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NEWS: Manga a Job Boom for Women




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chicogrande



Joined: 11 Jun 2004
Posts: 190
Location: Huntsville, Alabama
PostPosted: Wed May 11, 2005 11:13 pm Reply with quote
After reading this article, I can't help to conclude that it is too late in having reported this revelation. IMO, this manga job boon for women has been going on for almost as long as there has been manga in Japan. There have been female manga artist in Japan since they decided that the male manga artists were not portraying women characters properly starting in about the 1950's! Now, I am saying this using information from the top of my head as I sit here typing. I made a presentation for my Japanese studies class in college (1999?) about the popularity of manga in Japan and one of my arguments was the popularity of it among Japanese females. One of the reasons is the accessability of the medium to women and the growth of Shoujou manga since after World War II. It was the women that decided that they could better portray female characters, from about that time on, that built on the popularity of Manga as a source of entertainment in Japan for men and women. I'm fairly sure there are many names of female manga artists that share in the pioneering spirit of the likes of Osamu Tezuka for example. To bolster my case, I made a little web-search and found "A History of Manga" at matt-thorn.com. In part 3, it states, and I concur, that Japanese women manga artists' numbers have grown through the 1960's, the 70's, the 80's, the 90's, and up until today. All through that time the subject matter in Shoujou (Girls') manga has also evolved and changed according to the evolving tastes of the Japanese female reader and every decade a new generation of female manga artists has emerged after reading the works of pioneering women before them. I may be a little too hard on this article's sudden discovery of a means of female empowerment in Japan. But I can't help feeling that they're not accurately portraying the impact and influence that female manga artists have had in Japan's social makeup for decades now.

I also feel that they are missing the fact that many women in Japan are owners of small businesses and are also prominent in blue-collar work. I don't think you can measure suppossed levels of discrimination that Japanese women suffer by only measuring how many are in influential white-collar positions.


The matt-thorn.com article "A History of Manga," part 3 can be found at: http://www.matt-thorn.com/mangagaku/history3.html
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