27

Creating Transnational Fandoms

— Adaptation of Japanese terminology among
English-language dōjinshi users —
Glasspool Lucy

Keywords: Fandom, Dōjinshi, Internet, Japaneseness, Gender

1. Abstract

This article examines the use of Japanese terminology in English-speaking fan

communities, or “fandoms”, of ‘manga created and self-published by fans’ (Meyer
2010, 233), known as dōjinshi, specifically Japanese role-playing video game (RPG)
dōjinshi, using Azuma’s (2009) concept of a postmodern “database” of media elements
to demonstrate how the adoption and shared use of Japanese words by
English-speaking dōjinshi fans online can help create transnational fan communities.
Such communities utilize user-created content and user-managed online spaces to form
postmodern fan networks that transcend geographical borders based on shared
imaginings of a particular cultural construct: Japaneseness.

2. Introduction

There are two main genres of dōjinshi available in English, and both are intimately
concerned with sexuality as well as being expressions of fan affection for pop culture
texts. The first genre I will discuss involves sexually explicit dōjinshi featuring one or
more (generally) female characters engaged in (generally) heterosexual sex acts, and is
known in English-speaking fan communities as “hentai”, ostensibly aimed at male
readers. This genre shares many aspects of content as well as fan practices of
dissemination and consumption with the other main dōjinshi genre, which in an
English-speaking context goes by the name of “yaoi” or “boys’ love” (BL); these BL
dōjinshi contain depictions of primarily male-male romantic and sexual relationships,
and their main readership is considered to be female.
This article begins by looking briefly at hentai dōjinshi, providing an overview
of the genre and its presence in English-speaking fan communities, before moving on
28 Glasspool Lucy

to examine how the term “hentai” used by those communities online differs from the
way it is used by Japanese native speakers. This is followed by a section dealing with
the boys’ love genre, its origins and how it has migrated into English-speaking
fandoms, the various terms employed by its users and the differences in nuance
between Japanese- and English-speaking fan users. In the final section I argue that this
reinterpretation of foreign terms or loanwords supports Azuma’s assertion: that fans of
contemporary Japanese pop culture are postmodern users, who treat media texts not as
privileged originals but as a ‘database of settings’ (Azuma 2009, 63) or parameters
from which they can select preferred elements, such as particular characters, scenarios,
or in this case words, creating new texts that alter or expand the initial text’s content
and which become, for some fans, as authoritative as the so-called “original” material.
In this sense, we might consider the adoption of Japanese words, and the ways in
which their nuances and uses are changed, to be one form of database use:
English-speaking fans with knowledge of Japanese “pick up” certain elements (words
and phrases) from commentary by Japanese fans, and they are then reinterpreted
through repeated use in online communities. These new lexicons, along with the visual
and narrative content of the dōjinshi texts themselves, thus become new content
through which members of those communities can, regardless of nationality, form
shared understandings and imaginings of “Japaneseness” around which they can build
networks of communication transcending geographical contexts.

The broadest definition of dōjinshi in both Japanese and English-language contexts is

something along the lines of ‘books edited and published by individuals with the aim
of presenting their own materials’1. In practice, the dōjinshi available in Japan at
specialist stores or sales events largely use characters or worlds from pre-existing
media texts2 and are produced by fans of those texts, and come in either comic form
using manga styles and techniques, or in “novel” or short written story form; a
minority of dōjinshi are based on original characters and settings. In English-speaking
contexts, it is far more common to find fan-produced dōjinshi of pre-existing texts than
“original” ones, perhaps because the former are more likely to find a ready-made
audience in the fans of the initial texts; and drawn dōjinshi in comic form prevail over
novel dōjinshi, which in English-speaking RPG fandoms are less visible than online
“fanfiction” written by English-speaking fans themselves.
In Japan the majority of dōjinshi are drawn using either pen and ink or computer
programs like Manga Studio designed for drawing comics, and are printed and bound
 Creating Transnational Fandoms 29

by companies catering specifically to dōjinshi artists. They are then disseminated as

hard copies in stores that also sell regular commercial manga, and at dōjinshi events
such as the hugely popular Comic Market (Comiket, held twice a year in August and
December in Tokyo). While online communities for the sharing of electronic art, such
as Pixiv.net, are growing more and more popular among Japanese-speaking artists and
fans, the printed and bound dōjinshi remains the most usual format.
In English-speaking fandoms, however, the vast majority of dōjinshi are scanned
and then distributed online in electronic format in the Japanese language (“raws”), or
scanned and translated into English (“scanlations”). Dōjinshi created from scratch by
English-speaking users, either digitally or in print, are in fact far less in number than
those created in Japanese and transformed or prodused by English speakers in digital
form, perhaps because of the ‘dynamics of fetishism’ (Pelletier-Gagnon 2011, 106) that
cause fans of Japanese pop culture to accord cultural capital to elements they consider
authentically “Japanese”. It is thus the digitized dōjinshi that were initially produced in
Japanese, and the online contexts in which they are found, that I will be concentrating
on primarily: not only is this type the most numerous in English-speaking fandoms of
Japanese pop culture texts, but it also matches the electronically mediated fan practices
and products that form the core of my broader research in the field of postmodern
fandom.

3. The expanded use of “hentai” in dōjinshi fandoms

As noted above, my examination of these online dōjinshi focuses on two main genres,
hentai and boys’ love. In this first section I shall deal with hentai dōjinshi. The
decision to use the term hentai rather than “heterosexual” or “aimed at male readers” to
describe this genre in the present article was a deliberate one: as shall be shown
presently, hentai, in English-speaking fandoms of much Japanese popular culture, has
strong connotations of the pornographic and texts described as hentai are generally
considered to be aimed at male readers, though they are not strictly limited to
depictions of heterosexual relationships. The above two traits are generally
characteristic of the dōjinshi genre examined in this section, although there are some
departures from them: while most of the dōjinshi contain male-female relationships as
their central focus, there are significant exceptions (such as female-female or
female-hermaphrodite), and defining the genre as “heterosexual” would be to exclude
30 Glasspool Lucy

these exceptions; and, while the context of their dissemination (for example adverts for
live-action pornographic websites on the sites where they are hosted) goes some way
to setting them up as “aimed at male readers”, this is by no means absolute, and the
online context makes it difficult to state definitively that their readers are exclusively
male. The pornographic nuance of the term hentai in English-language fandoms is
useful when defining the characteristics of these dōjinshi, as almost all the dōjinshi
available on English-language fan websites which are not labelled by fans themselves
as belonging to the boys’ love genre are sexually explicit (while many boys’ love
dōjinshi are also explicit, their male-male relationships and primarily female
readerships distinguish them from the majority of hentai). It is not easy, in fact, to find
an RPG dōjinshi in an English-speaking context that is neither boys’ love nor
pornographic. These non-boys’ love dōjinshi with sexually explicit elements are known
in English-speaking fandoms as hentai, which is used as a general term for the genre.
The term hentai demonstrates one of the ways in which English-speaking fans of
such material borrow from, and are influenced by, Japanese cultural sources, and also
how these borrowed texts and terminologies shift and are transformed as they move
between cultures. McLelland has traced the roots of the word from its Japanese use
into English-speaking fandoms, and states that ‘the use of the term hentai to refer to
erotic or sexual manga and anime in general is not a Japanese but an English
innovation’ (McLelland 2006, paragraph 3). In a modern Japanese context, its meaning
is both broader and more specific: in a sexual sense, it designates ‘a person, action or
state that is considered queer or perverse’ (2006, paragraph 1) (“queer” here is rather
different from queer in its US/UK usage as a political and activist term, as will be
clarified further below), and is not necessarily linked to the popular media forms of
anime/manga/games. Where it is applied to pornographic comics or animation, it is
‘only of an extreme, “abnormal” or “perverse” kind; it is not a general category’ (2006,
paragraph 3). As pornographic drawn and animated materials began to spread into
English-speaking fandoms, however, the meaning shifted to refer more generally to
non-boys’ love drawn or animated pornography, and it has now become a loanword in
English-speaking fandoms, much as the meanings and nuances of many English words
have been altered by use in a Japanese context.
If we consider the Japanese use of the term “hentai” along with the English
alternatives that most closely approximate it – McLelland suggests “queer” or
“perverse” – we find that its nuances differ from both of these in terms of implied
sexual orientation. In a UK context, at least, the words “queer” and “pervert” have
 Creating Transnational Fandoms 31

often been linked with the notion of homosexuality, whereas, McLelland explains,
‘hentai in Japanese has had a primarily heterosexual nuance’ (2006, paragraph 24).
This part of its meaning can be said to have transferred partially intact into
English-speaking fan usage, as the dōjinshi that fall under the category of hentai on
English-language distribution sites are largely, though not absolutely, heterosexual.
Hentai, in the English usage, can refer to various forms of media, including
anime, manga, dōjinshi, games, even explicit cosplay photos or videos, though it is
most often used to refer to animated or drawn media. In Japan, commercial manga
defined as hentai in English-speaking fandoms are rather known as “ero-manga”,
stemming from the English loanword “erotic” (Kelts 2006), while sexually explicit
dōjinshi tend to be labelled “seijin-muke” or the English “for adults”, or “dansei-muke”
(“for men”). The content and production process of these two types of media differ
slightly: commercial ero-manga contain “original” characters and settings, and are
produced by artists and assistants working under the supervision of a publishing
company, which edits, prints and distributes the manga in either monthly anthology
form or as a collected volume of multiple chapters. Many are available for purchase in
mainstream bookshops, convenience stores, or as a section of tabloid magazines such
as Nikkan Sports, as well as in specialist stores. Dōjinshi, on the other hand, are
generally produced and disseminated by single artists or small groups known as
“circles”; they predominantly contain characters from pre-existing media texts (manga,
games, films, etc.) – though some professional artists also produce dōjinshi using
characters from their own commercial manga – and are self-financed and “unofficial”.
In this sense, they are not subject to editing or restrictions of content and form (size,
length, color, and so on) in the same way as commercial manga artists, though they
may face greater budget restrictions and do not have a company to publicize their work
for them. They are disseminated in some specialist manga/anime/game stores, at
conventions, and by mail order via artist websites.
These differences, however, do not prevent ero-manga and explicit dōjinshi from
sharing many traits: the materials used, presentation of sexual scenes, and censorship
techniques are common to both media, as are the scanlation and distribution practices
of their English-speaking fans. It is not surprising, then, that in English-language
contexts both media should fall under the heading of hentai, though it is generally
understood that manga are drawn by commercial artists and dōjinshi are fan-made and
largely based on pre-existing media texts. In the same way, scholarly observations
about the content and techniques of hentai manga may also apply in many cases to
32 Glasspool Lucy

hentai dōjinshi, particularly in terms of the articulations of sexual practices found in

both media. In this way, English-speaking fan use of the term “hentai” is both narrower
than the Japanese, in terms of only being applied to a set of media forms, and wider, in
its use to refer to a broad spectrum of sexually explicit material.

4. The use of Japanese terms in boys’ love dōjinshi fandoms

The term “boys’ love” or BL, by which I describe the dōjinshi and their fandoms that
are the focus of this section, in its current Japanese3 usage, is somewhat broader than
the use of “hentai”: it does not apply only to print manga and fan comics but has come
to encompass anime, video games, live-action films and light novels, all of which
contain central themes of boys or men in scenarios of male-male attraction, some of
which are romantic and some graphically sexually explicit. This genre is said to have
sprung from the shōjo manga that emerged in the 1950s. Shōjo manga of this period
were aimed primarily at girls and young women and often featured romantic narratives
centring on a female character, her emotions and experiences. In many cases they
addressed issues of female views and hopes regarding alternatives to hegemonic
gender ideals by creating successful heroines not dependent on a male character, and
some went so far as to blur distinct gender categories by creating female lead
characters who dressed and lived as beautiful young men (such as Princess Knight,
serialized from 1953 in Shōjo Club) and were portrayed as the romantic targets of other
female characters (The Rose of Versailles, serialized from 1972 in Margaret).
Suzuki states that it was a common trope in shōjo manga that ‘ideal relationships
should transcend gender’ (Suzuki 1998, 248); to reflect this, and to depict human
relationships without the visual stigma of female repression in a male-dominated
hegemonic cultural context, some artists in the 1970s began to replace girls with boys
in narrative romances. The most well-known of these early male-male romance manga
in both Japan and the English-speaking West are Hagio Moto’s Heart of Thomas
(serialized from 1974 in Shūkan Shōjo Comic) and Takemiya Keiko’s Song of the Wind
and Trees (serialized from 1976 in the same publication). These manga, which abound
with dark melodrama and tragedy, are set in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe,
and at the time of publication were not labelled as a fully-fledged sub-genre but
regarded as part of the shōjo manga corpus.
Around the same time, dōjinshi were growing more prolific thanks to events at
 Creating Transnational Fandoms 33

which artists and readers could gather, such as Comic Market (Comiket), first held in
Tokyo in December 1975. It was at this time that fan dōjinshi which featured male
characters from pre-existing media and reimagined those characters as engaging in
male-male sexual relationships became visible within dōjinshi culture (Mori 2010,
71-2) and began to grow in popularity with female artists and readers. Such fan texts
became known by the collective term “yaoi”. Yaoi is an acronym, generally regarded as
standing for the phrase “YAma nashi, Ochi nashi, Imi nashi” (“no climax, no point, no
meaning”), ‘emphasizing that the plots were little more than vehicles to stage the sex
scenes between the youthful male characters’ (McLelland 2005, 13), and signaling the
highly sexualized features of these dōjinshi. Indeed, McLelland also offers an
alternative derivation – YAmete Oshiri ga Itai (“Stop, my ass hurts”) (2005, 13) –
which not only highlights the texts’ sexual nature but also the theme of anal penetration,
which is central to much of the sexual activity depicted within them.
The sub-genre of dōjinshi known as yaoi continued to flourish in many fandoms;
original yaoi manga magazines were also published, and narratives of male-male
romantic or sexual relationships became alternatively known by some fans as “June”,
after the title of one of the earliest and most well-known publications in the genre4. The
Japanese “gay boom” of the 1990s did nothing to discourage this flourishing. This
boom entailed an increase in public awareness of male homosexuality and a
concomitant increase in commercial media depictions of male-male relationships, not
only in manga and anime but also television dramas such as Dōsōkai (1993). It was in
the 1990s that the term “boys’ love” emerged, coined, according to Sugiura, by an
editor at the manga publishing company BiBLOS (Sugiura 2006, 136). Used initially
to classify commercial manga, the term boys’ love and its short form, BL, has
broadened in scope to include manga, dōjinshi, anime, novels, games, and film.
In a Japanese context, BL covers not only multiple media, both original and
fan-created, but also varying levels of explicitness: the BL comics section on Amazon
Japan, for example, carries over 9000 manga titles, and these range from high school
romances, the culmination of which is a kiss, to explicit sadomasochistic pornography,
and everything in between. The use of the term yaoi, on the other hand, appears to be
reserved in Japan mainly for fan-produced dōjinshi, particularly those containing
mainly explicit content, rather than multiple media forms; although some Japanese fans,
as well as scholars such as Mori, use the terms interchangeably. Mori, discussing
manga genres in the 1990s, speaks of ‘yaoi (boys’ love)’ (Mori 2010, 70), using both
terms to talk about pornographic manga, though she also modifies boys’ love to “hard
34 Glasspool Lucy

BL” at times, to emphasize pornographic content. The introduction of new terms into a
media discourse, it is clear, does not automatically mean that older terms fall into
disuse; in the context of Japanese media aimed at female users and containing themes
of male-male attraction, the variety of terms available stemming from both Japanese
words and English loanwords, each with nuanced and shifting usages, suggest a
multiplicity of interpretations and reading practices by fans, who are themselves by no
means uniform in terms of gender, sexuality, age or nationality. The same lack of fixed
definition regarding the terminology of this genre can be seen in both English-language
fan practices and scholarship, and is complicated by the use of these media in a
transnational context.
Western fans of Japanese media dealing with male-male attraction have had
ample time to get used to many of the tropes presented in yaoi, as a somewhat similar
genre of fan-produced texts, known as “slash”, has been growing in popularity over the
last four decades. Slash, much like yaoi dōjinshi, arose in the 1970s and was originally
a ‘predominantly female fandom which imagines same-sex scenarios between the male
leads of popular TV dramas and action movies’ (McLelland 2005, 17). Initially
developing out of stories written by fans about Star Trek characters (the term “slash”
springing from the “/” mark between the names of the two male characters who are
paired together, i.e. Kirk/Spock), slash now makes use of a much wider variety of
media texts. It primarily takes the form of written fanfiction that invites comparison
with Japanese novel dōjinshi, though fan-produced pictures and comics are also not
uncommon, particularly since the increase in electronic scanning and art technologies
and the migration of fandoms online in the Internet age.
Scholars such as Stanley (2010) and Isola make comparisons between slash and
yaoi; drawing parallels between the two genres in terms of ‘the female deployment of a
same-sex male sexual desire’ (Isola 2010, 87), Isola states that ‘yaoi and slash form
and frame a multimedia media community that transcends linguistic, national, and
cultural borders’ (85). Isola conflates the genres slightly, seeing in their undeniable
similarities and the crossovers between fanbases a potential for ‘a shared act of
imagining’ between users cross-culturally (2010, 85). Thorn also sees similarities
between yaoi and slash in terms of the historical positioning of female fans in cultures
of masculine hegemony, arguing that ‘what these fans share in common is discontent
with the standards of femininity to which they are expected to adhere and a social
environment and historical movement that does not validate or sympathize with that
discontent’ (Thorn 2004, 180). This is not to say that the histories and experiences that
 Creating Transnational Fandoms 35

have led to a state of “discontent” are the same for Japanese and English-speaking fans,
only that there may be parallels in the culturally specific methods of expressing it in
the media they currently use.
The use of Japanese boys’ love/yaoi media by fans in the English-speaking
world does currently converge in some ways with slash, particularly online: some users
of fanfiction based on Western media are introduced to Japanese texts through
English-language fiction based on Japanese media, found on large community websites
like Fanfiction.net, while others discover Japanese dōjinshi scanlations based on the
Western media they read/write fiction about. Some websites go so far as to equate the
two terms, particularly if they contain written fanfiction based on texts of Japanese
origin: Advent, a section of multi-fandom site Noiresensus.com devoted to the hugely
popular RPG Final Fantasy VII (1998-2008), notes on its main archive page that ‘the
majority of the files contained in this archive are classified as yaoi or slash’5,
suggesting that, although these fanfictions are produced by English-speaking fans in an
English-language online space, they are equally qualified to be considered yaoi as they
are slash, based on the perceived Japaneseness of the media from which they are
appropriated.
BL/yaoi, however, is a much more recent addition to English-speaking spheres
than slash, being popularized in the US and UK, for example, in the late 1990s;
knowledge of the genre, says Thorn, has ‘grown exponentially, thanks to the Internet’
(Thorn 2004, 172), in an online environment in which fans became able to share both
information and the manga/dōjinshi themselves; the spread of the Internet was
instrumental in making potential users aware of the existence of these Japanese media
and providing them with access to it.
As in Japan, the term yaoi was in use in English-speaking fandoms some years
before the term boys’ love or BL, and both are now used in online fandoms; but the
ways in which they are employed and the nuances they are given by English-speaking
fans often differ slightly from Japanese usage. In Japan, yaoi, where it is still used,
continues to refer firstly to fan-created comics or novels based on pre-existing texts.
There are many English-language websites that also use the term in this way:
BlackSKY Scans, for example, is a Livejournal.com (LJ) page offering ‘FFVII Yaoi
Doujinshi Scans’6, creating a link for the users of the page between yaoi and the
fan-produced medium of dōjinshi. Others, however, use it in a broader sense to signal
both fan-produced and commercial, “original” media: the Yaoi Shares LJ community
allows posts to be made by its members offering both electronic scanlations and
36 Glasspool Lucy

subtitled anime episodes for free download, and hard copies of manga/dōjinshi for sale
from members’ private collections. In this case, yaoi does not differentiate between
fan-produced and commercial media; though, in the case of scanlated commercial
manga, it could be argued that this also has become fan-produced, that is, reinterpreted
and recreated or prodused (Bruns 2006), to a certain extent through the practices of
translation and editing. Yaoi, in this particular community, refers to the male-male
content in the media offered, rather than any nuance of specific production practices.
In other instances, yaoi can refer not only to media of Japanese origin but also to
works by fans of the genre who produce their own English-language media based on
Japanese texts, or original media inspired by the aesthetics or content of BL/yaoi.
Yaoi-Con, the US’s largest convention catering specifically to this genre, has been held
annually since 2001, and features discussion panels with Japanese commercial manga
artists, cosplay, a manga library, fanfiction contests, anime music video contests, and a
dealer’s room with both commercial publishers of Japanese manga in English and
amateur artists producing their own works7. The use of yaoi here does not limit it to
one medium or even to a specifically Japanese cultural context of production and use.
As these examples suggest, there is no firm consensus in English-language fan
communities as to exactly what media the term yaoi should describe; and this is
equally the case in scholarly works. The edited book Boys’ Love Manga: Essays on the
Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre (Levi et al., eds. 2010)
suggests, by its title, a preference for the newer English loanword term, but the
contributing authors use both BL and yaoi, not often specifying whether they are
talking about commercial manga, fan-made dōjinshi, or both. This use of multiple
terms may well stem from a sensitivity to the more fluid ways in which those terms are
used among non-Japanese fans, as it is these users on which the book’s theoretical
focus rests8; it certainly makes it difficult to give a fixed definition of the term yaoi in
an English-speaking context, whether that context be fandom or academia (which are
by no means easy to separate at times and have in fact led to the coining of a new term,
“aca-fan” (Jenkins 2014)), pointing to a diverse and variable user environment for
these media.
The issue of explicitness complicates the yaoi term further. As mentioned above,
in Japanese-language fandoms the acronym yaoi is said to stem from the sexual
explicitness and perceived lack of plot in early male-male dōjinshi. For some
English-speaking fans, yaoi can be used in a similar way, not to classify narratives of
male-male attraction along production lines but according to the level of graphic sexual
 Creating Transnational Fandoms 37

description. Meyer, for instance, speaks of ‘BL and its more explicit subgenre yaoi’
(Meyer 2010, 232), suggesting that the term BL may be used broadly to refer to media
depicting male-male romance but that yaoi contains specifically sexually explicit
material. The link between yaoi and graphic sexual imagery can be seen in fans’
appropriation of another Japanese loanword, shōnen-ai (literally “boy-love”), for use
as an indicator of explicitness. While no longer in popular use among Japanese fans to
describe either manga or dōjinshi, this term emerged in the 1990s in English-language
fandoms, around the same time as yaoi. Like BL, it is often used synonymously with
yaoi to describe male-male content in manga, anime, dōjinshi or English fanfiction,
regardless of the level of sexual content: Gongaga Yaoi, a long-running but now
defunct website carrying video game dōjinshi, among others, displayed the Japanese
kanji for “Shōnen-ai Dōjinshi” as the title on its top page9, and offered both explicit
and non-explicit raw and scanlated dōjinshi.
However, Pagliassotti points out that ‘yaoi is often used to refer to harder, more
sexually explicit boys’ love stories, and shōnen-ai for softer, less explicit stories’
(Pagliassoti 2010, 60). Some fan articulations support this: one user reply to the query
‘What is the Difference between Shounen Ai and Yaoi?’ on Fanpop.com offers this
definition:

Yaoi is a shortening for a Japanese phrase that translates to “No [sic] plot, no
climax, no point”. It’s basically male on male porn. The genre is totally focused
on getting two males into a sexual situation…

Shonenai is just two cute looking guys in a close relationship. Sometimes there is
sex and/or nudity, and sometimes they are gay, but it’s really just about cute guys
in close relationships…
(User ID: “darmintoutau”)

Another states, ‘they are both about Boys Love, but yaoi tend to be more graphic than
shounen ai’ (User ID: mari_giovani)10. While not employed in this way by all
English-speaking fans, the use of yaoi and shōnen-ai as part of a ratings system
constructs a particular nuance of sexual explicitness in yaoi in Western fandoms,
signalling the type of content rather than media form; as has been demonstrated, this is
by no means universal, but it cannot be discounted.
The apparent need for terminology with which to signal the explicitness and
38 Glasspool Lucy

non-explicitness of this media genre is one of the ways in which BL/yaoi can be said to
differ from the hentai genre examined in the previous section: while the latter are
invariable sexually explicit and generally require a warning of the fact on their covers,
BL/yaoi texts vary greatly. Even within dōjinshi of this genre, which were the first
media to be described by the yaoi acronym in Japanese due to their frequent sexual
content, there is a broad continuum of depictions of male-male relationships, from
platonic to pornographic. For this reason, the term boys’ love is growing in use in
English-language fandoms; whereas yaoi has been invested in the English-language
with sexually explicit nuances and the less widely-used shōnen-ai with the less
specifically sexual “close relationships”, BL encompasses both ends of the spectrum
and everything in between. In both Japanese- and English-language fandoms it is the
least prescriptive and most able to take in the varied themes, levels of sexual content
and reading practices found in an English-speaking online context.

5. Japanese terms as a transnational lingua franca

With the migration of fandoms online and the anonymity that attends this, it becomes
difficult to locate geographical or cultural sections; rather, the Internet creates a plethora
of fragmented and diverse groups (Busse and Hellekson 2006, 15). When considering
online fandoms, ‘it is important to remember that we are dealing with a range of
different histories and experiences, and that we should not generalize based on “our”
use of the Internet’ (Goggin and McLelland 2009, 10). Yet, according to scholars such
as Wood (2006), these globalizing (but not homogenizing) technologies can provide fans
with strategies that are not based on content alone for challenging social norms and
hegemonies, such as dominant gender binaries.
Azuma links his theory of database consumption, in which fans no longer revere
the original text as a grand narrative but selectively pick up their favourite elements from
a plethora of official and fan-produced simulations, specifically to the structure of the
Internet:

...the behavioural pattern in database consumption, where the body of a work is

understood as a database (the invisible), while the simulacra (the visibles) are
extracted from it based on the preferences of the consumer, perfectly matches the
logic of the Web...
 Creating Transnational Fandoms 39

(Azuma 2009, 102)

The Internet can be said to mirror the patterns of fan consumption, which, in the case of
English-speaking fan communities, is carried out within its environs, forming a
connection between technology and users based on how they manipulate the various
media texts or simulacra.
These online communities of users can certainly be seen as globalized, with
groups of fans organizing themselves and consuming works according more to language
than cultural or geographic specificity; it is hard to tell, for example, whether scanlators
and readers of the dōjinshi found online are American, British, South African, Chinese,
and so forth. There may be clues in the word usage and spelling, but web technologies
allow these fans ‘the freedom of anonymity and the potential to construct or present an
online identity resistant to social constraints’ (Wood 2006, 409). This enables textual
circulation among fans in many countries without the need for their particular
backgrounds to be specified.
Indeed, the online consumption of dōjinshi transnationally can ‘transcend even
the rather obvious constraints of language barriers’ (Wood 2006, 405), through shared
terminology specific to various types of fandom that operates in an even broader field
than English-language fandoms. Wood lists the Japanese words which have come to be
shared among BL fans regardless of their native language, like yaoi, uke, seme, and
bishōnen (2006, 405). Kelts adds to these instances of shared terminologies, although his
examples show words migrating both from and into Japan: the Japanese use of the term
“ero-manga”, for instance, derived from the English “erotic”, and the tendency in the
West to use the Japanese word “hentai” instead (Kelts 2006, 127).
This suggests that, although a good deal of scholarship shows how cultural
elements flow outwards from Japan, in the process of which they are picked up and used
by both international fans and Japanese economic and political institutions for the
project of “J-cool” (Allison 2009, 90), the flow works in multiple directions. This
highlights the complexity of the processes of globalization, which are emphatically not
West-rest, or even, as can appear the case with the video game industry, Japan-rest; like
Azuma’s database model there is movement in many directions, with English-language
fandoms online not being limited to a Western geographical context, and Japanese
lingua franca terms also connecting speakers of other languages like French and
Spanish (although there is not the scope in this article to explore outside
English-language fandoms); and, while there may appear to be a privileged original, as
40 Glasspool Lucy

in the promotion of an idea of “Japaneseness” by dōjinshi fans in an English-speaking

context, these online practices underline its artificial and fantastical character.
The use of terms such as those this article has discussed, which may also serve to
promote the cultural capital of “Japaneseness” among fans, simultaneously dislocates
them from their original cultural context; they become a method of transnational
communication, a lingua franca that facilitates the sharing of discourse in a
geographically non-specific online society through the fetishizing of an imagined
cultural identity. While such practices may raise some concerns that merit further
research about the essentialization of Japaneseness through a kind of “positive”
orientalism, they also have the potential, through those shared imaginings, to provide a
site in which the articulation of the varying national and cultural contexts of fan users as
difference is subsumed in their collective appreciation of popular culture.

Notes

1 From the What is the Comic Market? presentation (English version, 2008, 3),
available from the Comiket website
(http://www.comiket.co.jp/info-a/WhatIs.html). The definition from the Japanese
version reads, ‘個人が自分たちの作品の発表の場として編集発行する本’
(2008, 3). Comiket is the largest dōjinshi convention in the world, with over
500,000 visitors attending twice yearly.
2 In Japanese, “二次創作同人誌” or “パロディー同人誌”.
3 “ボーイズラブ” or the romanized abbreviation “BL”.
4 June magazine was published by Magazine Magazine from 1978-1979, then
re-launched in 1981; it was characterized by romantic rather than explicit sexual
manga and stories. It is still running.
5 http://www.noiresensus.com/bookshelf/ff7/index_marchive.html Accessed August
11, 2012.
6 http://blacksky-scans.livejournal.com/ (Livejournal membership required for
access) Accessed August 12, 2012.
7 A notable example is the original webcomic Teahouse, ‘a yaoi webcomic about
fancy whores’ (http://www.teahousecomic.com/), whose American female
amateur artists print and produce goods and hard copies of their online comic and
who attended Yaoi-Con, much as Japanese fans produce dōjinshi and attend
 Creating Transnational Fandoms 41

Comiket.
8 This fluidity and the multiple use of terms cross-culturally was also the subject of
discussion, though not consensus, at the conference “Global Polemics of BL
(Boys Love): Production, Circulation, and Censorship” held at Oita University in
January 2011.
9 http://web.archive.org/web/20111229181545/http://www.gongaga.com/ Accessed
December 5, 2010.
10
http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/anime/answers/show/223026/what-difference-betw
een-shounen-ai-yaoi Accessed November 17, 2010.

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