It’s here – the book about shota!

Based on interviews with readers and creators of shota in Japan, Impossibly Cute Boys is the first book in English about shota comics and the people who love them!

Combining ethnographic fieldwork with archival research, the book explores:

  • The history of shota
  • How shota reading differs from other genres
  • Shota’s power to heal trauma
  • Attraction to real boys among shota fans
  • Understanding shota through a theory of “play”

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Shotaology

Shota research

boy eroticism

Gon Freecss in Hunter x Hunter shirtless

Homoerotic symbolism in Hunter × Hunter

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The sexual references are bouncing off the pages as Japan’s favourite manga character Gon has his shōkō popped by a man.

Hunter × Hunter is the ultimate adventure comic. It was created by Togashi Yoshihiro in 1998, and made into an anime twice: In 1999 and 2011. The series is one of Japan’s most popular mainstream manga and anime. With 148 episodes of the 2011 anime so far, the adventure is still ongoing in the manga. Here we will take a closer look at episodes 39 – 44 of the anime from 1999.

The ultimate boy

The protagonist of Hunter × Hunter is Gon Freecss, a good-hearted and high-spirited 12 year old, who in many ways is the ultimate boy – not only because twelve is the perfect age for a shota boy. Gon is on a quest to find his father, who abandoned his family to become a “hunter”, a title and status given only to those who pass certain tests. So Gon sets out to become a hunter himself, figuring an occupation that leads a father to abandon his family must be truly awesome, or else his father wouldn’t have left them.

That’s the backdrop to what eventually leads up to a classic – in the word’s most literal sense – coming-of-age story. This arc plays out in the Celestial Tower, a huge phallic building with hundreds of floors – each one a battleground to conquer in order to reach the top. People spend months and years in the tower, which can be seen not only as a symbol of puberty – the transition from boy to man – but for life in general; each floor, each year is a struggle – a fun struggle.

Gon approaches the tower together with his friend Killua. (The friendship between the two boys is beautiful and full of symbolic hints; much has been written on Gon and Killua being “more than friends”.) They befriend a younger boy, Zushi, and his coach Wing. In order to win matches, the fighters must master nen, a kind of energy which resides inside every human being, but which must be awoken before it can be put to use. If a fighter enters the ring without knowledge of this technique, they are quickly “initiated” by their nen-using opponent, but since it’s a fight, there is malicious intent in this kind of sudden initiation, and it can result in damage or death. Wing is therefore teaching nen to Zushi, so that his protegé can learn to master it in a controlled way before entering the ring.

Wing immediately senses Gon’s and Killua’s natural proclivity for nen, and takes it upon himself to teach the boys how to master it. He has a hard time hiding his excitement about his new pupils to Zushi, whose progress with nen is slow – maybe because he is still too small, whereas Gon and Killua are at the exact right age where this initiation can and should occur in boys.

Sexual innuendo

Technically, nen (念 ≈ “mind force”) is a way for its users to control their own aura. Every person has an energy flow emancipating from their body, and mastering this energy field is key to winning the matches in Heaven’s Arena – the top floor of the Celestial Tower – and to mastering life as a hunter in general.

Symbolically, however, nen is akin to another three letter word with “e” in the middle: Sex. To understand this, we need to take a brief historical look at male coming-of-age rites:

When a boy of the Dorian people of ancient Greece was coming of age, he was given over to the care of a male friend of the family, who over a period of three months would teach the boy everything he needed to know in order to become a man. Learning to hunt was one of the most important parts of this initiation; the theme (and title) of Hunter × Hunter thereby focuses on a fundamental aspect of a boy becoming a man. But another important part of the initiation was the symbolical and literal insertion of manhood into the boy through anal sex; the man had to “inject” the boy with his semen, where the source of manhood was believed to reside, as described by Michel Foucault in the second volume of The History of Sexuality (1985). This practice is echoed almost to the letter by the contemporary tribes described by the anthropologist Gilbert Herdt in Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia (1984). It seems that sex between men and boys has been an intuitive feature of male coming-of-age rites in cultures otherwise diverse, and maybe it still lurks in our subconscious?

Popping the tight shōkō

Wing’s initiation of Gon and Killua begins in episode 39 in the 1999 anime. Nen is usually taught for a longer period of time, but since Gon and Killua are rushing to their next match, where they will need nen, Wing decides to transfer his nen, or ki (気 ≈ “energy”), to the boys in a more direct way – by opening their shōkō (精孔). We need not dwell on the exact meaning of this concept, as it is pretty abstract; shōkō basically function as the “nodes” for a person’s “aura”.

“Take off your coats and turn your back towards me”, he instructs the boys, and advises them to focus on their “tightly closed shōkō”.

“Take off your clothes and turn your back towards me!” Hunter x Hunter (1999) episode 39.

He goes on in a way that would make the late Kenneth Dover (author of Greek Homosexuality, 1978) blush:

“I will now pass on my ki into your body in one shot, and open your shōkō.”

Wing explaining how he will “shoot” his “ki” into the boys’ “shōkō”.

Cut to the boys’ nervous and excited faces, as Wing says from behind their backs: “I’m going to begin.”

Wing prepares the boys.

How does a boy feel when the man transfers his manhood to him? What did a boy in ancient Greece think? Were they afraid? Proud? Excited? Gon is thinking this:

“I feel very hot, and I have a feeling of being pushed by a force.”

  • Gon in Hunter x Hunter is feeling hot.
  • Gon in Hunter x Hunter is being pushed by a force.
Gon feeling hot as Wing pushes from behind.

Then suddenly, the boys’ eyes wide open, their mouths gasping in shock and amazement.

The moment Wing pops the boys’ shōkōs.

It has happened – the man has transfered his energy – a part of himself – into the boys.

“Now your shōkō have been opened”, Wing concludes.

In the next episode, he reflects: “I may have awoken uncontrollable beasts.”

Comparing loads

Nen consists of many sub-concepts such as gyō, hatsu, ren, so for the next month the boys are busy learning all of them from their sensei. In episode 41, it has become time for the boys to get to know their newly awoken nen more intimately. There are different types of nen (or more specifically hatsu, 発), but you can’t choose for yourself which type you are – your type is as static as your DNA throughout life, a bit like how we think about sexual orientations, or blood types. A test with water and a leaf in a glass reveals which type you are.

Wing shows the boys how it is done:

“Hold your hands close to the cup and release your ren.”

Getting ready for the circle ren.

In Wing’s case, the water starts overflowing the cup, which means he belongs to the “reinforcement” type of hatsu. Then it’s the boys’ turn. Gon’s aura too causes the water to overflow the cup – he too is a reinforcer. For little Zushi, the leaf starts moving – it means he’s a “manipulator”. But for Killua, nothing happens, and he is disappointed at first. But Wing instructs him to taste the content of the cup into which he has released his ren. Gon and Killua stick their fingers into the liquid and moves them to their mouths, taking a lick:

“It’s a little sweet.”

Gon tastes Killua’s sweet release.

The water changing taste means Killua belongs to the “transformation” group.

The whole scene brings to mind the cup-bearers of ancient cultures, the sweet or overflowing liquid of course being a symbol of the boys’ own unique liquid DNA: Sperm. One of the personality types revealed by the water test is even called “emitter” (hōshutsu, 放出). The excellent Fandom page on Nen explains:

An affinity for Emission (放出系, Hōshutsu-kei; abbrev. as 放) means that a user has an easier time separating their aura from their body.

A person’s aura is a person’s soul, an abstract concept that in our scientific times can be said to reside in a person’s DNA, which is literally emitted through ejaculation.

Gay Hisoka

The main reason why Gon wants to master nen is because he wants to fight Hisoka, a flamboyant Pierrot and fellow hunter candidate. Hisoka’s interest in Gon has been expressed very explicitly throughout the series. He talks about wanting the fruit to ripe before he picks it. He is obviously the “gay” character of the series, but not in a negative way – Hisoka is portrayed as the most powerful (and dangerous) of the hunter candidates. Since Gon too is a wunderkind of sorts, this binds them together. Hisoka is very smart and relies on advanced magic in his fights. Gon, on the other hand, is a bit dumb but has an extremely good smelling sense; his intelligence works on a more intuitive level. Hisoka, who belongs to the transformation group, concludes: “Opposites attract.”

Hisoka is attracted to Gon.

After the water test, Gon seeks out Wing again to show him “his results so far”. The water overflows again and Wing expresses his admiration for the boy’s development. Yet he knows, or fears, why the boy really came to him, and the ensuing dialogue has a subtle intensity that we are used to from heterosexual love dramas:

“You want to fight Hisoka”, Wing says with his back turned towards Gon. “Am I right?”

Gon confirms, and Wing turns around to face him:

“I’m only a person who teaches you nen. I don’t have the right to decide how you should live. I agree to your fight with Hisoka.”

And so, the boy is free to leave the man who introduced him to nen, and go out in the world to practice it in his own life, with the people he choose.

Overt man/boy eroticism

Let the game begin: Gon vs Hisoka.

“Both participants have looked forward to this match. Does that mean there is a special connection between them?” the female commentator says in the microphone as the match is about to start.

Hisoka is thinking: “Don’t look at me like that. The eyes you use to look at me are full of passion.” As he is thinking this, his arm straightens out on its own. “This makes me excited”, Hisoka says to himself as his straight arm starts pointing upwards despite he tries to keep it down with his other hand. “Even more excited!” he exclaims as the arm reaches full erection – the allusion to an erect penis is obvious and humorous.

Gon’s intense look gives Hisoka an arm erection.

Killua in the audience thinks to himself as they start fighting, with the vastly superior Hisoka scoring the first point without even moving: “Hisoka looks like he’s in ecstasy. But Gon looks like he’s having fun too, even though he has been punched hard.”

“I finally hit Hisoka”, Gon happily remarks as he scores his first point; Hisoka turns his bruised face towards the boy and smiles.

Gon gets a facial

As the real fight between the two begins, Hisoka squirts out his magic “pansy gum”, a whiteish, semi-transparent lash of energy, into Gon’s face, where it gets stuck on his chin and lets Hisoka control him:

“You will never be able to escape me again. … You will never be able to escape from my flexible pansy gum.”

Hisoka has given Gon a facial.

But the fight suddenly turns around and Gon manages to repeatedly hit and kick Hisoka hard. Hisoka is thinking between the blows:

“Gon … Great … this is great! Your eyes, your expression, and your spirit … Right now, I want to … destroy you. But not yet. I’ll wait … until the fruit is ripe. It’ll be such a pity if I destroy you now. I’ll wait till the wait piles up higher and higher. I have to endure … endure … endure!”

Hisoka is obsessed by Gon.

The obvious references to sex and love almost takes the fun out of the analysis. Let’s just conclude that the Hunter × Hunter watchers get a hefty dose of man/boy intimacy every time Hisoka and Gon appear on stage together. If anyone still doubts this, the next cut lets us watch Hisoka in the nude as he’s taking a shower after the match.

“It’s good that I’ve found new toys to play with”, he comments as we get to see a shot of Gon and Killua. “It’s time to find the prey …”

Hunters know nen, men know sex

Episode 43 opens with the water test, this time the final exam. Gon’s hands around the cup, with the phallic Celestial Tower in the background. The water overflows. Killua’s turn, we know what will happen by now. He lets Gon and Zushi taste the content of the cup:

“It almost tastes like honey”, Gon says. Yummy!

After some more matches, the arc closes with Wing telling Gon and Killua that they have now mastered nen, and that they thereby have passed the secret hunter exam:

“Knowledge of nen is the basic requirement for a hunter.”

The initiation from candidate to hunter, from boy to man, is over, and the message between the lines is clear:

“Knowledge of sex is the basic requirement for a man.”

Wing goes on to explain that the secret exam of mastering nen doesn’t have a predetermined path:

“It doesn’t matter if you’re willing, as long as you’ve passed the exam, you will one day feel the existence of nen. It’s coincidence, or fate, that you two came to Celestial Tower and met me.”

After spending four months together – very close to the three months of the Dorians – the boys and the man part. They do so in the sunset, against the backdrop of the phallic tower and a thick rug of romantic violins.

The boys have become men and part from their teacher, phallic tower in the background. (Little Zushi on the right is not ready yet, he’s still a child.)

The boys’ new status as nen users is confirmed in some comical interactions with women at the end of the episode. Killua makes fun of the elevator girl. Gon is shocked by Killua’s teasing and tells him to stop, but Killua replies:

“It’s okay. Don’t forget, we’re nen users now. We shouldn’t be afraid of her no matter how strong this woman is.”

So mastering nen changed the boys’ attitude toward women; instead of being boys in relation to women, they are now men. But it turns out the woman is a nen user too, and as Gon and Killua leave the elevator, they have bruises all over their faces – apparently a fight had broken out between the three nen users. It’s not without sorrow that we conclude that the boys just got their first bite of adulthood.

Eroticism at work

This is my reading of Hunter x Hunter. The erotic undertones happen (mostly) on the subconscious level on both the producing side (creator, editor, publisher) and among the consumers (readers and viewers). Of course there are also intended sexual references: Producers use “fan service” to give the fans “what they want” in terms of sexual desire for the characters, and consumers use “shipping” to pair up their favourite characters in romantic and sexual unions. But these are just droplets of desire compared to the male eroticism that is the very fundament of boys’ manga, a kind of inexhaustible source that keeps guaranteeing their success as new generations of boys want to become men.

Hunter × Hunter (2011) is available subtitled at services like Netflix, Hulu, and Crunchyroll.

Liked this? Read my other takes on eroticism in mainstream manga:

Boys with swords: Wataru, Toraoh, Yoh-kun

Young boys with big swords – phallic symbolism in Wataru and Shaman King

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A boy’s greatest desire is to become a man. This theme therefore permeates virtually all boys’ manga and anime – only the execution varies. Especially robot anime feeds on this desire, where the robot represents the man that the boy admires, wants to learn from, fight alongside with, and eventually become. The robot is an externalisation not only of the boy’s desire, but of his potential: Eventually, all boys will become men, but this is a complicated process, a process that engages not only the boy himself but all of society. Hence the focus on male coming-of-age rituals in virtually all cultures and eras: The boy must be guided to manhood, and watching a semi-disguised version of that process in anime is what keeps us glued to the screen year after year. Probably it provides us with solace to see new generations of boys being fostered into men, thus implicitly convincing us that the world will continue to exist.

This process is beautifully captured in the transformation sequence of robot anime. That’s where the magic happens, and isn’t the boy’s transformation into a man a kind of magic? The boy’s greatest desire logically receives the greatest care in the form of an advanced animation sequence, a real treat for the eye, accompanied by powerful music. The sequence often includes the boy summoning the robot by throwing a magical token, ejecting or ejaculating a piece of himself if you will, like a seed that gives birth to something greater, outside of himself – the man he will become. The boy is then shown (as in Wataru below) ascending into the inner core of the robot, from where they will control its huge limbs. Boy and robot – boy and man – have become one: Only so can they fight the enemy and save the world.

This process includes overt symbolism. Most obviously, the boy always sports a long and powerful sword (in Granzort we even see it grow), the swinging of which to eliminate the enemy marks the “orgasm” of each episode. If you haven’t got it yet, the sword of course symbolises the boy’s penis, or phallos with a fancier word.

Wataru
Nine-year-old boy Wataru grabs his big … sword.

Once you’ve understood that, the story makes more sense, since all boys and men are obsessed with their penises. So whether they “get it” or not on a conscious level, seeing a boy swinging a long object fills male viewers (maybe female too, in a different way) with satisfaction. We’re not only seeing the slaying of a villain – we’re watching the supreme victory of our own sex! And it’s big. Very big. And so it taps into the fascination and desire of every single boy out there: The fascination with the growing capability of their own body part, and the desire that it will one day grow bigger than the little miniscule appendix they are stuck with as boys. Or in short: That they will one day become men.

The desire fueling the imagery of boys with swords is evident in anime 30 years apart: Wataru (1988), Granzort (1989) and Boku no Hero Academia (2019). I’m not much of an anime buff, so you can probably find many more examples.

Shaman King (1998–2004, by Takei Hiroyuki/武井宏之) is not a robot manga, but is fueled by the same manly desire: 13-year-old Yoh-kun merges with various men in the form of ghosts, who enter his body. Instead of controlling the robot, the boy’s body is here controlled by the man whose spirit has entered it. This frame with the boxer was cut out of the anime but well captures the man/boy dynamic of this idea:

Man on boy: Yoh-kun as a boxer.

The fact that several men can take advantage of Yoh-kun (or “have some fun with his body” as one of them put it) seems to be at odds with the idea that a boy should only have one man who guides him, but after a while the samurai Amidamaru accepts this role. Beyond the obvious symbolism of man-on-boy action (or man inside boy even), the manga also sports several phallic objects, most evidently the sword which Yoh-kun holds in the same iconic way as Wataru above:

13-year-old boy Yoh-kun grabs his big … sword. In the background Amidamaru.

There are lots of other phallic objects that are held and pointing in various suggestive ways throughout Shaman King, but whereas metal pipes and wooden planks are symbolic, the ihai (位牌), or “spirit tablet”, almost perfectly represents the size of a boy penis and is held in a way that reminds of masturbation:

Boy grabbing his hard … ihai. Note that something is going on in Yoh-kun’s pocket in the right frame.

Some frames are suggestive in a way that makes you wonder if you’re a pervert who sees “signs” everywhere. But seriously. The wooden stick in the bucket in this frame is simply a bit too perfectly positioned, don’t you think? Just squint your eyes …

Quite early on, Yoh-kun gets a rival in the form of Ren. Ren is equipped with a long halberd. You may want to squint your eyes again …

Yoh-kun’s rival Ren grabs his long … halberd.

It’s amazing to see when Ren gets going. He swings his halberd in such a confident and powerful way that my thoughts go to Murakami Takashi’s legendary sculpture My Lonesome Cowboy. This piece of art is brilliant in that it captures exactly what I have been trying to describe in this post, namely the underlying phallic desire in mainstream boy culture. The boy’s self-image of being an omnipotent, sperm-shooting demigod on his way to manhood is epitomised in Murakami’s sculpture. But look closely and you will be able to see the sperm of the lonesome cowboy running as a common white-greyish thread through so many manga works.

It should be mentioned that this is most probably not a conscious thought process in the creators of manga and anime. Although there are cases where shota and loli artists also create mainstream, non-sexual works, in most cases the desire that results in all these symbols probably works as a motor deep down, under the hood so to speak. It’s a societal desire, and creators are part of the society.

When I studied literary analysis at the university, someone (maybe it was me) asked: “But why do we have to interpret so much? Can’t we just ask the author what they meant, if they’re still alive?” The teacher replied: “No, because it doesn’t matter what the author intended. Our job is to analyse the work and find things in it that not even the author is aware of.” So that’s what I’ve done here. Tell me what you think and please contribute with your own observations!

Full Ahead! Coco, volume 15, cover art

Man/boy romance in Full Ahead! Coco

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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.

Boy wants to be taught

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.
Crying boy.

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?”

“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!”

“Only the two of us!”

Man and boy get naked

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
Barts explains the logic of being shirtless at sea to Coco.

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.

Coco throws off his shirt.

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.

Halfnaked boy and man engaged in education.

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
“Look Barts! Land! Laaaand!!”

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.

Man on boy.

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.

You stole my man!

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”.

“Don’t steal Barts from me!!”

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!

Jumbor Angzengbang 2, ユンボル 1, manga cover art

Jumbor and the eroticism of mainstream boys’ manga

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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:

Fold-out in Jumbor Angzengbang, volume 2 (ユンボル 安全版, 全2巻), 2010.

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.
Jumbor Baru discovers his prepubescent penis
Jumbor Baru discovers his prepubescent penis, p. 86-87.
Baby elephant in diapers symbolises small penis
This discovery is illustrated with the symbolic image of a baby elephant in diapers, p. 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.
Jumbor 1, p. 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:

Asukara Yoh (麻倉 葉) in Shaman King.

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.