Writing girls through girls’ magazines: (En)gendering childhood, 1895–1912

Throughout Japanese literary history, though the shōjo genre (a genre for girls) was often marginalized, it evolved and was renewed at every stage in the development of print media, blending with another or several different genres. This article examines how the circulation of girls’ magazines such as Shōjokai (Girls’ Sphere) shaped girls’ reading communities to accompany the sense of national belonging that arose in tandem with the reinforcement of gender ideologies. An analysis of Shōjokai will show how, why and by whom images of desirable female ‘little citizens’ were constructed, fractured and expressed through print media. As the first girls’ magazine, Shōjokai delineated how the reading and writing of girls opened up a new arena in which subscribers expressed their ideas and opinions without constrains while understanding the value of being good ‘little citizens’. Thus, the development of girls’ communities created tensions between universal principles of love and national consciousness, illuminating the ways in which the discourse of modern girlhood alternately negated and affirmed their association with fluid communities for ‘little citizens’.