Anime Genres in Japanese: Shonen, Shojo, Seinen, Josei and Isekai

Shōnen, shōjo, seinen, josei: readers, not genres

Manga in Japan usually appears first in a magazine, and every magazine has a target reader. A series that runs in a boys' magazine is a shōnen manga whatever its story is about. When it becomes an anime, the label travels with it. Bookshops sort their shelves the same way, so these four words are worth knowing before any genre name.

The suffix muke (向け), aimed at, is the natural way to talk about audiences in conversation: kodomo-muke for children, otona-muke for adults. Japanese speakers say josei-muke far more often than josei alone when they describe a series.

What the kanji say

Shōnen (少年) is few plus years: a person of few years, a boy. Shōjo (少女) is few plus woman: a girl. Both contain a long ō, and that length matters. Shōjo with a long first vowel is girl; said with short vowels it becomes a different word, so hold the sound for two beats.

Seinen (青年) uses 青, blue or green, the colour of things that are still fresh, plus year: a youth, a young adult. Josei (女性) is simply the neutral, polite word for woman, the one printed on forms beside dansei (男性), man. None of the four is a special anime term. You will meet them in news articles and on signs.

Why an audience label is not a genre

Because the label comes from the magazine, it cuts across story types. The table shows what each word promises and what it leaves open.

Readers ignore the labels freely. Plenty of adults read shōnen magazines, and many women follow series from boys' magazines. An original anime with no manga behind it has no magazine at all, so Japanese fans describe it by genre or with muke.

Isekai: reading 異世界

Isekai joins i (異), different, to sekai (世界), world. The hero ends up in another world, most often by being summoned or by dying and being reborn there. The second pattern has its own name, tensei (転生), reincarnation.

The kanji 異 is useful beyond anime. It appears in ibunka (異文化), a different culture, and ijō (異常), abnormal. Sekai is the everyday word for world, as in sekaijū (世界中), all over the world.

Nichijō-kei, supokon, rabukome: how genre names are built

Japanese makes genre words in three ways. It clips long loanwords down to four beats: rabu komedi becomes rabukome. It blends a loanword with a kanji word: supokon is supōtsu, sports, plus konjō (根性), guts, for stories where athletes win through grit and brutal training. And it adds a suffix to an ordinary noun.

Two suffixes do most of the work. Mono (もの), thing, makes a loose category: gakuen mono, school stories. Kei (系), type, sounds a little more like a fan's label: nichijō-kei, the everyday-life type, is the standard word for slice of life.

Mecha comes from Japanese too. Meka (メカ) is clipped from mechanism or mechanical and covers machines in general; for giant robot series, robotto anime is the common phrase.

More genre words from streaming menus

Most remaining genre names are loanwords, so the challenge is the katakana sound, not the meaning. A few are kanji words worth learning for everyday use.

Saying what you like and asking for recommendations

The pattern is simple: genre or title, then ga suki desu. Hamatte imasu, literally I have fallen in, means you are hooked right now. All the lines below are polite enough for a classmate, a colleague or a language exchange partner.

With friends, drop desu and masu: isekai mono ga suki, saikin nani mite ru? Keep the polite forms with anyone you have just met.

Three words that make you sound like a fan

A few production words come up in every anime conversation. Gensaku (原作) is the original work, usually the manga or novel a series is based on. Anime-ka (アニメ化) is being made into an anime. Sakuhin (作品) is the neutral word for a title or a work, more natural than repeating anime every time.