2025/09/02 by Thomas Baudinette · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Asian Culture and Media Studies #Japanese History and Culture #South Asian Cinema and Culture
paper · doi:10.1080/10371397.2025.2601065
openalex publication_date 2025/09/02 · openalex created_date 2025/12/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
Within Japanese girls’ culture, perhaps no fandom is more influential than that of the ubiquitous male celebrities known as ‘idols’ who dominate Japan’s media landscape. Usami Rin’s 2020 award-winning novella Oshi, Moyu (Idol, Burning) presents a thought-provoking window into the lives of the women who dedicate themselves to supporting these male idols via the practice known as oshi-katsu (pushing one’s ‘bias’). Rejecting the view that oshi-katsu solely represents a consumerist behaviour that entangles women within neoliberal structures geared towards their exploitation, this reading of Oshi, Moyu instead argues that oshi-katsu may operate as a significant practice which asserts the agency of women within a society that routinely silences their desires. This article argues that Oshi, Moyu explores the experiences of young women navigating precariousness in contemporary Japan’s hetero-patriarchal society to recuperate oshi-katsu as a feminist praxis. Through a ‘fanthropological’ reading of Oshi, Moyu, it brings previous scholarship on the Japanese idol industries into dialogue with recent feminist theorisations of fandom in Japan, providing a reparative analysis of women’s participation within the fandom which has been largely absent from the previous English-language literature on Japanese idols.