[Rina Touin]

Shōjo or shoujo (少女, Shōjo or shoujo?) is a term used in English to refer to manga and animetransliteration of the Japanese 少女, literally Young girl. The genre is stereotyped as melodramatic stories of romance usually with a female protagonist, and drawn in a flowing style where beautiful characters with huge, intricately drawn eyes become spontaneously surrounded by flowers, stars, and/or bubbles. Shōjo works cover a huge range of subjects, from historical drama to science fiction and by no means do all adhere to the same artistic sensibilities or conventions. In the end, it is not a style or a genre but a demographic.

• History

Shōjo manga has its roots in the early Shōwa era, for example Machiko Hasegawa's Nakayoshi Techō and Shosuke Kurakane's Anmitsu Hime, and then the manga expansion in the 1950s, with titles like Princess Knight by Osamu Tezuka. However, it took off with a new wave of female authors beginning in the 1970s - centered around the Year 24 group, named as such because they were all born in the 24th year of the Shōwa period (1949). In particular, Moto Hagio, Keiko Takemiya and Yumiko Ōshima were instrumental in redefining manga from a female perspective, and inventing the shōnen-ai genre. Around the same time but not as conveniently born in the same year, Suzue Miuchi, Riyoko Ikeda and A-ko Mutsu have created equally influential manga.
Shōjo anime has been a part of television animation from its beginnings, Tōei Dōga starting the 'magical girl' emphasis with Mahō Tsukai Sally and Himitsu no Akko-chan in the second half of the 1960s. Also active at the turn of the 1970s were Tōkyō Movie Shinsha with sports anime Attack No. 1 and Ace o Nerae!, and the 1979 historical drama Versailles no Bara has been highly influential. The 'World Masterpiece Theatre' series by Nippon Animation, based on classic works of Western literature, began in 1975. While not aimed solely at female viewers, it had a huge impact, running for two decades from and widely syndicated outside Japan. Magical girls were everywhere in the 1980s, notably with the various Mahō no... series by Studio Pierrot, but the genre became recognized in the west through Toei Animation's Sailor Moon, begun in 1992. There are some shōjo girls who are not magical, but who exert extreme, unreal stunts, like Yuniko Sakuraba in Wild Act, who jumps to the ground from tall buildings with little to no injury.

• Meaning and spelling

As shōjo just means 'girl' in Japanese, the equivalent of the western usage will generally include the medium: girls' manga (少女漫画 shōjo manga), or anime for girls (少女向けアニメ shōjo-muke anime). The parallel terms shōnen, seinen, and josei are also used in the categorisation of manga and anime, and are qualified the same way. Though the terminology originates with the Japanese publishers, cultural differences with the West means application in English tends to vary wildly, with the types often confused and misapplied.
Due to the vagaries involved in the romanization of Japanese, 少女 (written しょうじょ in hiragana) may be transcribed in a wide selection of ways. By far the most common is shoujo, largely because it follows English phonology, preserves the spelling, and requires only ASCII input. The Hepburn romanization shōjo uses a macron for the long vowel, though the prevalence of Latin-1 means a circumflex is often substituted instead, shôjo. It is also common practice to just ignore long vowels, shojo, however this is sometimes discouraged due to potential confusion with 処女 (shojo, lit. 'virgin') as well as other possible meanings. Finally Nihon-shiki type mirroring of the kana spelling may be used, syôjyo, or syoujyo. None of these many variants are any more 'correct' than the rest, unless a particular style guide is expected to be followed.
aimed at a female audience between the ages of 10 and 18. The term is a