In January 2026, ahead of the opening of the exhibition Shojo Manga Infinity: Moto Hagio, Ryoko Yamagishi, and Waki Yamato, the National Art Center, Tokyo (NACT) held talk events in London and Paris featuring Rei Yoshimura, Curator at the NACT and one of the few researchers who specialize in this field.
The talks took place in the cities where “MANGA<->TOKYO” (La Villette, 2018) that the NACT has organized and “Manga” (the British Museum, 2019) that Yoshimura had been deeply involved in planning, were previously held. In conversation with local specialists, Yoshimura discussed how to bring manga to the museum and the diverse world of shojo manga.
At Japan House London, Yoshimura gave a lecture titled “Bringing Manga to the Museum.”
“I am often asked the following question: is manga art? For us, Japanese people, manga is a visual art form that stands alongside more established artistic genres. It occupies an important place in Japanese history and carries a strong, original significance. But because manga has long been part of our everyday lives, it has not always been perceived as art.”
The international gaze formed another key point in her analysis. In 2019, the British Museum in London organized its first major manga exhibition. Yoshimura took part as a courier and installation advisor, spending a month on site. The impact was immediate. When a major foreign museum decides to exhibit manga, the effect goes beyond simple cultural diplomacy. Widely covered in Japan, the event fed back into the work of publishers and artists alike, altering perceptions of manga’s value and reminding audiences that legitimacy is also shaped from the outside.
“I believe that our role, as curators, is always to think about the place a particular manga or mangaka occupies in the history of manga, about the value of that work, and about whether it is something that deserves to be passed on to future generations.”
Meanwhile, at the Maison de la Culture du Japon à Paris (MCJP), Yoshimura, and Bruno Pham, Editorial Director at Akata, had a discussion focusing on the history and challenges of shōjo manga, delving deeper into this theme.
Yoshimura opened the lecture with a structural observation: since the postwar period, the Japanese manga market has been built on an extremely precise system of editorial segmentation in which female readership occupies a central place. Unlike in many other countries, where comics long remained a predominantly male territory, both in terms of authors and readers, Japan very early on granted women significant editorial visibility. “In much of comics history, women have been largely forgotten. They were not considered either as creators or as readers. From my point of view, within global comics publishing, it is undeniably Japan that has given the most space to women, both editorially and in terms of readership,” Pham emphasized.
1970s has its reputation as the golden age of shojo manga, driven by a generation born in the immediate postwar period. This era saw the emergence of a profound narrative and aesthetic transformation. Works gradually moved away from conventional storytelling to explore more complex themes: identity, death, sexuality, solitude, power relations, and aspirations to independence. Graphic devices were also renewed, with particular attention paid to the staging of time, the layering of images, and the expressiveness of bodies. Shojo manga thus became a formal laboratory that would exert a lasting influence on the medium as a whole.
To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the NACT’s opening, a three-person exhibition will showcase the careers of three giants of shojo (girls’) manga: Moto Hagio, Ryoko Yamagishi, and Waki Yamato in this October.
Hagio, Yamagishi, and Yamato all debuted as manga artists in the late 1960s and went on to be central figures in the 1970s “golden age of shojo manga,” when the genre greatly expanded its creative possibilities. They have continued to publish actively up to the present day, making them witnesses to a history era of artistic diversity and innovation.
This exhibition retraces their creative paths through original drawings from their best-known works and valuable archival materials, while also exploring their respective careers and sources of inspiration.
