Term · Anime culture
Shojo
A readership, not a genre. The tears are optional. The magazine on the cover is what actually defines it.
In Otakana the clue reads: Comics aimed at a young female readership
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Anime culture
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Shojo is 少女, young girl, and it labels magazines edited for a teenage female readership. Nakayoshi, Ribon, Hana to Yume and Margaret are the names to know. What goes in them is not restricted to romance, whatever the shelf label implies. Horror, sport, historical epic and outright comedy all run in shojo magazines, and the category tells you who is being sold to rather than what happens.
The visual grammar is distinctive and deliberate. Panel borders dissolve, flowers and screentone fill the negative space around a face, and interior monologue floats loose on the page rather than sitting in a balloon. Those techniques were developed to show what a character is feeling while she says nothing, which is a problem shojo storytelling faces on nearly every page.
The genre's export record is strong. Naoko Takeuchi ran Sailor Moon in Nakayoshi from 1991 and changed what a magical girl series could be. CLAMP built Cardcaptor Sakura for the same magazine. Fruits Basket, Ouran High School Host Club and Nana all came off shojo and josei pages, and several of them outsold the shonen titles they shared a publisher with.
Spelling SHOJO
SHOJO drops a long vowel in the middle. The Japanese 少女 is shoujo, printed shōjo with a macron, and the U in that first syllable is real but does not make the row. Five letters, two O's, one J. Its opposite number shonen shares the same first three tiles and the same missing U, which makes the two easy to mix up in a hurry.