Established in the United States in the 1930s, Esquire and GQ were the first magazines to be designed with a male audience in mind. Subsequently, other nations in the West began to follow this trend and men's magazines were established in various other western nations; this development followed different paths and consequently had different outcomes. The concept of masculinity being constructed and presented in men's fashion magazines increasingly seems to be the work of global capitalist agents reconfiguring, reshaping, and redefining the concepts of masculinity and what masculine bodies should resemble (Iwabuchi 2002; Tam et al. 2009). The recent rise in popularity of men's fashion has undoubtedly accelerated the commercialization of so-called masculine male bodies in the East Asian region, following a historical trajectory similar to the West's (Tanaka 2003). The year 1954 oversaw the establishment of the first men's fashion magazine in Asia; Men's Club was established that year in Japan. Since 1954, many more men's fashion magazines have been added to the Japanese market. Though Japanese men's fashion magazines were the first of their kind to emerge in Asia, it still remains an ambiguous category. While magazines exist that target fashion-conscious and fashion-forward males, magazines that solely target females are always defined by the gender of their readership and are referred to as “women's magazines.” When Black and Coward examined in 1990 the emergence of men's fashion magazines as a subcategory of women's magazines, they suggested that magazine publishers took such action to enable males to be able to represent themselves as non-gendered; magazines targeting men were classified on the basis of content, while those targeting women were classified by gender. This theory is seemingly in line with previous critical analyses that ultimately confront the status of the establishment of masculinity and images of the male as the norm, from which images of women and femininity deviate (Tanaka 2003).