EAPC 1 (1) pp.

133–153 Intellect Limited 2015

East Asian Journal of Popular Culture

Volume 1 Number 1
© 2015 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/eapc.1.1.133_1

Giancarla Unser-Schutz
Rissho University

What text can tell us about

male and female characters
in shōjo- and shōnen-manga

Abstract Keywords
The manner in which manga can reflect and influence readers’ gender perceptions manga
has been a frequently researched issue. This article is an attempt to consider those language
questions through language, a traditionally less-examined element, in order to shed gender
new light on how male and female characters are used in manga. To do so, I use a characters
linguistic corpus of ten popular shōjo-manga and shōnen-manga to look at (1) how corpus linguistics
much of the text found in speech bubbles was spoken by male and female characters;
and (2) how many characters were seen. With regards to approximately 80% of all
text, the corpus shows that shōnen-manga are extremely skewed towards male char-
acters, compared to shōjo-manga, which is more balanced between female and male
characters. While many more characters appear in shōnen-manga, the majority are
male. Furthermore, only two female characters in all of the shōnen-manga series
account for more than 10% of text, whereas all the shōjo-manga have male charac-
ters accounting for over 12%.
In examining why this might be, I suggest that the focus on interpersonal
relationships – including both friendship and romance – in shōjo-manga may lead to
a smaller cast of characters and better balance between male and female characters.
However, with authors usually writing for their own gender, I also maintain that
it is related to differences in the roles of women and men in Japanese society. These
distributions also have an impact on characterization itself, particularly in regards

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Giancarla Unser-Schutz

to the use of gendered speech patterns. With insight from Kinsui’s yakuwari-go,
or role-playing language (2003), I specifically argue that the results predict that
shōnen-manga will use more stereotypical speech, particularly in depicting female
characters. In offering supporting evidence for this hypothesis, I suggest that this
may affect how readers engage with the characters, thus creating different types of
reading experiences within the genres. Through this discussion, it will become clear
that linguistic data can shed light into how characters are manipulated in manga
on a variety of levels, thus appealing to its potential as a legitimate and unique
approach to manga research.

Overview
Recent years have seen an incredible boom in the international popularity of
manga (Japanese comics). One of the reasons that manga are said to have
become popular abroad is their positioning as an alternative to local comics,
as Goldberg (2010) notes with regards to the US market. Indeed, due to their
genre diversity (Bryce and Davis 2010), manga may offer many new options
for international readers. The major genres are, however, characterized first
by the gender of their target audience, and shōjo-manga – comics for girls,
in comparison to shōnen-manga, comics for boys – have especially found a
niche in foreign markets that traditionally featured fewer comics aimed for
young girls, such as the United States (Prough 2010). Because of its impor-
tance in how they are produced, marketed and consumed, gender has been
a popular focus of manga research, with one important question being how
manga reflect and influence gender perceptions.
While most of the research has focused on narrative themes and the
personalities or appearances of characters, this article will complement
such literature by using linguistic data to assess the prominence of male
and female characters in the two genres, as seen by how much text char-
acters speak. As Weitzman, Eifler, Hokada and Ross (1972), Signorielli and
Bacue (1999) and others have argued, the ways that media use characters
can shape people’s perceptions of gender. Given that the manga genre is so
gender-differentiated, one can expect differences in how they utilize char-
acters, and I argue that examining how shōjo-manga and shōnen-manga
use characters can give insight into (1) how the genres are constructed and
consumed; and (2) how characters are depicted, particularly in regards to
their speech patterns.
To do so, I specifically use data from a corpus – that is, ‘[…] a large collec-
tion of authentic texts that have been gathered in electronic form according
to a specific set of criteria’ (Bowker and Pearson 2002: 9) – constructed of
popular shōjo-manga and shōnen-manga. The analysis shows that, in addi-
tion to having a larger cast of characters, shōnen-manga are characterized
by a high ratio of male-to-female characters, with male characters ultimately
accounting for nearly 80% of all text in speech bubbles. In comparison, shōjo-
manga feature a smaller cast of characters, with only a moderate skew towards
female characters (~55%). I argue that these differences are attributable to
both a focus on interpersonal relationships in shōjo-manga and differences in
the lives of men and women in Japanese society. These differences also have
an impact on characterization, and in particular, characters’ speech patterns.
Touching upon Kinsui’s concept of yakuwari-go (2003) – ‘role-language’ ster-
eotypically aligned with the images of characters – I argue that with more

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extra characters, shōnen-manga, and especially female characters therein, 1. This article was
partially based upon
should be more stereotypical in their speech patterns than in shōjo-manga, a paper presented at
for which I offer some supporting data. In this way, I show that language can the inaugural East
offer a unique way of measuring patterns within manga genres without look- Asian Popular Culture
Association conference
ing at the narratives themselves, thus suggesting that quantitative analyses held in Taipei, in
such as offered by this corpus can help observe trends which can ultimately September 2011.
further our understanding of manga as a media.1, 2 2. All translations from
Japanese are by
the author unless
Gender and genre in manga otherwise stated.
One of the defining points of manga is its division of genres by the gender of
their target audiences. Most manga are first published as serials in komikku-
shi (comic magazines). The Japanese Magazine Advertising Association (2012),
which tracks magazine advertisement statistics, organizes comic magazines
into two categories by their gendered readership: dansei-komikku (men’s
comics) and josei-komikku (women’s comics). Comics for men are further
divided into shōnen-muke komikku-shi (comic magazines for boys) and
dansei-muke komikku-shi (comic magazines for men), and comics for women
are divided into shōjo-muke komikku-shi (comic magazines for girls) and
josei-muke komikku-shi (comic magazines for women). While popular series
are republished as tankōbon (novel-sized book editions), most manga books
are still organized by these genres in places of sale. That is to say, before being
organized by authors’ names, manga are typically grouped by (1) the size of
the book; (2) their target audience; and (3) the magazine they were originally
published in. Knowing the genre and publisher of the manga can be more
crucial to finding it in the bookstore than knowing the author’s name: to find
Sugar Sugar Rune by Moyoco Anno, one must look at the Kodansha shelf for
shōjo-manga, as it ran in the magazine Nakayoshi, but to find her Hataraki-
man / Working Man, one must look at the Kodansha shelf in the men’s section,
as it ran in the magazine Morning.
Because of these issues, sometimes series appear to be superficially closer
to other genres than their own. For example, Suetsugu Yuki’s Chihayafuru,
which follows the story of a girl endeavouring to become the top karuta (a
traditional Japanese card game) player, may seem more similar to shōnen-
manga in its use of formulaic fight – or, in this case, card game – scenes.
However, being published in the shōjo-muke comic magazine Be Love, it is
classified as shōjo-manga. While this might make it seem that shōjo-manga
and shōnen-manga are only demographic categories, as Shamoon (2012: 1)
notes, ‘[s]hōjo manga is not just a genre of comics aimed at a specific demo-
graphic; it is a part of shōjo bunka, or girls’ culture, a discrete discourse on the
social construction of girlhood.’ Indeed, certain generic trends can be estab-
lished: Fujimoto (2008) argues that shōjo-manga traditionally have the female
character’s achieving the love of the main male character as their main theme,
whereas shōnen-manga are said to be more concerned with the personal
social development of the main character through perseverance (Schwartz
and Rubinstein-Ávila 2006); differences in drawing styles also appear to be
important, with shōjo-manga picking up on illustration traditions from girls’
magazines (Shamoon 2012). As such, the differences between the genres may
not always be obvious in the storylines themselves, but rather in how series
are constructed in a larger sense. Indeed, Chihayafuru is still interlocked with
more typical shōjo-manga themes, such as the relationships between the
main characters Chihaya, Taichi and Arata. It should be noted that, within the

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major genres themselves, one can find further subgenres, such as sports and
action shōnen-manga (reviewed in Drummond-Mathews 2010).
These distinctions are deepened by another gendering of genre on the
authorial level, as there is a tendency for authors to write for audiences of
their own gender. In particular, shōjo-manga are generally considered as
comics ‘for girls, by girls’ (Fujimoto 2008). The identification of shōjo-manga
as comics for-and-by-girls is an important and relatively new characteristic.
Indeed, the series most often noted as the birth of shōjo-manga, Ribon no
Kishi / Princess Knight, was written by Tezuka Osamu, the (male) author more
generally associated as the father of modern story-oriented manga (Yonezawa
2007). As Nanba (2001) explains, most shōjo-manga in the 1950s and 1960s
were published anonymously, with little billing for authors, who were then
primarily male. Starting in the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, more female
authors began to appear, and they began to be given credit. This took away
the anonymity of the genre, and the author as star in shōjo-manga was born.
With new forums in magazines for interaction between authors and writers,
such as letters sections, a new connection was formed between readers and
authors. As Shamoon (2012) notes, these interactional forums recreated a
connection with shōjo-bunka and heavily international-oriented pre-war
girls magazines. This also coincides with shifts in the themes seen in shōjo-
manga, which began to develop a more questioning stance towards the roles
of women in society (see Fujimoto 2008 for an overview).

Characterization in manga
Because manga are written as gendered texts, one can expect the genres
to have different character descriptions and world-views due both to their
authors’ experiences and the anticipated needs of their audiences. In turn, the
way that characters are depicted can influence readers’ perceptions of gender.
Media are important because of their role in socialization; as Tetenbaum
and Pearson (1989: 381) note, ‘[c]haracters in children’s literature can serve
as symbolic models, and as such provide important sources of identifica-
tion for children with the capacity to influence both sex-typed and moral
behaviors.’ These points are not relevant to children alone. As Peirce (1997)
argues, the ways that characters are used and depicted in fiction can have an
equally important impact on adult readers through (1) the reinforcement of
their socially constructed reality; and (2) their supply of one unified vision of
reality.
What, then, is known about how characters in manga are depicted? While
some research seems to suggest that female characters in either genre are
somewhat stereotypical – Choo (2008) finds that female protagonists in shōjo-
manga from the 1990s often took on maternal roles; Harrell (2007) argues that
even female characters in shōnen-manga possessing non-stereotypical capa-
bilities are still placed in situations aligning them with traditionally feminine
characters; Ito (1994) shows that female characters in men’s comic magazines
are stereotypically feminine in personality, roles and occupations – in general,
the changes observed above in shōjo-manga in the 1970s led to changes in
narratives and the characterization of female characters in both genres.
Ogi (2003: 780) describes the 1970s as a ‘turning point’ for shōjo-manga,
with advances of women into the working force leading to a diversification
of narratives and the narrative roles being taken by female characters. These
changes did not stay within shōjo-manga exclusively, but also led to changes

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in how female characters were depicted in shōnen-manga: while female char- 3. Unno (2006) notes
that that male main
acters started off as child-like side-line characters, starting in the 1970s they characters and female
began to develop into more perky and aggressive characters, with more adult- main characters are
like looks (Shiokawa 2009). Unno (2006), looking at trends in shōjo-manga rare in shōjo-manga
and shōnen-manga,
and shōnen-manga magazines from 1995 and 2005, also found that while respectively; but this
female characters tended to be childish and offered up as ‘rewards’ for male is not the article’s
characters’ success in 1995, female comrades and enemies were common main focus, and it
is otherwise left
in 2005. untouched within the
On the other hand, there has been comparatively little research on male discussion.
characters in either genre. Much of the research on male characters in shōjo-
manga has focused on the bishōnen, or beautiful boy, especially in boys-love
series, which focus on the homoerotic relationship between male char-
acters. Boys-love also has its roots in the changes shōjo-manga undertook
in the 1970s and is particular in its focus on male characters, who are often
androgynously beautiful. As McLelland (2010), Shamoon (2012) and others
have observed, by removing the female character, boys-love series are able
to overcome the social restrictions experienced when describing hetero-
sexual relationships, thus offering a creative zone for reimagining relation-
ships. In comparison, male characters in manga for men in general are said
to be ‘hypermasculine figures who are highly competitive and aggressive’
(McLelland 2010: 80). Harrell (2007) specifically postulates several character-
istics for male characters in shōnen-manga, including physical strength and
recklessness and strong focus and adherence on goals. Male characters are
thus described as strongly masculine, yet ‘the shōnen male embodies a much
freer and more appealing masculinity than the salaryman, who is doomed to a
life as a cog moving another’s machine’ (Harrell 2007: 9). Interestingly, while
female characters tend to be idealized, male characters in men’s comic maga-
zines tend to be ‘[…] depicted more realistic so that the readers can relate
better to the characters’ (Ito 1994: 84).
In this respect, the previous literature suggests that there are differences
between characters in the two genres, but there are still many unknowns. In
particular, while many of the works have looked at characters’ traits, one of
the questions that has been central to other reviews of characters in literature –
that is, the actual number of characters seen in the genres – has not been
well covered.3 As Clark (2002) reviews, quantitative analyses of the numbers
of characters seen in literature, especially that for children, have been very
popular, and have established: (1) that while improving over time, female
characters appear in fewer numbers than male characters; (2) that characters
of both sexes are frequently stereotyped; and (3) that children are influenced
by the visions of gender that they thus consume. Similar imbalances have
been reported for Japanese fiction: Takeda’s examination (1998) of picture-
book magazine magazine Kodomo no tomo / A Friend for Children shows that
while female protagonists now appear in far greater numbers than the ~10%
that they originally constituted from 1956–59, at somewhat less than 30% in
issues from 1986–98, they are still skewed towards male protagonists (~45%).
Similar imbalances also appear in other genres, such as Japanese textbooks
(Ohba 2001).
Manga would also seem to be an interesting target for such research.
One can hypothesize that shōjo-manga and shōnen-manga differ in how
they depict gendered characters, both in recognition of their audiences and
because of the gender of the authors themselves, especially as some research,
such as Tuck, Bayliss and Bell’s analysis (1985) of works by young authors,

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suggests that people tend to include more characters of their own gender.
Weitzman et al. (1972) have shown that descriptions of characters’ person-
alities and roles are important. Yet looking at the number of characters alone
can lead to important realizations about how media function, and the world-
views that they propagate. One problem when conducting such research is
the labour involved in doing the actual counting. However, since 2008, I have
been compiling and analysing a linguistic corpus of popular manga; having
included detailed information about characters and their speech patterns, it
provides a unique way to investigate these questions. In the sections below,
I introduce the project and the related data to look specifically at these ques-
tions: how many characters appear in each series; how much speech char-
acters account for; how these distributions differ across shōjo-manga and
shōnen-manga and what they say about how characters speak.

The study
This project originally began with the goal of examining how manga reflect
and influence language patterns, for which I have constructed a corpus of
the first three volumes of ten series, focusing on widely read series under the
assumption that they would have greater linguistic impact (Table 1). I measure
popularity by comparing my results from surveys conducted amongst Tokyo
high-school students on manga reading habits with sales ranking data from
July 2007 to July 2008, as reported by PHP Kenkyūsho/PHP Institute (2013)
using data from Tohan Shirabe, the research subdivision of the distributor
Tohan. Specifically, I select series that multiple students favour, which have
also been placed on the monthly top-ten sales lists.
All text was organized into eight categories that reflected visual context:
Lines, Thoughts, Narration, Onomatopoeia, Background text, Background
lines/thought, Comments and Titles (Table 2; see also Unser-Schutz 2011a).
For this study, I target only Lines, as they form the majority of text (Table 3).
As conversation between characters, they can measure how active characters
are within the narrative. To differentiate it from other usages, I refer to this

Genre Japanese title English title Author Magazine Publisher Start Finish
date date

Bokura ga Ita We Were There Obata, Yuki BetsuKomi Shogakukan 10/2002 2/2012
Shōjo-manga

Kimi ni Todoke From Me To You Shīna, Karuho Bessatsu Margaret Shueisha 9/2005 ―
(Lit: Reaching You)
Nana Nana Yazawa, Ai Cookie Shueisha 10/1999 ―
Nodame Cantabile Nodame Cantabile Ninomiya, Tomoko Kiss Kodansha 7/2001 10/2009
Rabu★Kon Love Com Nakahara, Aya Bessatsu Margaret Shueisha 9/2001 12/2006
Death Note Death Note Ohba, Tsugumi; Shōnen Jump Shueisha 12/2003 5/2006
Shōnen-manga

Obata, Takeshi
GinTama Gin Tama Sorachi, Hideaki Shōnen Jump Shueisha 12/2003 ―
Meitantei Konan Case Closed (Lit: Aoyama, Gōshōō Shōnen Sunday Shogakukan 1/1994 ―
Detective Conan)
Naruto Naruto Kishimoto, Masashi Shōnen Jump Shueisha 11/1999 ―
One Piece One Piece Oda, Eiichrōō Shōnen Jump Shueisha 8/1997 ―

Table 1: Series in corpus.

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 What text can tell us about male and female …

Category Environment Characteristics Text

Lines Unbroken speech bubbles Audible information; primarily Generally type

dialogue, some onomatopoeia
Thoughts Dot-tailed speech bubbles; Characters’ inner voices; are not Generally type
squares/whited-out audible to other characters; do not
space; on the background directly address the reader
Narration Square captions; directly Text informing plot development, Generally type
on background location, etc.; primarily descriptive,
often featuring privileged information
unknown to characters; any person;
not audible/accessible to characters
Onomatopoeia Directly written on Do not form full sentences; are not Stylized;
background spoken by anyone; are mimetic of real graphically
world sounds or describe the nature or handwritten
atmosphere of a scene
Background text Part of drawing Text written as a part of the scene; is Graphically
not actually vocalized, such as adver- incorporated
tisements, building names, etc.; into drawing
appear as text to characters
Background Directly written on Text representing secondary lines or Handwritten
lines/thoughts background, sometimes thoughts; it is impossible to tell whether
marked by straight lines they vocalized; often jokes, criticisms or
other non-essential information
Comments Directly written on Notes or jokes about characters or Generally
background, sometimes items; supply privileged information handwritten
marked by arrows or stars about the scenes that has not been
otherwise made available to the read-
ers; generally non-essential information
Titles In captions; directly on Titles or subtitles of the chapter or Generally type
background series name; authors’ names

Table 2: Summary of the roles and environments of the major text categories in manga (modified from
Unser-Schutz 2011b).

text type as ‘Lines’ below. Lines were also subject to a morpheme analysis 4. Excluding stand-
alone onomatopoeic
(i.e. divided into individual words), which was used to calculate the frequen- Lines, which were not
cies of linguistic phenomena. Table 3 shows the number of text-characters targeted for morpheme
(one symbol of Japanese writing), corpus entries (equivalent to the number analysis.

of speech bubbles including text) and the average length of entries, e.g. the
number of text-characters to entries.
I use two markers to assess the role of characters: the number of characters
and the amount of text they speak. While the number of characters may tell
us about the nature of the plots and gendered characters’ roles, the amount of
text spoken can be a marker of how active their roles are. For each Line I note
whether their speakers are male, female, both/unclear, onomatopoeia or animal
and calculate the number of entries, text-characters and words for each group4
and individual character. To assess the differences between female and male
central characters in the genres, I also divide characters into identifiable and
extra characters. I define identifiable characters as individuals with ten or more

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Giancarla Unser-Schutz

Category
Background
Background Lines/ Grand
Genre Data type Lines Thoughts Narration Onomatopoeia Text Thoughts Comments Titles total

Shōjo-manga Text-characters 2 19,513 52,427 8,839 15,904 10,115 21,622 2,394 682 331,496
Entries 16,239 4,285 582 4,164 977 2,310 342 73 28,972
Entry Length 13.52 12.24 15.19 3.82 10.35 9.36 7.00 9.34 11.44
Shōnen-manga Text-characters 2 80,455 40,056 4,819 15,539 12,584 1,209 162 2,022 356,846
Entries 18,052 2,276 276 4,367 1,212 142 20 163 26,508
Entry Length 15.54 17.60 17.46 3.56 10.38 8.51 8.10 12.40 13.46
Total Text-characters 4 99,968 92,483 13,658 31,443 22,699 22,831 2,556 2,704 688,342
Entries 34,291 6,561 858 8,531 2,189 2,452 362 236 55,480
Entry Length 14.58 14.10 15.92 3.69 10.37 9.31 7.06 11.46 12.41
T-Chars./Page 94.57 17.49 2.59 5.94 4.29 4.32 0.48 0.51 130.20
Entries/Page 6.48 1.24 0.16 1.61 0.41 0.46 0.07 0.04 10.49

Text-characters: The number of  ‘letters’, Entries: The number of blocks of text; Entry length: The average number of text-characters per entry;
T-Chars./Page: Average number of text-characters per page; Entries/Page: Average number of text-characters per entries

Table 3: Overall corpus data.

 What text can tell us about male and female …

Lines and over 150 text-characters. All other characters have been determined
to be extras: since the average number of Lines per page is 6.48, less than ten
implies that such characters are not part of multi-page, ongoing dialogues.
Note that other character qualities have not been considered to avoid some of
the problems such as over-simplifying characters’ narrative roles or inserting
one’s ideologies in framing categories that Bal (1997: 116–18) describes.
Finally, as the corpus consists of the first three volumes of each series, the data
presented here is a sample, with the number of characters presumably increasing
as series progress. However, I would argue that the data shown here is repre-
sentative of the trends one can expect. As the first three volumes correspond to
approximately one or two years of publication, series have likely entered into their
main plotlines. In addition, the corpus offers comparable samples for each series,
as they all include both the initial plot set-ups and parts of the main plotlines.

Results
The data is generally skewed towards male characters, who made up 62.29%
of entries as compared with female characters’ 34.64% (Table 4). This is
slightly higher for text-characters (64.71%), suggesting that male characters’
Lines are slightly longer. This imbalance is mostly due to shōnen-manga, with
male characters’ accounting for 79.13% of Lines. This is somewhat predictable
as the main characters, who generally speak the most text, are likely aligned
with the gender of their target audiences, which is also true for shōjo-manga.
However, the gap there was considerably smaller, with female characters
accounting for somewhat over half of all Lines (54.69%).

Genre Sex Entries Text-characters Words

Shōjo-manga Male 7,076 43.57% 91,481 41.67% 46,844 43.07%

Female 8,881 54.69% 125,660 57.24% 60,944 56.04%
Both/Unclear 217 1.34% 2,173 0.99% 968 0.89%
Onomatopoeia 64 0.39% 194 0.09% -
Animal 1 0.01% 5 0.00% 2 0.00%
Total 16,239 219,513 108,758

Shōnen-manga Male 1 4,284 79.13% 232,026 82.73% 126,869 83.39%

Female 2,996 16.60% 43,978 15.68% 23,945 15.74%
Both/Unclear 191 1.06% 2,202 0.79% 1,138 0.75%
Onomatopoeia 489 2.71% 1,697 0.61% -
Animal 92 0.51% 552 0.20% 196 0.13%
Total 18,052 280,455 152,148

Grand total Male 21,360 62.29% 323,507 64.71% 173,713 66.58%

Female 11,877 34.64% 169,638 33.93% 84,889 32.54%
Both/Unclear 408 1.19% 4,375 0.88% 2,106 0.81%
Onomatopoeia 553 1.61% 1,891 0.38% -
Animal 93 0.27% 557 0.11% 198 0.08%
Total 34,291 499,968 260,906

Table 4: Number of Lines seen.

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Giancarla Unser-Schutz

Genre Series Sex

Total
Male Female

Shōjo-manga Bokura ga Ita 26 47.27% 29 52.73% 55

Kimi ni Todoke 47 46.53% 54 53.47% 101
Nana 22 57.89% 16 42.11% 38
Nodame Cantabile 59 51.30% 56 48.70% 115
Rabu★Kon 27 50.00% 27 50.00% 54
Total 181 49.86% 182 50.14% 363

Shōnen-manga Death Note 119 86.23% 19 13.77% 138

GinTama 104 88.14% 14 11.86% 118
Meitantei Konan 61 66.30% 31 33.70% 92
Naruto 42 91.30% 4 8.70% 46
One Piece 200 95.69% 9 4.31% 209
Total 526 87.23% 77 12.77% 603

Grand Total 707 72.89% 262 27.01% 970

Table 5: Number of characters seen in each series.

More generally, the gender of the main characters may be the major factor
here: one shōjo-manga series Nodame Cantabile actually features more male
Lines (61.19%). Nodame Cantabile is peculiar, however, in that its main character
could be argued to be the male Chiaki. Although the title may suggest Nodame
is our protagonist, Chiaki fits all of the characteristics that Bal (1997: 132)
proposes for the ‘hero’: we know the most about him (qualification); he is the
most frequent character (distribution); he both speaks and thinks (independence);
he has privileged actions, from reminiscing to fantasizing (function) and he inter-
acts with the majority of characters (relations). This is supported by the data:
he individually accounts for 24.25% of all text-characters (Table  6). However,
while this suggests the importance of the main character’s gender, the skew in
Nodame Cantabile is nonetheless not as dramatic as that of shōnen-manga.
This imbalance may be more related to the overall number of charac-
ters: shōnen-manga tend to have a large cast of characters, averaging 121
per series (range: 46~209), compared to 73 in shōjo-manga (range: 38~115)
(Table 5). While this is not statistically significant (t(8) = 1.56, p = .1576), there
is a strong positive correlation in shōjo-manga between female and male
characters (r = .958, N = 5, p = .009*), suggesting that as the overall number of
characters increases, both male and female characters tend to increase. There
is a moderate negative correlation between female and male characters in
shōnen-manga, but this is not significant, likely due to the limited number
of cases (r = –.206, N = 5, p > .1). However, none of the shōnen-manga series
show a balanced ratio of characters, making it clear that (1) shōnen-manga
feature more male characters; and (2) shōjo-manga have a more balanced
ratio of male and female characters.
The differences between shōjo-manga and shōnen-manga become starker
when looking at the number of identifiable and extra characters (Graph 1).
Averaging 30.8 characters, shōnen-manga tend to feature a larger iden-
tifiable cast. At just twenty characters, Naruto is exceptional; however, its

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 What text can tell us about male and female …

Graph 1: Distribution of Lines by character types.

exceptionality may be consistent, having also been so in its use of text types
(Unser-Schutz 2011b). In comparison, shōjo-manga average 18.2 identifiable
characters; this difference was significant (t(8) = 3.20, p = .0126*), suggest-
ing that shōjo-manga focus on a smaller group of core characters. While the
percentage covered by identifiable characters does not differ significantly
between the genres, identifiable characters in shōjo-manga speak more than
they do in shōnen-manga (2,279.96 vs. 1,680.78 text-characters), which while
not significant, is trending (t(8) = 1.74, p = .1195).
In shōnen-manga, there are also many identifiable male characters, with
the minimum 18 (Naruto) and the maximum 30 (GinTama); yet identifiable
female characters range from as low as 2 (Naruto) to as high as 12 (Meitantei
Konan / Case Closed) (Graphs 2 and 3). Shōjo-manga are more balanced; in
some series they even have more male characters, with a minimum of 7 (Kimi
ni Todoke / From Me to You, Bokura ga Ita / We Were There) to a maximum of
17 (Nodame Cantabile). Female characters range from 5 (Nana, Rabu★Kon /
Love Com) to 15 (Kimi ni Todoke).
Additionally, the number of Lines spoken by the main male and female
characters, e.g. the one with the most Lines, differs between genres. All the

Graph 2 (Left): Number of identifiable male Graph 3 (Right): Number of identifiable female
characters by series. characters by series.

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Giancarla Unser-Schutz

Genre Title Male Female

Name Total % Text Name Total % Text

Shōjo-manga Bokura ga Ita Yano 9,999 29.81% Nanami 11,999 35.78%

Kimi ni Todoke Kazehaya 6,381 14.05% Sawako 12,827 28.25%
Nana Shōji 6,722 12.77% Nana 17,059 32.40%
Nodame Cantabile Chiaki 9,733 24.25% Nodame 9,069 22.60%
Rabu★Kon Ōtani 12,188 25.51% Risa 17,976 37.62%

Shōnen-manga DeathNote Light 18,607 28.81% Naomi 2,518 3.90%

GinTama Sakata 12,424 23.62% Kagura 3,370 6.41%
Meitantei Konan Conan 13,846 21.62% Ran 6,455 10.08%
Naruto Kakashi 9,139 23.16% Sakura 3,508 8.89%
OnePiece Luffy 9,742 16.30% Nami 6,071 10.16%

Table 6: Percentages of text-characters spoken by each series’ main male and female characters.

shōjo-manga series have at least one male and one female character with
more than 10% of all Lines (Table 6). The main female characters account for
up to 37.62% (Risa in Rabu★Kon); the lowest is 22.60% (Nodame in Nodame
Cantabile), but this is because the main character is male (Chiaki: 24.25%). The
lowest percentage for a main male character is 12.77% (Shōji) in Nana, which
has a high number of male characters, and the highest 29.81% (Yano in Bokura
ga Ita). On the other hand, all shōnen-manga but One Piece have two or three
male characters each covering 10% of Lines, but only two have female charac-
ters with over 10%, topping off at just 10.16% (Nami in One Piece).

Discussion
Gender imbalances in manga
As examined above, shōjo-manga are often described as being for girls, by
girls, with both their readers and writers female. Yet shōjo-manga clearly do
not depict a world that is exclusively made up of women. If anything, as in
Nodame Cantabile or Nana, the number of male characters can actually be
higher. This is a major point of difference with for-boys, by-boys, about-boys
shōnen-manga, which feature a larger cast of characters and a very high ratio
of male-to-female characters. This begs the question of why the genres should
differ in their use of characters: even presupposing that it is normal to prima-
rily feature characters who are the same gender as their readers/authors, this
does not explain why they should differ in the degree that they favour them.
Several reasons may be suggested for this, but one important point may
be the importance of interpersonal relationships in shōjo-manga. As Fujimoto
(2008: 22) details, shōjo-manga have long centred on the development of the
main female character through her relationship with men. While their narra-
tive varieties seem to have diversified in recent years (see Shamoon 2004 for
an overview), to a large degree the stories often closely follow the characters’
developing (generally heterosexual) romances. Indeed, if anything, the trend
in shōjo-manga is for it, too, to limit female characters, as in the subgenre of
boys-love. In shōnen-manga, however, the plots are more action oriented,
generally making romance a secondary factor.

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However, I nonetheless have chosen the term ‘interpersonal relation-

ships’ to avoid limiting this focus on romance. While the main themes of
We Were There and Love Com is romance, this is less clear in the remaining
series. While romantic relationships affect the plot, Nana’s main focus is the
two main (female) characters’ relationship, typified by Nana Komatsu’s remi-
niscences throughout the series. From Me to You also features romance, but
as of the three volumes included here, the focus is on the characters’ devel-
oping friendships: the main character, Sawako, only recognizes her feel-
ings as romantic later on. Likewise, although Nodame constantly says that
Chiaki is her boyfriend in Nodame Cantabile, most of the series focuses on
their platonic relationship, which only blossoms into a romance towards the
end. While secondary female characters are rare in Bokura ga Ita and Nodame
Cantabile, these trends nonetheless recall the tradition of female friendship
as a major theme both of shōjo-manga and girls’ magazines that Shamoon
(2012) describes.
This focus on interpersonal relationships has a consequence on the
number of characters themselves. Shōjo-manga’s relatively limited set
of characters is likely a reflection of the lengthy development of relation-
ships between characters in shōjo-manga over time: whether friendship or
romance, the depth of the relationship usually requires time to come to frui-
tion. On the other hand, all of the shōnen-manga series included here are
largely action oriented, with clearly defined story arcs that feature their own
set of problems, locations, themes and characters. While the corpus only
includes the first three volumes of each series, one might actually predict
that the gap between the number of characters in shōjo-manga and shōnen-
manga will increase over time.
However, interpersonal relationships are not a sufficient explanation
for the gender imbalance. Given the historical importance of female friend-
ships in shōjo-manga (Shamoon 2012), if anything, one would expect them
to feature a similar imbalance between male and female characters, yet this
is not the case; there is no definite reason why there should not be more
female comrades – or enemies – in action series. It is interesting, however, to
consider that certain similarities in this exclusion of women may be found in
other media for men. As Clammer (1995: 201) notes, some types of Japanese
men’s magazines are typified by their lack of women in their pages, even
as ‘accessories to young men’. There also appear to be similarities between
shōnen-manga and men’s sports tabloids: as Nakamura (2008) describes, they
also have the hero’s journey as their narrative heart and primarily function to
strengthen ties between men, with the roles of women largely restricted to
the ‘pink’ pornographic pages. This suggests that additional factors outside of
manga itself are necessary to explain these trends.
One such additional explanation might be that these are reflections of the
different social experiences of Japanese men and women. That is, because
shōjo-manga and shōnen-manga are primarily written by women and men,
respectively, these differences may actually be reflections of their authors’
own experiences. As was noted earlier in the review of the development of
shōjo-manga, women’s lives in Japan have greatly changed over the last
several decades. In 2012, 45.8% of all female high-school graduates went on
to four-year colleges – which, while still lower than boys’ 56.0%, is still seven
times higher than the 6.5% in 1970 (boys: 27.3%; Ministry of Internal Affairs
and Communications Bureau of Statistics 2013). In 2011, 63.0% of women of
productive age were in the workforce, maintaining the record made in 2010

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(Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare Equal Employment and Families

Bureau 2012), and there is now a much wider variety of socially acceptable
options for women. These changes, however, also mean more interaction
with men in a variety of environments, whether one chooses a life centred
around marriage or to pursue a career. Men make up the majority of the
workforce (57.3%), particularly those of productive age, of whom 84.5% are
in the workforce (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare Equal Employment
and Families Bureau 2012) and are more likely to be one’s boss, given that just
7.2% of all department heads of companies with 100 or more employees are
female (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2012). Thus, interaction with
men in a variety of settings and hierarchies will be a natural part of women’s
everyday lives.
On the other hand, expectations for men have changed comparatively
little, and adjustments to social expectations for men have been slow. To be
sure, this means that, for example, single older men are often viewed more
negatively for deviating from the traditional family structure (Murata 2009),
but this does not mean that men’s relationships with women are central to
their experiences in the same way: given the long hours and after-work social-
izing that typify the Japanese workplace, the traditional family structure has
been largely one of father absenteeism. Indeed, workplace conditions and the
social value placed upon women’s maternal roles ‘still hinder women’s ability
to negotiate the allocation of household tasks with their husbands effectively’
(Yasuike 2011: 1704). As Kobayashi, Murofuji and Watanabe (2011) report,
men’s involvement in household chores has increased over the last several
decades – but it is still just 50 minutes a day on weekdays, compared with
206 minutes for working women, with childcare comprising just 18 of those
50 minutes. Men spend more time at work than women (8:27 hours vs. 6:08
hours per day on weekdays (Kobayashi et al. 2011)), and as a primarily male
environment, most men’s relationships there will also be with men, particu-
larly as they move up the ladder.
Being written by adult writers, who have gone through the process of
socialization themselves and likely experienced these kinds of workplaces
and life issues, shōjo-manga and shōnen-manga may thus be reflective of
the differing life experiences that their authors themselves have likely already
experienced. As Fujimoto (2008), Shamoon (2012) and others have written,
shōjo-manga have often acted as a kind of guide-to-life for girls – a friend
to lead the way to adulthood – and the experiences that its adult women
writers have had form a basis for that. While not as commonly perceived as
such, shōnen-manga, too, ‘provide a mirror of the reader’s life’ (Drummond-
Mathews 2010: 74), and authors’ own experiences will likely have an effect
on how that is expressed. Thus, with shōjo-manga and shōnen-manga both
generally written by authors of the same gender as their audiences, one
could perhaps say that they are one generations’ way of communicating –
and helping to reproduce in their readers – their experiences and values to
the next.

The impact of the distribution of characters on characterization

Aside from what these distributions say about how manga reflect current
society, it is also important to consider their effect on how characters are
depicted and how those characters are perceived by readers. As has been
seen from Weitzman et al. (1972) and others, there seems to be a relationship

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between the uncommonness of female characters and how stereotyped they

are. Continuing with the focus on language, the above results likewise make
an interesting prediction about how natural characters’ use of gendered speech
is. Japanese is commonly said to be a highly gendered language, meaning that
the speech patterns of male and female speakers differ greatly (Kindaichi 1989;
Tsujimura 2007). Over the past twenty years, however, numerous studies have
reported changes in the use of female speech, with reports that women are
using more neutral or masculine speech (e.g. Kobayashi 1993; Okamoto 1995;
Philips 2001), leading some to say that Japanese is becoming more gender
neutral (Kobayashi 1993).
However, strongly gendered speech patterns are often found in works
of fiction, where they can be used to create stereotypical characters. Kinsui
(2003: 205) coined these kinds of stereotyped speech patterns ‘yakuwari-go’,
or ‘speech patterns which are aligned to the images of their speakers’, and
has argued that they are in fact an ‘essential’ element of manga (Kinsui 2007:
98). Because they clearly label speakers as being male or female, gendered
language is a common site of yakuwari-go. Typical examples can be found in
the speech of Professor Agase in Meitantei Konan, whose use of non-standard
forms such as the first personal pronoun ‘washi’, the copula ‘ja’, and the verb
of existence ‘oru’ matches his professorial image, as in ‘Masaka/Shin’ichi no
yatsu […]/washi no himitsu o/ii furashite/oru n ja[…]’ (‘Could it be possible
that Shin’ichi has been going about spreading my secrets[…]?’) (1: 53;
emphasis added).
However, not all characters use yakuwari-go. Characters who are more
peripheral to the narrative are more likely to use yakuwari-go than central
characters because of the performance cost involved (Kinsui 2003). Having
main characters utilize yakuwari-go requires greater effort by authors to be
consistent, with failure to follow the stereotypes causing potentially negative
breaks in character. While this holds true for peripheral characters as well,
such gaps are less likely to be noticed. One can hypothesize that shōnen-
manga, with their larger cast of secondary characters, are more suceptible to
yakuwari-go, especially amongst female characters, who have minimum roles.
On the other hand, because shōjo-manga feature fewer extras and a more
balanced ratio of male and female characters, one can hypothesize that shōjo-
manga will feature more natural speech.
While a full discussion of these points calls for its own forum, initial
analyses appear to uphold these hypotheses. Looking at the use of sentence
final particles (SFPs) – non-obligatory particles added to the end of sentences
which differ in use by gender – I have found that shōnen-manga series tend
to use stronger forms, with both male and female characters using more
stereotypically gendered forms (Unser-Schutz 2010). Female characters in
shōnen-manga particularly use strongly feminine forms more than has been
reported for natural speech; for example, while Okamoto (1995) and others
have shown the use of the strongly feminine SFP ‘wa’ to be rare amongst
young women: ‘wa’ alone accounts for 6.94% of all female characters’ SFPs
in shōnen-manga. Conversely, the use of SFPs amongst female characters in
shōjo-manga is closer to real-life patterns, with ‘wa’ accounting for just 1.86%
of all female characters’ SFPs.
It is tempting to simply conclude that shōnen-manga may contribute to the
propagation of linguistic stereotyping through their use of non-realistic speech
amongst female characters. However, these differences may actually reflect
something greater about how the genres are constructed and read. Empathetic

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engagement with characters is associated with realism (Keen 2006), of which

language is one part: does this character ‘talk like they ought to’, consider-
ing the background they have been supplied with? The limited numbers of
characters in shōjo-manga, and the more realistic speech patterns which that
seems to entail, may suggest that it is easier for readers to become engaged
with characters in shōjo-manga, whether they are centred on romance as in
Bokura ga Ita and Rabu★Kon, or friendship as in Kimi ni Todoke and Nana.
On the other hand, the stereotypical speech patterns of characters in shōnen-
manga suggest that readers are limited in how they can engage with char-
acters, instead recalling the escapist hero-narratives world of sports tabloids
observed by Nakamura (2008). As Nakamura suggests, by not demanding that
readers emphasize with the ‘characters’, tabloids offer a place of escape, thus
presenting a different form of pleasure for readers. Shōnen-manga, too, may
simply be offering a different reading experience than shōjo-manga.

Conclusions
This article seeks to examine the prominence of male and female characters in
shōjo-manga and shōnen-manga, as measured by how many characters are
seen and how much they speak using data from a linguistic corpus. As a result,
it becomes clear that shōnen-manga greatly skew towards male characters,
with few major female characters. In comparison, shōjo-manga are much more
balanced, with only a moderate skewing towards female characters. Shōnen-
manga also feature larger casts of characters than shōjo-manga, which seem
to focus on a small, core set. In discussing why this should be, I argue that it is
related to the focus on interpersonal relationships in shōjo-manga, and to the
different world-views and social experiences of men and women. I also argue
that this can affect characterization following Kinsui’s predictions (2003) that
stereotyped yakuwari-go would be more common amongst peripheral char-
acters. This would lead to the hypothesis that shōnen-manga use more stere-
otyped speech, especially amongst female characters, which the data appears
to support. Although it would be easy to negatively write off shōnen-manga
as simply more stereotyped, I instead suggest that this is also related to the
different types of reading experiences the genres offer. While the analysis
purposefully does not touch upon characters’ personality traits, in this way
it is possible to make interesting observations about how shōjo-manga and
shōnen-manga differ, thus suggesting the potential of quantitative analyses
in manga research.
Of course, there are still many points which cannot be examined here,
two of which are worth considering: first, the historical development of these
trends; and second, their impact on readers. As regards to the earlier point,
one must ask whether the trends observed here are new. Since the domi-
nance of female authors is a relatively new characteristic of shōjo-manga,
comparisons with pre-1970s series may prove informative of both the roles
of authors in characterization and trends within the genres more generally.
In her examination of characters in picture books, Takeda (1998) finds that as
the number of female writers increase, the number of female protagonists also
increase. This may also be the case with manga, although analyses such as
that by Shamoon (2012) suggest in fact that the relationships between female
characters were previously more important. A comparative historical analysis
could thus both help understand how the genres developed and also the role
of the authors’ own genders.

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With regards to the latter point, one might also expect that these differ-
ing usages of characters would have an impact on the way that young readers
perceive genders. As has been argued for such varied media as women’s
fashion magazines (Peirce 1997), television (Signorielli and Bacue 1999) and
pictures books (Weitzman et al. 1972), visions such as those presented in
manga become part of what shape our world-views over time. By exposing
readers regularly to such gender-demarcated worlds, both shōjo-manga and
shōnen-manga create an image of how interactions and relationships with
others should (and could) be like. In particular, while shōjo-manga present
a relatively balanced world in terms of the participation of male and female
characters, with their general lack of female characters, shōnen-manga can be
thought of as participating in the re-creation of a male-centric world. In this
way, evidence from the numbers of characters alone makes it clear that the
two genres create different, and somewhat conflicting, visions of the world.
It is interesting to consider this in light of the fact that audiences are not
strictly reading along the genre lines anymore, with especially many girls
reading shōnen-manga (Ogino 2001, Allen and Ingulsrud 2005). This makes
one reflect upon what girls get out of reading shōnen-manga: with few female
characters to look towards, are they engaging with the male characters? Or
is it that they are drawn to the different style of the genre in the first place,
such as the focus on action rather than interpersonal relationships? While it is
tempting to argue simply that the female-less world of shōnen-manga have
a negative impact on female readers’ perceptions of themselves, as Tanaka
(2012: 114–15) suggests, women’s limited role in media may in fact stand
out as a gap with their own experiences and thus present an opportunity for
the curious reader to consider why that should be. Similarly, girls consum-
ing shōnen-manga may experience something more complex than just the
internalization and reproduction of stereotypes. Researching such issues may
provide a new avenue into understanding not just how manga influence read-
ers’ gender constructions, but also how media in general are consumed and
function.
Although a thorough review of the issues above requires a separate
forum, it may be interesting to end the discussion with a look back at genre in
manga. In recent years, the changes in readership noted earlier have led some
to suggest that the current manga genres no longer function, thus calling
for a content-oriented reassessment of genre in manga (Itō 2005). However,
the data here demonstrates that there may be formal differences between
the genres, beyond mere target audiences; language and character patterns
appear to be a helpful way of establishing those differences, as has been
shown with other genres of literature (e.g. Biber 1993; Stamatatos, Fakotakis
and Kokkinakis 2000). As one of the original goals of this project was to estab-
lish whether language could be useful for considering genre in manga, this is
a significant finding, and it suggests that linguistic data may prove a fruitful
way of gaining new insights into how manga function, above and beyond the
scope of the present discussion.

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Suggested citation
Unser-Schutz, G. (2015), ‘What text can tell us about male and female
characters in shōjo- and shōnen-manga’, East Asian Journal of Popular
Culture 1: 1, pp. 133–153, doi: 10.1386/eapc.1.1.133_1

Contributor details
Giancarla Unser-Schutz is a lecturer in the Faculty of Psychology at Rissho
University, where she teaches classes on English and Sociolinguistics. Her
main research project concerns a sociolinguistic analysis of the characteristics
of language in manga, using corpus-based approaches. She has presented her
work at a variety of venues, including the Popular Culture Association and the
Linguistic Society of America. Questions and/or comments are always appre-
ciated, and may be sent to her at giancarlaunserschutz@ris.ac.jp.
Contact: 141-8602, Tokyo-to, Shinagawa-ku, Osaki, 4-2-16 1-gōkan Shinrigakubu
jimushitsu, Japan.
E-mail: g
 iancarlaunserschutz@ris.ac.jp,
giancarlaunserschutz@yahoo.co.jp

Giancarla Unser-Schutz has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format
that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

153
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