Source: Fruits Basket (2019), TMS Entertainment Co., Ltd., Hakusensha, Inc.
Fans of shoujo manga are voicing their frustrations on X after the Shogakukan Manga Awards eliminated its boy and girl categories for this years’ contest. As a result, three of the four awards went to series marketed to young boys and adult men. None of the winning series were for young girls. The unintended consequence of trying to make something more “diverse” and “equitable” has done the opposite.
In Japan, manga are categorized according to their intended audience. For men, series are separated into shonen for teenage boys and seinen for adult men. For women, series are classified as shoujo for teenage girls and josei for adult women.
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By eliminating these distinctions in the Shogakukan Manga Awards, this means that popular shoujo series like NANA and Fruits Basket would have been forced to compete with Naruto and One Piece for only four awards.
X user MangaMoguraRE first noted the change in format and celebrated it. “Personally I think [that’s] a very good decision and inevitable in a changing distribution system away from magazines. I would prefer it if readers would let go [of] thinking in demographics and rather simply select new works based on story and art they like.”
Source: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, Madhouse, Inc., Shogakukan, Inc.
Others pointed out that none of the four manga that won at the Shogakukan Manga Awards were in the shoujo genre. Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End and The Elusive Samurai are shonen series, Trillion Game is a seinen series, and Suji de Asobo (Playing with Numbers) is a josei series.
Shoujo Crave on X posted Shogakukan’s official announcement of the winners and their changes to the format. They also machine-translated it from Japanese into English. Shogakukan notes that they changed the format due to manga being enjoyed by all, regardless of age or gender, echoing the common woke refrain of “this hobby is for everyone.”
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Fans of the shoujo genre took to X to call out the company and complain about how much they hated the removal of categories. One X user claimed “demographics don’t matter anymore” and pointed out that zero shoujo series received an award this year. Another wrote, “female mangaka you deserve so much more than what the industry gives you.”
This comes as a concerted effort has been happening in Japan to inject woke politics into anime. In 2022, anime and Japanese culture commentator Scratch Point discovered that Kadokawa had updated its website to include a page dedicated to “diversity and inclusion.” Other users found pages dedicated to “environmental, societal, and governance” (ESG) goals.
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Scratch Point writes “Kadokawa pledges allegiance to an ideology contrary to freedom of expression, as it can’t exist without the risk of offense. Fiction can’t infringe on rights & stories don’t have to promote the zeitgeist. These rules are left vague to impede creativity. This is how the game works: create ill-defined rules virtue-signaling against prejudice & discrimination, so that any time something they personally dislike comes along they can label it as such & destroy it.”
ESG and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives use investor and hedge fund money as bribes to encourage corporations to actively institute more woke policies within the company, such as discriminating against straight, white men in hiring, injecting Western political tropes into the work, and censorship of anything deemed “problematic.”
Niche Gamer wrote an article back in October on the increased efforts by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to court ESG cash from investment companies like BlackRock, and inject it into Japan’s struggling bottom line. BlackRock is one of the primary investment companies that promotes ESG scores in lending, and uses it as leverage to force corporations to give in to woke demands. Kishida, who took over for the late Shinzo Abe, remains deeply unpopular in Japan. Reuters reported his overall support plummeted to 17.1% in December.
What do you think about removing categories from the Shogakukan Manga Awards? Are you in favor of splitting the awards by genre or do you think the new format is perfect? What do you think about the rise of ESG in Japan? Let us know in the comments below what you think.
Larry Fink needs to be expelled from Japan. And Fumio Kishida needs to be removed as prime minister, because he’s acting like a World Economic Forum agent.
Yes and Yes.
Shounen has always been massively more popular than shoujo. This won’t end well.