Year 24 Group
The is a grouping of female manga artists who heavily influenced "shōjo" manga (Japanese girls' comics) beginning in the 1970s. While "shōjo" manga of the 1950s and 1960s largely consisted of simple stories marketed towards elementary school-aged girls, works by members of the group significantly developed "shōjo" manga by expanding it to incorporate new genres, themes, and subject material. Narratives and art styles in "shōjo" manga became more complex, and works came to examine topics such as psychology, gender, politics, and sexuality. Manga produced by the Year 24 Group brought the "shōjo" category into what scholars  have described as its "golden age". Individuals commonly associated with the Year 24 Group include Yasuko Aoike, Moto Hagio, Riyoko Ikeda, Toshie Kihara, Minori Kimura, Yumiko Ōshima, Nanae Sasaya, Keiko Takemiya, , and Ryōko Yamagishi. Etymology. "The Year 24 Group" is not a proper name for a specific collective of artists, but rather a name used by critics, journalists, and academics to retroactively refer to the generation of female manga artists who emerged in the early 1970s and contributed to the growth and development of "shōjo" manga. Though the precise origin of the term is unknown, it was widely in use  by the end of the 1970s, notably in manga critic 1979 book "Twilight Times: Dőjidai no Manga no Tameni". "Year 24" refers to Shōwa 24 – the 24th year of the Shōwa era in the Japanese calendar, or 1949 in the Gregorian calendar. The number thus ostensibly references the year its members were born in, although only a small number of individuals associated with the Year 24 Group were actually born in 1949. History. Context. During the 1950s and 1960s, "shōjo" manga largely consisted of simple stories marketed towards elementary school-aged girls. Stories were typically sentimental or humorous in tone , and were often centered on familial drama or romantic comedy; manga scholar Rachel Thorn notes that these stories frequently focused on "passive, pre-adolescent heroines in melodramatic situations, often involving separation from a mother." Authors of "shōjo" manga were typically men who began their careers in the genre before migrating to "shōnen" manga, or manga for boys. During the 1960s, the manga industry responded to an aging readership and increased competition from television by increasing the production of manga magazines and diversifying the content of their publications. "Shōnen" manga during this period innovated and found new audiences through the concept  of "gekiga", which sought to use manga to tell serious and grounded stories aimed at adult audiences; "shōjo" manga largely stagnated, and was generally perceived as frivolous and of low quality by critics. Though the increase in manga production during the 1960s allowed female manga artists such as Hideko Mizuno, Toshiko Ueda, and Yoshiko Nishitani to launch their careers, the sclerotic conventions and editorial standards of "shōjo" manga publishing of this era prevented them from achieving the degree of innovation seen in "shōnen" manga. The "Ōizumi Salon" and professional debut. By the early 1970s, the majority of the male artists  who had launched their careers in "shōjo" manga in the 1960s had migrated to "shōnen" manga, giving way to a new generation of female "shōjo" manga artists. These new artists drew inspiration from a diversity of sources, including European literature and cinema, American rock and roll culture, and the "Bildungsroman" genre. Magazines such as "Shūkan Shōjo Comic" that granted more editorial freedom to creators provided outlets for these artists to publish their work. The so-called "Ōizumi Salon", a rented house in Ōizumigakuenchō, Nerima, Tokyo that manga artists Moto Hagio and Keiko Takemiya shared as roommates from 1971 to 1973 , came to be an important gathering point for members and affiliates of the Year 24 Group. Hagio and Takemiya made the house available to "shōjo" artists for use as living and working space, allowing them to both bond socially, share ideas and influences, and collaborate on manga. Notable artists who visited the Ōizumi Salon include Shio Satō, Yasuko Sakata, Yukiko Kai, Akiko Hatsu, Nanae Sasaya, , , , and . The Ōizumi Salon has been compared to Tokiwa-sō, an apartment building that housed multiple influential manga artists in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1972, two major works of "shōjo" manga were published by  members of the group: "The Rose of Versailles" by Riyoko Ikeda, and "The Poe Clan" by Hagio. Widely acclaimed upon their release, the works attracted the attention of critics who had to that point largely ignored the "shōjo" genre. These works paved the way for a wave of "literary manga" (roughly analogous to Western graphic novels), which due to their aesthetic and literary qualities, brought "shōjo" manga into what has been described by scholars as its "golden age". Innovation of the "shōjo" genre. The 1970s would see the publication of multiple works by the Year 24 Group that significantly contributed  to the development of "shōjo" manga. Notable works in addition to the aforementioned "Rose of Versailles" and "Poe Clan" include "Shiroi Heya no Futari" (1971) by Ryoko Yamagishi, "The Heart of Thomas" (1974) by Moto Hagio, "They Were Eleven" (1975) by Hagio, "From Eroica With Love" (1976) by Yasuko Aoike, "Kaze to Ki no Uta" (1976) by Keiko Takemiya, and "Toward the Terra" (1977) by Takemiya. These works expanded "shōjo" manga to incorporate new subgenres, including science fiction, historical fiction, adventure fiction, horror, fantasy, and same-sex romance (both male-male and female-female). These stories typically focused on complex  narratives that emphasized the psychology and interiority of their protagonists, and addressed controversial topics and subject material. Works that openly explored politics and sexuality came to be a defining trait of Year 24 Group manga. While pre-war girls magazines had forbidden discussion or depictions of these topics, cultural shifts in the 1970s allowed manga artists to depict these concepts more freely. Members of the Year 24 Group were shaped by the counterculture of the 1960s, particularly the New Left student protest movements; Ikeda was a member of the Japanese Communist Party, and the group generally was "empowered by the  sense of youthful rebellion and iconoclasm at the time." This realist style, notably in the manga of Takemiya, Ōshima, and Hagio, contributed to the popularity of "shōjo" manga among general audiences. Works by the group often examined issues of gender through their focus on male protagonists, a departure from earlier "shōjo" manga that focused on female heroines exclusively. These protagonists were often "bishōnen" – literally "beautiful boys", distinguished by their androgynous appearances – or were characters that blur gender distinctions, such as the crossdressing Oscar François de Jarjayes of "The Rose of Versailles". These male-focused works were often homosocial or homoerotic  in nature, and helped lay the foundations for the manga genres of "yaoi" (male-male romance, also known as boys' love or BL) and "yuri" (female-female romance). Stylistically, the Year 24 Group created new conventions in panel layout by departing from the rows of rectangles that were the standard at the time, creating borders that were abstracted or removed entirely. These so-called "non-narrative" layouts focus on communicating the emotions of the characters, and often superimpose and overlap backgrounds, characters, and dialogue to create an effect that breaks the standard narrative structure. For example, Ikeda is noted for  using panel compositions that remove spatial landmarks, while Hagio often removes panels entirely to merge characters and backgrounds into a single composition. By the end of the 1970s, "shōjo" manga "had ceased to be a monolithic and homogeneous genre," and the innovation introduced to "shōjo" manga by the Year 24 Group was firmly entrenched in the medium. The trend towards specialization and narrowly-targeted readerships through subgenres continued into the 1980s and 1990s, as "shōjo" works targeted towards young adult and adult women continued to proliferate. Members. As a largely notional group, the criteria used by scholars to determine the  membership of the Year 24 Group varies. Some define its membership as only the most popular and "radical" "shōjo" artists of the era (typically considered to be Hagio, Takemiya, and Ikeda), while others include every artist who frequented the Ōizumi Salon. Analysis and influence. Initial critical reaction to works published by the Year 24 Group was almost invariably positive, as many critics who had previously ignored "shōjo" manga seriously considered the genre for the first time through the group's work. Critics noted how works by the group considered women as human beings, rather than as the idealized young girls  of early "shōjo" manga. Comiket, the world's largest comic convention, was founded by the "dōjinshi" circle to study the works of various manga artists, including Hagio and other members of Year 24 Group. Critic Osamu Takeuchi argues that the shift in "shōjo" manga that the Year 24 Group represented is an example of how "shōjo" manga in the 1970s was changing "from simple entertainment to a vehicle of self-expression for the author"; Eiji Ōtsuka compares this shift to the discovery of interiority in early Meiji fiction, while Inuhiko Yomota sees the Year 24 Group as analogous to New  Wave cinema. One of the group's first dissenting critics was Hiroshi Aramata, who has criticized the group's "deification" and believes the group "should not be singled out or treated as special." Deborah Shamoon concurs that while the works of the Year 24 Group are "often characterized as revolutionary," she argues that the ascendance of the group "was less a counterculture takeover and more a recognition by (male) editors that stories penned by female artists were and still are more popular with girl readers than works by male artists and hence more profitable." Academic Tomoko Yamada has criticized the  use of the term "Year 24 Group", arguing that the designation lumps women together based on their age, that it may perpetuate a bias against earlier "shōjo" manga artists, that it is overly inclusive of all female baby boomer manga artists, and that some manga artists considered part of Year 24 Group may reject the label. The group's works were not representative of all "shōjo" manga of the 1970s; artists such as Suzue Miuchi continued to create "conventional" "shōjo" manga, even at the peak of the Year 24 Group's popularity. Nonetheless, the themes and aesthetic styles established by  the Year 24 Group would come to heavily influence the subsequent generation of "shōjo" manga artists: the acclaimed manga artist group Clamp was heavily influenced by works of the Year 24 Group, and topics such as sexuality have become common subject material in contemporary "shōjo" manga. Many of the artist assistants and amateur artists who attended the Ōizumi Salon, such as Yasuko Sakata, Akiko Hatsu and Shio Satō, went on to become professional manga artists. These artists are sometimes referred to as the .