Renowned battle shonen JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure has been published for almost forty years. For all that time, JoJo only afforded a marginal part to women in its narrative. One quote from series creator Hiroiko Araki, however, raises questions about the forces at play behind that.

With the recent animation of Stone Ocean, the first JoJo part featuring a female protagonist, it’s worth analyzing the history of Araki and JoJo’s navigation of women characters. JoJo now has nine parts, each with independent themes, settings, and protagonists (all of the Joestar bloodline). With every new iteration of the series, creator Hirohiko Araki develops (and occasionally revises) what has been established in preceding parts, weaving an expansive narrative forever both familiar and fresh.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Doesn’t Have Many Women Early On

Social Pressures And Araki’s Own Work Prevented Women JoJo Characters

In a 2021 interview with SPUR entitled “JoJo’s Bizarre Heroines”, Araki discusses women’s presence in the series:

Of course, I’ll always have a place in my heart for Jolyne. It was thanks to her that I was finally able to depict violent scenes, such as women getting punched in the face, and people having their arms cut off. Prior to then, that wasn’t something I could easily get away with.

Before JoJo, I drew Gorgeous Irene (1985), a series that also featured a female main protagonist. Nowadays, there’s a lot of works that feature women fighting, but back then that wasn’t something possible to do in a shonen magazine. So, I gave up on it and decided not to make it a full-length series.

The first JoJo part Phantom Blood set a standard for JoJo characters which would prove borderline inescapable. It emerged from the hypermasculinity of the 1980s. Primary influences for Araki included Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and manga like Fist of the North Star. Hamon was the combat system for Phantom Blood and the following part, Battle Tendency. Against vampires with superhuman strength, Hamon was conceived as their solar-powered counter. It was practiced through a combination of breath control and bodily manipulation, a system built for hand-to-hand combat and predicated on raw physical prowess.

There would be only one prominent Hamon-using woman: Battle Tendency‘s Lisa Lisa, who serves as a mentor to protagonist Joseph Joestar and his companion, Caesar Zeppeli. Eventually, she is revealed to be Joseph’s mother. In other words, Lisa Lisa’s prowess with Hamon would be explained through JoJo‘s overarching logic of bloodlines and heritable potential. This recuperation allows her to be present within a domain meant for men.

This is part of a double bind that prevented Araki from prominently featuring women without troping them as “damsels in distress” and the like. JoJo’s combat was designed for men with bodybuilder physiques; women were excluded by default. This doesn’t mean that, although limited, JoJo’s early representation of women was all bad; Erina’s presentation in Phantom Blood is laudable for realistically reflecting the period’s expectations of women while also making her defiant and self-sufficient. Nonetheless, characters were defined by gendered expectations — for which Lisa Lisa served as the exception that proved, rather than transgressed, the rule.

The other component of the double bind was his readership. In a 2021 interview with Billboard Japan, Araki was unwilling to simply say that “changing times” were the reason he would be able to later create characters like Jolyne. He instead qualified it by explaining his own position as a mangaka:

It could have been the times. Shonen Jump readers stopped caring if we used female characters. Before, they would have outright rejected them and if a character got rejected, the series was basically over. That type of thing was still prevalent in 1980s Japan, but now Shonen manga is starting to reflect the current social climate and how we view gender. In Part 3, I really wanted to include a girl.

In part 3, Stardust Crusaders, Araki would create Stands, an innovation that would drastically change JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. This would involve a series of intentional and unintentional changes. All told, the shift would make it possible to imagine far more complex gender dynamics within JoJo.

Stands Made New Characters Possible

Stands Gave JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Room To Grow

Stands are soul manifestations that provide unique abilities to those who possess them. They offered a counterpoint to Hamon’s strictly defined mechanics by allowing a more-or-less infinite range of powers to be manifested by virtually any living being. Their introduction would lead to a massive shift in storytelling, world-building, and characterization within the series.

To a certain extent, this change was intentional. Araki moved from Hamon to Stands out of necessity, having hit a wall with the former. He was also aware that Stands allowed for a broader cast. In a 2006 interview accompanying Phantom Blood‘s video game adaptation, he described the shift from Hamon (“Ripples”) to Stands:

I had a meeting [where] I was asked, “What are you going to do next? You can’t use the Ripple anymore.” But when I said, “Well, a punch comes out of here (referring to the front of the body) and breaks stuff,” they’d be confused and wouldn’t understand me. So I was like, how should I say this…? “Well, there’s a thing like a guardian spirit and…it comes out and attacks.” That’s how I explained what the new ability would be and nobody would understand what I was on about. […] Unlike the ripple, I can do lots of variations. […] Stands gave me alot of trouble when it came to explaining them, but I really felt that I could keep inventing new characters and ideas this way forever. It was like I dug up a gold mine. No one else thought it was gold, but I was like “Wow, look what I dug up!”

The transition from outer to inner power enabled Araki to write characters who were less brawny and masculine. This was complemented by changes to JoJo’s overarching story. Stardust Crusaders developed something Battle Tendency had started: battles based around strategic outplays and tactical dominance. With Diamond is Unbreakable, battles also start to become localized and spontaneous, even when they loosely serve an antagonist. This allows women like Yukako Yamagishi to appear naturally in the story. Their placements become more interesting, too, because they no longer need to be seduced by DIO or related to a Joestar to justify their own presence.

Although Stands made it possible for characters to be less masculine, Stardust Crusaders was still defined by its super-buff cast. Characters like Rohan Kishibe and Koichi Hirose in Diamond is Unbreakable broke from this mold, but the towering Josuke Higashikata, lovable buffoon Okuyasu Nijimura, and returning titan Jotaro Kujo were the part’s pivots. In Golden Wind, Araki shifted focus to depicting “beautiful men” (0:50 in the video below), and he moved toward a more lifelike and notably androgynous cast.

Stardust Crusaders, and Stands themselves, were immensely influential for shōnen; Araki wasn’t immune to his own influence. By pushing the boundaries of what characters he could draw, he gradually used the mechanical space he had opened with Stands to help the public imagine other kinds of shōnen characters. This would gradually permit a JoJo part featuring a woman protagonist and taking place in a women’s prison — even though in early JoJo this would be both mechanically unthinkable and commercially unviable.

Araki’s Depiction of Women Characters Can Be Controversial

The Author Has Shown Signs of Progressive Evolution Over the Years

Perhaps without even realizing it, through the culmination of intentional efforts, external pressures, and accidental opportunities, Araki both restricted himself in early JoJo and forged a path to break those self-imposed restrictions. A follow-up question is raised: how has he taken advantage of that opportunity? Araki’s willingness to contest gender norms has been commendable, but far from immune to criticism.

Despite good intentions, many gaps remain for JoJo’s presentation of women. An early example is Reimi Sugimoto’s introduction in Diamond is Unbreakable, a ghost who was murdered by the part’s primary antagonist, Yoshikage Kira. After using his stand to read her history, Rohan Kishibe dictates intimate details of her life and body, like the mole above one of her breasts.

While it could be played off as comic relief pandering to the shōnen audience, this viewpoint appears more insidious when put alongside moments like Jojolion‘s chapter #25, “Paper Moon Deception, Part 3”. Yasuho Hirose falls under the sway of the Stand Paper Moon King and is sexually assaulted twice. On one hand, it could be read as an earnest critique of a predatory culture. On the other, it becomes important to ask whether the depiction is necessary, what it accomplishes narratively, and how moments like Reimi’s objectification contribute to that culture.

In Stone Ocean‘s first bunkoban, Araki positions Jolyne’s perspective as one of a girl who must save her father after being denied his love:

She has lived in Florida since she was a little girl. Her father was very busy in Morioh back then, so she longed for his affection above all. But she would spend her entire childhood without a father. Despite her tough and cool bloodline, she somehow found herself going down a path filled with anxiety. All she ever received from her mother was nagging. When she fell in love with a boy, Jolyne came to believe in her boyfriend’s love. From him she received the love and trust that her father never gave her. But that feeling of love dragged Jolyne into a world of misery. Can Jolyne unravel the thread that binds her and escape that place?

The trope of a lost girl denied masculine validation is time-tested, but still just that: a trope. After admitting that, delicacy and care are what make the difference. The overall idea that a woman becomes tough in response to a lack or insufficiency, while male protagonists become tough in and of themselves, is sufficient to at least raise eyebrows.

When one looks at the aged Erina in Battle Tendency, who has become a headstrong and loyal elderly woman, it’s clear that there are many ways to fascinatingly depict women. When it comes to gendered expectations, subverting them and leaning into them can both offer productive routes to write strong women in new ways and from new perspectives.

Notably, Araki has made an effort to write characters who defy expectations of how men or women should behave, be, and look. One example is his introduction of a character who is either transgender or non-binary in part 9 The JOJOLands: Dragona Joestar. Dragona’s introduction has already allowed Araki to broach the uncomfortable realities of feminine presentation, including when it is incongruent with one’s gender assigned at birth.

Speaking with Eureka in 2007, also, Araki confirmed that Steel Ball Run‘s character Hotpants binds her breasts in order to appear more masculine. This play with gender recasts what are otherwise questionable changes. For example, Stone Ocean‘s Anasui conspicuously and notoriously moves from a design that communicates an overtly feminine female to a very androgynous male.

While not immune to criticism, Araki has shown a willingness to depict characters in new ways. This doesn’t exclude women, even if readers can still find certain biases and expectations in his work if they want to. At the same time, elements of his depictions, as well as his unceasing determination to contest gender norms, are noble and noteworthy. His track record demonstrates open-mindedness and a desire to improve, making JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure a more compelling — and welcoming — series for every reader.