Year 24 Group

The Year 24 Group (Japanese: 24年組, Hepburn: Nijūyo-nen Gumi) is a grouping of female manga artists who heavily influenced shōjo manga (Japanese girls' comics) beginning in the 1970s. While shōjo manga of the 1950s and 1960s largely consisted of simple stories marketed towards elementary school-aged girls, works by members of the group significantly developed shōjo manga by expanding it to incorporate new genres, themes, and subject material. Narratives and art styles in shōjo manga became more complex, and works came to examine topics such as psychology, gender, politics, and sexuality. Manga produced by the Year 24 Group brought the shōjo category into what scholars have described as its "golden age".

As a largely notional group, the criteria used to determine the membership of the Year 24 Group varies. Individuals who have been associated with the Year 24 Group include Yasuko Aoike, Moto Hagio, Riyoko Ikeda, Toshie Kihara, Minori Kimura, Yumiko Ōshima, Nanae Sasaya, Keiko Takemiya, Mineko Yamada [ja], and Ryōko Yamagishi.

"The Year 24 Group" is not a proper name for a specific collective of artists, but rather a name used by critics, journalists, and academics to retroactively refer to the generation of female manga artists who emerged in the early 1970s and contributed to the growth and development of shōjo manga. Though the precise first use and originator of the term is unknown, it was widely in use by the end of the 1970s, notably in manga critic Tomohiko Murakami's [ja] 1979 book Twilight Times: Dőjidai no Manga no Tameni.

"Year 24" refers to Shōwa 24 – the 24th year of the Shōwa era in the Japanese calendar, or 1949 in the Gregorian calendar. The number thus ostensibly references the year its members were born in, although only a small number of individuals associated with the Year 24 Group were actually born in 1949.

During the 1950s and 1960s, shōjo manga largely consisted of simple stories marketed towards elementary school-aged girls. Stories were typically sentimental or humorous in tone, and were often centered on familial drama or romantic comedy; manga scholar Rachel Thorn notes that these stories frequently focused on "passive, pre-adolescent heroines in melodramatic situations, often involving separation from a mother." Authors of shōjo manga were typically men who began their careers in the genre before migrating to shōnen manga, or manga for boys.

During the 1960s, the manga industry responded to an aging readership and increased competition from television by increasing the production of manga magazines and diversifying the content of their publications. Shōnen manga during this period innovated and found new audiences through the concept of gekiga, which sought to use manga to tell serious and grounded stories aimed at adult audiences; shōjo manga largely stagnated, and was generally perceived as frivolous and of low quality by critics. Though the increase in manga production during the 1960s allowed female manga artists such as Hideko Mizuno, Toshiko Ueda, and Yoshiko Nishitani to launch their careers, the sclerotic conventions and editorial standards of shōjo manga publishing of this era prevented them from achieving the degree of innovation seen in shōnen manga.

By the early 1970s, the majority of the male artists who had launched their careers in shōjo manga in the 1960s had migrated to shōnen manga, giving way to a new generation of female shōjo manga artists. These new artists drew inspiration from a diversity of sources, including European literature and cinema, American rock and roll culture, and the Bildungsroman genre. Magazines such as Shūkan Shōjo Comic that granted more editorial freedom to creators provided outlets for these artists to publish their work.

The so-called "Ōizumi Salon", a rented house in Ōizumigakuenchō, Nerima, Tokyo that manga artists Moto Hagio and Keiko Takemiya shared as roommates from 1971 to 1973, came to be an important gathering point for members and affiliates of the Year 24 Group. Hagio and Takemiya made the house available to shōjo artists for use as living and working space, allowing them to both bond socially, share ideas and influences, and collaborate on manga. Notable artists who visited the Ōizumi Salon include Shio Satō, Yasuko Sakata, Yukiko Kai, Akiko Hatsu, Nanae Sasaya, Mineko Yamada [ja], Aiko Ito [ja], Michi Tarasawa [ja], and Misako Nachi [ja]. The Ōizumi Salon has been compared to Tokiwa-sō, an apartment building that housed multiple influential manga artists in the 1950s and 1960s.