Change in the social status, form and content of adult manga, 1986–1996

Abstract

Abstract During the 1960s the Japanese manga medium grew rapidly and transformed from a radical youth culture into a new national medium. Manga provided a public space for the communication of taboo interests and desires and often dissident political attitudes which could not be expressed elsewhere in Japanese society. The manga industry exhibited a distinctive ‘populism’ and actively recruited young manga artists from all sections of society in contradiction to the dominant social mechanisms of educational meritocracy and promotion by gender and seniority. The sociological and political accessibility of manga is both the reason for its continued dynamism and popularity and for its historically low and controversial status in Japanese society. Since the mid‐1980s however, a new genre of realist adult manga, targeted at mature male readers, has been pioneered from within the manga industry. This has often transmitted conservative political and social ideals which support, rather than invert, national ideol...