Bishōnen
[3] It has always shown the strongest manifestation in Japanese pop culture, gaining in popularity due to the androgynous glam rock bands of the 1970s,[4] but it has roots in ancient Japanese literature, the androsocial and androerotic ideals of the medieval Chinese imperial court and intellectuals, and Indian aesthetic concepts carried over from Hinduism, imported with Buddhism to China.
These are often depicted with very strong martial arts abilities, sports talent, high intelligence, dandy fashion, or comedic flair, traits that are usually assigned to the hero/protagonist role.
[8] Biseinen is to be distinguished from bishōnen as seinen (青年) is used to describe men who are of age, including those who have entered or completed tertiary education.
[6] The bishōnen typically has the same traits as idealized female beauties in Japan: lustrous black hair, opaque skin, red cheeks, etc., but simultaneously retains a male body, making them aesthetically different from both men and women.
[10] Ian Buruma notes that Yoshitsune was considered by contemporaries to be not physically prepossessing, but that his legend later grew and due to this, he became depicted with good looks.
Scottish pop singer Momus notably used the term in his song "Bishonen" from the Tender Pervert album (released on Creation Records).
[18] Accepted into Johnny & Associates in their early teens, these boys, collectively known as 'Johnnys', are trained and promoted to become the next leading singing-acting-commercially successful hit sensations.
Almost all can be classified as bishōnen, exhibiting the same physically feminine features combined with a sometimes deliberately ambivalent sexuality or at the very least, a lack of any hint of a relationship to maintain their popular availability.
Many of the bishōnen stars hired by Johnny & Associates eventually abandoned their princely image, and became stock characters in variety shows and other normal day-to-day programming.
[22] Mainstream shounen and seinen fare also often uses such characters as rivals for a traditional masculine protagonist, with some degree of comic relief, or for the blander everyman, whether as the embodiment of his insecurities in a grittier realism, or as a more lighthearted constant reminder of his less than advantageous social status and the constraints thereof.
Comics for younger boys tend to use arrogant bishōnen in the role of the recurring minor rivals readers love to hate, though their effeminate good looks there will often appear older, bigger, stronger, and thus in fact more masculine than the commonly shorter and less mature protagonists.
[14] Several cultural anthropologists and authors have raised the multifaceted aspect of what bishōnen represents and what it is interpreted as, mostly to fit a particular external viewpoint.
[25] Jonathan D. Mackintosh believes that the bishōnen is a "traditional representation of youth", being "interstitial" between both childhood and adulthood and between being male and being female,[26] regardless of the sexual issues.
