Bishounen and Bishoujo - Meaning in Japanese

In many anime there are characters known to be bishounen 美少年 or bishoujo 美少女. Many times, the only quality of these bishounen and bishoujo characters is to be... well, a bishounen or a bishoujo. But what do these words mean again?

Looking at it by the kanji, we can separate 美少年 and 美少年 into 美 followed by shounen 少年 and shoujo 少女, which mean "boy" and "girl" respectively. The bi 美 kanji here means "beauty." This 美 is the same as the one in the word utskushii 美しい, "beautiful."

Bishounen means "beautiful boy."  Bishoujo means "beautiful girl." Very literally and very directly. We could end the post here, now, if only beautiful meant the same thing always.

Young and Beautiful

When we say beautiful girls and beautiful boys there's an emphasis that we're talking about young people here. The 少 kanji in 少年 and 少女 means "little," and shounen and shoujo are literally "few years" and "little woman"  in Japanese.

So, most of the time, bishoujo characters in anime, bishoujo girls, are portrayed as flat-chested, younger, cuter, and full of glee. Similarly, bishounen characters in anime, bishounen boys, have lean physique, never too muscular and never, ever, ever have beards, of whatever kind.

Both bishounen and bishoujo characters are awfully popular inside the anime, specially characters in a highschool setting.

The words bishounen and bishoujo really just mean beautiful. Like a beautiful starry sky, a beautiful scenery, or a beautiful work of art. They have nothing to do with sensual, sexual or sexy in any way or form.

Synoyms

Some related terms have more or less the same meaning as bishounen and bishoujo because they share the kanji 美. Those are:

Bijin 美人

Literally "beautiful person," as hito 人 means "people."

However, bijin is usually used as a way to say "beautiful women" in Japanese. Simply because it's more common to call women beautiful than it is to call men beautiful.

Bijo 美女

Since shoujo 少女 means "girl" and onna 女 means "woman," bijo 美女 is the woman version of bishoujo 美少女. That is, it's often used for older, adult-ier women, but not old women, just not too young women either.

Unlike bijin, bijo puts emphasis on the woman attributes (oppai!) of the woman.

Bimajo 美魔女

This word is like bijo, but comes from the word majo 魔女 instead of onna 女, which means "witch" in Japanese.

This isn't used for beautiful witches, which by the way don't exist, but instead, for older women who look too young for their age and are beautiful like your usual bijo.

(do not mistake mahou 魔法, which means "magic," with keisei shujutsu 形成手術 that means "plastic surgery" in Japanese)

Beautiful Men

Some words used for men that mean beautiful are:

• bidanshi 美男子
  Beautiful young man.
• binan 美男
  Beautiful man.
• biseinen 美青年
  Beautiful adult man
• ikemen イケメン
  Rather difficult to translate.

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