The postwar emergence of manga and anime as mass media directed at children emphasized the importance of shōjo and shōnen (boys and girls) characters that encouraged its targeted audience to achieve easy identification. As teenagers gradually became the intended key audience, an increasing range of imagined lives were displayed in these visual narratives. From the late 1950s onwards, popular culture and related merchandizing focused on the teen years as an idealized time period that eventually became viewed less as a period of transition than an end in itself. Over the last thirty years the teen years in Japan have become less a time of preparation for the adult world than an apogee that can only be followed by a decline into the confining expectations of career and family during the remaining decades of life.

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