Introduction

In 2009, a special 100th anniversary issue of Shōjo no tomo (Girls’ Friend) was published in Japan (Endō and Uchida 2009), an event that generated broad public interest and helped to revive one of the most popular girls’ magazines from the previous century. A ten-minute news story on NHK News (2009) interviewed two writers who contributed to the volume. One was Endō Hiroko, a writer of children’s books and the lead supervisor of the volume, who had been collecting signatures for years to petition the publisher to commemorate the magazine. Endō was a reader of the magazine in her youth, and explained that “Shōjo no tomo tried to teach readers not only to dream but also the shōjo way of life and way of thinking”Footnote 1 (NHK News 2009). The other interview was with Asano Atsuko, also a popular writer, who was profiled in the commemorative issue. Asano was too young to be a reader in her youth, but she knew of the magazine and expressed her view that “The dignity that was described in Shōjo no tomo is incredibly useful right now. It is very much needed in the present age” (NHK News 2009).

Shōjo no tomo was one of the leading girls’ magazines of early 20th century Japan, and one of only two that kept publishing during the 15 Year War (1931–1945). The other magazine was Shōjo kurabu (Girls’ Club). However, this magazine has not been revived in the contemporary period. Although Shōjo kurabu had a larger circulation before the war, it was read by girls from a broad range of class and place backgrounds (Imada 2019) and did not feature the same kinds of artistic and sentimental content that attracted older middle-class girls to Shōjo no tomo (Dollase 2019). As for Shōjo no tomo, it originally had a publishing history of almost 50 years, but the commemorative issue is only one small volume. There was, no doubt, a lot that was left out, and there were many hard decisions to make. So, our questions are as follows: In the commemoration of Shōjo no tomo, what was included, excluded, and marginalized, and how were these choices made? How did the editors engage with the intersections between shōjo gender identity and collective memory of the war?

How people in contemporary Japan understand national identity and the war is intertwined with and inseparable from how they understand gender identity. Our purpose in this paper is to investigate how a central object of Japanese girls' culture before 1945 was adapted to the present era, and what this commemoration tells us about gender and national identity in contemporary Japan. We approach this first by comparing the content of the original issues of Shōjo no tomo with the content of the commemorative issue, to assess what has changed and what has remained the same about the magazine. We focus on non-fiction articles, because they explicitly represent the reality of the times but have not received as much attention in prior research. Our data show that themes about creative independence were preserved and elaborated, emphasizing expression and empowerment through writing, while support for war was marginalized, highlighting an anti-war interpretation. We then examine how the lead editor of the commemoration reconstructed narratives of shōjo identity and agency to justify these editorial choices and to deemphasize contradictions between feminism and nationalism in Japan. Our study contributes to research on commemorative practices by highlighting how narrative accounts of identity and agency can be transformed through successful commemorations.

Literature review

We examine this case of commemoration as a narrative performance (Alexander 2004), where “commemoration provides people with autobiographical narratives of their purportedly shared past as a group and induces them to feel and accept such narratives as authentic” (Saito 2010, p. 630). To create such narratives, mnemonic agents must draw together a variety of symbolic and material resources. In the following sections, we first explain the symbolic background of the magazine and shōjo identity and detail how a community of readers and writers grew around the magazine. We then examine factors shaping commemorations of difficult pasts, highlighting the role of narrative templates in shaping agency and identity, and, lastly, describe the contradictions of gender and national identity that the editors of the commemorative issue engaged.

From dreamy shōjo to patriotic shōjo

Shōjo was a new gender identity established mainly through the school system and the development of girls’ magazines in the early twentieth century (Honda 1990; Otsuka 1991). The grace period given to girls by the school system before getting married, about 4 or 5 years from the age of 12, is the period of “shōjo” (Watabe 2007, pp. 32–33). This new category for girls became a gender identity through girls’ magazines. These magazines gave girls their own stories and offered a site to express themselves in writing through readers’ columns. Girl readers acquired their identity as shōjo by imaginatively interacting with other girls and stories presented in girls’ magazines.

Kawamura (1993) describes contributions to readers’ columns in girls’ and women’s magazines in the 1910s and 1920s as focusing on romanticism, narcissism, and being “sentimentally lost in thought” (p. 66). These contributions shared space in the magazines with other types of “beautiful writing” (bibun) and “lyrical pictures” (jojōga) (Shamoon 2012, pp. 77, 61). The illustration style typically showed girls or women who were “big-eyed, small-lipped, slender, well-proportioned…urban top-mode beautiful girls” (Fukiya Kōji, quoted in Nakagawa 2013, p. 76). This fictional image of shōjo, however, was not stable; it especially underwent great change during the war.

The period known as the 15 Year War, which began in 1931 with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, became a full-scale war with China in 1937 and then expanded in 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbor. With the expansion of war, girls’ magazines were used to propagate images of girls that were suitable for a military nation. Dollase (2019) cites two relevant government restrictions from 1938, the “National Mobilization Law” and “The Guide for the Improvement and Purification of Stories for Children” (pp. xvii, 68). After these restrictions, the main representation of shōjo changed from the “beauty of lyricism” to a nationalistic shōkokumin (little citizen), with an image of health, cheerfulness, youth, life, maternity, and healing (Nakagawa 2013, pp. 98–99).

Shōjo no tomo was not an exception to these changes, and despite resistance in the beginning, the changes were accepted by readers. In a study of readers’ contributions and editors’ responses to them in the magazine, Imada (2007) points out that sentimental themes were already suppressed by editor Uchiyama Motoi after 1937, when the Japan–China War started. Uchiyama started to expect shōjo to be loyal to the nation, healthy, hardworking, and intelligent (pp. 164–175). In the same way, Dollase (2019, p. 78) points out that the authors and editors in Shōjo no tomo transformed the image of Japanese girls from “yumemiru shōjo (dreamy shōjo)” into “aikoku shōjo (patriotic shōjo).” The sentimentalism of earlier years disappeared from the magazines.

Although Shōjo no tomo encouraged girls to become the nationals that the government required, shōjo culture also maintained a certain power to encourage girls to be creative and independent. Dollase (2019, p. 80) states, “Despite pressures and suppressions by the wartime state, the fantasy tradition of shōjo bunka [culture] survived the war, merely changing in form.” Imada (2007) also states that shōjo maintained some consistency before and after the change and that this is why readers accepted the change. She points out that shōjo were always better than adults, contrasting “pure shōjo” and “ugly adults,” and “shōjo who are conscious as people in the nation” and “adults who are ignorant of it” (Imada 2007, p. 186). These changes occurred in the period that the editors of the commemorative issue call the “golden age” of the magazine, from approximately 1935–1942.Footnote 2

A community of readers and writers

The intimate relationship among readers of girls’ magazines is often mentioned in research studies. For example, Kawamura (1993, p. 101) calls such relationship “Otome kyōdōtai (Girls’ Community)” and Honda (1990) calls it “Shōjo gensō kyōdōtai (Girls’ Illusionary Community),” which Cockerill (2011, pp. 537–8, fn. 2) explains as “middle-school girls’ desire to create their own fantasy world in girls’ magazines in order to escape reality,” a more specific idea of community than Anderson’s (1991) concept of an imagined community. This girls’ illusionary community was not a phenomenon specific to Shōjo no tomo, but the intimate relationship there was especially strong. This suggests that the magazine offered readers a particularly important venue “to fashion and refigure their subjectivity” (Thumala Olave 2018, p. 448).

The identity and culture of shōjo were not just a matter of consuming magazines, but also of becoming writers. The community in Shōjo no tomo especially functioned to stimulate readers to become writers. Imada (2007, p. 135) calls the girls’ imagined community in Shōjo no tomo the “shōjo network” and points out that the communication between readers and the editor enabled the magazine to cultivate a targeted audience (p. 141). The readers’ column in Shōjo no tomo was much larger than those in the magazine’s counterparts, Shōjo kurabu or Shōnen kurabu (Boys’ Club) (Imada 2007, pp. 143–144), and Imada states that the magazine was first to stimulate girls’ aspirations for literature (2007, pp. 153–154). The network functioned to give readers role models and emotional support when they entered and worked in the literary world (p. 156).

Over time this shōjo community created a powerful cultural force, which Dollase (2019, p. 128) calls “the way of shōjo,” a set of cultural patterns and processes that “has evolved into an agent that represents those who are dissatisfied with social norms, bestowing the opportunity to express oneself.” Dollase continues,

This idea is neither merely a historical process nor a temporary haven in the cultural life of a growing girl. Simply put, it is the power of marginality. Delivered from a position of cultural weakness, messages of resistance against disagreeable cultural conditions are cloaked in fantasy, sentimentalism, humor, and sarcasm. (2019, p. 128)

For the commemoration of Shōjo no tomo, the way of shōjo is reflected in the story of one reader, Endō Hiroko, who became a writer and then the lead supervisor of the commemoration. In her 2004 book, Endō argues that editor Uchiyama Motoi encouraged her to be an independent shōjo, and she recognizes this cultural force as a vehicle for agency, one that has lasted even as she grew older. Endō’s interpretation of how the magazine related to the war is therefore based on her privileging of shōjo as a cultural force and a narrative template for her own autobiographical narrative.

Commemoration as narrative performance

The production of the commemorative issue of Shōjo no tomo can be understood through the framework of social performance theory (Alexander 2004). A performance metaphor highlights how actors draw on both symbolic and material resources in their efforts to construct commemoration narratives. Material resources include possession of and competition over political, economic, and cultural power, including the props that assist performance. Symbolic resources include both background collective representations and specific foreground objects such as scripts. The arrangement of resources in space and time (metaphorically, stage design and direction of actors) provides the context in which actors project meaning and try to emotionally connect with an audience. Although an edited volume differs in many ways from a live performance, both are “integrative processes that create some sense of shared identity” (Alexander 2004, p. 528).

However, it is not easy to create a shared identity when commemorating a difficult past. Commemorations of lost wars (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991), about which there remain conflicting views, often result in the production of memory objects with a multivocal form, so that diverse audiences can read various meanings into the commemorative object. Vinitzky-Seroussi (2002) shows that commemorations can also be fragmented across time, space, and audiences, as in the case of memorials to assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The commemoration we study does not fit neatly with this distinction between multivocal and fragmented commemorations. As the product of a commercial publisher, it is not an official or public source of memory that aims to be open and multivocal for all readings. As a product by and for girls and women it does not target male-dominated cultural markets, but nor is it limited to a small niche of popular culture. As an edited volume it contains multiple types of content from different time periods, suggesting some measure of fragmentation.

There are also symbolic constraints shaping the choices of commemorators. Although commemorations often take a narrative form, the concept of narrative used in research on commemorations is usually limited to the specific stories told by mnemonic agents. These may be autobiographical narratives that are told by specific people (DeGloma 2015) or they may be the specific narratives constructed by institutions such as museums (Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi 2007). This difference maps onto the distinction Somers (1994) makes between individual-level ontological narratives and public narratives. The framework of social performance theory, however, highlights how a “universe of basic narratives” is a fundamental part of the “collective representations that compose culture” (Alexander 2004, p. 550), what Somers (1994) would call metanarratives.

We can further specify this idea by clarifying how the narratives included in background collective representations interact with the specific stories told in commemorative performances. Wertsch (2008, p. 123) argues that “schematic narrative templates” provide a “single general story line” that specific narratives build from. Wertsch’s example for (post-)Soviet memory of World War II is “expulsion-of-foreign-enemies” (p. 120), a template underlying otherwise dissimilar specific narrations of key events from the war. Such templates “provide chronologies” (Alexander 2004, p. 530) but also establish fundamental relations between actors, their intentions and actions, and audiences. The concept of narrative templates helps to expand our analysis beyond the individual level to the templates available in the collective cultural background.

Because a narrative template connects actors to lines of action, it is a useful concept for understanding inclusions and exclusions in commemorative acts. For example, DeGloma (2015) compares how mnemonic agents use different strategies for “making public claims to define a past trauma or atrocity…to achieve a social consciousness-raising” (p. 180). These strategies build on agents’ own autobiographical memories, but they also use these memories to debate common understandings of the existence, the nature, or the relevance of past events. While DeGloma focuses on outlining the “polar opposition of subversive and reactive strategies” (2015, pp. 182–183), we build on this work to examine ambivalences in commemorative projects. These ambivalences arise not only from the competition of mnemonic agents and specific narratives, but also from contradictions between the narrative templates shaping performances of narrative and identity.

Navigating contradictions of gender and national identity

A major challenge for the narrative template of shōjo identity is reconciling long-standing themes of innocence and creative independence with the history of wartime collaboration. Some Japanese feminists encouraged girls to take part in the war effort, seeing it as an opportunity for social advancement. For example, Ichikawa Fusae, a leader of the suffrage movement, actively cooperated with the government for the fight to participate in political decision-making (Germer 2013). The collaboration of prominent feminists with the wartime government became a source of tension between feminist and nationalist identities in subsequent decades. Such questions of blame and responsibility are fundamental to concepts of agency, and debates about shōjo agency are in turn embedded within larger debates about war memory in Japan.

In the postwar era, women’s active cooperation with the wartime government was often denied. Yoneyama (2005) shows how a clear change occurred in relation to Japanese women during the US/Allied occupation period, which lasted from 1945 to 1952. Reviewing US news media reporting about Japan at the time, she states, “‘Japanese women’ were discursively constituted as passive victims of male-dominant militarism and the devastations of war who were liberated as a result of the nation’s defeat and the postwar occupation” (Yoneyama 2005, p. 892). These new narratives may have resonated with the pre-war image of shōjo as pure and innocent (Imada 2007) but in making girls and women passive victims, it excluded shōjo agency and independence (Endō 2004), creating a contradiction. This narrative of passivity can be considered a “moral trauma” (Saito 2010, p. 632) that disrupted core aspects of pre-war shōjo identity.

At the same time, Yoshida (2019) finds that postwar Japanese memory was shaped by a “(hyper)feminization” (p. 160) of the nation, which was associated with “a victimized public war memory and national amnesia” (p. 156). Today, there is no single collective memory of the war in Japan; there are, rather, competing ways of narrating the cultural trauma. Hashimoto (2015) suggests that in the early 21st century a stalemate emerged between three competing narratives of war memory in Japan: that of perpetrators, tragic victims of defeat, and/or fallen national heroes. This fragmented narrative context intersected with the evolving narratives of shōjo culture. The immediate postwar template had declared that shōjo were passive victims of the war (tragic victims) rather than active supporters (perpetrators), however, this narrative also denied the agency of shōjo independence. To recover that sense of agency, the commemorators we study sought to re-tell the story of Shōjo no tomo during the war and to reconstruct the narrative template of shōjo identity, emphasizing creative resistance to the war.

Since the commemorative issue of Shōjo no tomo was limited in its number of pages, it is reasonable to ask how the selection of items was accomplished, and how this selection relates to the stories the editors tell about shōjo culture. Our research questions are: In the commemoration of Shōjo no tomo, what was included, excluded, and marginalized, and how were these choices made? How did the editors engage with the intersections between shōjo gender identity and collective memory of the war? It is our contention that the question of what was included and left out cannot be understood apart from the specific narratives that commemorative agents tell to make sense of themselves and their efforts. These specific narratives provide heroic role models who help to define the agency, innocence, and independence of shōjo in a fragmented context of war memory, providing a basis for reconstructing the narrative templates defining shōjo identity.

Data and methods

We draw on two sources of evidence to examine our research questions. To measure what has been remembered, forgotten, and marginalized from Shōjo no tomo, articles from both the original and commemorative issues were coded and compared. To interpret how the commemoration engaged with narratives of shōjo identity, we examine the published works of the lead supervisor of the volume, Endō Hiroko. As Wertsch (2008, p. 122) explains, “collective remembering involves an irreducible tension between active agents and textual resources, and it calls for the analysis both of textual resources and the specifics of how they are used by active agents.” By comparing the commemorative volume with the original wartime issues of the magazine, we first see how representations of shōjo differed by time period. By examining the stories told by the editors, we interpret how their narrative performances draw on and reconstruct narrative templates shaping collective memory about shōjo and the war. This analysis gives us a window into questions of independence and agency, which are key elements of the narrative templates shaping the performance of shōjo identity.

The magazine contains images (pictures and photos), fiction (novels, poems, short stories, and comics), supplements (gifts, announcements, and surveys), readers’ contributions, and a variety of non-fiction articles. Our focus is on how non-fiction articles from the original magazine, especially profiles of women and girls who serve as role models, were (or were not) selected for the commemorative issue. This focus allows us to address the representation of reality given in the original and republished magazines, directly addressing issues of how collective memory is constructed. We note that other scholars of Shōjo no tomo have examined both non-fiction profiles of women and fiction stories in the magazine (Dollase 2019; Imada 2007), but researchers have yet to examine how these themes are represented in the 2009 commemorative issue. We build on prior research by highlighting the importance of non-fiction articles in both the original and commemorative issues.

To collect data from the original issues, the first author visited the Center for International Children’s Literature in the Osaka Prefectural Central library, which has the most issues available in Japan (no place has the complete collection). Because of the commemorative issue’s emphasis on Uchiyama Motoi’s editorship, which covered the whole period of the 15 Year War (1931 to 1945), we initially sought articles from each of those years, but eventually had to adjust (1934 to 1945) due to lack of availability in the earlier years.Footnote 3 The collection still covers the time period before the 1937 intensification of war in China and the 1938 law restricting magazines.

Two types of data were collected. First, in order to show the relative emphasis placed on non-fiction, the tables of contents for each available issue between 1934 and 1945 were collected, and highlighted titles for images, fiction, and non-fiction were coded and compared (n = 999 titles).Footnote 4 Second, for more detailed coding of themes, the full texts of major non-fiction articles were collected (n = 1055).Footnote 5 Non-fiction articles included book reviews, essays and poetic writing, interviews, lectures, profiles of girls/women, profiles of boys/men, reports, roundtable discussions, school tours, and articles about theater (Takarazuka).

With respect to the commemorative issue, we analyzed the whole table of contents and selected all 40 non-fiction articles for thematic coding. Both original issues and the commemorative issue were coded for two major themes: girls’ lives and nationalism/war experiences. Inductive coding was used to identify more specific themes within these two categories. Table 1 shows the final coded themes and their definitions.

Table 1 Themes and definitions
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The first set of themes is about girls’ lives, including articles ranging from school to job experiences, relations with family and friends, and advice about fashion and behavior. Shōjo no tomo is said to encourage girls to be “independent shōjo” but as the literature review showed, the magazine changed during the war. The second set of themes, about nationalism and war, include articles about Japanese culture and history, reports from East/Asian and West/Euro-American countries, and articles about war experiences and the national crisis in Japan. Although articles about Japanese arts and artists were not always explicitly nationalistic, they often included content promoting Japanese pride. The themes are not mutually exclusive and articles can have more than one theme.

Our study uses an explanatory sequential design (Creswell et al. 2003), in which quantitative content analysis is used first to describe thematic patterns and qualitative interpretation is used second to understand the meaning of thematic patterns. To show how role models shaped narratives of shōjo identity, we examine and compare profiles of women and girls from the original magazine to interviews with prominent women writers in the commemorative issue. To investigate how narratives relate to the selection of items for the commemoration, we interpret the specific narratives that the anniversary issue’s lead editor Endō (2004) tells both about her own experiences and about Shōjo no tomo’s lead editor Uchiyama Motoi. These narratives show how Endō aligns her own autobiographical narrative with that of Uchiyama and Shōjo no tomo, offering heroic role models in a bid to reconstruct the narrative of shōjo and the war. In the following section, we first give a quantitative description of the non-fiction articles, identifying trends related to girls’ lives and nationalism/war.

The content of the magazine during the war

Non-fiction themes

To show the relative importance of non-fiction articles in Shōjo no tomo, the highlighted titles in the tables of contents between 1934 and 1945 (Shōwa 9–20) were coded by article type (n = 999). Figure 1 shows the number of entries coded as non-fiction compared to fiction, images, and supplements. Of all of these types, non-fiction had the most highlighted titles in each year, except for 1937 when it was tied with fiction. After 1937, highlighted non-fiction titles increased in absolute numbers until 1941 and in relative numbers until 1945. These patterns support our choice to focus on non-fiction as an important component of the magazine. They also show how the magazine changed dramatically during the late-1930s “golden age.”

Figure 1
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Number of highlighted titles in the table of contents by type, 1934–1945

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Changes in types of content over time reveal the shifting context in which non-fiction is presented. In Figure 1, the second largest type is fiction writing, which peaks between 1937 and 1939 before declining. The smallest category is supplements, which peak in 1936 before declining. Both of these peaks happen in the during “the golden age” of Shōjo no tomo, corresponding with the intensification of war between Japan and China following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July, 1937. The number of images shows several different peaks over time, both during and after Nakahara’s time at the magazine (1935–1940). These changes show how Uchiyama’s editorial direction gradually adapted to the wartime context.Footnote 6

For major non-fiction articles, we are interested in how the themes of girls’ lives and nationalism/war are represented over time. Figure 2 shows the number of non-fiction articles with ten themes related to girls’ lives and nationalism/war. The largest group of articles are coded with just one theme (45%), but some have two (31%) or three or more themes (7%), while the remainder have themes outside of our coding categories. To show the overall prevalence of themes, this figure counts each code separately. The overlap between themes is examined in more detail below.Footnote 7

Figure 2
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Number of coded themes in major non-fiction articles, 1934–1945

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The most prominent theme identifies articles about schoolgirls. The gender identity of shōjo was established with the development of the school system, so it makes sense that school experiences are the most prominent theme in a magazine designed for shōjo. This is, therefore, the main non-fiction theme related to girls’ lives in the magazine. Secondary themes related to girls’ lives include fashion and jobs, the first emphasized earlier and the second later in the time period. The decline of the schoolgirls theme in the 1940s parallels the change from dreamy to patriotic shōjo (Dollase 2019).

The second most prominent theme is about Japanese Arts and Artists, which also relates strongly to the shōjo identity. A large part of how girls acquired their identity as shōjo is by being inspired to be literary and to contribute to the readers’ column, but this theme shows that the magazine also sought to inspire girls artistically through non-fiction articles. This theme declines dramatically after 1941. A similar decline occurs for articles about the West, and instead articles about being Japanese, about war experiences, and about the national crisis increase.

These shifting emphases in themes related to girls’ lives and nationalism/war suggest areas where themes may overlap. For example, after 1942 the theme “jobs” increases dramatically as does the theme “national crisis.” This is reasonable because in 1941, the National Labor Bulletin Decree ordered unmarried girls and women aged 14–25 to join the labor force, and the Pacific War started in December of that year. However, even before 1941, articles about jobs and war experiences are consistently featured in the magazine, showing how Shōjo no tomo previously highlighted connections between jobs and war. This shows the importance of war and nationalism in the “golden age.” To illustrate our point more concretely, in the next section we examine articles that show how the magazine’s representation of jobs and war experiences changed over time.

Profiles of role models

As Imada (2007) has argued, one of the core features of Shōjo no tomo was providing role models to its readers, encouraging their creativity and independence. To see how role models changed over time, we examine how themes about girls’ lives and nationalism/war intersected in non-fiction articles offering profiles of girls/women. These profiles purport to represent the lives of actual girls or women, and their inclusion in the magazine is a direct measure of role models being offered. A total of 143 (14% of all non-fiction) articles offer such profiles, the second largest type of non-fiction after lectures.

Table 2 shows the number of articles in the top 10 combinations of themes for profiles of girls/women between 1934 and 1945. Of these top combinations, 19 present profiles featuring just the jobs theme or jobs in combination with schoolgirls, but another 19 present profiles combining jobs with war experience or national crisis themes. The jobs include mostly teachers/educators, factory workers, and nurses, but also an engineer, a train conductor, and a retail worker. Some of these are presented as just occupations, but others are shown as working for the nation during the war. This shows that a large proportion of the profiles portray work that is highly related to the war, often with the woman or girl profiled as either an army nurse or a schoolgirl working in the labor services or doing volunteer labor.

Table 2 Number of profiles of girls/women by theme combinations, 1934–1945
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Here we examine some example articles that illustrate the changing representation of these themes during the so-called golden age of the magazine. An early profile that discusses jobs but not war experience is the 1935 article “Nijūhachi nen no yōran” (Twenty Eight Year Cradle), which describes a woman who took a job as a telephone operator at a young age. The woman is pictured sitting and looking mournful, not smiling. Although this woman had a job, it was considered a “dark fate” to have taken this job at a young age, because it meant that her family could not support her further schooling. She also worried that “everyone despises” her for this lowly work among “bad mannered girls” (Anonymous 1935, p. 93). She still expresses aspirations for beauty, but also recalls that she was an enthusiastic reader of the magazine from the first issue in 1908 and that she even won a silver watch for her writing in May 1910.

Many years later, this telephone operator still finds comfort in reading the magazine. At the end of the article, she says, “I just cannot forget Shōjo no tomo, which nourished my mind and gave me mental fortitude and comfort during my unhappy girlhood. So, I still read Shōjo no tomo at my age” (1935, p. 99). She also reveals the middle-class context of many magazine readers by saying:

Only Shōjo no tomo welcomed me equally without discrimination and differentiation between socially well-regarded schoolgirls and working girls, and it gave me this beautiful gift [of a silver watch]. (1935, p. 96)

This profile illustrates how the aspirations for beauty and creative independence that were nurtured in the magazine can remain a source of comfort and sentimental feelings many years later. In this case, having a job is not an achievement, but rather a tragic situation that can only be escaped imaginatively through the magazine. In continuing to embrace the beauty of Shōjo no tomo, even this sad woman can be a role model.

As the Japan–China War intensified after 1937, more profiles started to link jobs to war experiences. An article from April 1938, “Kizutukeru Ai no Te” (A Wounded Hand of Love), writes of the war experiences of a nurse. The article includes a picture of the nurse, a young woman near the age of the expected readers, who is holding a copy of Shōjo no tomo. This visual suggests that the article explicitly offers her as a role model. In the article, the nurse romanticizes Japanese soldiers as fighting for the people of Japan. She says:

Perhaps the atmosphere in Tokyo is too peaceful. However, when I think that this peace is kept for the sake of the brave soldiers who are fighting on the front line, my heart is filled to the brim with endless gratitude. And, I feel joy that I was born in Japan even more deeply. (Kuro 1938, p. 223)

In addition to romanticizing the war, the nurse also refers directly to her role as a woman:

It goes without saying that Japanese women’s mission is to strengthen home-front defense (jūgo no mamori) and keep home. Women’s hands are also very helpful for nursing and taking care of brave soldiers wounded at the front. (Kuro 1938, p. 216)

By promoting the missions of home-front defense and nursing soldiers, the article models a supporting role for women in the war. This article is clearly not about being a good wife and wise mother (ryōsaikenbo), because it encourages girls to work as professionals. However, in pursuing that mission, it strengthens the gender ideology that women should be supporting men, and this is consistent with the ryōsaikenbo ideal. This article also shows how the sentimentalism of the magazine shifted over time away from beauty and toward supporting soldiers and the war. Although the nurse is strong and dedicated to her work, she often has tears in her eyes for the wounded soldiers who wish to go back to the battlefield.

Later in the war, even patriotic sentimentalism is suppressed. In the 1941 article “Ware wa hakui no senshi” (I am a Warrior in White), Satō Teruko (1941) writes about a girl who studies to be a nurse so she can go to the battlefield. An inset portrait shows the woman gazing confidently at the camera. Inspired by the words of her brother, who was wounded in the navy, she says, “Red Cross nurses can go to the front even if they are women.” While she studies, she has to work as a maid in the house of a family that owns a factory. Comparable to the 1935 article, this woman has to work to support her family, which could be read as tragic, but she is happy and enthusiastic to do the work. Unlike the 1938 article, she does not express sentimental feelings. Instead she expresses pride in her accomplishment: “I am full of and bursting with hope. People around me rejoiced at my passing the exam and further encouraged me, despite my insignificance” (1941, p. 73).

The content of the commemorative issue

Non-fiction themes

The commemorative issue is comprised of items that were selected from original issues and new articles that were written to explain Shōjo no tomo to contemporary readers. There are 78 items in the table of contents of the commemorative issue and, as Figure 3 shows, most are for items republished from original issues. Of this original material, images make up the largest category, followed by fiction and then non-fiction. Of the new material that is included, most of it is non-fiction, which far outnumbers the quantity of non-fiction articles in the originals. This is a clear indicator of the marginalization of original non-fiction in the commemorative issue.Footnote 8

Figure 3
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Number of titles for original and new items in the commemorative issue by type

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Table 3 shows configurations of themes for all non-fiction articles, which were coded with the same themes as the original articles. There is a relatively large number for the theme Japanese Arts among new articles. As the content analysis of original issues showed, this theme had a relatively high percentage, so it is reasonable to give space to this theme in the commemorative issue. Even so, the number of new articles with this theme is notable, and it reflects how the commemoration was realized: from the signatures collected by Endō and other former readers who were inspired to literature by the shōjo community.

Table 3 Number of non-fiction articles by theme combinations in commemorative issue
Full size table

Many of the new articles about Japanese Arts and Artists are about former readers who became writers, like Endō herself, and about their memories of the magazine (Endō and Uchida 2009, p. 291). The large representation of this sub-theme shows how those former readers, and especially women writers, were inspired by the magazine. In her book, Endō (2004, p. 28) mentions Chief Editor Uchiyama’s words encouraging “shōjo who are independent and have individual thinking.” This “independence” is a vague concept that Endō does not specify in her book, but from her description it appears to mainly mean independence of mind. In the commemorative issue, however, this “independence” actually extends to women’s financial independence from their husbands.

Profiles of role models

The changed representations of war, jobs, and the arts are seen most clearly in “Interviews of Shōjo no tomo’s 100th anniversary,” where three women writers and artists are interviewed. All three are well-known in Japan and have had books made into movies, dramas, and anime. Although other interviews appear later in the volume, these interviews comprise the first section, and as a set they represent editorial intentions to introduce the commemoration. The first interview is with Tanabe Seiko, an original reader of the magazine (born in 1928) who later became a famous writer. Her interview is headlined “I am still doing ‘adult Shōjo no tomo’” and she says that because she immersed herself in the magazine as a girl, she now only writes “sweet” things (Anonymous 2009a, p. 11). Tanabe does not mention the war even though she previously wrote of her experiences as a girl during the war (Dollase 2019, p. 79), and even though she also wrote a biography of Yoshiya Nobuko (Tanabe 1999), a popular writer of shōjo stories who also wrote wartime reports. These omissions illustrate ways that the commemoration forgets the war.

A brief essay by Nakahara Sōji, the son of original illustrator Nakahara, follows Tanabe’s interview, setting up a focus on visual art that continues with an interview with Anno Moyoko, who is introduced as the top contemporary artist in the manga world. Anno also does not mention the war, in part because she is of a younger generation, but also because she most admires the art of Nakahara and other pre-war artists. Her interview supports the commemoration’s emphasis on the visual aesthetics of the magazine, especially Nakahara’s illustrations, and draws a connection between these and contemporary manga.

The last interview to appear in the anniversary issue is with Asano Atsuko, a writer of children’s books who is also from a younger generation and who did not have prior associations with the magazine. In a photograph at the top of the interview, a smiling Asano sits at a table with several original copies of Shōjo no tomo. The lead phrase of the interview says, “the amazing anti-war of girls” (Anonymous 2009b, p. 22). A larger headline reads “I think ‘Shōjo no tomo’ created a good route to come and go between dream and reality” (p. 23). Another emphasized phrase reads: “Dreams make shōjo strong in the real world” (p. 23). Asano says it is astonishing that the magazine was so romantic when the nation was marching to war, and she concludes, “Shōjo’s heart, which pursues beauty, is amazingly anti-war” (p. 23).Footnote 9 Paired with Tanabe’s forgetting of the war, Asano focuses on remembering the dreams that were fostered in wartime, and gives the impression that all of Shōjo no tomo and girls’ culture was anti-war.Footnote 10 As Tanimoto (2011) identified in shōjo manga, Asano’s words suggest a “twisted structure” in which innocent cultural activities are assigned heroic value because of the assumed victimization of shōjo during the war.

Beyond these famous women writers, a central role model who is cast as a heroic guardian of shōjo culture during the war is Chief Editor Uchiyama. In a new article titled, “Kazoku ga kataru, Uchiyama Motoi no sugao” (The true face of Uchiyama Motoi, as discussed by his family), Uchiyama’s daughter says that he often mentioned women’s independence to her. To the question of whether she took it for granted that women should have jobs, she says (Uchiyama 2009, pp. 331–332):

My father kept saying, “Women have to be independent.” He said he didn’t want to see me in a miserable situation where I want a divorce but must stay with my husband despite my wishes because I cannot support myself.

In this article, women’s independence refers to working women who have financial independence from their husbands. This understanding of the relationship between jobs and independence differs greatly from what is discussed in the original issues, where jobs were often taken out of necessity or out of patriotic duty. For example, while the nurse’s job was to support men, having a job is now presented as a way to be independent from men.

As the content analysis of the original issues showed, the sub-theme of jobs was well represented in the magazine. However, in the commemorative issue, no original articles about jobs are included. Instead, only two new articles discuss jobs directly, and only one of these, an article written by Endō Hiroko about her childhood memories of the war, explicitly mentions war experiences. This indicates that both the war theme and job theme, and the connections between them, are not totally forgotten, but instead are marginalized. This creates a totally different impression of the original magazine for readers of the commemorative issue.

By emphasizing the arts and deemphasizing war-related jobs, the commemorative issue significantly reconstructs the relationship between war and Shōjo no tomo. The only original content that represents war experiences is a photo essay from April 1940. Titled “Ōjō no jogakusei” (Schoolgirls in a king’s castle), this report shows the evacuation of girls in England to a castle. In an explanation of the article, Endō writes (2009b, p. 214):

This article positively values the policy of Britain. The military government could regard it as anti-government in a time when the Japan–Britain relationship was getting worse. It might be hard to understand now to say that this demonstrates a courageous stance, but those were hard times.

Endō’s explanation seeks to justify the marginalization of war experiences. Additionally, since Endō was born in 1931, she would have been only 9 or 10 years old at this time, so she was unlikely to have much firsthand knowledge of the politics she describes. However, her lived experience of evacuation and fear during the war may have provided a basis for justifying Uchiyama’s courage.

Endō Hiroko and the commemoration of Shōjo no tomo

We started our study with Endō Hiroko, the lead supervisor of the commemorative issue. It was in large part due to her efforts that Shōjo no tomo was commemorated, and she became one of the editorial supervisors when it was republished. Because she was a big fan of the magazine, she did extensive research on it, published in her 2004 book entitled Shōjo no tomo to sono jidai – Henshūsha no yūki Uchiyama Motoi. The title can be translated as “Shōjo no tomo and its era,” and the subtitle refers to the “courage” of Uchiyama Motoi. As this title indicates, Endō emphasizes the era of Uchiyama Motoi and creates a heroic narrative focused on him. In this section, we examine how Endō aligned narratives about herself, Uchiyama, and Shōjo no tomo to justify the commemorative issue’s inclusions and exclusions and to reconstruct narrative templates defining shōjo identity and agency. In this commemoration, Endō (as lead editor) selected and arranged the material and also (as actor) performed her own autobiographical narrative. Together, Endō and Uchiyama embody the role of heroes in a narrative of creative resistance.

Endō realized what she calls the republication (fukkoku) of the magazine by organizing a petition from former readers to the publisher. According to her 2004 book, this effort was sparked by an essay about her memories of Shōjo no tomo and Uchiyama Motoi that she published in a monthly magazine for the elderly. In particular, when she wrote about the “green room” (midori no heya), a readers’ column in which only girls who won silver watches (gindokei) for their writing could publish (see Imada, 2007, pp. 151–152), she subsequently received many letters from former prize winners who had still been exchanging letters with each other in the current day. This response led to a readers meeting (aidokushakai) in 1998, which Endō says was the first such meeting in 60 years. The theme of the meeting was “Shōjo no tomo, a meeting to talk about the chief editor Uchiyama” (Shōjo no tomo Uchiyama shuhitsu o kataru kai). This reunion of readers initiated the signature collecting campaign (Endō 2004, pp. 168–171).

Endō also writes about how she felt about meeting those former readers, who she had never met when she was a girl. She visited one of the prize winners, who is now a poet, to see the collection of prizes and supplements that she had preserved. Endō (2004, pp. 89–90) says, “Ms. Hanada is a warm and open-minded person. I felt close to her even after leaving our common world, Shōjo no tomo. But more than that, we were united by Shōjo no tomo. We were able to talk like a long-established senior (senpai) and junior (kōhai) at once.” Endō’s book shows that the commemoration was realized through the intimate relationships readers built through contributing to the magazine. Therefore, it was readers (who also were writers) who formed the core audience for the commemoration. The advanced age of many of these reader-writers would make them a prime audience for shōjo-related content. As Dollase notes, young and elderly women “are both treated as marginal beings in society” (2019, p. xviii) and shōjo culture offers them a means of expression.

These readers’ interests focused on the leading role of chief editor Uchiyama Motoi. Even after such a long time, readers felt they belonged to the community of the magazine in part because of their relationship with the editor, who was considered a guardian of shōjo culture (Imada 2007, p. 159). Regarding Uchiyama’s editorship during the war, Endō emphasizes the courage that Uchiyama Motoi must have had to edit the magazine in the way that he did. Endō writes (2004, p. 163):

Shōjo no tomo was neither anti-war nor anti-government, but it only tried to calmly create a cultural magazine, resisting the senseless anti-cultural policies of the government and the military. Even that required a lot of courage.

Here, Endō implies that Uchiyama never agreed with the government’s cultural policy, even as he complied with wartime restrictions. Endō explains this contradiction by arguing that Uchiyama had a hidden educational policy that reflected his true intentions.

The government called for Shōjo no tomo to change, and Shōjo no tomo changed. But it was a different change from what the government intended. The “independent-thinking shōjo,” which chief editor Uchiyama originally sought for its readers, could not be expressed very strongly in a commercial magazine. Now, taking advantage of the government’s demands for a “healthy girls’ magazine,” “healthy and cultural” content unfolded on each page of the magazine, starting from the correspondence column. (Endō 2004, p. 28)

Here Endō suggests that Uchiyama still promoted shōjo independence, but that this was now done through the “healthy and cultural” themes required by the government. She also implies that by conforming with the government’s demands, the commercial success of the magazine was improved.

This narrative emphasizes Uchiyama’s good intentions and directs attention away from his actual support for the goals of the war. Uchiyama’s war support is shown in the content of the original issues, which increasingly featured articles about wartime jobs. It is also shown in Uchiyama’s own words at the time. Dollase quotes an August 1945 article in which Uchiyama concludes that the Japanese people “headed to the enemy knowing that we were making a big mistake…. We chased after a beautiful ideal…. The method the Japanese people took may have been wrong, but the dream of constructing East Asian ethnic happiness was never fake” (2019, p. 81). In this passage, Uchiyama casts himself in the role of a fallen hero, sacrificing for a future dream (Hashimoto 2015). However, in Endō’s narrative, Uchiyama’s support for the war is marginalized and his sacrifice is presented as being only for shōjo independence and not for the wartime nation.

While the other popular girls’ magazine, Shōjo kurabu, generally followed the norm of ryōsaikenbo (good wife and wise mother), Endō argues that Shōjo no tomo was distinguished by how it advocated for a different kind of gender identity, one that emphasized creative expression through writing. Endō’s argument that Uchiyama never agreed with wartime government policy can be understood as an attempt to align her own past and present with that of Uchiyama and Shōjo no tomo. When Endō writes about Uchiyama supporting independence in shōjo and also having courage during the war, this story justifies remembering the dreams and forgetting the war. It makes a narrative of good intentions for Uchiyama, based on his good sense of commercial publishing at the time, so that any nationalism found in Shōjo no tomo can be attributed to the wartime context.

Endō’s own editorial choices in the commemorative issue mirror the strategies attributed to Uchiyama, emphasizing intentions and innocence in a hostile commercial publishing context. Endō (2004, p. 178) explains that her petition to the publisher was based not just on wanting to recreate her childhood memories, but also on recognizing the underappreciated cultural value of Shōjo no tomo. Describing an exhibition that she witnessed in Shōwa 30s (1955–1964), Endō complains that the magazine was misrepresented at that time because it only focused on the early years (1910s–1920s) (Endō and Uchida 2009, p. 372). She also points out that the bibliography for an exhibition by the famous writer Kawabata Yasunari omitted stories he published in Shōjo no tomo (Endō 2004, p. 44), which she offers as an example of bias against girls’ culture in Japanese literary history. Like Uchiyama, Endō casts herself as a hero and guardian of shōjo culture, which she commemorates not only for its cultural value but also for its commercial success. Uchiyama’s words, as quoted by Endō, can be projected onto Endō’s own self-narrative (2009a, p. 327): “It is easy to just make a magazine with good content. I’m proud of myself because Shōjo no tomo was highly rated and sold a lot.”

Conclusion

In the commemoration of Shōjo no tomo, what was included, excluded, and marginalized, and how were these choices made? How did the editors engage with the intersections between shōjo gender identity and collective memory of the war? Our data showed that Japanese arts and artists are remembered and became the primary theme in the commemorative issue. On the other hand, the intersections between jobs and the war are forgotten and marginalized in the new articles. The marginalization of war experiences reconstructs shōjo culture as anti-war even though the war theme occupied a large part of the original issues. Chief Editor Uchiyama’s emphasis on intellectual independence for shōjo was significantly reworked to connect with themes of financial independence. His intention to nourish independent shōjo was framed within a narrative of courage to resist wartime policies and any problematic choices were attributed to the wartime context. Uchiyama can be compared to other intellectuals who become heroic actors: “Their persons become iconic, condensed, simplified, and charismatic collective representations of the transformational models they themselves propose” (Alexander 2017, p. 107).

These editorial and narrative choices resulted in a commemoration that emphasized the dreams established in the ongoing shōjo community of literary readers, especially those about women’s expression and empowerment through writing. This commemoration was realized in part through the petition signatures of former readers, especially the privileged members of the community who had followed professional trajectories that led them to literary success. Inspired by the shōjo community in their literary careers, they, especially the key figure Endō Hiroko, had become as they dreamed to be. The magazine that had encouraged them was, therefore, something that could help them explain their present success. By emphasizing creative independence and innocence, the editors of the commemoration offered role models and a reconstructed narrative template for shōjo culture, that of creative resistance. The result is a naturalization of past experience according to present necessities (Orbaugh 2007, pp. 14–15).

The commemorative issue is still available 12 years later, and can be considered a successful narrative performance, one which reconstructs a collective identity.Footnote 11 This performance was influenced by larger postwar changes in narratives about responsibility for the war (Hashimoto 2015; Tsutsui 2009) including changes in the agency assigned to Japanese women (Yoneyama 2005; Yoshida 2019). In the postwar view, girls were assumed to be passive victims of the wartime government and society. However, if girls are presented only as passive victims, the message of girls’ independence cannot be presented either. It is this message that is important for Endō and for readers of the commemorative issue. Resolving this contradiction necessitated the reconstruction of shōjo culture as anti-war, where girls were both innocent victims of the war but also independent agents, even if only in their minds. The commemoration highlights shōjo actively constructing their innocence through imaginative independence from the world of “ugly adults” (Imada 2007, p. 186).

This paper contributes to studies of Japanese girls’ culture, commemoration, and narrative. Studies of pre-war girls’ culture in Japan have shown that themes of feminism and nationalism became mixed in WWII-era Shōjo no tomo (Imada 2007; Dollase 2019). We build on this work by examining the 2009 commemoration of the magazine, showing how contradictions of feminism and nationalism in girls’ culture have been reconstructed in an era when wartime memories remain contentious. How people in contemporary Japan understand national identity and the war is intertwined and inseparable from how they understand gender identity. The postwar feminization of the nation, which allowed for a narrative of passive victimization, had to be reworked to recover a sense of shōjo agency. The ambivalent narrative of the commemorative issue illustrates how these changes remain unfinished. Future research could examine how other aspects of shōjo culture have been remembered, forgotten, and marginalized in contemporary Japanese society, and how these aspects are related to gender, national, and class identities and contexts.

As Vinitzky-Seroussi (2002) emphasized, the interactions of political culture, timing, and the differential power of agents of memory affect how commemorations are accomplished. For our case, changes in collective memory of the war and in the social status of women created conditions for a relatively multivocal commemorative object. However, as a commercially published edited volume, the form of commemoration was also fragmented, not unified in time and place (cf. Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi 2007). In order to control the content of the commemoration and appeal to the widest possible commercial audience, the editors suppressed potentially disagreeable aspects of shōjo culture and reconstructed an ambivalent narrative of shōjo agency. While the term multivocal emphasizes uncertainty of interpretations (cf. Vinitzky-Seroussi 2002, p. 31), ambivalence identifies contradictory and competing interpretations that may be held simultaneously. Future research could explore further how forms of commemoration shape strategies for controlling content, especially for the commemoration of difficult pasts.

The cultural background of shōjo identity is a cultural force that Dollase (2019) calls “the ‘way of shōjo’” (p. 128). Dollase theorizes this force as a set of cultural patterns and processes that, despite being generated from a position of cultural weakness, enable agency through the power of marginality. Like the subversive actors studied by DeGloma (2015), shōjo use autobiographical stories to make public claims, but in relation to war memory, shōjo culture offers ambivalent cultural templates for building these narratives. To address these ambivalences, the editors used the stories of role models to propose a new narrative template for shōjo identity, one that reconciles the contradiction of shōjo independence and innocence. In this sense, the central hero, Uchiyama, is neither perpetrator nor victim, but a fallen hero, one who showed courage and sacrifice during the war so that shōjo may have a “better and brighter” future (Hashimoto 2015, p. 9). In scholarly studies, the ambivalent narratives of shōjo identity are more openly acknowledged (Imada 2019; Dollase 2019), but in the commercial form that the Shōjo no tomo commemoration took, those same ambivalences are marginalized. Further study of how shōjo culture integrates the contradictory dynamics of feminism, nationalism, commercialism, and self-identification holds promise for revealing the complexities of commemoration.