Literally meaning “rotten girls,” fujoshi is a pun on the homonymous word meaning “women and children,” “women,” or “grown women.” By changing the Chinese character for fu from “married woman,” “woman,” or “lady” to the one indicating “rot,” “decay,” or “sour,” a neologism was born.^[1] Fujoshi is most often used to mean female fans of manga and anime, specifically manga and anime focused on relationships, romance, and sex involving male characters. Fujoshi are “rotten” because: they have a taste for the “abnormal” relationships of boys’ love manga and anime; produce fanzines about male characters that imagine them in romantic or sexual relationships, which is part of the genre of yaoi; and generally have an active imagination geared toward “coupling” boys and men, real and fictional, human and nonhuman.

Fieldwork conducted among self-identified fujoshi in Japan shows that they often position themselves against “normals,” or people who are satisfied with “reality” and thus do not imagine things otherwise (Galbraith 2011, 2015). They also position themselves as something other than otaku, or fans of manga and anime generally, because they have a specific interest in male-male romance and sex.

That said, fujoshi do not necessarily have an interest in real homosexual men. They tend to be oriented toward manga and anime characters, and characters more generally, as opposed to the “real thing.” Psychoanalyst Saitō Tamaki has described this as an orientation of desire toward fiction as such, which is “asymmetrical” in that it does not refer to “reality” (2009, 160–64). This orientation toward fiction as opposed to reality is part of what makes fujoshi “rotten.” As Sugiura Yumiko, a journalist who interviewed female fans of manga and anime in Japan in the mid-2000s, puts it, fujoshi are perceived as uninvolved in reproductive sex, or people who have not achieved or rejected reproductive maturity (2006, 114–24).^[2] Fujoshi thus cease to be “women” and “rot.”

Fieldwork conducted among self-identified fujoshi in Japan does not, however, confirm that they are completely uninvolved with the opposite sex in reality (Galbraith 2011, 2015). Instead, fujoshi define themselves in terms of an active imagination and an economy of desire that is distinct from “reality”: One fujoshi, while married, imagines her husband in romantic and sexual relationships with other men. As one woman puts it, fujoshi have an “abundant imagination,” which, another explains, allows them to “fantasize about anything” (Galbraith 2015, 155). So, manga and anime characters, people, animals, inanimate objects, and even concepts can be turned into characters and coupled. Through what they call their “filter,” fujoshi see things differently and imagine relationships between different things.

Even as fujoshi are oriented toward objects that do not necessarily refer to something “real” beyond them, this orientation of desire does not necessarily correspond to sexual orientation. In foundational Japanese-language literature, readers of boys’ love manga are identified as heterosexual women who are imaginatively working through sex with, through, and as characters (Fujimoto 1998; Ueno 1998). As Sagawa Toshihiko, founder of an influential boys’ love manga magazine, puts it, characters are artists “wearing cartoon character costumes” (quoted in Schodt 1996, 123; see also Matsui 1993). Feminist thinker Ueno Chizuko describes the appeal of boys’ love as allowing girls and women to imaginatively experience sex without the fears associated with the female body, especially one’s own, which “provides wings for girls to fly” (quoted in Fujimoto 2004: 86; see also Ueno 1989). Manga scholar Fujimoto Yukari agrees that imaginative forms intentionally separated from reality open a space for “playing sex(uality)” (2015, 79). On the one hand, for heterosexual women, imagining sex between and through male characters is a way out of the taboos limiting female sexual exploration and expression. On the other hand, it provides ample opportunity to gaze at the bodies of attractive male characters, who are created by and for women, and sex can be imagined with them (Hori 2013).

In addition to fujoshi as heterosexual women, there is literature that approaches boys’ love readers in Japan as lesbians, homosexual men in women’s bodies, and more (Sakakibara 1998; Mizoguchi 2003; Welker 2011). There are enough Japanese men reading boys’ love for fujoshi to be modified to fudanshi as a label for these “rotten boys.” Like the women who read boys’ love manga, these men are not necessarily homosexual, and their imaginary identifications are complex (Nagaike 2015). In Japan, the response of gay men to boys’ love manga ranges from rejecting it as unrealistic fantasy by and for women to challenging the politics of such representations or simply enjoying it as another form of erotic entertainment (McLelland 2000; Lunsing 2006; Baudinette 2017).

Amid all the speculation about fujoshi, boys’ love scholar Kaneda Junko (2007) suggests that the term refers to anyone who shares the interpretative framework that allows for imagining male-male couplings. That is, anyone—male or female, gay or straight, Japanese or not—who is part of this “interpretative collective” (kaishaku kyōdotai) is a fujoshi. While admirably inclusive, the position has proven to be highly controversial among girls and women who claim fujoshi as their identity. Important as they are, these identity politics should not obscure the equally important observation that fujoshi, in their interactions with characters and one another, open up “alternative sites and different dimensions of what is typically conceived of as sex and sexuality” (Shigematsu 1999, 128).

Despite the word itself being coined in the new millennium, fujoshi are not an entirely new development. Girls and women have been important players in manga/anime fan culture in Japan since at least the 1970s. Examining existing historical evidence, critic Sasakibara Gō points out that the first fan club for an anime series was dedicated to Triton of the Sea (Umi no toriton; 1972) (2004, 21). Given that the series features a beautiful boy character as the lead, it is not surprising that girls and women dominated the roster of this fan club. While Space Battleship Yamato (Uchū senkan yamato; 1974–75) is often remembered as kicking off the anime fan movement in Japan, few realize that girls and women were among those journeying to the production studio to pay homage (Clements 2013, 148). During the 1970s, attendance at the Comic Market, founded in 1975 and now the world’s largest gathering of manga/anime fans, was dominated by girls and women (Shimotsuki 2008, 18). From the late 1970s into the 1980s, fanzines featuring romance and sex involving male characters became a common genre at this and other events. Nevertheless, because of the overwhelming influence of male critics biased toward male genres (Clements 2013, 148), as well as the stereotype of otaku as male (Kam 2013, 163–65), girls and women have often been omitted from the history of manga and anime in Japan.

This is why the existence of female fans of manga and anime every bit as hardcore as their male counterparts was perceived as shocking in Japan in the 2000s, when in fact all that had happened was their numbers had swelled to the point that they could not easily be ignored. In the 1990s, a so-called “gay boom” in the Japanese media fueled the expansion of boys’ love manga as a commercial genre. In 1998, monthly boys’ love offerings included nine literary magazines, twelve comic magazines, and approximately thirty new manga volumes available at major bookstores (Mizoguchi 2003, 57). In 2003, boys’ love accounted for an estimated 3.8% of the market for manga magazines in Japan (Choo 2008, 278). The annual market has been estimated at 12 billion yen or 110 million USD (Sugiura 2006, 27).

At the same time, fans of such media were increasingly visible in the Ikebukuro neighborhood of Tokyo. This early hub of manga/anime fandom (where Animate opened its first store in 1983) had gradually become gendered female as the Akihabara neighborhood of Tokyo transformed from a place to buy computers and computer games to a place to buy manga, anime, and related merchandise in the 1990s (Morikawa 2012). Because the core clientele of computer stores in Akihabara had been male, the computer games targeted them, and the transformation of the area was clearly biased toward male interests. Meanwhile, Ikebukuro began to target girls and women by focusing on beautiful boy characters. By the early 2000s, the concentration of manga and anime stores in East Ikebukuro had become a destination for boys’ love media, merchandise, and more. In its May 2004 issue, Puff magazine, founded in 1982 as one of two offshoots of the legendary Manga Wave (Manpa, 1976) and a central source of information for manga/anime subculture, dubbed the area from Sunshine Crossing to Ikebukuro Sanchōme Crossing “Otome Road,” or “Maiden’s Road.”

It was here that fujoshi were “discovered.” Beginning in June 2005, Sugiura (introduced above) published a series of articles in the news magazine Aera on “the girl otaku of East Ikebukuro,”^[3] which were republished in the books Girl Otaku Research: A Compendium of Fujoshi Thought (Otaku joshi kenkyū: Fujoshi shisō taikei; 2006) and The Fujoshi-izing World: The Otaku Girls of East Ikebukuro (Fujoshika suru sekai: Higashi Ikebukuro no otaku onnatachi; 2006). Note how otaku, who are by now assumed to be male, must be modified to capture the “new” phenomenon of “girl otaku,” and that these “girl otaku” then become “fujoshi.” In the process, fujoshi becomes the corresponding term to otaku, with the former female and the latter male, the former new and the latter established, and so on. A clever play of words, fujoshi caught on and spread through the media in the mid-2000s, and Japan was soon engrossed in “a fujoshi boom” (Hester 2015, 170). At the time, it was possible to have Nakagawa Shōko, a celebrity known for her interest in manga and anime, attempt to explain to senior celebrity Wada Akiko the meaning of fujoshi on primetime television—only to find that Wada had already heard the word before.^[4] It would go on to appear in works such as Fujoshi Girlfriend (Fujoshi kanojo; 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009), Fujoshi Detective (Fujoshi deka; 2008), The Dignity of Fujoshi (Fujoshi no hinkaku; 2008), The True Longing of Fujoshi (Fujoshi no honkai; 2008), A Manual for Dealing with Fujoshi (Fujoshi toriatsukai setsumeisho; 2009), and many, many more.

Among the many examples of fujoshi in the media, “801-chan” stands out. Pronounced “yaoi-chan,” with “yaoi” being a genre of fanzines focusing on male-male romance and sex and “-chan” being a diminutive suffix appended to the names of children, girls, pets, and intimate friends, 801-chan is a little green monster that lives inside a Japanese woman. Originally the mascot of the Misono Bridge 801 shopping center in northern Kyoto, 801-chan was designed by a student at Kyoto Seika University and released into the world in 2005. Because the numbers 8-0-1 can be pronounced “ya-o-i” in Japanese, the mascot became an online sensation among fans of boys’ love manga.

Kojima Ajiko, a Japanese blogger, then took the mascot and modified it to use in his webcomic My Neighbor 801-chan (Tonari no 801-chan), which was first posted on April 18, 2006.^[5] Told in the style of four-panel strips such as Peanuts, the story centers on the relationship between a male otaku named Tibet (or Chibe) and his girlfriend, Yaoi, who is a fan of boys’ love. When Yaoi sees something that triggers her very active imagination concerning male-male romance and sex, she transforms into a green, furry monster that snorts and quivers with excitement. It often appears, in fact, that the monster is the real Yaoi, who unzips its human costume to come out and play. Yaoi is a fujoshi, and 801-chan is the active imagination of male-male romance and sex that makes a normal woman a fujoshi. The little green monster is, simply, the imagination of fujoshi.

A major hit, Kojima’s My Neighbor 801-chan was collected into a printed volume and released commercially by Ohzora Publishing in December 2006, which was quickly followed by a second volume. Together, these two volumes sold over 320,000 copies in Japan. As of July 2016, a total of ten volumes had been published. A live-action film adaptation was released in 2007, as well as the spin-off manga series A Fujoshi-Like High School Life (Tonari no 801-chan: Fujoshi-teki kōkō seikatsu; 2007) and Yaoi-Style Junior High Diary (801-shiki chūgakusei nikki: Tonari no Hina-chan; 2009) and two drama CDs. Kojima’s original manga began serialization, starting from the first chapter, in Ohzora’s Romance Tiara magazine in April 2009. That same year, a teaser for a planned anime adaptation of the series was released. While by no means an overwhelming presence in Japan’s sea of character merchandise, 801-chan existed in dozens of material forms by the end of the decade.

However, My Neighbor 801-chan is not without its critics. Anthropologist Jeffry T. Hester, for example, notes that the story is told from the first-person perspective of the male character, Tibet, who is a stand-in for Kojima and observes the antics of Yaoi (2015, 178). Although Tibet, a twenty-eight-year-old company employee, is an otaku, he seems downright normal in relation to Yaoi, a fujoshi. When Yaoi goes out of control, Tibet takes notes about the strange creature—the little green monster—that comes out of her and appears before him. “In short,” Hester writes, “it is fundamentally his story of her” (ibid., 179).

Further, the story has Tibet and Yaoi, who first met online, coming to live together, marry, and settle down. While some have argued that fujoshi can be subversive in their imagining of sexuality (Wood 2006), the webcomic tells a reassuring story of heteronormative romance, which dampens down “the more gender-troubling or destabilizing aspects of fujoshi” (Hester 2015, 183, see also 181). Insofar as Tibet is producing discourse about “fujoshi,” he is also part of the construction of “a gender-specific social type” (ibid., 169) in Japanese media more broadly. In the 2000s, Hester argues, fujoshi were not simply “discovered,” but also “constructed in the process of exposure” (ibid., 171). Fujoshi become objects of discourse, analysis, and knowledge and become subjects, in ways familiar from philosopher Michel Foucault’s history of sexuality (1976).

However, even as 801-chan lives inside of Yaoi, there is in fact a person inside of her, too. That is, My Neighbor 801-chan is apparently based on Kojima’s real-life relationship with his girlfriend. Like Tibet in the webcomic, Kojima and his girlfriend were married in 2008 and now have two children. Made famous by the media franchise, Mrs. Kojima became something of a celebrity when she took to social media in 2009.^[6] Put another way, Kojima is no longer solely responsible for telling stories about the character of Yaoi/801-chan, because Mrs. Kojima has stepped out of the story and has started shaping it herself.

In this way, Mrs. Kojima, known to her followers as “Kojima801” or just 801-chan, is a public fujoshi figure, which is relatively unique. Due to concerns about exposure and unwanted attention, fujoshi often mask their websites from online search engines and actively discourage the circulation of their fan fiction and art outside of closed and close networks of friends.^[7] Many girls and women who self-identify as fujoshi and appear in the media find themselves at the receiving end of vitriol online—coming mostly from other female fans of manga and anime, who would rather not be made into a spectacle.^[8] In contrast, Mrs. Kojima has been largely immune to backlash. This could be because of her low-key presence, which is limited to social media and does not include showing her face, or perhaps her focus on herself and her own opinions. It is also possible that 801-chan is enough of a beloved character, and Mrs. Kojima sufficiently submerges herself into that character, to deflect the criticism of being an outsider, poser, or attention-seeker wearing and selling the mantle of fujoshi. Whatever the reason, Mrs. Kojima, 801-chan, is one of the few people in Japan today who have been able to successfully navigate life as both a fujoshi and celebrity.

1. Like so many other words in contemporary Japan, fujoshi is said to have originated on the anonymous online bulletin board 2channel (Suzuki 2013). ↑
2. For her part, Sugiura challenges this perception of fujoshi as a “misunderstanding,” which is part of a larger discourse about a perceived “refusal to be women” (2006, 124, 187). ↑
3. The first article, which appeared in Aera on June 20, 2005, was titled “Female Otaku are Blossoming” (“Moeru onna otaku”). ↑
4. This occurred on the October 14, 2006 broadcast of TBS’s Private Lesson: The Way to Make a Proper Wada Akiko (Kojin jugyō puraibēto ressun: Tadashii Wada Akiko no tsukurikata). See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnJRWIInSnM. ↑
5. See “Tonari no 801-chan+: Uchi no tsuma ga fujoshi desu” at http://801chan.hateblo.jp/entry/2006/04/18/125218. Some date it earlier (Hester 2015, 176). ↑
6. See https://twitter.com/801_chan?lang=en. ↑
7. Speaking at the University of Wollongong on November 1, 2014, a Japanese fujoshi and fanzine creator was told that many in the audience had read her work online in unofficial English translation, which distressed her greatly. Responding that she wished this kind of “sharing” would end, the speaker explained that if she had intended her fanzines for those in the audience, then she would have put them online, which she had not. Rather, she published printed fanzines to be circulated at the Comic Market, where it was understood that the work would not become too visible. Reasons for such decisions vary, but many fujoshi state that they do not want to offend the original authors whose works they parody, offend homosexual men with their fantasies, or draw attention to themselves and their activities. This is summarized in the oft-heard phrase, “Please leave us alone” (hottoite kudasai). ↑
8. For example, Yamamoto Sayaka, an idol from the popular group NMB48, is often criticized online for openly self-identifying as a fujoshi when appearing on television. ↑

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