I read a lot of manga in question just kind of suddenly sprung to mind. So much stuff that includes fan service or other forms of sexualization centers around or prominently involved high school girls or girls within that age range.
I would understand if it were like 18 year old seniors but it’s usually not, along with the huge age gaps that are often added on to this like a High School freshman dating a 30-year-old, if someone who likes romcoms it can be hard to avoid.
I often need to ignore the age of the characters just to get through a story, but that can be hard because often they make their age incredibly explicit or even emphasize it as if it is a desirable trait.
So I just found myself wondering why this is the case. Is there like a cultural reason or is it just men being gross?
Comments
Japanese Manga and Anime is extremely popular with highschool boys.
highschool boys also like fan service
The target demographic is teenage boys..
The primary audience of the medium is adolescents, teens, and young adults. Mediums whose primary audience are adolescents, teens, and young adults usually disproportionately feature characters that are adolescents, teens, and young adults. This is consistent across cultures.
They write what sells. You would have to look at the demographics of the audience to know which it is.
The intended target audience are teenage boys and young adults
To get the attention of same or younger age boys.
Why does Peter Parker keep going to high school? Because high schoolers like Spider-Man, and high school girls…
There are definitely cultural reasons I find distasteful, (ex. Literal authentic underaged schoolgirl-worn underwear vending machines. Primary clientele: middle aged men. Not joking.) but you’re also only looking at a looking at a subset.
Manga, light novels, anime are extremely popular among all demographics in Japan. This includes women and girls among many others who obviously do not all fetishise schoolgirls for the male gaze. The media you encounter is sold with horny men and boys in mind.
> Snopes Fact Check
> Claim: Vending machines in Japan offer for sale panties purportedly worn by schoolgirls.
> Status: True.
> Origins: Used underwear that has supposedly been previously worn by schoolgirls is being offered for sale in vending machines in Japan. Though we don’t know the current price for such items, in 1993 they sold for the equivalent of US $50 apiece. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-love-machine/
Edit: added link for people who didn’t believe it.
High school? try middle school
Beyond what others have said, a lot of it has to do with the life expectations of Japanese people. For many, early high school is the time of their life that they were the most free. By the end of high school the people on the salaryman path are beaten down into constant study/work; they don’t have time for club activities or saving the world. The early years of high school are often the best years of their lives, and nostalgia is a big deal.
I don’t watch anime or read manga but I have taught in Japanese schools for about 20 years.
Most of this stuff is aimed at teenagers and young adults in their 20s. That’s why they focus on teenagers and school life so much.
School takes up a huge amount of their time. Many will go to school six days a week and spend a lot of their free time involved with school clubs after school. School is basically their second, if not their first home for the majority of the first 20 years of their lives.
Some boys will develop a thing for sexually mature high school girls during these formative years when they often have little to no chance of actually forming relationships with them. This can continue into adult life and been seen with fetishes for schoolgirl uniforms and stereotypical cute, shy, somewhat immature girls.
…why is young adult fiction obsessed with young adults?
Why are horror movies obsessed with scaring you?
What you’re probably exposed to is shounen which is catered to teens and preteens.
Teen demographic
Sex sells
Even an adult, jaded by life and work, can reminisce about a time they were teenagers, having crushes on their highschool classmates and having fantasies that they would stumble upon the powers to save the world.
Manga is meant to help you revisit that no matter how old you are.
It is as close to legal pedo shit as possible
Because before a lot of japanese artists enter the industry, their only lived life experience to draw from would be school.
Something I noticed between being a teen and being an adult:
Age gaps seem worse to me now. As a teen, a teen dating an adult didn’t seem that weird, because teens being attracted to adults is basically normal. As an ADULT, the idea of dating a teen is horrifying to me, because they’re so incredibly young in comparison.
Books aimed at teens? It’s not going to seem weird to them like it does most adults.
Because one of the primary target demographics for it are high-school boys
To be fair, it wasn’t so long ago that we regularly had American sex comedies and the like coming out on cinemas with nudity of high school characters, sometimes with actors that were below the age of consent *cough* Blue Lagoon, American Beauty *cough*. You can make the argument that in both America and Japan, it’s just to appeal to the core audiences of these types of media, but you just have to look at some of the people working in these industries to see that there’s a lot of creeps working behind the scenes.
Some of the speculative answers by the other commenters here are wrong and tend to be popular memes not backed by empirical evidence. The YouTuber Japanese Guy Yuta presented the polls for older consumers and those who still like high school manga tend to have better memories of their university days, and don’t really idealize high school in particular:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lB9gIv_TsPg&pp=ygUiSmFwYW5lc2UgZ3V5IHl1dGEgbWFuZ2EgaGloIHNjaG9vbA%3D%3D
So the reason is probably a combination of “people just like the fictional setting of high school” and that editorial-wise, there’s some trend setting inertia. It’s a proven formula that’s safe and easy to copy.
And anime girls are popular and idealized and they just happen to be commonly presented in a high school setting.
But it’s not isolated to high school. In this current Spring 2025 season, there are 3 series of the CCGDCT genre (cute anime girls doing cute things) in which one of them is a high school setting, one is in a university, and another has a lead character who is a manga artist and presumably already graduated.
There are all kinds of manga in Japan.
Thousands of new manga are released every year, from big publishers to self-published works.
Many of the most popular manga in Japan are also known overseas, but are Naruto, Dragon Ball, One Piece, and Attack on Titan, for example, obsessed with high school girls? No.
Even Shonen Jump, the world’s best-selling weekly manga magazine, does not have many works that depict high school girls.
I’d presume you read manga which have been translated into English?
For better or worse, most of those series have targeted audiences as young teenage boys or young adult male.
The most popular magazine is Shounen Jump after all. While people of all age and gender can enjoy most series in Shounen Jump, the demographics is most boys in their teens.
Then there is a boom in “isekai” in which the authors just put in whatever self-inserted fantasy they wanted.
Unfortunately, most of them wanted the romance that they never had i.e highschool girls.
There are a large number of manga with other targeted demographic as well, we just don’t see them outside of Japan.
The genre of “Boys Love”/ “BL” / “Yaoi” (what we call them in the West) has a massive, and I do mean MASSIVE, fanbase but once again, we don’t see them unless you actually look.
It’s a stressed county most Japanese feel high school is their happiest time.