Bishōnen

From The Right Wiki
(Redirected from Bishonen)
Jump to navigationJump to search
For the film, see Bishonen (film).
"Bishy" redirects here. For the radial route in York, England, see Bishy Road.

File:Gackt in 2008(2)(cropped).jpg
Gackt, a Japanese singer-songwriter, is considered to be one of the living manifestations of the Bishōnen phenomenon.[1][2]

Bishōnen (美少年, IPA: [bʲiɕo̞ꜜːnẽ̞ɴ] Audio file "ja-bishonen.ogg" not found; 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.[3] It has always shown the strongest manifestation in Japanese pop culture, gaining in popularity due to the androgynous glam rock bands of the 1970s,[4] but it has roots in ancient Japanese literature, the androsocial and androerotic ideals of the medieval Chinese imperial court and intellectuals, and Indian aesthetic concepts carried over from Hinduism, imported with Buddhism to China.[5][failed verification] Today, bishōnen are very popular among girls and women in Japan.[5] 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 role.[6]

Origin

File:Kuniyoshi Ishiyakushi.jpg
Yoshitsune, the most famous historical bishōnen[7] 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.[5] Bichūnen (美中年) means "beautiful middle-aged man".[8] 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.[5] 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.[6] 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 typically has the same traits as idealized female beauties in Japan: lustrous black hair, opaque skin, red cheeks, etc., but simultaneously retains a male body, making them aesthetically different from both men and women.[6] Western audiences may perceive bishonen as effeminate, but Japanese see them as something like angels, wholly male and female.[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.[4] The bishōnen aesthetic is continued today in anime and manga, especially shōjo and yaoi.

Usage

Scottish pop singer Momus notably used the term in his song "Bishonen" from the Tender Pervert album (released on Creation Records).[11] Almost 8 minutes long, the song is an epic tale of a young boy raised to die young by an eccentric stepfather.

Popular culture

According to Pflugfelder, the bishonen concept can be related to the "smoothie/roughneck" dichotomy of the Edo period. Sophisticated Japanese young men (smoothies) competed for hierarchical sexual dominance with so-called "roughneck" (juvenile delinquent) men, with occasional reports of violence between the two groups. By the 1920s the "smoothie" men had won out over the roughnecks in the popular imagination; "rough was no match for smooth", writes Pflugfelder.[12]

Art

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

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; 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.[13]

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.[14] 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.[15] 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,[16] 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 1960s, rather than the elegiac aesthetics of usages in an earlier era.[17] 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.[18] 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.[15] 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."[19]

See also

File:Wiktionary-logo-en-v2.svg
Look up bishōnen in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

References

  1. ↑ American Anthropological Association (2003). Abstracts of the Annual Meeting -- American Anthropological Association. p. 336. ISBN 978-1-931303-15-6. Retrieved 3 June 2023. ...popular music stars such as Gackt and Hyde, will trace their beautification efforts to a domestically - produced aesthetic. The recent appearance of living specimens of the bishounen...
  2. ↑ Johnson, Adrienne Renee (2019). "From Shōjo to Bangya(ru): Women and Visual Kei". Shōjo Across Media: Exploring "Girl" Practices in Contemporary Japan. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 308, 322. ISBN 9783030014858. Laura Miller refers to Gackt, a widely recognizable Visual Kei performer (and former vocalist of Malice Mizer), for example, as a "living … specimen of bishōnen,"45 relating his "baroque, androgynous indeterminacy"46 too to The Rose of Versailles.47
  3. ↑ "飲中八仙歌" [Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup] (in 中文). 宗之瀟灑美少年 [He has Very High color and Beautiful boy.]
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Orbaugh, Sharalyn (2002). Sandra Buckley (ed.). Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture. Taylor & Francis. pp. 45–46. ISBN 0-415-14344-6.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Buckley (2002). Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture. Taylor & Francis. pp. 188, 522, 553. ISBN 0-415-14344-6.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 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.
  7. ↑ Yamazaki, H.; Yorifuji, B.; Yoshida, T.; Horn, C.G. (2010). The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. Dark Horse. p. 202. ISBN 978-1-59582-528-5. Retrieved 26 January 2024.
  8. ↑ Febriani Sihombing. "On The Iconic Difference between Couple Characters in Boys Love Manga". Archived from the original on 21 July 2015. Retrieved 25 March 2011.
  9. ↑ "Bishounen". Tofugu. 26 September 2014. Retrieved 3 June 2023. Western readers may perceive bishounen ambiguity as effeminate, but that is a misreading. Bishounen as perceived by the Japanese audience are neither effeminate nor ambiguous; rather, they are seen as "something like angels, wholly male and female." Thus the character is sexually liberated, or is it the Japanese reader who is freed from their own traditional social restraints?
  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. ↑ "Tender Pervert Lyrics". Imomus.com. Retrieved 31 October 2011.
  12. ↑ Pflugfelder 1999, pp. 224–225: "Echoing Mori, one commentator wrote in 1914 that "juvenile delinquents" of the "rough-neck" stripe saw themselves as "toughs" (soshi) and "swashbucklers" (kyo-kaku), while "smoothies" fancies themselves "high caller dandies" (harikara danji)...With the close of the Meiji period, however, such reports began gradually to diminish, until, by the end of the 1920s, most "juvenile delinquents" had become, according to one authority on the subject, confirmed nanpa. In the popular imagination, "rough" was no match for "smooth"."
  13. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named beauty
  14. ↑ 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.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 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.
  16. ↑ "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.
  17. ↑ 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
  18. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named Wood-06
  19. ↑ 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.
Retrieved from "https://rightwiki.org/index.php?title=Bishōnen&oldid=21269789"