What is the ‘shojo’ and how does it function in Miyazaki's anime?

In its original sense the shōjo (“little girl”) meant an adolescent girl.

In the Japan of the 1920’s “rising affluence permitted” middle and upper-class families to send their daughters to boarding schools, resulting in an extended period of adolescence “creating the youthful and all-female subculture” (Naoto, H., cited in Treat,1993). 

However, from the ‘70s the word has acquired a more specific meaning: “rearticulated as a definitive feature of Japanese late-model, consumer capitalism.”(Treat, 1993, p.362). Shojo adventures entail exclusive private schools, luxury goods and high doses of cuteness.

Susan Napier, one of the leading experts on anime and Miyazaki’s works, in particular, defines the cultural phenomenon in the introduction of her article about “Miyazaki’s […] Cinema of De-assurance”: “Feminine, innocent, and cute […], the shojo serves as an appealing alternative identity in contrast to the image of the hardworking, highly pressured Japanese male.” (2001, p.473)

The shojo is usually presented in the shojo manga or shojo bungaku like Yoshimoto Banana’s “disposable” (consumable) novels as a non-productive group of girls and males increasingly like the shojo, “effectively signify[ing] sheer consumption” (Treat, 1993).

In Miyazaki’s works, however, the shojo assumes important functions in de-familiarizing the distinction between self and Other in order to de-stabilize the audience. Where Kiki, the heroine of Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) is quite stereotypical shōjo kawaii despite her flying talents, others, -particularly San [Princess Mononoke] who “clearly possesses supernatural powers” - are more complex, violent creatures who take up normally male coded characteristics thus acting as destabilizers and underpinning Miyazaki’s message of de-assurance (Napier, 2005).

Miyazaki uses his shojos in protest of the post-war Japanese society’s top-down (emperor and samurai centered), strongly patriarchal concept of Japanese history to open up possibilities of “an alternative, heterogeneous and female-centered vision of Japanese identity in the future” (Napier, 2005, p.232) while remaining appealing to a wide range of audience and enjoying immense popularity despite the unsettling presentation of fundamental dilemmas of past present and future.

References

Napier, S. J. (2001). Confronting Master Narratives: History As Vision in Miyazaki Hayao's Cinema of De-assurance. positions: east asia cultures critique, 9(2), 467-493. doi:10.1215/10679847-9-2-467

Napier, S. J. (2005). Anime from Akira to Howl's moving castle: experiencing contemporary Japanese animation. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Treat, J. W. (1993). Yoshimoto Banana Writes Home: Shojo Culture and the Nostalgic Subject. Journal of Japanese Studies, 19(2), 353-387.