the magical girl programs
strictly relegated contexts of power into the unique status of shōjo stamped with an
expiration date, thereby maintaining the traditional meaning of marriage unchanged.
NEW SHŌJO CULTURE
AND
THE 1980S EMERGENCE
AESTHETICS
OF
OF
ANIME VIEWING:
OTAKU
In the 1970s, following the success of Sally and Akko-chan, Tōei continued to
produce magical girl anime with partial adjustments and improvements, ranging from
melodramatic romance to action comedy, with the heroines using magic, physical
strength, or technological extrasensory power, but the genre overall declined steadily.
Contrary to Tōei’s relatively ascetic portrayals of girls’ romance and sexuality, however,
most successful magical girl anime from the 1970s emerged from test productions inviting a wider range of viewers to this feminine genre, including Mysterious Merumo (Fushigina Merumo, 1971–72), Cutey Honey (Kyūtı̄ Hanı̄, 1973–74), and Meg the Witch
(Majokko Megu-chan, 1974–75). Regardless of the content or intent, they all shared in
common the almost aggressive visual portrayal of the female body, often laboriously
invested in animation of female flesh and its instant metamorphosis into a seductive
adult body. Although Susan Napier (2005, 73–74) rightly discusses Cutey Honey as pornographic anime, it is also important to note that Honey and its successors like Meg were
originally intended for mostly preteen girls. These three series extrapolated the magical
girl genre toward a form of visual pleasure centered on the heroine’s erotic charm and
sexual empowerment amplified by the use of magic.
The magical girl genre’s downfall in the 1970s was not the sole reason for its shift
toward sexually provocative visuals that invite male and older female viewers. Apart
from the anime industry, comics for girls, known as shōjo manga, became increasingly
popular and original, stimulated by the emergence of new narrative techniques and innovative storylines. Some of these sprouting manga quickly turned into the most popular
television animation, including Candy Candy (1976–79), Aim for Ace! (Ēsu o nerae!,
1973–74, 1978–79), and Here Comes Haikara-san (Haikara-san ga tōru, 1978–79).
These embodied the first media-crossing outburst of shōjo manga for young women
written by young women, through which girls pursued the new “self” within personal
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reflection on sexuality (Miyadai 1993, 38–40) in order to create “‘my culture’ that is timeless and deprived of historicity, dissociated from external restrictive frames such as nation
and tradition” (Honda 2004, 168). Many of the 1970s shōjo manga employed this timeless, internal depth of the protagonist’s psyche through gender ambiguities (Oshiyama
2007, 141–42; Yonezawa 2007, 136), which propelled young women’s internalized
imagination of personal romance and psychological growth, an element generally
lacking in the classic magical girl anime. Tōei stopped its magical girl serial production
in 1981 while shifting to other genres, and did not record another success until Sailor
Moon in the 1990s.
While Tōei withdrew, other studios entered the genre, among which were Ashi Production (Ashi Pro) and Studio Pierrot. Both Ashi Pro and Pierrot had already won acclaim
from anime fans due to their original productions, making some writers and animators,
including Oshii Mamoru, famous. Their first magical girl productions, namely Ashi
Pro’s Minky Momo (1982) and Pierrot’s Creamy Mami (1983), almost entirely changed
the context of the magical girl raison d’être. Their innovation in treatment of both
style and semantics largely stems from two changes in the genre. First, anime’s value
expanded from its promotion of merchandise sales as twenty-five-minute-long toy commercials, toward visual commodities that allegedly have their inherent values in being
owned by individual consumers. It is no coincidence that this phase parallels the emergence of VCR technology that enabled personal recording and viewing in the mid-1980s.
Second, successful animation studios’ new investments in the magical girl increased
male fans’ mobility toward this classic feminine genre. Accordingly, the magical girl genre
after this period covers the viewer expectations and visual grammars drawn from malecentered anime that feature robots, battle action, and “fan service.”5 The challenge of
reading anime after the 1980s stems from the emergence of fan culture surrounding
anime, including fan fiction writing, costume playing, and other grassroots activities
that deconstructed the gender = genre formula of children’s media. This contemporary
marketing strategy evidences that the male viewership, and possibly the male subjectivity,
is deeply wedged into the magical girl genre.
These two fan-based factors—the commodification of the anime text and the
inclusion of the male gaze—helped to introduce a unique measure to valorize the
quality of visual art based on a new aesthetics of limited animation. Japanese limited animation techniques, which are often ascribed to Tezuka Osamu’s cost-cutting technique in
the 1960s (Akita 2005, 228), consist of material restrictions, including limiting the
number of drawings to eight or fewer per second, using static characters with three-cel
animation of the mouth, repeatedly using the same cels in similar actions or situations
(called the “bank system” in Japanese), and employing complex camerawork and
editing that counterpoise the lack of animated motion, especially fast cutting (228–29).
This economical approach led to the general emphasis on the complex plot (233),
while befitting the Japanese tendency of imagining the totality of the story based on a
limited range or fragments of image and action (Akita 2005, 235–36; Ōtsuka 2001,
105). Itō Gō (2005) argues that the poor quality control of images in Tezuka’s works
5
“Fan service,” a Japanese term that literally means serving fans, signifies shots and scenes in manga
and anime that are presented to please the viewer’s (often sexual) interest.
Magic, Shōjo, and Metamorphosis
153
corresponds to the spread of the modern narrative in manga and anime, which signifies
the supremacy of the internal psyche and the profound story over the image. Material
limitations directly helped develop the complexity and depth of narrative, which is the
stage to be called anime and manga’s “modernist era.”
The 1980s anime fan culture presumably transvalued the limited animation style and
generated a new set of aesthetics that critics today tend to call postmodernist. Azuma
(2001, 26–27) points out the coincidence between the rise of otaku fandom and the surfacing of postmodernist critics, as exemplified by Asada Akira in 1983. He compares
anime’s postmodern condition in the 1980s and 1990s to what Jean-François Lyotard
(1984) calls the collapse of the grand narrative. In the era that lost the depth, reality,
and universality of the modern grand narrative, Azuma (2001, 50–52) argues, otaku
people simply realign information into their database that lacks the center or stratum
of meaning. The consumption of the story no longer signifies hermeneutic understanding
of the text’s messages: otaku consumers instead regroup data to create secondary fiction,
blurring differences between fan fiction and originals. What comes after the death of the
story is the character (Azuma 2001, 58; Itō 2005, 88), or “chara” (kyara) in Itō’s term,
which is different from “characters” in the sense that charas appear as signs that lack
the depth and context that are indispensable for a round human character (Itō 2005,
118). The charas are easily classified into a database of iconic patterns, such as “maid”
or “pink hair,” which enables secondary fiction writing to simply reproduce images and
settings of charas. Saitō Tamaki (2000, 248) presents a similar argument about otaku
fandom, in which fetish characters serve as objects to be owned across different
media, ranging from character-printed goods to figurines. This postmodern conversion
in the anime market supposedly emerged in the early 1980s and came to define contemporary subcultures surrounding anime and manga.
The conventions of the magical girl genre transformed significantly against this paradigm shift. Both Minky Momo and Creamy Mami originally targeted children, recording
a decent outcome in business and eventually leading to the revival of the genre. Because
the plots are directly built on the genre clichés, however, the jokes and sarcasm of many
episodes appear comprehensible only to adult viewers equipped with the knowledge of
the Tōei magical girls. The intrigue of these programs largely lies in the way they
parody and mock the established genre conventions, especially the restrictive function
of magic and the meaning of transformation. The genre is now founded on the expectation that the adult viewer has acquired a diachronic fan perspective to fetishize both
the characters and the text’s meanings.
Creamy Mami presents the story of fourth-grader Yū, who gains magical power that
enables her to turn into a sixteen-year-old girl. Yū’s magical power is more restrictive than
Momo’s, for her superhuman capacity simply means metamorphosis into her adult form,
who happens to become an idol singer called Mami. Given that the magic’s ability is selforiented cosmetic effect and bodily maturation, the heroine’s ultimate goal by means of
magic is to grow old enough to attract her male friend Toshio, who neglects Yū’s latent
charm but falls in love with the idol Mami. The series concludes when Yū loses her
magic, which correlates to Toshio’s realization that Yū is his real love. Mami’s thematic
messages teach the idea that magic does not bring much advantage or power after all,
or rather, magic serves as an obstacle for the appreciation of the truly magical period
called shōjo. The heroine gains magic to prove, although retroactively, the importance
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Kumiko Saito
of adolescence preceding the possession of “magic” that enables (and forces) female
maturation.
Some episodes in Minky Momo can be even more disheartening. Whereas it imitates
the traditional princess-in-training formula found in Sally, the series also introduces the
viewer to the magical girl’s reality in which her magic signifies little more than transforming herself into an eighteen-year-old form of herself with a certain occupational skill. The
magical empowerment sometimes reveals the sarcasm of forced maturation, implying
that adult society is less exciting than tiresome and disappointing. The original purpose
of her stay in the human world was to bring back dreams and hopes to humans, but
her efforts to save people in her adult form appear mostly useless compared to the
utter impact of her carefree cuteness that makes “us,” the viewers, happy. The series
ends when Momo dies in a car accident and is reborn as an ordinary human baby.
If the classic magical girl’s dilemma—magic as power and liberation on the one hand,
and domestic duties on the other—stemmed from women’s split life across the turning
point prior to marriage, these new magical girls reached an extreme by denying magic,
that is, female maturity, including romance and sexuality. The magical girls’ true goal
becomes the eternal deferral of growth, and their task, to be just cute and young (see
figure 2). This anime philosophy goes hand in hand with the commercial culture of childish idols and Hello Kitty-based cute merchandise that rapidly spread in the early 1980s in
Japan. This cute trend, which Kinsella (1995, 243) describes as “a kind of rebellion or
refusal to cooperate with established social values and realities,” enticed the magical
girls as well into the post-industrial practice of indulgence in consumption of cute images.
It is in this cultural climate that transformation sequences became a key component
of the genre. Because the genre’s message now resides in the reappreciation of shōjohood, feminine sexuality—one of the most attractive elements to adult male viewers—
must be expressed in the form of its denial, a foundation of the so-called “Lolicon”6
taste, which locates eroticism in its absence. The metamorphosis scene, as seen in
Momo’s transformation and most of the later programs in the genre, employs the
“bank system,” which is to repeat the same transformation sequence in each episode.
Although the technique of reusing cels in multiple episodes was not a new concept in
itself, Momo successfully incorporated the well-exploited robot anime’s bank method
in which mechanical parts are captured in the camera’s dynamic tracking motion for
the maximum effect of promoting the target merchandise. Fragmentation of an object
into shots is one of the most effective ways to show the details of the toy, thereby
making it appear attractive to potential buyers, while it can simultaneously redeem the
lack of human and material resources. Momo’s transformation conforms to this limited
animation technique as it abundantly splices close-ups of limited body parts, leading to
the choppy circular tracking of Momo’s nude body in transformation. Despite such
poor configuration of space, the screen duration for the transformation sequence tends
to be unnaturally long.7 This disintegration of space paired with the expansion of time
is a major characteristic of the magical girl transformation sequence that develops
6
“Lolicon” is a Japanese abbreviation for “Lolita Complex,” a taste for visual representations of
young girls common in anime and manga.
7
Momo’s transformation is about twenty-three seconds. Sailor Moon’s transformation sequence is
about forty seconds (first season), and Precure’s (first season) is more than one minute when uncut.
Magic, Shōjo, and Metamorphosis
155
Figure 2. Minky Momo, the first anime character with vivid pink hair
whose symbolic task is to be cute (Bandai Visual, n.d.).
from Momo to Sailor Moon and more recent ones that openly sell fetishism of the metamorphosing body. The spatial dissection of the female body allows the camera’s gaze to
explore the depth of the viewer’s affection in the disembodied body.
These technical innovations of transformation go perfectly with the symbolic function of shōjo, that is, the transience that lasts forever. This fantasy is secured by repetitions
of transformation sequences, a limited animation technique that repeats the act of border
crossing between shōjo and her sexual maturity, thereby enabling viewers to envision the
simultaneity of sexuality and its absence. It is important to note that the VCR technology
greatly contributed to the emergence of repetitious viewing in the early 1980s, essential
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Kumiko Saito
for anime fandom (Okada 1996, 8). The bank sequence is meant for repetition, and this
repetition itself becomes visual pleasure. The thematic feature of the 1980s magical girl,
which is to rediscover and reaffirm the innocence of shōjo retroactively, further enhances
the value of repetitious viewing, for the recurrence of the bodily transgression between
the past and the future protracts the fantasy of the shōjo, whose sexual maturation has
already happened and will never happen.
GENDER BENDING
AND
NEW MEANINGS
OF
POWER: 1990S–2000S FEMALE BATTLE
HEROES
Toward the late 1980s, the Japanese economy reached previously unseen heights of
stock and asset prices, known as a bubble economy, soon followed by the “bubble burst”
and a long recession leading to the current global financial crisis. The third phase of the
genre concurs with this prolonged period of social anxiety coming from the collapse of
Japanese myths, from the corporate management system of lifetime employment to
welfare systems stressed by an aging population. Simultaneously, the marriage rate and
birth rate dropped to the level that, researchers estimate, 40 percent of the Japanese
population will be over sixty-five years old in 2055 (National Institute of Population
and Social Security Research 2010). Naturally, children’s media culture reacted to
these socioeconomic transitions. The Power Rangers series, for example, which reflected
“the new industrial model of postwar Japan,” as represented by Toyotism and Sonyism
(Allison 2006, 100), recorded the most radical fall of audience share around 1990, continuing to the series’ period of lowest viewership in 1994–96.8 Some popular manga
and anime were clearly digressing from conventional heroic narratives, possibly mirroring
crumbling masculine confidence. Especially eminent is the rise of female battle hero narratives, which originally circulated only among fans with an eccentric taste but quickly
came to catch public attention in Japan, and soon in the international market, such as
Bubblegum Crisis (1987–91), Patlabor (1988), Aim for Top (1988), and Ghost in the
Shell (1989–2001). In the meantime, the Friday evening spot long reserved for the
Power Rangers series was occupied by Ranma 1/2 (1989–92), an action comedy anime
about a martial arts hero who metamorphoses into a cute girl each time he is in
contact with cold water.
In parallel, the third wave of the magical girl genre emerged as an art of crossreferencing among multiple genres and gender codes. Reacting to withering Power
Rangers programs, Tōei branched off a comedic battle heroine series Masked Beauty
Powatorin (1989–90), which directly became a model for Sailor Moon, a parody of
teamed-force battle hero action. Following the success of Sailor Moon, the magical
girl genre revived with various series that played with gender-crossing themes. Lesbian
and gay romantic interests are openly addressed in CLAMP’s Cardcaptor Sakura (Kādokyaputā Sakura, 1998–2000), while its other magical girl series Magic Knight Rayearth
8
According to Video Research Ltd. (n.d.), the Power Rangers (Super Sentai) series viewer ratings
averaged 10–13 percent until 1988, dropping to 6–7 percent in 1989–93. Between 1994 and 1996,
the ratings recorded were the lowest at 4.5–4.8 percent on average. Currently the series regularly
maintains 7–8 percent.
Magic, Shōjo, and Metamorphosis
157
(1994–95) makes female heroes pilot giant robots to save a princess. In the meantime,
magical girl manga and anime solely targeting an adult male audience became increasingly visible, ranging from Pretty Sammy (Mahō shōjo Puriti Samı̄, 1996) to Lyrical
Nanoha (Mahō shōjo Ririkaru Nanoha, 2004). Tōei’s most successful magical girl
anime, Precure, features action battles planned by the series director of Dragonball.
With these genre-crossing diversifications and gender-confusion tendencies, the
magical girl from this period is far less a genre than a code that binds certain ideological
values and advantages attributed to the shōjo identity in contemporary Japan.
Accordingly, the implications of the shōjo altered significantly along with a seemingly
minor change in the genre’s stylistic mannerism, that is, metamorphosis. Whereas the
magical girl genre prior to the 1990s clearly involved literal transformation of the body,
usually from a small girl into an adult woman (that is, sixteen years old or older),
recent magical metamorphoses rarely concern actual physical growth. Many of the
magical girl anime still utilize the visual euphemism of transformation by adding frills
or accentuating a hair style, but their morphing does not go beyond a cosmetic makeover.
This trend can be observed in Ashi Production’s magical girls in 1990–92 and ensuing
Tōei productions like Sailor Moon. A possible reason for the decline of physical transformation is the 1988 Miyazaki Tsutomu “serial murder of little girls” (renzoku yōjo satsujin jiken) case,9 which became an impetus for the mass media’s scandalization of
anime’s pedophilic taste as a potential cause for sexual crime. Whether this was the
true cause or not, later makeover magical girls established their own aesthetics within
the absence of flesh maturation befitting the changing social condition. In either stage
of the 1960s conservatism or the 1980s otaku culture, “growing up” via magic signified
some form of empowerment, whether social or sexual, but this symbolic system of
visual language seems to have collapsed. In other words, magical girls may no longer
need the grow-up magic to claim power—shōjo are already powerful as they are.
This “power” is of a highly schizophrenic kind, however. On the one hand, with the
erosion of the shōjo-adult boundary, many adult obligations—especially maternal and
other domestic roles, as well as financial responsibility for the family—entered the life
of the magical girl. From Sailor Moon to Magical Do Re Mi (serialized 1999–2003)
and Precure, the virtual experience of maternal duties is a component that consistently
intervenes in the battle heroines’ everyday life, ranging from caring for a baby to building
a mother-daughter cooperative relationship. In Cardcaptor Sakura’s motherless household, the family members rotate on housework, including fourth-grader Sakura herself
cleaning and cooking in many episodes. Sailor Moon’s later series could not succeed
without the virtual family relationship of Sailor Moon, her future husband Tuxedo
Mask, and their daughter who time-traveled from the future. In Do Re Mi, owning
and running a store to earn magical money that fuels their power weighs heavily with
the witch-candidate protagonists who aspire to climb the ladder system of witchcraft to
the top. Romance, which was a reward after a bittersweet farewell to shōjo-hood, is
now the essence of magical girls’ everyday school life. As various duties and pleasures
originally reserved for female adulthood penetrate the shōjo stage, their everyday life
9
Miyazaki Tsutomu kidnapped and murdered four girls aged four to seven. The mass media
depicted him as a mentally abnormal “otaku” whose pedophilia culminated in capital crimes.
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Kumiko Saito
appears increasingly busy and multitasked, even overstrained from undertaking many
responsibilities simultaneously. In this respect, many of today’s magical girl programs continue to provide young girls the opportunities to envision adulthood that fits the demands
of the contemporary society.
On the other hand, contrary to the above tendency, the attenuation of the shōjo-adult
boundary is also bringing about an infinite extension of the shōjo phase. From this perspective, the adult tasks, including childrearing and job training, turn into temporary
game play, such as Tamagotchi-like digital pet-raising games and various toys for fulfilling
feminine fantasies about accessories, baking, dance, and fashion. Concerning Sailor
Moon, for example, Allison (2006, 139) explains that, “[a]ssumed to bear the fewest
responsibilities and pressures to be socially productive, the shōjo (as both subject and
object) has come to stand as the counterweight to the enterprise society.” The dream
identity of shōjo originates from her status as liberated from a wide variety of obligations
undertaken by men, as well as from domestic obligations of married women. Whereas
enemies are often power-hungry seductresses with thick makeup, the visual and figurative measure of the magical girl’s power is shown by youth and cuteness, such as frilly
layers of skirt added to a school uniform (see figure 3). If transformation in the previous
era signified empowerment by growth, the 1990s magical girls maximize their power by
simply being themselves—cute and carefree students. Accordingly, there is little, if any,
realistic connection between power and its wielder in the new magical girl trope, compared with the military or coercive power of male heroes or the classic magical girl’s
restrictive magic constituted by her social and communal usefulness. Given that cuteness
is a concept associated with youth, passivity, femininity, and, overall, powerlessness, the
recent brand of magical girls—cute battle heroes—is a sheer paradox of claiming power
in powerlessness.
The notion of cute culture as a passive form of resistance is not a new concept, as
already discussed earlier. What is new in the current condition is that this culture of feminine and juvenile defiance is widely diffusing into Japanese men’s identity, or possibly,
into Japan’s national identity on an international scale. Scholars and journalists have
reported that Japan’s brand image is shifting from a feudal past and modern bureaucracy
to pop culture driven by the youth-oriented “cool.” In reaction to Douglas McGray’s
article on “Japan’s Gross National Cool” in 2002, the idea of Japanese pop culture as a
means of cultural diplomacy entered Japan’s mainstream discourses, including Asahi
Newspaper, Nikkei Weekly, and Gaiko Forum. The government has utilized this cultural
boom to heighten its image, through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ cooperation with the
private sector and other overseas diplomatic strategies (Otmazgin 2008, 80). In this
process, “the masculinized image of Japan at work . . . has given way to that of feminized
Japan at play,” or more precisely, “Japan as play” (Yano 2009, 684).
In the domain of the magical girl industry, the feminine image of Japanese pop parallels
the emergence of men’s magical girl anime, or genre parodies and spin-offs released only on
video or broadcast in midnight spots, apparently separated from the children’s toy market. It
is worth noting that those with lasting popularity among fans, especially Pretty Sammy and
Lyrical Nanoha, are offshoots from anime or games that typically serve a male fantasy of
harem-style heterosexual romance, in which a mediocre boy becomes a love interest of multiple cute girls. Whereas this common type of men’s paradise in anime and games invites (or
forces) the male protagonist to simulate romantic, and often sexual, exploration with
Magic, Shōjo, and Metamorphosis
159
Figure 3. A clear contrast staged between the enemy queen as a seductive adult woman and Sailor Moon as shōjo (Takeuchi 1993).
multiple girls, the magical girl byproducts are almost entirely devoid of romance, sex, and
even male figures that can be a threat to shōjo’s pre-pubertal utopia. In contrast to the overwhelming presence (and pressure) of romance in the originals, the spin-off magical world
usually consists of female friendship and ordinary but fun school life, which forms a pseudolesbian community in which girls enjoy a carefree everyday life.
Simultaneously, it is no longer uncommon to find stories about boys transforming
into magical girls, a sort of empowerment desire realized by means of cross-dressing as
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Kumiko Saito
Figure 4. The magical boy as a criticism of the increasing difficulty in
envisioning male hero models (Ishida 2007).
shōjo.10 Calling this trend “men’s feminization” perhaps misrepresents the situation,
however: the magical girl as an epitome of shōjo actually provides viewers the agency
for a heroic and independent identity against the failing image of male adulthood. To
cite a magical boy manga, the deteriorating image of the paternal role is making it difficult
to project a hero model on a male member of one’s family (see figure 4). Although the
10
Some examples that are popular enough to turn into television series are Ubukata Tō’s novel Chevalier (2005–present) and Tsukiji Toshihiko’s novel Kämpfer (2006–present).
Magic, Shōjo, and Metamorphosis
161
visual rhetoric of power relies on feminine implements like frills and long hair, it is
becoming increasingly difficult to equate representations of the magical girl’s gender
with biological sex. The shōjo, whether male or female, now appears like a presence
whose transcendence over the childhood/adulthood dichotomy determines her power.
The changes we observe today, therefore, do not necessarily derive from the feminization
of men, but from a new configuration of gender that wields its power in its youthfulness
and cuteness. If the magical girl identity now blankets both genders’ perspectives, then it
is possible to assume that the transition to the adult world (especially marriage, sex, and
childrearing) is equally considered a crisis by men as well as by women. To cite a magical
girl trope from Puella Magi Madoka Magica (Mahō shōjo Madoka Magika, 2011), vastly
successful anime among Japanese men today, the magical girl’s true task is to fight against
her own adult form called “witch.”
As could be seen in the 1980s development of shōjo culture, the Japanese cute values
generated from deferrals and refusals to undertake gendered roles expected by the social
standards, that is, a passive, temporal, and disguised leeway to play resistance to maledominant adult society. This method proved popular and effective in a country where
gender inequality is tightly embedded in the social system. This is a form of resistance
only so far as it simultaneously maintains the existing power structure against which
the resistance is intended. In a similar way, the magical girl’s power can be considered
as power only so far as her entry into the adult world of “real” power is precluded.
The growing appeal of the genre to adult men may equally signify men’s resistance to
their gendered responsibilities, such as deferrals of marriage and reproduction in an
era that highly values traditional family relationships. The success of the magical girl
genre implies the society’s embracement of the paradox that resistance to gender roles
simultaneously secures the conservativeness of the roles.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
The magical girl, a popular genre of girls’ television animation program in Japan, has
closely reflected shifting ideas of gender roles in society. The classic magical girl anime
from the late 1960s and 1970s underscored the interim period of “shōjo” before marriage
that allows a girl to enjoy temporal freedom from future obligations as a woman. The new
magical girls of the next decade developed the idea that the magical girl’s mission is now
solely to be cute and lovable so as to provide viewers in and outside the text visual enjoyment. The visual techniques of transformation rapidly developed, which went hand in
hand with concurrent social trends, including the emergence of otaku culture, the popularity of Sanrio-based cute characters, and the increase in women’s deferral of marriage
and childbearing. This culture became a foundation for the 1990s magical girl, which
explored genre crossing and self-parodies, often featuring gender bending or samegender romance. The contemporary magical girl’s utopian identity, embedded in
shōjo-ness, whose power is generated from cuteness, raises questions about the
current understanding of the Japanese cool or cute as power.
Are these magical girls exploring new gender ideals or demonstrating meaningful
alternatives to predetermined gender norms in Japan? Of course, transgressive gender
models in the pop media always have the potential to question and mobilize existing
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Kumiko Saito
systems, thereby conceptualizing more performative representations of gender. The conclusion reached in this essay, however, is more skeptical and equivocal. The empowerment of female heroes visualized in the magical girl genre has developed symbiotically
with heterosexual norms in society: fighting girls and cross-dressing boys in the
magical girl tropes function as counter-agencies to anxieties about conventional gender
roles undertaken in reality. In theory, the increasing popularity of the magical girl genre
today forecasts the simultaneous growths of Japanese shōjo-ism (defiance to marriage,
domesticity, and gender) and conservative gender roles in public discourses of “reality.”
The supreme shōjo body does present various possibilities of power and liberation for
both women and men, but these potentials materialize as ambivalent mixtures of contesting
values, as exemplified by contradictory messages conveyed by metaphors of magic and
transformation. In this respect, the magical transformation is a mechanism that bridges
utterly different, often opposite, spheres of a seemingly homogeneous society, thereby
mending fractures between the media representations of shōjo and gendered reality.
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