話し合いましょう！
3D shota looks quite different from regular, comic-style shota. Some would say it looks more realistic. With 3D shota I mean computer generated (CG), for example in DAZ Studio.
If you want to contribute to my research, please fill in the bilingual minisurvey below!
3DCGショタと漫画ショタはよく違うと思います。僕の研究で助けたければ、下のアンケートを回答してください！
Illustration by Barbotage (cropped).
Volume 15 of Full Ahead! Coco (フルアヘッド！ココ) by Yonehara Hideyuki (米原秀幸) contains the most beautiful example of the kind of man/boy romance that is so common in mainstream boys’ manga. The series is about how the orphan Coco Felkena finds an alternative family in the form of a gang of pirates. He is especially close to the captain, Crazy Barts, a long-haired man in his twenties who always struts around shirtless.
Volume 15 of Full Ahead! Coco starts in the middle of a fight, in which captain Barts is hurt badly by the enemy. In a heart-wrenching frame, Coco, tears flowing from his eyes, begs of the enemy:
There are so many things I still want to learn from Barts! Please … Don’t kill him … Don’t kill him!!
Full Ahead! Coco, volume 15, chapter 127, page 79.
This brilliantly captures a typical dynamic in man/boy relations, namely teaching: Boys want to learn from men in order to become men themselves. This has been the theme of numerous coming-of-age rituals all over the world, most notably among the Dorians in ancient Greece, where a boy and a man went on a three month trip together, during which the man taught the boy to hunt. The theme is almost satirically spelled out in the superhero anime My Hero Academy (僕のヒーローアカデミア), where Midoriya is taught by All Might.
Barts survives and the band recuperates in a nearby guesthouse, all in one room, like the alternative family that they are. Barts’s swords are broken, and he needs to go on a trip to fix them or get new ones. He declares that he’ll go with Coco, only the two of them. Close-up on Coco’s surprised face: “Only the two of us?”
Preparations are made and they sail off. Coco narrates to the reader:
For the first time I’ll go alone with Barts on a sailing trip. My body has never felt this excited!
P. 106
The next chapter begins with a full-page illustration of the ship surrounded by the ocean, and the exclamation: “Only the two of us!”
Chapter 129 is all about the everyday life of the boy and the man onboard the Sweet Madonna. Barts puts Coco behind the ship’s wheel (舵/かじ) and goes fishing from the gunwale while Coco endures the challenges of trying to navigate the ship according to Barts’s instructions: He has to turn the wheel in the right direction the right number of times depending on the direction of the wind and the position of the sun. It’s exhausting and doesn’t go too well in the beginning. The ship goes round and round and Barts taunts him until the boy has had enough:
I can’t navigate!! It’s because of your crappy teaching!
P. 119
In my reading, this is all part of Barts’s intuitive education. The boy has mellowed out through some initial hardships, and is ready to learn. “Hey, Coco”, Barts says, sits himself down next to the boy, and starts explaining:
Do you know why I’m always shirtless? It’s in order to feel the wind and the sun on my body. The direction and strength of the wind, the position of the sun – it’s all caught by my body and transferred to the wheel.
P. 120
He explains a bit more and then jumps off the ledge and leaves the boy alone to ponder what he has heard. Coco repeats the captain’s words to himself:
“To know with my body … To remember with my body …”
P. 121
Coco glances at the ship’s wheel again. Before we know it, he throws off his shirt and jumps up behind the helm.
The wind and the sun caress the boy’s shirtless body as he learns the skill of navigating a ship. As the sun sets, he falls asleep at the wheel. Barts, who has been watching over him, takes the boy in his arms and carries him to a makeshift bed on the deck. As he does so, there is a flashback to the scene in chapter 127, with the crying Coco exclaiming that “there are so many things I still want to learn from Barts”. We understand that this is exactly what has happened here: The man has imparted his knowledge to the boy. After Barts has put a blanket over the sleeping Coco and taken over the wheel, he looks at the stars and concludes that they have drifted way too much west, but I guess that’s part of letting the boy learn by doing.
Next day, Coco continues navigating. Maybe several days have passed when Coco sees something in the horizon and yells at Barts:
Look Barts! Land! Laaaand!!
P. 126
The boy has taken them ashore. The trip that they undertook, “only the two of them”, has been a success: Teaching and learning has taken place, and they have come out on the other side. The cover page of the next chapter solidifies this impression: In an artistic watercolour painting, the shirtless boy and man face the reader with confident smiles. We did it, they seem to say. Only the two of us.
I found this whole chapter not only very beautiful, but also important in that it instils the teaching aspect of man/boy relationships in the reader, and it does so not in a subcultural shota comic, but in a mainstream manga that was serialised in a major publication. There is a clear man/boy eroticism bubbling under the surface here, enhanced by the theme of getting undressed as an integral part of the learning process.
Your typical action-packed boys’ manga adventure follows, where Coco and Barts get the chance to save each other’s lives. As they sail away again in chapter 131, the boy behind the helm again, the training continues. Barts tells Coco that although they are pirates, there is one thing that a pirate must never steal, according to some unwritten code of conduct. He doesn’t get to tell Coco what it is, because they realise they are followed by another pirate ship.
As they board the enemy ship, Barts is taken captive but Coco manages to hide, and even finds his way into the abandoned captain’s cabin. There he finds some kind of expensive looking necklace framed on the wall. As the enemy captain is holding a sword to Barts’s neck on the deck, Coco rushes out and dangles the necklace outside the gunwale, threatening to drop it into the sea if they don’t release Barts. Everyone looks at Coco in shock. The enemy captain walks up to the boy, slaps him in the face so that he falls backwards onto the deck, hand still clenching the necklace.
“Listen up, you brat”, the enemy captain says. He explains that there is a certain thing that pirates don’t steal from each other, something that is more important than life itself, namely that necklace, which has been traded down through generations and represents his father’s memento. “Oh yeah? Well you did the same,” the boy counters. “You stole Barts from me!!” The captain is obviously moved by the implication of the boy’s words, and they decide to trade the necklace for Barts – both “more important than life itself”.
After this gooey love story, the volume ends with another relaxing chapter, in which Coco and Barts disembark on a female island where Coco will learn to cook, but well, that’s another story!
I stumbled upon Jumbor (ユンボル) by Takei Hiroyuki (武井宏之) at a Mandarake in Tokyo in October 2017. Jumbor is a dystopian manga set in a future ruled by various construction syndicates which fight each other with heavy duty construction machinery. The resistance movement get their hands on a jumbor, which is a mix of human and machine originally used to mine the valuable substance jumborite. This particular Jumbor, model 11D, is a boy: Jumbor Baru.
But enough of the background – just look at these striking covers! One of the volumes even comes with a full colour fold-out with the shirtless Jumbor, pin-up style:
Jumbor Baru has been frozen for several years, so when he finally wakes up, he has the body of a 10-year-old boy, despite he is actually a teenager. After having examined the huge mechanical hands and feet he has been equipped with, he glances down at his crotch and concludes with sweat drops in his face:
But that thing …! It’s still small, hasn’t grown at all!!!
しかもコイツは…！小せえし生えてねえ!!!
Takei Hiroyuki (武井宏之). 2010. Jumbor (ユンボル), volume 1, p. 87-88.
The jokes on the boy’s penis continue when Jumbor realises that the woman who has awaken him is in fact Princess Rivetta, who he knew as a child – when they were both children:
“That means, you must be that tiny little Princess Rivetta, right?”
“Right. Speaking of tiny little things, how about covering yourself up, Jumbor Baru.”
「するとやっぱりあんたはあの小せえリベッタ姫なのか…？」
「さあな。あれこれ聞く前にその小せえモノを隠したらどうだユンボル・バル」
Takei Hiroyuki (武井宏之). 2010. Jumbor (ユンボル), volume 1, p. 100-101.
So it’s small. Super tiny. 小せえ! But that is compensated by a huge shovel, many times his own size, that grows out of one of Jumbor Baru’s mechanical hands the first time he’s confronted by an enemy. He’s surprised by this sudden power, which he was not aware of and which he can’t control well in the beginning. Princess Rivetta observes him contentedly in the foreground as he battles with his shovel: “So that’s his secret power.”
This is what awaits all boys. Their bodies will transform and they will have a hard time mastering the new powers that demand attention within them. I come to think of the anime D.N.Angel, where 14-year-old Niwa Daisuke transforms into a “phantom thief” at certain occasions. Or why not Momonari Junta, the good-for-nothing rascal who turns into “Mega-Playboy” in DNA2. Just like Jumbor Baru, Daisuke and Junta can’t control the powers they’ve been equipped with. What we’re seeing is the struggle of puberty and newly awakened sexuality, as manifested in a shovel, a phantom thief, and a playboy.
But back to Jumbor. Even after he has got dressed, Jumbor Baru is running around in several sizes too big bib trousers that expose his shirtless upper body. This imagery is erotic, but not erotic enough to be designated as such. It reminds quite a bit of Takei’s hit manga and anime Shaman King (シャーマンキング) from 1998 (and onwards), whose 13-year-old boy protagonist Asukara Yoh (麻倉 葉) similarly has an exposed chest under an unbuttoned shirt:
Moe! We might call this imagery titillating, but titillating for who? For boy readers with a latent erotic interest in their peers (and themselves)? Or for older readers? The lack of furigana makes me think that the manga is not aimed at too young readers.
On the female side, people have argued that the girl characters in series like Sailor Moon were sexed up to cater to a secondary (or maybe even primary) target group of adult men, beyond the obvious audience of teenage girls (see Patrick W. Galbraith: Otaku and the struggle for imagination in Japan, Duke University Press 2019, p. 113–115). Is something similar at play in mainstream boys’ (shōnen) manga? I think it’s quite obvious that a series like Made in Abyss (on Netflix of all places) flirts quite shamelessly with both shotacon and lolicon, with Reg – like Jumbor, a boy with robot hands – being one of the most popular characters in shota fan art.
The shota genre makes explicit what is implicit in mainstream manga. No one would claim that Hunter x Hunter and other mainstream series featuring and made for boys have an erotic undertone, and anyone who claims that would not be able to prove it. And that’s exactly what makes mainstream manga so interesting – because you have to read between the lines!
Please contribute with additional examples.
Kurumatani Haruko (車谷晴子) is my favourite shōjo mangaka. I just started reading her work Kyokujō danshi to kurashitemasu 1/極上男子と暮らしてます。①. I think the title can be (freely) translated to “Yay, I’m living with a super sexy boy!”
16-year-old Ruki lives with her mother and adores the manga boy Shun-sama. One morning when she exits her room, Shun-sama is standing in front of her. How is it possible? Ruki concludes that it must be a dream, and since you can do what you want in a dream without consequences, she starts kissing Shun-sama.
It turns out, of course, that it wasn’t a dream. The boy is Senri-kun, who has come to live with them, as arranged by Ruki’s mother. And here begins the quandaries for Ruki-chan, who on one hand thinks the new boy is naughty and irritating like boys are, but on the other thinks he looks so much like fictional Shun-sama that she just has to throw herself in his arms every now and then.
After once again having told Senri-kun off (he keeps making advances on her because of the mixed signals he’s getting), Ruki thinks while looking at both Senri-kun and the poster of Shun-sama that hangs above her bed:
Wow, once again he looks just like Shun-sama up close! My god, Shun-sama is standing in front of me!
She throws herself in Senri-kun’s arms, thinking “Shun-sama … ❤️❤️”, but quickly comes to her senses, thinking “What am I doing?” She thinks:
When I’m looking at Senri-kun I can’t differ between fantasy and reality!!
I love how the discussion of fantasy and reality, or 2D and 3D shota, takes place within a fictional work, just like in Yankee-shota to otaku-onēsan/ヤンキーショタとオタクおねえさん.
Kurumatani Haruko-san is my favourite shōjo mangaka. Her theme is “bad boys” and the girl who falls for them. I have previously read and loved these works by Kurumatani-san:
I’ve just finished a close reading of the second shota section of Nagayama Kaoru’s (永山 薫) Eromanga Studies (エロマンガ・スタディーズ) from 2006. While the first section on shota (p. 83-86) covers its history and the boom of female creators in the 1990s, the second section (p. 238-44) analyses the male shota reader by way of some interesting titles. This is a translated summary of those pages.
In the mid 1990s, “male characters as target for desire” in the form of “shota” appeared. In the late 1980s, a dōjinshi critic predicted that “the 1990s will be the era of cute boys”. Although this prediction was delayed due to the bishōjo-eromanga boom in the early 1990s, it turned out to be true.
At first, shota was a subgenre of BL/yaoi. Various factors made it cross the border to become a genre targeted at men. Beyond readers’ and artists’ will to read and draw, there must be a business decision that turns it into a product.
Shota oriented male writers were published in shota anthologies for women. Since it was aimed at women, censoring was not needed. So what was called “for women” on the surface in reality consisted of the three types “purely for women”, “for both sexes”, and “purely for men”. However, this boom stalled in the next decade.
But although male homosexual shota was destroyed, characters that were beautiful boys, neutral-gendered boys, cross-dressing boys, and passive “non-macho boys” spread into the world of erotic manga. Works like Yonekura Kengo’s Pink Sniper (2001) and Hayabusa Shingo’s Sweat & tears (2001) started a mini-boom of “one-shota”, with couplings between a beautiful boy and an older woman. Nagayama sees homophobia as a reason to why shota resorted to the male ╳ female scheme.
In 2002, a small boom occurred with the publication of the shota anthologies “Koushoku-shounen no susume” (2002), “Shounen-ai no bigaku” (2003), and “Shounen shikou” (2003). Shota had thereby been established as a genre, but its future is unknown.
Note: Nagayama-san’s book was published in 2006, so Budōuri Kusuko’s history of commercial shota magazines provides more details in that regard:
Although Nagayama only discusses works aimed at men, he stresses that the coupling is basically boy on boy (少年╳少年) or youth on boy (青年╳少年), but almost never boy on youth (少年╳青年).
And in the case of boy on boy, the seme/uke roles are not always fixed.
Nagayama provides a hilarious example in the form of Yōkihi’s Asoko Kinoko (1990), in which the penises of two boys are parasitised by autonomous and intelligent mushrooms of feminine forms. These mushrooms live off the boys’ semen as nutrients, and in return provides pleasure to their hosts.
In one scene the boys are kissing deeply while the “mushrooms” in their crotches are having what must be described as lesbian sex. The boys’ seme/uke roles are fluid, sometimes determined by apparent gender difference, height and physique, but only “to some extent”.
Nagayama notes that while the female mushrooms might be titillating for some, as the story progresses they retreat into the background and the boys become the full focus:
It’s a return to a boys only secret society, where sex is the homosocial company secret. Not only is there disdain, fear, and dislike for women, but maybe also fear and dislike for “the outside world”.
Nagayama Kaoru/永山 薫. Eromanga Studies/エロマンガ・スタディーズ (2006), p. 240
What kind of desire is it that male readers feel towards boy characters? Nagayama asks. Of course it could be homosexuality, conscious or subconscious. Although some shota reminds of heterosexual ero-manga in that the “uke” in the anal sex a substitute for a woman, the penis sprouting from the boy’s crotch makes it clear that we’re actually dealing with a male delight. The roles are also not that settled and the direction of power might change.
Nagayama notes that all pleasures in shota are physical pleasures. He argues that the reason why latent homosexuals fear gay porn, as represented by Tagame Gengoroh, is not that they don’t understand it, but that they understand the psychological and physical pleasures all too well. “Kawaii” suppresses such homophobia.
In other words, making the boys “cute” is a way to “de-pornify” them, since otherwise the “male pleasure” would be all too evident to the reader, which might evoke uncomfortable questions about his own homosexuality.
In addition, a major premise is that “it’s just a manga character”.
Nagayama identifies various ways in which male readers project their selves on shota characters:
In the latter case, an illusion is achieved through transformation, as Nagayama has written about in a quoted article:
I transform myself to a cute boy who does sexy things with other cute boys.
Nagayama Kaoru/永山薫: “Sexuality transformation”/セクシュアリティの変容. In Azuma Hiroki/東浩紀, editor: Mōjō genron F aratame/網状言論F改, Seidosha/青土社 collection 3/2003所収.
Nagayama asks rhetorically: Is there really such a big difference between “Cute me = an ideal model of myself” and “Cute you = an ideal model of others”? Even when this ideal model is temporarily entrusted to others, isn’t it always a projection of our self image?
No matter if the “other” that the boy is coupled with is a youth, middle-aged, or old, what we see is ourselves in various generations. In conclusion, shota is about “me and my sex”.
Nagayama illustrates the autoerotic structure of shota through Akio Takami’s/秋緒たかみ work “Tamamimi”/たまみみ (in “Juvenile”/じゅぶないる, Shobunkan, 2004):
Terumi was missing his close friend Rōta, and was shocked to have grown cat ears the next morning. According to his grandfather’s reminiscence, if you have feelings for a person you can’t meet, you will grow “soul ears”/魂耳 which listen to that person’s presence. As Rōta too grows soul ears, the two realise that they love each other. The most beautiful thing in this work is the sequence when the soul ears are touched by “the person who thinks about them”, and they realise that it feels good, so they caress each others’ soul ears, their cheeks are blushing, and they get excited. And when the two notice each other’s hot cheeks they let their lips meet and their bodies get close.
In the sequence that goes from caressing to fucking it should be noted that the difference between the two is so thin that they are almost indistinguishable. Although the inner thoughts of the two fill the frames as narration, it is impossible to determine if it is Terumi or Rōta who utters things like “I want to touch” and “I want to be touched”. Even if the reader identifies with the story’s narrator Terumi, he can no longer tell who Terumi is.
This is an intentional manipulation by the author. As the story progresses from caressing to kissing, the two boys are drawn almost as mirror images, stressing the equal gender, but it could maybe also be read as a message about love having neither a lord nor a customer. “Tamamimi” features ideal love of the kind “you and I become one”.
The ero-manga “Dream Users”/夢使い (Kodansha/構談社, 2002) by Ueshiba Riichi/植芝理一 shows no mercy. Cross-dressing boys lure girls to another world, where their alter egos grow penises and transform themselves into boys who rub their penises against each other. Although the manga can be seen as following the schema of “yaoi/BL”, the main focus is on “mating with myself”. As the otherness is extinguished, the unity causes a gravitational collapse towards the vanishing point of autoeroticism. We end up in the “cute me” universe with no outside world.
Departing from “Tamamimi” (with its one-on-one coupling) and “Dream Users” (myself-on-myself), Nagayama next illustrates how individual humans don’t matter when the purpose is autoeroticism.
In the popular gang rapes of “many on one” (多数╳一人), the more “seme” that are participating, the more their individuality disappears, and the reader’s consciousness is focused on the raped boy, the “uke”. The raper squad thus turns into “a role that appeared for the sole purpose of raping cute me”.
This is the ecstacy that is at the heart of “Spitfire”/スピットファイア (Moeru Publishing, 2005) and similar stories. No matter how they are set up with boy gangs and raped boys and so on, both the “uke” and the “seme” will eventuall become “me”.
Nagayama ends his analysis of the autoerotic aspect of shota by saying that it is of course only one way in which one can make sense of shota. But he argues that the position of shota is productive when trying to deconstruct ero-manga as a whole by using this keyword, and not only ero-manga for that matter, but porn in general.
I’m reading bits and pieces of Manda Ringo’s The Syotaroh and stumbled over some quite personal passages in “Manda Ringo’s shotacon discussion” (「まんだ林檎のショタコン談義」縮めてまん談) on page 102.
After lamenting how shota recently has become synonymous with the hardcore depictions seen in eromanga, as well as elaborating on shame and being judged by society, she goes on to comment on fantasy and reality:
When I see a boy in reality, I feel no sexual desire. Well, sometimes I want to hug them close from behind. But that only happens inside my head. Real boys aren’t that sweet.
Manda Ringo (まんだ林檎), The Syotaroh, p. 102
Ringo’s view on real shota is almost identical to that of some of my research participants.
She goes on to explain why she thinks she became a shotacon:
I really wanted to become a boy. I went all in and lived that gender role. But as I grew up, my body became curvy and I became a girl. Up till middle school I almost never wore a skirt. Only shorts (半ズボン). But that started to look awkward after a while. At age 14 I had to accept that it was no good. So until 14, I was basically a boy. Of course, I didn’t consciously think of it like that, but when I have looked back later and thought about it, that’s how it was. How we think about the boy as a concept is probably influenced by such things.
Manda Ringo (まんだ林檎), The Syotaroh, p. 102
Ringo-san adds that this is why her own shota interest is directed towards boys in middle school, despite shota as such can mean boys in a rather wide age span. I also think that the sometimes traumatic events that occur around puberty heavily influence what kind of shota we come to like as adults.
What do you think? どうしてショタコンになったのか？