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In the mid-1960s one of the few female artists in the field, Yoshiko Nishitani, began to draw stories featuring contemporary Japanese teenagers in love. But the average age of the readership rose, and its interests changed.
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Unless they used a fantastic setting (as in Princess Knight) or a backdrop of a distant time or place, romantic love for the heroine remained essentially taboo. These early shōjo manga almost invariably had pre-adolescent girls as both heroines and readers. These manga featured sweet, innocent pre-teen heroines, torn from the safety of family and tossed from one perilous circumstance to another, until finally rescued (usually by a kind, handsome young man) and re-united with their families. While some chose to simply create longer humor-strips, others turned to popular girls' novels of the day as a model for melodramatic shōjo manga. Īdapting Tezuka's dynamic style to shōjo manga (which had always been domestic in nature) proved challenging. At this time, conventional job-opportunities for females did not include becoming a mangaka. Chiba asked his wife about girls' feelings for research for his manga. Many, such as Tetsuya Chiba, functioned as rookies, waiting for an opportunity to move over to shōnen (少年 "boys'") manga. Until the mid-1960s males vastly outnumbered the handful of females (for example: Toshiko Ueda, Hideko Mizuno, Masako Watanabe, and Miyako Maki) amongst the artists working on shōjo manga. But Osamu Tezuka's postwar revolution, introducing intense drama and serious themes to children's manga, spread quickly to shōjo manga, particularly after the enormous success of his seminal Ribon no kishi (リボンの騎士 Princess Knight). Initially followed the pre-war pattern of simple humor-strips. Postwar shōjo manga, such as Shosuke Kurakane's popular Anmitsu Hime, As World War II progressed, however, "comics, perhaps regarded as frivolous, began to disappear". The most popular manga, Katsuji Matsumoto's Kurukuru Kurumi-chan (くるくるクルミちゃん), debuted on the pages of Shōjo no tomo (少女の友) in 1938. Simple, single-page manga had begun to appear in these magazines by 1910, and by the 1930s more sophisticated humor-strips had become an essential feature of most girls' magazines. Japanese magazines specifically for girls, known as shōjo magazines, first appeared in 1903 with the founding of Shōjo kai ( 少女界 ?, Girls' World), and continued with others such as Shōjo Sekai ( 少女世界 ?, Girls' World) (1906) and the long-running Shōjo no tomo ( 少女の友 ?, Girls' Friend) (1908). A simple four-panel manga from the November 1910 issue of Shōjo (Artist unknown) File:Nazo no clover page 7.jpgĪ page from Katsuji Matsumoto's groundbreaking 1934 shōjo manga, The Mysterious Clover