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Popular belief states that Ribbon no Kishi (1954) by Osamu Tezuka was the first shōjo manga in history. The truth is that being strict this statement is flatly erroneous, and proclaiming it leaves in the forgetfulness the work of some artists who worked in the genre during the pre-war, being the best known Katsuji Matsumoto author of The Mysterious Clover (1934) and the very popular Kurukuru Kurumi-chan, which was in circulation from 1938 to 1940 in the magazine Shōjo no Tomo. And without forgetting Shosuke Kurakane, who during the first years of the postwar period published Anmitsu Hime (1949 - 1955).

Ribbon no kishi, born as ... a result of the influence that the Takarazuka theater exerted in the life of Osamu Tezuka, certainly meant a step forward in the development of the genre both visually and thematically, emulating in certain way to what years before it achieved Shin Takarajima While Ribbon no kishi and the Tezukian style dictated the way for some other pioneers of the genre such as Tetsuya Chiba, Leiji Matsumoto and Shotaro Ishonomori, the facts are clear and the aesthetic that prevails today in the shōjo world did not drain from Tezuka's sources, but rather of those provided by Makoto Takahashi.

Strongly influenced by the art of Kashō Takabatake and Jun'ichi Nakahara, two of the artistic leaders of the girls' culture (Shōjo Bunka) during the first decades of the 20th century, Makoto Takahashi adopted the visual style of the magazines for pre-war girls to use it in the visual construction of its manga. Takahashi is recognized as the inventor of the "shojo aesthetic" that is represented in those pages with wide and open panels aswell as full-body characters which undoubtedly evoked the cover of girls' magazines.

Sakura Namiki was born in that new culture of girls that emerged after the Meiji period (1868-1912) mainly within the hermetic homosocial world of schools for girls, and that had its means of expression in the shōjo magazines of the time. This is not only reflected in the aesthetic aspect of the manga, but at the same time Takahashi uses the argument to explore, and takes as central axis of his narrative one of the most important elements of the girls' culture: strong emotional relationships between schoolgirls Unlike what he did in one of his previous works, Paris-Tokyo, where feelings of love are focused on the parent-child relationship, in Sakura Namiki these feelings are channeled into a relationship between girls (S kankei). These types of relationships (Called S relationships) were not only very common during the time, but were even motivated by teachers and other authority figures as a way to channel and ward off the heterosexual desires of girls. But the love between females was not given in a sexual way at all, but in a totally spiritual form (ren'ai).

In conclusion, Sakura Namiki is not only a manga that experiments with visual narrative and that lays the aesthetic foundations of the genre, but at the same time it is a beautiful and sincere journey through the immaculate world of girls during the first decades of the last century.

Recommended Book: Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girl's Culture in Japan