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Josei manga (女性漫画, lit. comics for women, pronounced [dʑosei]) also known as "ladies" (レディース redīsu) or "ladies' comics" (レディコミ redikomi, lit. "LadyComi"), is a term that refers to the target demographic of manga created mostly by women for late teenage and adult female audiences. Readers range from 15-44.[1] In Japanese, the word josei means simply "woman", "female", "feminine", "womanhood" and has no manga-related connotations at all.
The stories tend to be about everyday experiences of women living in Japan. Though there are some that cover high school, most cover the lives of adult women. The style also tends to be a more restrained, realistic version of shōjo manga, keeping some of the wispy features and getting rid of the very large sparkly eyes. There are exceptions in the style described above, but what defines josei is some degree of stylistic continuity of comics within this particular demographic (the same is true with different demographics that have different stylistic tendencies).
Josei comics can portray realistic romance, as opposed to the mostly idealized romance of shōjo manga, but it does not always have to be. A famous example of a josei is Honey and Clover, which was animated, which is unusual for josei comics.[original research?] Josei tends to be both more sexually explicit and contain more mature storytelling, although that is not always true either. It is also not unusual for themes such as infidelity and rape to occur in josei manga target specifically towards more mature audiences. Some other famously popular josei series include Yun Kouga's Loveless, Ai Yazawa's Paradise Kiss, and the award-winning works of Erica Sakurazawa.
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Circulations [link]
The reported average circulations for some of the top-selling josei manga magazines in 2007 are as follows:
| Magazine title | Reported circulation |
|---|---|
| You | 194,791 |
| Be-Love | 194,333 |
| Kiss | 167,600 |
| Chorus | 162,916 |
| Elegance Eve | 150,000 |
| For Mrs. | 150,000 |
| Romance White Paper Pastel | 150,000 |
| Dessert | 149,333 |
| The Dessert | 141,664 |
| Office You | 117,916 |
For comparison, here are the circulations for the top-selling magazines in other categories for 2007.
| Category | Magazine title | Reported circulation |
|---|---|---|
| Top-selling shōnen manga magazine | Weekly Shōnen Jump | 2,778,750 |
| Top-selling seinen manga magazine | Weekly Young Magazine | 981,229 |
| Top-selling shōjo manga magazine | Ciao | 982,834 |
| Top-selling non-manga magazine | Monthly The Television | 1,018,919 |
(Source for all circulation figures: Japan Magazine Publishers Association[2])
History [link]
![[icon]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg){kind=small} |
This section requires expansion. |
Josei manga (then called Ladies Comics, or Redikomi) began to appear in the 1980s, during a boom period in manga, when the girls who had read shoujo manga in the 1950s and 60s wanted manga for adult women.[3] The first ladies comic magazine, Be-Love, was printed in 1980. At the end of 1980 there were two ladies comics magazines, at the end of 1989 there were over fifty.[4] Early ladies comics were sexually free, and the comics became more and more sexually extreme until the early 1990s.[1] Manga branded as "Ladies' Comics" has acquired a reputation for being low-brow, and "dirty", and the term josei was created to move away from that image.[5]
Examples [link]
See also [link]
- Children's (Kodomo): intended for younger children
- Shōnen manga: intended for boys
- Shōjo manga: intended for girls
- Seinen: intended for adult males
- List of Josei manga magazines
- Yaoi: homoerotic stories about men in love for female audiences
References [link]
- ^ a b Ito, Kinko (2003). "The World of Japanese Ladies' Comics: from Romantic Fantasy to Lustful Perversion". The Journal of Popular Culture 36 (1): 68–85. DOI:10.1111/1540-5931.00031.
- ^ Japan Magazine Publishers Association Magazine Data 2007. The publication, which relies on information provided by publishers, categorizes the magazine Cookie (with a reported circulation of 200,000) as josei, but Shueisha's "S-MANGA.NET" site clearly categorizes that magazine as shōjo, and it is therefore not included here.
- ^ https://www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/viewFile/124/95
- ^ Matt Thorn What Shôjo Manga Are and Are Not
- ^ a b O'Connell, Margaret (September 8, 2008). "Comics for Grown-Up Women, Part 1". Sequential Tart. https://www.sequentialtart.com/article.php?id=1101. Retrieved 2009-10-15.
- ^ a b c Aoki, Deb. "2008 Readers Poll: Best New Josei Manga". About.com. https://manga.about.com/od/recommendedreading/tp/2008NewJoseiPoll.htm. Retrieved 2009-10-13.
- ^ a b Aoki, Deb. "Josei Manga — Ladies Comics". About.com. https://manga.about.com/od/glossary/g/josei.htm. Retrieved 2009-10-15.
- ^ a b Brenner, Robin E. Understanding manga and anime. — pp. 36. ISBN 978-1-59158-332-5
- ^ a b c Aoki, Deb. "2007 Readers Poll: Best New Josei Manga". About.com. https://manga.about.com/od/recommendedreading/tp/2007NewJoseiPoll.htm. Retrieved 2009-10-15.
- ^ Kai-Ming Cha. (April 25, 2006). "Kind of Blue: The Josei Manga of Nananan". Publishers Weekly. https://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6327715.html. Retrieved 2009-10-13.[dead link]
Further reading [link]
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Please expand this article. Some suggested sources are given hereafter. More information might be found in a section of the talk page. (February 2012) |
- Fusami Ogi, 2003: Female Subjectivity and Shoujo (Girls) Manga (Japanese Comics): Shoujo in Ladies' Comics and Young Ladies' Comics, Volume 36, Issue 4, pages 780–803
- Gretchen Jones, 2003: "Ladies' Comics": Japan's Not-So-Underground Market in Pornography for Women, US-Japan Women's Journal English Supplement, Volume 22, pages 3–30
- Deborah Shamoon, Office Sluts and Rebel Flowers: The Pleasures of Japanese Pornographic Comics for Women, in: Porn Studies, ed. Linda Williams, 2004
- Gretchen Jones, Bad Girls Like to Watch: Writing and Reading Ladies' Comics, in: Bad girls of Japan, ed. Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley, 2005
