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The data force one to ask why characters in shounen-manga pattern so differently from shoujo-manga. In the discussion below I focus on female characters, as the differences between the genres and real-life speech is most obvious for them; and I look at three possible reasons. One perhaps unsurprising reason is that of author-related issues surrounding shounen-manga as comics by and for boys. I also offer two possibilities which are character and/or narrative driven. The first centers on the differences in roles female characters in the two genres play.

Related to this point, the second possibility is that the personal distance between characters may also be responsible for some of these differences. Below, these hypotheses are discussed in greater detail.

Author-related issues: The first reason for the differences may be possible interference due to the sex of the authors themselves. In examining the use of feminine SFPs in television dramas, Mizumoto (2006) found that

Table 37: SFP distributions in other studies

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male screenwriters tended to use more feminine SFPs for its female characters than do female screenwriters.

Mizumoto also found that male screenwriters have female characters who are in a wider age group use them than female screenwriters do, thus finding that young female characters in male-written series use them where characters of similar ages in female-written series generally do not. The same point may hold for manga, as men tend to write for men, and vice-versa. This is certainly the case here, as all the shoujo-manga series were written by women, and the shounen-manga by men—with the possible exception of Death Note, which is co-authored by a male-artist and a writer who has not made his-or-her identity public. It may be that male writers have female characters use more strongly feminine SFPs because (1) as non-users of feminine speech patterns themselves, male writers may be less sensitive to the current differences in usages among particularly young women’s speech, and (2) they may have a more conservative internalized view of women’s language.

To some degree, this may be related to the preferences of the speakers themselves; Endo (1997, pp. 176-177), in analyzing the results of a 1995 language survey by the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs, found that older speakers and male speakers are more likely to prefer gendered differences in speech. While the male authors are by no means elderly, they are generally older (Table 38) than the characters they write about, who are, like their audience, mostly young men and women; and so Endo’s results seem to strike true here, too.

However, while it is tempting to say that this is what men view as being ideal female speech, it may be hasty to assume that this is necessarily an issue of usage values. Rather, as Suzuki (2001, p. 92) writes, written spoken language is a reflection of “what people have in their heads”, and the language patterns seen here may simply be those that male speakers are most aware of. While the authors may be trying to write naturally, they are forced to imagine what would be realistic for individuals not only of the opposite sex, but also who are several generations below them in age. They may thus not be as aware of recent linguistic changes, a point which is as pertinent to the female writers as it is to the male writers.

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Differences in roles: In considering the second reason—the differences in the roles female characters play in the genres—it is necessary to recall the results from the first study on the distribution of Lines from Section 4.2 above. With the dramatic skew of Lines in shounen-manga, female characters clearly have less page-time, and are less visible than male-characters overall. Given this fact, it seems natural to assume that female characters do not play as great a role in shounen-manga as they do in manga, or as male characters do in shoujo-manga, either. Indeed, they are primarily secondary characters, such as people on the streets, intermittent characters, etc., and while three out of four series have female semi-main characters, they and their relationships with the main characters are not as central as other male characters are in shounen-manga, or even as male secondary characters are in shoujo-manga. With female characters less central to the plot than male characters, they may be more susceptible to using stereotypical yakuwari-go speech patterns. As I noted in Section 4.2.3, there is a cost involved in using yakuwari-go, which explains why shoujo-manga female characters, who play more central roles in the narrative, use less yakuwari-go like speech. On the other hand, because the mostly secondary female characters in shounen-manga are not subject to the same demands as main characters—such as being able to relate to them—realism may simply not be as important. For these types of characters, filling certain roles may trump realism. As Kinsui (2003) demonstrated in his analysis of yakuwari-go, stereotypically female speech patterns form an easy way to build characters like “the haughty upper-class woman”; and when a fully-fleshed character is not necessary, using yakuwari-go based characters may be more economic for authors.

Note that this would also be relevant for male characters in shounen-manga, who also use more strongly gender-marked SFPs: The abundance of male characters, especially extras, means that there is that much a need to create many different characters, leading to the importance of economical speech patterns.

Table 38: Age of authors

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Of course, some of this may also be a result of narrative differences. Where shoujo-manga are said to be highly psychological and focused on characters’ inner sides (Natsume (1997), Schodt (1996)), shounen-manga might be said to focus more on action than on individual relationships (Ôtsuka, 1994). While there appears to be good reason to not fully accept this schema for today’s shoujo-manga and shounen-manga—as I discussed in Chapter 2, Thoughts, which Ôtsuka saw as an important part of the psychology of shoujo-manga, no longer appear to be a point of significant difference—recalling the results from the morpheme analysis in Chapter 3, shoujo-manga appeared to use names and personal pronouns more commonly than shounen-manga, which featured more theme-oriented nouns, leading one to argue that shoujo-manga were more interested in the personal relations between characters than shounen-manga. With that in mind, it may be that narratives in shoujo-manga, being more focused on interpersonal relationships, may not permit characters to use stock speech patterns: Readers must be able to identify with the characters they see, which is associated with the realism they feel for the characters (Keen, 2006), which means that realism expressed here in their speech patterns is also likely crucial. However, given the right conditions, i.e., characters one is not expected to relate to—or possibly even actively dislike—even characters in shoujo-manga will utilize such stock speech, as has been described by Takahashi (2009) for the villainess in Life.

Personal distance between characters: Related to this second point, it may be that, as secondary characters, female characters in shounen-manga are too distant, relationship-wise, to use masculine forms of speech. As has likely become obvious from the results and their analyses, the use of gendered speech in Japanese is not exclusively about gender. As Sullivan (2006) notes, research on personal pronouns and SFPs in Japanese has started to move towards indexicality in recent years, meaning that those elements that have been discussed as being gendered should not be thought of as signs of gender exclusively, but rather index gender indirectly amongst factors . Thus, “. . . the meaning of gendered language in not static, but multiple and ultimately dependent upon the context of the speech act (Sullivan, 2006, p. 54).” As a result, the usage of personal pronoun and SFP choice is not just about whether or not the speaker is female or male, but about what larger interactive and/or other processes they may be seeking to mark or establish by means of the indexing they use in their language.

With these points in mind, feminine speech patterns are often associated with politeness, and they tend to use more masculine forms when at home or with close friends, etc. (McGloin (2005)). Since female characters in shounen-manga are usually in more public positions, such as clients (Detective Conan) or area villagers and townspeople (One Piece, Naruto), not only are their relationships to the main characters not important, they are often shallow or non-existent, and there is very little interaction between female characters. Thus we may think

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that they are not in a position to talk casually with other characters in more relaxed speech patterns. In contrast, female characters in shoujo-manga are usually of the same age and in familiar settings: In the corpus here, two are centered upon relationships at the main characters’ high school (RabuKon, KimiTodo), one on college friends (Nodame) and one on roommates, band members and college friends (Nana). Thus female characters are often already very familiar, or are in situations where they could be considered equals, and this familiarity may be what permits more casual rough speaking. As Nakajima (1997) found with the use of masculine question-forming SFPs, masculine speech amongst young women is more likely to come out amongst other young women of equal status; given this, one can expect more masculine speech in shoujo-manga as such relationships are the norm therein.