was one of the first shōjo

Shojo

The term refers to manga marketed to a female audience roughly between the ages of 10-18. The name romanizes the Japanese 少女 , literally: "little female". Shōjo manga covers many subjects in a variety of narrative and graphic styles, from historical drama to science fiction — often with a strong...

magazine

Magazine

Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...

s in Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

. It was published by Hakubunkan

Hakubunkan

is a Japanese publishing company founded in 1887 amidst the wealth and military prosperity of the Meiji era. Hakubunkan entered the publishing arena by printing a nationalist magazine as well as expanding into printing, advertising, paper manufacturing, and related businesses, becoming one of...

 beginning in 1906 and was initially edited by renowned children’s author , better known by the pen name . Shōjo Sekai was created as a sister magazine to , which was also edited by Iwaya, and which began publication in 1895.

According to Kiyoko Nagai, for the first ten years of its publication it was the best-selling shōjo magazine of the time, with peak circulations somewhere between 150,000 to 200,000 copies per issue.

The final issue of Shōjo Sekai was the December 1931 issue.

Contributors

Shōjo Sekai had a number of well known contributors over the years, including the following:

• Sazanami Iwaya (:ja:巌谷小波), author, children's author, editor, publisher
• Yasunari Kawabata
  Yasunari Kawabata
  was a Japanese short story writer and novelist whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award...
  
  , novelist and short story author
• Chiyo Kitagawa , children's author
• Tama Morita
  Tama Morita
  was a Japanese essayist whose books were quite popular in Japan around World War II. She later served as a member of the House of Councillors in 1962.- Early life :...
  
  , essayist
• Midori Osaki (:ja:尾崎翠), novelist
• Kikuko Oshima , author
• Akiko Yosano, poet, feminist, pacifist, and social reformer