If you often watch anime and read manga, you have probably come across the word “otaku” before. Heck, you even probably call yourself an otaku. An infamous word in Japan used to describe people with a specific passion, otaku has become the signature term globally for the consummate anime and manga fan, and can frequently be found here on Honey’s Anime, a website which specializes in “OTAKU Reviews & Recommendations.”

Making waves among fan communities currently, and bearing similarities to otaku with drastically different connotations is a new term referring to a particular type of female fan: fujoshi. Like otaku, the term“fujoshi” originated in Japan and has since spread globally. What does fujoshi even mean and how is it used today? This article sets out to answer these questions by briefly examining the Japanese word itself and the history behind it and also by taking a look at notable fujoshi representations in anime.

Now without further ado, let’s get rotten.

Fujoshi History and Etymology:

One can’t speak of fujoshi without first mentioning Boys Love. What would perhaps be called “gay porn” by those unfamiliar with it, Boys Love (often shortened to BL) refers broadly to media – often manga, anime, and light novels – depicting male-male love narratives with Japanese women as the targeted audience. Most people outside of Japan have probably heard yaoi used instead of BL when talking about media representing such narratives. Yaoi has been used and is still being used as an all-encompassing term much like BL to indicate these male-male fictions, though in in recent years in Japan, BL has eclipsed yaoi since its birth as a commercial genre in the 1990s.

The predominant demographic consuming and producing BL are widely viewed as Japanese women ranging in their early-teens to mid-to-late forties frequently called and self-identified as fujoshi, a term that literally translates to “rotten women.” While women who consumed and produced BL have existed since the 1970s, the conception of a particular type of women, the fujoshi, associated with BL appeared in the early 2000s on 2-chan, a popular messaging board website in Japan.

Since its first appearance on the Internet (within Japanese BL fan culture), fujoshi has become only one of many terms used to describe women with these interests. Despite this, it is by far the most commonly used term among BL fans and mainstream media in Japan (Saito, 2011: 171–3).

In Japanese, fujoshi is a homonym for “fujoshi” written as 婦女子, meaning a woman or grown woman. In this instance, fujoshi uses the kanji characters 腐女子 with 腐 meaning rotten and 女子 still meaning girl or woman. Fujoshi can be directly translated as “rotten woman,” however it gains a sense of self-deprecating humor due to its dual homonym meaning. This dual meaning perhaps reflects the standing of fujoshi culture in relation to the rest of society. Often times, fujoshi hide their media preferences, instead relying on coded language to communicate with other fujoshi in the public sphere. Fujoshi can be said to have a dual nature in this way: their “fujoshi” woman side and their “fujoshi” rotten side (Okabe et al., 2012).

Much like otaku, the term fujoshi has since spread among fan communities inside and outside of Japan and has appeared in many anime series. The following is a short list of notable anime featuring fujoshi characters.