The “Truth” About Delinquent Girls in Late 1970s–1980s Japanese Media

In a later 1970s–1980s Japanese mediasphere awash with idol images, “bad girls” and their media representations also carved out a prominent space within the cultural imagination. This talk explores a late 1970s–1980s boom in juvenile delinquent (furyō, hikō, or tsuppari) media content in Japan, focusing on furyō shōjo (delinquent girl) films and visual culture. In this moment, an explosion of furyō shōjo content crossed genre lines and populated such diverse media as film, television, manga, photography, and literature. As complex mixtures of the cool, the titillating, and the melodramatic, these images, performances, and stories capitalized on current cultural and subcultural trends. Yet they also reflected contemporary social concerns surrounding femininity and youth, illuminating gendered and patriarchal attitudes toward and prurient interest in bad girls and their behavior—an enduring visual and narrative trope in the Japanese context and beyond. Stressing the social and historical significance of attempting to write one’s own body—while acknowledging its ambiguities—Seuffert locates a counterarchive of media content produced by self-identified furyō girls and women that renegotiates control over such limiting narratives and images. This diverse body of materials demonstrates that in 1970s–1980s Japan, there were many ways a girl could go “off the rails”—or be labeled as such—and just as many media and modes via which furyō experiences could be and were expressed.

Kirsten Seuffert is a Lecturer in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her main fields of research are cinema, media, and visual culture in postwar and contemporary Japan and gender and sexuality studies, though her interests extend to popular culture, performance, and literature within the Japanese and transnational/transpacific contexts and other aspects of embodiment such as disability, aging/wellness, affect, and reception. She is currently working on a manuscript that explores live action cinema and visual media in Japan from the later 1970s through the 1980s through the lenses of gender, authorship, and subcultures. Her work on women’s professional wrestling in Japan and the media mix was published in Mechademia (Winter 2023), and her latest article on women’s participation in punk-related film and other media in 1970s-1980s Japan will appear in the August 2025 issue of The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.

Co-sponsored with Wolf Humanities Center

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