Theorizing the feminist potentials of Japanese women's fandom for male idols through Usami Rin's Oshi, Moyu

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.