Abstract
Manga is at the core of modern Japan's culture and is a unique product that has neither equivalent nor competitor: this characteristic is largely due to its mixed readership. Indeed, contrary to comics mainly written by male authors and dedicated to the male public, manga devotes a part of itself to female readers, shoujo manga1 being a recognized genre opposed to shounen manga2. This specificity is probably coming from the Japanese conception of gender that radically distinguishes female world from male world and that is therefore unable to conceive non-gender-orientated manga even though reality proves that most of them are read by both boys and girls.
Thus, each gender's world has its own characteristics and their relationship evolves at the same time as the Japanese society modernized itself and as its stereotypes, its ideals and the role it assigns to each gender changed. Being an accurate image of how Japanese society and mentalities has been evolving, manga is therefore reflecting well the specific characteristics of male and female worlds, of the way they interact and build a relationship that has been constantly evolving.
