shota ショタ

Have you ever done 70% of the things for the sake of completeness? Anyway, here's the meaning of the word "shota" in Japanese.

Definition

A "shota" is a "little young boy" character in manga and anime. Most things worthy of note are in the female counterpart of "shota" so I'm not going to write them again here.

Female Shota

The word "shota" can only be used for boys. The term loli is used to refer to girls.

Trap Shota

A character that's a trap shota, cross-dresser, gender-ambiguous, etc. is still considered a shota, never a loli. Even Hideyoshi is not a loli.

Shota vs. Shotacon

The words shota and shotacon are not the same thing, even though some people assume one is the abbreviation of the other. The difference is that shota is a boy, while shotacon refers to hentai pornography featuring these boy characters (yes, really). In Japan, a shotacon is also synonymous with a "pedophile" who goes after boys.

Written in Japanese

The word shota in Japanese is, well, shota ショタ. This word doesn't have kanji, so it's normally written with katakana.

Syota

The word syota ショタ is the same thing as shota ショタ, the only difference is the romaji system used to get the romaji of the word. The word shota uses Hepburn, made for westerns, while syota uses Kunrei-shiki, made for Japanese people. So syota is probably only written by someone who's Japanese.

Appearance & Age

Because anime, there's no age requirement for a character to be considered a shota. Since there are characters who are actually hundreds of years old but look like little boys, or transform into little boys, or whatever. The requirement is purely from appearance.

And this was all written in the post about lolis anyway so go check that.

See types of shota for specific terms of appearance variants.

Origin

The term "shota," or shota ショタ, comes from the term shotakon ショタコン, or "shotacon, " which was born when someone tried to make a word like lolicon, which comes from Lolita Complex, the Lolita being the name of a character, with the name of a male character called Shoutarou instead. So Shoutarou Complex is Shotacon, and Shota is an abbreviation of Shoutarou.

This Shoutarou character in question is the one from the 1980 anime Tetsujin Ni-juu-hachi-gou 鉄人28号.

Character Kaneda Shoutarou 金田正太郎 from anime Tetsujin 28-gou 鉄人28号, comparison between 1960 and 1980 anime designs.

Because Shoutarou wore short pants and white socks, it's been historically inferred that whether short pants and white socks suit a character or not defines whether the character is a shota. (of course, nobody seriously cares about this rule)

Shouta-kun

Besides the original Shoutarou, there are a number of shota characters in manga and anime who are called Shouta-kun because their names are either Shoutarou or Shouta or something.

This is (probably) purely coincidental. Those are real Japanese animes, so it's not unusual for anime characters to have them. However, sometimes it does look like the name was chosen on purpose.

For example, in Kobayashi-san Chi no Maid Dragon, most characters seem to be design purely for the sake of fulfilling a given anime trope. Specifically, Lucoa appears to be paired with a shota character solely for the sake of creating an oneshota scenario. And the name of this shota character ends up being Shouta. Coincidence? I think not.

Types of Shota

For types of shota characters, see Types of Loli & Shota.

For terms for pairings in fanfic and doujinshi, see oneshota おねショタ.