Interest
BBC Story on Women's Sex Manga
posted on by Andrew Osmond
The BBC website has posted a news report called "The godmother of manga sex in Japan." Written by Yuko Kato, the report includes comments by the female manga artist Keiko Takemiya, who wrote the 1976 manga Kaze to Ki no Uta (The Poem of Wind and Trees, pictured), published in a girl's magazine. The manga story has sexual themes, involving boys who are teenage and even younger. (It was later adapted as an OAV in 1987.)
According to the BBC report, Takemiya is "seen as the woman who opened the floodgates to sexually explicit manga." In the report, Takemiya says it took years to persuade her editors to let her do a story with such subjects.
The report also brings up the comments made by the U.N. Rapporteur Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, who says that "any pornographic representation of a child... constitutes child pornography."
Yukari Fujimoto, a professor at Meiji University, is also quoted; she argues, "A ban on sexual violence in manga would effectively be a ban on the hard-won achievements and expression of female artists."
Regarding the sexual violence in her work, Takemiya says, "Such things do happen in real life. Hiding it will not make it go away. And I tried to portray the resilience of these boys, how they managed to survive and regain their lives after experiencing violence."
