Bishōnen

Bishōnen (美少年, also transliterated bishounen ) is a Japanese term literally meaning "beautiful youth (boy)" and describes an aesthetic that can be found in disparate areas in East Asia: a young man of androgynous beauty. This word originated from the Tang dynasty poem Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup by Du Fu.[1] It has always shown the strongest manifestation in Japanese pop culture, gaining in popularity due to the androgynous glam rock bands of the 1970s,[2] but it has roots in ancient Japanese literature, the homosocial and homoerotic ideals of the medieval Chinese imperial court and intellectuals, and Indian aesthetic concepts carried over from Hinduism, imported with Buddhism to China.[3] Today, bishōnen are very popular among girls and women in Japan.[3] Reasons for this social phenomenon may include the unique male and female social relationships found within the genre. Some have theorized that bishōnen provide a non-traditional outlet for gender relations. Moreover, it breaks down stereotypes surrounding feminine male characters. These are often depicted with very strong martial arts abilities, sports talent, high intelligence, dandy fashion, or comedic flair, traits that are usually assigned to the hero/protagonist.[4]

For the 1998 Hong Kong film, see Bishonen (film).

Origin
Yoshitsune, a historical bishōnen and his retainer Benkei view the falling cherry blossoms.

The prefix bi (美) more often than not refers to feminine beauty, and bijin, literally "beautiful person", is usually, though not always, used to refer to beautiful women.[3] Bichūnen (美中年) means "beautiful middle-aged man".[5] Biseinen is to be distinguished from bishōnen as seinen (青年) is used to describe men who are of age, including those who have entered or completed tertiary education. The term shōnen is used to describe boys of middle and high school age. Last, bishota can be used to refer to a beautiful, pre-pubescent male child or a childlike male.[3] Outside Japan, bishōnen is the most well-known of the three terms, and has become a generic term for all beautiful boys and young men.

The aesthetic of the bishōnen began as an ideal of a young lover, originally embodied in the wakashū (若衆, literally "young person", although only used for boys), or adolescent boy, and was influenced by the effeminate male actors who played female characters in kabuki theater. The term arose in the Meiji era, in part to replace the by then obsolete erotic meaning of the older term wakashū, whose general meaning of "adolescent boy" had by this point been supplanted by the new term shōnen.[4] The bishōnen was conceived of as "aesthetically different from both women and men [...] both the antithesis and the antecedent of adult masculinity".[6]

The bishōnen is typically slender, with clear skin, stylish hair, and distinctly feminine facial features (such as high cheekbones), but simultaneously retains a male body. This androgynous appearance is akin to the depiction of angels in Western renaissance art, with similar social roots for this aesthetic.[4]

Minamoto no Yoshitsune and Amakusa Shirō have been identified as historical bishōnen.[7] Ian Buruma notes that Yoshitsune was considered by contemporaries to be not physically prepossessing, but that his legend later grew and due to this, he became depicted with good looks.[8] Abe no Seimei was depicted according to the standards of a Heian-era middle-aged man, but since 1989 he has been depicted as a modern-style bishōnen.[9]

Kyokutei Bakin wrote many works with nanshoku undertones featuring bishōnen characters,[10] and in 1848 he used the term bishōnen in the title of a work about the younger wakashu partner in the nanshoku relationship.[2]

The bishōnen aesthetic is continued today in anime and manga, especially shōjo and BL.

Usage

Some non-Japanese, especially American, anime and manga fans use the term to refer to any handsome male character regardless of age, or any homosexual character.[11] In the original Japanese, however, bishōnen applies only to boys under 18. For those older, the word bidanshi (美男子, literally "handsome man") is used. In the place of bishōnen, some fans prefer to use the slightly more sexually neutral bishie (also spelled as bishi) or bijin (美人), but these terms remain less common. The term binanshi was popular in the 1980s. Bishōnen is occasionally used to describe some androgynous female characters, such as Takarazuka actors,[12] Lady Oscar in The Rose of Versailles,[2] or any women with traits stereotypical to bishōnen.

Scottish pop singer Momus notably used the term in his song "Bishonen" from the "Tender Pervert" album (released on Creation Records).[13] Almost 8 minutes long, the song is an epic tale of a young boy raised to die young by an eccentric stepfather.

The enduring preference for bishōnen males can clearly be seen in Japan and throughout parts of East Asia to this day.[4]

In particular, Japan's largest male talent agency, Johnny & Associates Entertainment Company, specializes only in producing male Tarento idols.[14] Accepted into Johnny & Associates in their early teens, these boys, collectively known as 'Johnnys', are trained and promoted to become the next leading singing-acting-commercially successful hit sensations. Almost all can be classified as bishōnen, exhibiting the same physically feminine features combined with a sometimes deliberately ambivalent sexuality or at the very least, a lack of any hint of a relationship to maintain their popular availability.

Current bishōnen examples from the same agency include Tomohisa Yamashita of J-pop group NEWS, Jin Akanishi and Kazuya Kamenashi of KAT-TUN, Takuya Kimura of SMAP, Ryosuke Yamada and Kei Inoo of Hey! Say! JUMP and Jun Matsumoto of Arashi, all of whom are phenomenally successful throughout East Asia by appealing to both younger and older women and whose widely praised, gender-incongruous physical beauty is often deliberately manipulated in terms of role-playing and, most commonly, fanservice.

Art
16-year-old Swedish actor Björn Andrésen's role in the 1971 film Death in Venice proved influential for many Japanese illustrators' depictions of bishōnen characters.[15]

Besides being a character type, bishōnen is also a distinct art style not usually forgotten in books about drawing manga. In art, bishōnen are usually drawn delicately, with long limbs, silky or flowing hair,[16] and slender eyes with long eyelashes that can sometimes extend beyond the face. The character's "sex appeal" is highlighted through introducing the character by using an "eroticized" full page spread.[17] Characters with "bulging muscles" are rarely considered bishōnen, as they are too masculine.[5]

It is said that Björn Andrésen's appearance as Tadzio in the film Death in Venice inspired many Japanese anime artists, such as Keiko Takemiya, who became known for their depictions of young, effeminate men.[15]

Bishōnen characters are fairly common in manga and anime. Many of the male characters show subtle signs of the bishōnen style, such as slender eyes or a feminine face.[4]

Some manga are completely drawn in the bishōnen style, such as Saint Seiya. bishōnen manga are generally shōjo manga (girls' comics) or yaoi (girls' comics focused on homosexual relationships between beautiful boys), however shōnen manga (boy's comics) may use casts of bishōnen characters for crossover appeal to female readers.[18] Mainstream shounen and seinen fare also often uses such characters as rivals for a traditional masculine protagonist, with some degree of comic relief, or for the blander everyman, whether as the embodiment of his insecurities in a grittier realism, or as a more lighthearted constant reminder of his less than advantageous social status and the constraints thereof. Comics for younger boys tend to use arrogant bishōnen in the role of the recurring minor rivals readers love to hate, though their effeminate good looks there will often appear older, bigger, stronger, and thus in fact more masculine than the commonly shorter and less mature protagonists.

Bishōnen and bishōjo

Bishōjo ('beautiful girl') is often mistakenly considered a parallel of bishōnen, because of the similar construction of the terms. There are major differences between the two aesthetics. The bishōjo aesthetic is aimed at a male audience, and is typically centered on young girls, drawn in a cute, pretty style; and bishōnen is aimed at a female audience, centered on teenage boys, and drawn elegantly. Another common mistake is assuming that the female characters in bishōnen manga and anime are bishōjo. In truth, female characters in bishōnen manga are very different from those in bishōjo; bishōjo females are usually more petite and drawn in a style that is cute rather than beautiful, whereas bishōnen females exhibit the long limbs and elegance of the bishōnen themselves.[11]

Critical attention

Several cultural anthropologists and authors have raised the multifaceted aspect of what bishōnen represents and what it is interpreted as, mostly to fit a particular external viewpoint.[19] Ian Buruma noted that although Western comics for girls also included "impossibly beautiful men" who are clearly masculine and always get the girl in the end, the bishōnen are "more ambivalent" and sometimes get each other.[12]

For Sandra Buckley, bishōnen narratives champion "the imagined potentialities of alternative [gender] differentiations"[20] James Welker describes the bishōnen as being "queer", as the bishōnen is an androgynous aesthete with a feminine soul "who lives and loves outside of the heteropatriarchal world".[21]

Jonathan D. Mackintosh believes that the bishōnen is a "traditional representation of youth", being "interstitial" between both childhood and adulthood and between being male and being female,[22] regardless of the sexual issues.

Ishida Hitoshi makes the case that the image of the bishōnen is more about a grounding in sexuality than a transcendence of it, drawing on the idea of the image as being a refuge for alternative methods of looking at sexual natures, and sexual realities, at least since the 60s, rather than the elegiac aesthetics of usages in an earlier era.[23]

Representations of men in manga by and for men show "an idealized man being ultramasculine and phallic", bishōnen are conversely drawn to "emphasize their beauty and sensuality", and female artists have been said to react against the ultramasculine representation by showing androgynous and "aesthetically beautiful" men.[17]

Ian Buruma, writing in 1984, considered the "bishonen in distress" to be a recurring motif in popular manga. The bishōnen in distress is always rescued by an older, protective, mentor. This scenario has an "unmistakably homoerotic" atmosphere.[12] He also notes that bishōnen must either grow up, or die beautifully. He considers the "worship" of the bishōnen to be the same as that of the sakura, and notes that "death is the only pure and thus fitting end to the perfection of youth."[24]

A similar South Korean aesthetic has been noted in the kkonminam ('flowery pretty boy').[25]

gollark: I am not going down the path of audiophiles, where I have to spend significant amounts of money for marginal audio quality gains which I'll then just get used to anyway.
gollark: no.
gollark: Me too, except I'd probably just listen off my laptop and generic cheap headphones because I don't really care.
gollark: They probably make them from digital recordings anyway.
gollark: Vinyl is analog, it's *inherently* lossy.

See also

Notes
  1. "飲中八仙歌" ["Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup"] (in Chinese). 宗之瀟灑美少年 [He has Very High color and Beautiful boy.]
  2. Orbaugh, Sharalyn (2002). Sandra Buckley (ed.). Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture. Taylor & Francis. pp. 45–56. ISBN 0-415-14344-6.
  3. Buckley (2002). Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture. Taylor & Francis. pp. 188, 522, 553. ISBN 0-415-14344-6.
  4. Pflugfelder, Gregory M. (1999). Cartographies of desire: male-male sexuality in Japanese discourse, 1600-1950. University of California Press. pp. 221–234. ISBN 0-520-20909-5.
  5. Febriani Sihombing. "On The Iconic Difference between Couple Characters in Boys Love Manga".
  6. Pflugfelder, Gregory M. (1999). Cartographies of desire: male-male sexuality in Japanese discourse, 1600-1950. University of California Press. p. 228. ISBN 0-520-20909-5.
  7. Drazen, Patrick (October 2002). '"A Very Pure Thing": Gay and Pseudo-Gay Themes' in Anime Explosion! The What, Why & Wow of Japanese Animation Berkeley, California: Stone Bridge Press pp.91-94. ISBN 1-880656-72-8.
  8. Buruma, Ian (1985) [1984]. A Japanese Mirror: Heroes and Villains of Japanese Culture. Great Britain: Penguin Books. pp. 132–135. ISBN 978-0-14-007498-7.
  9. Miller, Laura. "Extreme Makeover for a Heian-Era Wizard". Mechademia.
  10. Reichert, James Robert (2006). In the Company of Men: Representations of Male-male Sexuality in Meiji Literature. Stanford University Press. pp. 3–4. ISBN 978-0-8047-5214-5.
  11. Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics. Laura Miller. University of California Press, 2006.ISBN 0520245091
  12. Buruma, Ian (1985) [1984]. A Japanese Mirror: Heroes and Villains of Japanese Culture. Great Britain: Penguin Books. p. 125. ISBN 978-0-14-007498-7.
  13. "Tender Pervert Lyrics". Imomus.com. Retrieved 31 October 2011.
  14. "Modern Japan - Entertainment - Johnny's Jimusho". Japan-zone.com. 16 November 2006. Retrieved 31 October 2011.
  15. "The adventures of Tadzio in Japan". 7 January 2008. Archived from the original on 7 May 2015. Retrieved 30 April 2015.
  16. "Short anime glossary [Краткий анимешно-русский разговорник]". anime*magazine (in Russian) (3): 36. 2004. ISSN 1810-8644.
  17. Wood, Andrea. (Spring 2006). "Straight" Women, Queer Texts: Boy-Love Manga and the Rise of a Global Counterpublic. WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, 34 (1/2), pp. 394-414.
  18. Thompson, Jason (2007). Manga: The Complete Guide. Del Rey. p. 417. ISBN 0-345-48590-4.
  19. Monnet, Livia (1999). "Montage, cinematic subjectivity and feminism in Ozaki Midori's Drifting in the World of the Seventh Sense". Japan Forum. 11 (1): 57–82. doi:10.1080/09555809908721622.
  20. Buckley, Sandra (1991) "'Penguin in Bondage': A Graphic Tale of Japanese Comic Books", pp. 163-196, In Technoculture. C. Penley and A. Ross, eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota ISBN 0-8166-1932-8
  21. Welker, James (2006). "Beautiful, Borrowed, and Bent: "Boys' Love" as Girls' Love in Shōjo Manga". Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 31 (3): 842. doi:10.1086/498987.
  22. "Intersections: Itō Bungaku and the Solidarity of the Rose Tribes [Barazoku]: Stirrings of Homo Solidarity in Early 1970s Japan". Intersections.anu.edu.au. Retrieved 31 October 2011.
  23. The Process of Divergence between 'Men who Love Men' and 'Feminised Men' in Postwar Japanese Media. Ishida Hitoshi and Murakami Takanori. Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context. Issue 12 January 2006. http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue12/ishida.html
  24. Buruma, Ian (1985) [1984]. A Japanese Mirror: Heroes and Villains of Japanese Culture. Great Britain: Penguin Books. pp. 130–131. ISBN 978-0-14-007498-7.
  25. "Flower Boys". Retrieved 30 January 2012.
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