shota

My own shota

2021-08-15 by ケイ Leave a Comment

Eric was hot. He had a rough edge, because he was a city boy and his parents were divorced. He had a moped. He had longish hair and lips that pouted just slightly and gave him a simple look. He probably wore braces, I don’t remember. But despite his rough aura, Eric was also kind. He didn’t hang out with the “cool” boys from the city, but he was respected by them. He was friends with the farmers, and since I was closer to the farmers (the only ones who would accept me), Eric was in my vicinity every now and then.

Eric was my classmate for three years in middle school. I don’t know anything about him either before or after, but for those three years I watched him every week in the changing room at gym class. He changed in the part of the changing room where I and the farmers changed.

My middle school changing room, or junior high school locker room for you Americans, but it didn’t have lockers.

I remember clearly when I watched him undress the first time. His muscles! Despite we were the same age – 12 or 13 years old – the muscles on Eric’s arms were bulging like smooth, toppy hills that disappeared in deep rivers that led into his dark armpit. I was mesmerised by that image, forever imprinted in my mind. I remember the intricacies of that dark pit of raw desire – it was like a mystery to me!

My sketch of Eric in the middle school changing room, as I carry the image with me.

Of course I also remember his penis. It was pointy; stood out a bit from the body, as if it was always slightly erect. A small patch of pubic hair just above it. Over those three years I watched his penis grow: In 9th grade it had the same form – pointy – but was now several sizes bigger. More hair grew on top of it. His muscles had also grown, an intoxicating mess of smooth hills and dark, dangerous rivers. And he had grown underarm hair.

On one of the last days of seventh or eight grade, our teacher asked us what we would do over summer break – would we have a summer job maybe? Eric said he would work at the local saw. “So it’s a muscular Eric who will come back after summer break”, the teacher replied, and I read some desire into her words, like, did she have to mention his body? I still remember this occasion because I thought about Eric and his muscles.

I think I was in love with Eric, but I didn’t realise it, and I’ve never really thought about it after either. At one time the two of us were to go together to a field or forest for an exercise day a bit away from the school. I don’t know how we ended up together, we might have been assigned something, so the others had gone before us. I came to school with the school bus, but Eric had a moped, so he offered me a ride. I did have a moped too, but maybe only later on. I had in any case never sat behind a boy, a sexy boy, on a moped before. I was excited. Where should I hold my hands? There was some kind of metal structure for packages behind the long seat, so I grabbed it behind my back. Eric said: “You can hold on to me.” I didn’t. I thought it would be gay. How I regret that I didn’t, to this day! But I remember the heat from his body under his flannel shirt, flapping in the wind as we rode through the city to the others. I was so much in love!

I don’t have many more memories of Eric. I’ve googled him over the years, but fortunately never seen a picture. He remains in my mind as the perfect 13-year-old boy who I watched naked in the changing room every week for three years. Eric and his muscles. Eric and his penis. Eric and his warm body next to mine on the moped. Eric is my own shota.

Listen up, you reader! You probably carry your own shota with you from when you grew up. Tell me about him! Draw him! And be part of the collective research project into shota and shotacon that will contribute important insights about desire and sexuality to academia. Get in touch, let’s chat, let’s share our imaginations! Fill in the shota survey and let’s take it from there. I want to talk to you!

The Ontology of the Boy, or: What are little boys made of?

2021-07-27 by ケイ 1 Comment

In the introduction to the book Kono shota ga sugoi (このショタがすごい！) from 1997, Shindōji Gun (真道寺軍) opens with this provocative question:

What are little boys made of?
Kono shota ga sugoi, p. 4

Introduction, page 4–5 in *Kono shota ga sugoi* (このショタがすごい！) by Shindōji Gun (真道寺軍), 1997.

The question evokes so many thoughts. At first, I think about the boy’s body. Like the rest of us, boys are made up of flesh and blood, bones and organs. But just by spelling this out, I realise what a bad answer it is. Of course boys are made of the stuff that makes all of us. Disgusting stuff that I don’t want to see. So why is the boy so great (or “sugoi”) when he’s made of the same things as the rest of us? Is it the composition of these things – the proportions in which the bones are held together? Is it the youthful lustre of the thin layer of skin that so perfectly wraps around the stuff we don’t want to see? Being so concrete about the answer makes me realise that what the question really asks is this:

What is the magic of boys?

That question has been asked before in shota research. In 1996, Manda Ringo phrased it like this in the shota survey published in her book The Syotaroh:

Where does the magic of the boy reside?”
The Syotaroh, p. 15

Popular answers included “smooth legs”, “thin limbs”, “beautiful face”, and “youthful skin”, but the number one answer, as entered independently by 13 respondents, was junsuisa (純粋さ), which can be translated as “purity” or “innocence”. This is something far more abstract than the physical attributes. It is something that is hard or maybe even impossible to grasp, and thus it is denoted as “magic”. But maybe one can try by way of examples. The introduction in Kono shota ga sugoi follows an illustration where the same question is posed – twice for impact:

Boys, what are they made of?
Boys, what are they made of?
Ray guns and spacecrafts,
what’s more, robot monsters,
What a wonderful anything goes!
Kono shota ga sugoi, p. 3

What are little boys made of? Page 3 in *Kono shota ga sugoi* (このショタがすごい！) by Shindōji Gun (真道寺軍), 1997.

The text reads like a poem, and maybe poetry is the only way one can close in on questions about magic.

The continuous outpour of books and dōjinshi discussing shota reflects a will among shota fans to understand themselves. Like few other genres, shota seems to create a curious reflexivity among its readers, who are more diverse than readers of other comics. Women and men, young and old, straight, gay and bi, ask themselves: What is the magic of the boy?

In academic terminology, one might talk about the ontology of the boy, as a way to try to capture his very being. The passionate production of shota dōjinshi provides a unique chance to close in on this transient ontology called Boy: How old is he? (Twelve!) What does he look like? What hobbies does he have? Of course there are many answers depending on personal taste, but taken together, the expressions in these dōjinshi make up an important databank devoted to an ideal that never lets itself be captured, and which therefore keeps engaging us.

So I ask you: What is the magic of the boy? Reply in the comments or in the shota forum – and don’t forget to take the shota survey!

Man/boy romance in Full Ahead! Coco

2021-02-27 by ケイ Leave a Comment

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.

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!”

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.

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

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.

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”.

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!

Shota and autoeroticism

2020-09-12 by ケイ Leave a Comment

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.

Background

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:

The rise and fall of commercial shota magazines

Boy on boy shota

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.

Yōkihi: *The Forbidden Mushroom* (1990).

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

Male desire for boys

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 case of youth on boy (青年 ╳ 少年), the gender roles are relatively fixed, which makes it easy for the male reader to project his self on the youth (the heterosexual pattern).
However, if the story is told from the point of view of the boy, it is easier for male readers to project their selves on an “uke” who is a boy than on an “uke” who is a woman.
In the case of boy on boy (少年 ╳ 少年), the feeling is the same no matter if you’re “uke” or “seme”.

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”.

Two illustrative shota works

Tamamimi/たまみみ

秋緒たかみ: じゅぶないる — Akio Takami/秋緒たかみ: Juvenile/じゅぶないる BOYS SEX (2004).

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”.

Dream Users/夢使い

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.

Boy gang rapes

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”.

Autoeroticism and porn

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.

国際おたく大学―1998年：最前線からの研究報告

2020-04-03 by Leave a Comment

This anthology, edited by Okada Toshio, contains the essay “Shota research” (ショタの研究) by Watanabe Yumiko (渡辺由美子), under the section “Otaku Sexuality 1” (おたくのセクシュアリティ1).

Watanabe-san’s essay is unique in that it interrogates female and male shota fans in the 1990s, while outlining the history of shota aesthetics, as well as providing an analysis of shota’s allure. I read it in great detail and used it as a springboard to watch several key animes from the 1980s and 1990s, “Mashin Eiyūden Wataru” being the most important of them.

Part 1: The history and definition of shota (p. 32-41)

Regarding the etymology of shota and shotacon, Watanabe-san mentions that there were several terms used within shōjo and shōnen-ai manga, including “ribocon” for “little boy complex”, but that the dōjinshi world eventually settled for the better sounding term “shotacon”, which first appeared in a 1981 issue of Fanroad.

Footnote 2 describes how Animecku’s editor Komaki Masanobu (小牧雅伸) and Fanroad’s editor Hamamatsu Katsuki (浜松克樹), pen name “イニシャルビスケットのK”, came up with the term. It was the lolicon boom in the early 1980s and they wondered what a male equivalent would be, for “boys in shorts” (半ズボンの少年). After Komaki dropped the hint of Kaneda Shōtarō (金田正太郎) from Tetsujin 28-gō (the original manga, not the remake which was broadcast at the time), the editors decided to call it “Shōtarō complex”, which became “shotacon”.

Watanabe-san goes on to describe how a number of mainstream boys’ anime, most importantly the “shota trigger” Mashin Hero Wataru (魔神英雄伝ワタル, Mashin Eiyūden Wataru) from 1988, awakened the “shota mind” and established shota as a new genre, separate from yaoi, among dōjinshi creators. I have summarised this development in a separate post:

Wataru and the birth of shota in mainstream anime

As for shota’s definition and age range, Watanabe-san writes that there might be as many opinions as there are shota fans. However, a shota character’s face should not have adult length, and the character must possess some kind of cuteness.

When it comes to shota characters’ personality, Watanabe-san has created a “shota gauge” (ショタゲージ), or “shotameter” in my translation, where she places the qualities “hot-blooded” vs “cool”, and “shorts” vs “skirt” on two continuums, in which she places the popular boy characters from mainstream manga and anime.

Part 2: Female shota fans (p. 42-47)

This section is a conversation between Watanabe-san and X-Kids mangaka Suō-san, who started out creating aniparo dōjinshi in high school. Starting out with Yuu☆Yuu☆Hakusho and Gundam W, both popular among aniparo creators, her taste turned towards shota with Shinji from Neon Genesis Evangelion (新世紀エヴァンゲリオン, 1995):

I didn’t think of him as shota until episode 24 when Kaworu appears, and I was like ‘What, is Shinji like that?!’. (laugh)

Suō-san

Episode 24 of Evangelion spurred a Kaworu ✕ Shinji boom among female creators, both in yaoi and shota. Kaworu’s arrival made fans realise that Shinji was a “total uke”.

Survey results from commercial shota magazines for women show that age difference, as in older/younger brother or even father/son, is the most appreciated feature among female readers. However, shota is much less strict than yaoi when it comes to the seme/uke division. If yaoi was a way for women to escape the uke role to become a seme with the power to “attack” male characters, shota is a whole different “playground” which much more open possibilities, Watanabe-san argues.

Part 3: Male shota fans (p. 48-54)

Watanabe-san begins with explaining how male shota interest emerged from the loli boom in the 1980s. Since the characteristics of loli are smooth, flat chests, and the cute style of shōjo manga, the step was not far to smooth boys. The yaoi boom made it easier for loli mangakas and publishers to experiment with boy characters, which made their ways into loli magazines like Lemon People (レモンピープル) and Hot Milk (ホットミルク). Surveys confirmed that the male readers liked “boy stuff” (少年もの). Eventually the main shota genre “big sister and me” (お姉さんと僕) emerged from this.

Watanabe-san now turns to interview Usagi-no-Tokei-san and Hakuo-san from the shota circle Shiro-usagi, and they claim to not “come from loli”:

At least, we are not shota who came from loli. Both of us were shotacons already in elementary school.

Hakuo-san

They explain how they watched robot animes as children and how they attracted to the boy heroes of animes like Triton of the Sea (海のトリトン) and Babel II (バビル二世), not to mention Kappei of Invincible Super Man Zambot 3 and Amuro of Gundam.

The most appealing thing in boys’ anime is hot friendships. When boys’ friendships are depicted in anime, it moves me and it makes me think of “something” beyond friendship. That “something” is not just friendship or affection.

Hakuo-san

Usagi-no-Tokei-san explains how he experienced “pseudo-love” between boys in elementary and middle school, and how he “got stuck in that stage” when other moved on to male-female relations. He thinks that “staying in the boy stage” is something that shotacons may have in common.

Next, Usagi-no-Tokei-san distinguishes this personal trajectory from that of shota fans who come from loli:

For people who come from loli-kei, as long as it’s smooth (tsurupeta) and cute, a boy too is okay, they seem to reason. Because only the lower body differs (laugh). Therefore they focus on the sex in their shota manga, whereas we who have been shota fans for a long time, for us the boy’s attraction is a much more special thing. That’s how I think about it.”

Usagi-no-Tokei-san

They call their thing “genuine shota” (真性ショタ), and say that there might be more of them than expected. They have set up a website where they collect impressions from other shotacons. They hope that people who find the website might feel relief that they are not the only ones with those feelings. Usagi-no-Tokei-san says that before they found fellow shotacons, they thought they were sick. Interesting here is that the Japanese word shinsei (真性) is also translated as “inborn nature”, and the literal meaning of the kanji is something along the lines of “true sex/sexuality”.

As for their relation to real (actual) boys, they keep a distance and talk about a “compromise” (割り切り). I understand this as a way to rationalise one’s inclination, “I’m ok, I’m not bad”, sort of. Hakuo-san likes 2D only, whereas Usagi-no-Tokei-san likes “2D Plus” (二次元プラス), in that he enjoys watching real (actual) boys, but that is where he draws the border.

Watanabe-san seems very surprised by the mindset of these “genuine” shota fans. She felt a strong sense of “shame”, which is non-existent for female creators who draw yaoi or loli. She observes that shota is drawn differently by men and women. In male shota, not only the seme but also the uke expresses emotions. The reason might be that male shota fans can identify with any boy character they like.

Watanabe-san mentions the recent (that is, recent in 1998) trend of youth ✕ boy (青年 ✕ 少年) couplings, which Usagi-no-Tokei-san exclaims would be “impossible”. Impossible is exactly what makes it good, Watanabe-san argues (with a laugh), and Usagi-no-Tokei-san replies:

(Laugh) I’m more like … Both when I look at shota manga and when I draw it, I immerse myself in that situation, they are not other people to me. If there is a relation between two boys, I too can feel like a boy, but if it’s a youth who does what he wants with a child, that’s a crime. It’s obscene, no matter how much 2D it is …

Usagi-no-Tokei-san

Watanabe-san concludes that for “genuine” shotacons, the boy character is used for self-identification, and that they through shota might be chasing the “imaginative boys” of their own past.

Finally, there is a discussion on homosexuality and how discrimination made it hard to say that you are attracted to your own sex, which I suppose the “genuine” shotacons are? If the word “homosexuality” was not so loaded, liking boys would be just another hobby, like “sabu-kei” (さぶ系) or “shemales” (ニューハーフ), Watanabe-san writes.

In the end, whether people are accepted or not depends on the ‘words’, as conceptual rules, that are attached to them. The fact that we have started to come out little by little is thanks to the word “shota”. I’m a shota, I’m an otaku, whatever the genre, the words attached to people do not only discriminate, but also have positive meaning, which leads to a feeling of acceptance.

Hakuo-san

Watanabe-san concludes that since “shota” is a word that spread from inside out, and wasn’t used by outsiders to discriminate, it can be used to accept, empower, and express oneself.

In the last section, Watanabe-san describes what she calls “borderless gender transformation” (性ボーダレス化):

Men turn from loli to shota, women turn to loli, in the shota world phenomena like “female Shinji” appear, whatever, whenever can be meshed together.

Watanabe Kumiko-san

However, my impression is that the “genuine” shota fans are not included in that optimistic analysis. Even so, Watanabe-san’s interview with Hakuo-san and Usagi-no-Tokei-san is indeed groundbreaking, and a great stepping stone for further research into shota and its readers.

腐男子にきく。

2020-03-28 by Leave a Comment

This is the first study of “fudanshi” (腐男子), or “rotten boys”, originally published as a dōjinshi in 2008 by Yoshimoto Taimatsu. The term “fujoshi” (腐女子), or “rotten girls”, for women with a strong interest in BL and yaoi gained attention in 2006. Taimatsu-san turned his focus to male readers of BL and yaoi. In the words of Nagaike Kazumi:

In 2008, another male fan and critic of BL, Yoshimoto Taimatsu, self-published a study, Interviewing Fudanshi (Fudanshi ni kiku) in an initial attempt, by means of an innovative analysis of heterosexual male readings of BL, to make heterosexual male readers of BL (i.e., fudanshi or “rotten boys”) visible for the first time.

Nagaike, Kazumi. 2015. “Do Heterosexual Men Dream of Homosexual Men? BL Fudanshi and Discourse on Male Feminization.” In Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan, edited by Mark McLelland, Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker, 189–209. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Taimatsu-san comments in the preface that the common image of straight men is that they are uninterested in, and sometimes hostile towards, homosexual imagery. Fudanshi obviously break with this homophobic tradition:

これまで男性は、同性愛者でない限り、同性愛は嫌いなのが当たり前と考えられてきた。同性愛者は「近寄るな」と遠ざけられるか、いいところネタとして、笑いの対象になるのがせいぜいだった。しかし「腐男子」は、嬉々として男性同士の恋愛を楽しんでいる。いったい彼らはどのような性志向を持っているのだろうか?

Of particular interest is the interview with BL and shota expert Budouuri XQO-san (葡萄瓜さん), who has bought shota material “in realtime” since their appearance around 1991. Among other things, the two discuss how BL became a refuge for (straight) men who felt opressed in terms of love and sex during the bubble years, and how those men deal with the fact that the content is “homo”. As for shota research, they emphasise the importance of looking at reader letters in shota magazines.

Budouuri-san and Taimatsu-san discuss the allure of shota, and I want to quote from the interview here:

T: ただ、ショタには惹かれるものがあったのですよね。
B: ありましたね。男の子同士のふれあいは、異性とのふれあいと少し違うかな、と言う感覚がありました。
T: やっぱり男の子同士が一番いい、と感じられていたのですか。
B: あくまでも男の子同士のふれあい、つながりの気分ですね。その表現としてエロもありと言うことで。
T: セックス先にありき、では無いわけですね、一貫して。
B: 無いですね。

I think Fudanshi ni kiku is a unique contribution to this field, and I look forward to digging deeper into it.