Shajo means a girl or girls in Japanese. Unlike "onna-no-ko" which means a "female child", shajo entails a cultural connotation of innocence, fancy, and emotion. I will cite a passage from John Treat's essay about shojo culture, "Yoshimoto Banana Writes Home: The Shojo in Japanese Popular Culture." .
The idea of emptiness, both as one associated with shojo culture and Japanese postmodernity in general, is probably, alongside commodity, the key term in contemporary Japanese cultural criticism today. In what Mitsui Takayuki has termed the 'vacuity of the present,' Yoshimoto Banana's work is held to symbolize the 'topos of neuter, neutral sign.' The concept of the shojo itself has been schematized in similar terms: a category of being more discursive than material, an adolescent space without substantive or fixed subjective content, a point in the commodity loop that exists only to consume. (John Whittier Treat Ed. Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture, 301).
Treat also says that nostalgia conditions the culture of shojo. I agree with him in some respects, but disagree in several points at the same time. He does not distinguish shojo culture in girl's perspective from boy's. I thought it is dangerous to treat them as the same cultural phenomena, because shojo as the sexual object for male eyes and nostalgic shojo in Banana's are very different in my opinion. Shojo for men (the culture of Lolita complex) is a girl as the object of men's sexual desire, and thus, she is virgin and innocent only because she awaits a man to explore her sexuality. She is not the object of nostalgia but of fetish eroticism. .
Girls' shojo is, as Treat says, the nostalgia for the past, and culture of girls. Shojo in this sense must be perfectly disembodied and bleached of bodily relationship (sex and family), which is impossible unless these filthy relations are prohibited (the strictest prohibition of sex is incest) or lost forever (the perfect loss is death).
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