Mama is My Rival (1972-): Shōjo manga and television depict the "fluctuating relationship between the home and women" (1970s)

Mama is My Rival (1972-): Shōjo manga and television depict the "fluctuating relationship between the home and women" (1970s)

Mama is My Rival" is based on a girls' manga by Yoko Chutsu and Mamoru Sasaki, which was dramatized from 1972 to 1973 for Daiei Television and TBS. The story revolves around the rivalry between Jun Saotome, a high school girl, and Mari Aomi, a transfer student who moved to Tokyo to marry her father. The extreme setting of a mother and daughter competing over the same man as classmates was not merely a comedy, but also symbolized the shaking of "women's roles" in society at the time. The images of mothers and families were rapidly changing due to the spread of the women's lib movement and the shift to nuclear families. Shōjo manga sensitively captured these changes, and developed into "emotional literature" in which young women considered their feelings, desires, and future as their own. At the root of "Mama is My Rival" is the viewpoint that both mothers and daughters are not "bound by the roles of the family" and that they can struggle as one woman. The popularity of the dr
ama version was also due in large part to the fact that television at the time tended to portray family discrepancies and intergenerational friction with a sense of humor, and the restructuring of the family system and women's search for independence that society was facing in the 1970s was reflected in popular culture in a light-hearted manner through this work.