Josei manga


Josei manga are Japanese comics aimed at older teenage girls and adult women who are able to read kanji without the aid of furigana. Subgenres of josei manga include "ladies' comics" and teens' love. Readers can range in age from 18 to 45.
Unlike Shōjo manga manga, which is aimed at young girls, Josei manga often portray realistic romance, as opposed to the mostly idealized romance of shōjo manga. They tend to be both more sexually explicit and contain more mature storytelling than shōjo manga, although this is not always the case either.
Some of the most popular josei manga have featured male protagonists and/or an almost entirely male main cast, and the male characters are often quite compassionate toward other men. Although some josei manga can contain plots and characters influenced by shōjo manga, others tell action-packed stories and lack the romantic and slice of life elements associated with shōjo.
The western approach to josei has all but ignored some of its more recent trends, such as an increase in shōnen-influenced series. Although there are housewife-, family-, and young mother-themed josei manga published in Japan, very few non-yaoi josei series are licensed for Western publication.

History

Josei manga began to appear in the 1980s, during a boom period in manga, when the women who grew up reading shōjo manga in the 1950s and '60s wanted to read works aimed at adult women. The first ladies' comics magazine, Be Love, was printed in 1980. There were only two ladies' comics magazines being published in Japan by the end of 1980; however, there were over fifty by the end of 1989. Early ladies' comics were free of sexual content, and the comics became more and more sexually extreme until the early 1990s. Manga branded as ladies' comics have acquired a reputation for being low-brow, and "dirty", and the term josei was created to move away from that image.

''Josei'' magazines in Japan

In a strict sense, the term "josei manga" refers to a manga serialized in a josei manga magazine. The list below contains past and current Japanese josei manga magazines, grouped according to their publishers. Such magazines can appear on a variety of schedules, including monthly, bi-monthly, and quarterly.

[Shueisha]

The reported average circulations for some of the top-selling josei manga magazines in 2007 are as follows:
Magazine titleReported circulation
You194,791
Be Love194,333
Kiss167,600
Cocohana162,916
Elegance Eve150,000
For Mrs.150,000
Romance White Paper Pastel150,000
Dessert149,333
The Dessert141,664
Office You117,916

For comparison, below are the circulations for the top-selling magazines in other categories in 2007:
CategoryMagazine titleReported circulation
Top-selling shōnen manga magazineWeekly Shōnen Jump2,778,750
Top-selling seinen manga magazineWeekly Young Magazine981,229
Top-selling shōjo manga magazineCiao982,834
Top-selling non-manga magazineMonthly The Television1,018,919