Looking at feminist fictional writings since the time of Charlotte Gilman's Herland from the perspective of how they dealt with the issue of reproduction, one can find a group of works using unisexual reproduction as the central theme or as an important motif. This paper examines one of them, Marginal (1985), a girls'manga (comic) by Moto Hagio. Girls' manga are an important source of insight into Japanese women's views on their gender, and this paper outlines the history of girls' manga in comparison with the boys' counterpart, which provides a clue as to what made Hagio use the theme of unisexual reproduction inMarginal, in which she attempted to examine the concept of maternity.
In the first phase of manga's development from the late 1960's up to the 1980's, both girls' and boy's manga were based on illusions about the opposite sex. Boys in girls' comics were either dashing gentlemen or handsome rebels aching for maternal love, whereas boys' comics were interested in girls only as the object of the macho hero's desire. However, from the late 1980's, while Boys' manga stayed with its fantasies of women as mere recipients of the male sex drive, girls' manga started to see men in a more sober light. The gap between the ideal of equal partnership and reality began to feature strongly, and themes such as homosexuality, transsexualism and transvestism have been given a serious examination.
This shift was a result of a significant change in Japanese women's view on reproduction. As women acquired education and financial independence, they rejected the notion that a woman's happiness lies in love, marriage and childbearing ; the link between marriage and motherhood was broken. Stories centring on the theme on unisexual reproduction appeared in girls' manga amidst this tidal change.
Marginal is a sci-fi manga set in 2999A.D., when Earth is a polluted and diseased planet long deserted by most humans after a pandemic viral infection 700 hundred years earlier made all women infertile. A company that runs an economic empire across the solar system maintains experimental colonies on Earth where no babies can be born and all inhabitants are men. The company supplies the colonies with test-tube children through a pseudo-religious system, but inhabitants live under a dark shadow of apocalyptic pessimism. Hagio examines maternity in an imaginary world where, in the absence of women, motherhood is artificial and there are no heterosexual relationships.
A scientist who has been running illegal reproductive experiments in a hideout on Earth is killed by the company, and a product of his experiments, a telepathic hermaphrodite with the ability to tune into other people's dreams and wishes, survives the attack and encounters colony men. The psychic child causes a catastrophic flood when he responds to the wishes of colony dwellers who dream their doomed world to end, but in a dramatic climax, he empathizes with the Earth's dream of ancient blue seas that nurtured life, a dream of life.
The ambiguous ending ofMarginal seems to support conventional praise of maternity, but here the hope of regeneration comes not from the child's ability to conceive but through restoration of the Earth's productive potential. Hagio sees maternity as something more fundamental than the materialistic notion of baby-making; to her, restoration of the fertility of the Earth, the source of life itself, is the paramount concern.

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The Japanese word "manga" stands for all kinds of cartoons and comics. Japan is unique among world's countries for the overwhelming predominance of manga in the publishing scene. Many works of manga have been adapted into TV animation series as well as films, both animated and acted by humans. Visual analysis of manga works is an effective way of studying their quality, theme, and influence on the readers and other artists. The Manga Department of the Kawasaki City Museum was conceived originally only as a museum of manga, but in order to contribute to the study of manga, it must acquire the functions of a library with a "visual database system" in addition to those of a museum.

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本稿では日本の漫画を広く絵物語のコンテクストの中で位置づけ,その文化史的な意義と可能性を明らかにする。日本の絵巻や浮世絵,絵草紙,漫画などの諸コンテンツは社会階級に依存せず創作され,また複製や二次創作を積極的に是認する文化を持つ。これは欧州型の,オリジナル作品にオーラがあるとみなし二次創作を是認せず,権威による作品の評価を基軸とするアートの文化とは大きく異なる。本稿では,絵物語の歴史を概観しながら,あらゆる社会の場から表出され,異なる立ち位置の人々の世界観を混淆循環させる力と多様性を持つメディアとしての絵物語空間に着目する。その上で,漫画の様な絵物語を日本のサブカルチャーではなくメインカルチャーとして位置づけその可能性を論じる。

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This study analyzes the relationship between the usage of media and subculture in extended adolescence. The media seen as most characteristic of people in extended adolescence include chatting and electronic bulletin boards on the Internet, and comic magazines. Sherry Turkle thinks that the use of the Internet has influenced the establishment of the identity of adolescents since they can experiment with multiple identities in the world of the Internet. She also presented the concept of an “online persona, ” where one can assume a fluid and multiple identity and act differently from one's true self.
During the 1960s and 1970s, young people were fond of popular television programs known as teen dramas, which were set in high schools and involved young teachers and their students. The shows were based on themes such as “effort, ” “dreams” and “love, ” and the heroes fulfilled their dreams, overcoming various obstacles. One effect of these shows was that during this period, young Japanese people discovered their own stories of adolescence by reproducing the teen drama programs in their everyday lives. However, after the 1980s, young people started to read comic magazines targeted at teens and the postadolescence stories gained in popularity. At that time, animated cartoons such as “Mobile Suit Gundam, ” “Dragon Ball” and “Neon Genesis Evangelion” became very popular. Their heroes all experienced an “awakening, ” in which they became super-heroes. Unlike the heroes of the teen drama shows, who were regular high school students, they realized that they had latent superhuman powers. In these animated cartoons, the “adherence to identity” is typically represented in the form of an ominous alien.
The sense of liberation from one's actual self through means such as chatting and electronic bulletin boards, as well as the post-adolescence stories, is thought to be closely related to the problem of extended adolescents who are a focus of social attention in the present world. It is clear that the adolescent strategy toward the media, which uses the media as a means to arouse one true self, has a parasitic relationship with the media.

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