"I Believed in Otaking"

So what IS an otaku? According to Shin-Ichi Karasawa in the recently-released Otaku Ron! ("A Theory of Otaku"), it's "someone who has become so interested in a given topic that they aren't interested in meeting other people or participating in society." For co-author and offical nerd curmudgeon Toshio Okada, it's "someone who only makes contact with the outside world for the express purpose of furthering their hobbies." (They left out the third potential definition: anyone who blogs about reading this book.)

Collected from a monthly column that runs just a few pages away from the USA Otackers in Figure Oh magazine, Otaku Ron! is the latest in a seemingly endless parade of books on the same topic. It's a follow-up to Okada's mildly controversial and grammatically questionable "Otaku is Dead" campaign of a few years back. (You can read a soulful ode written by a proponent here.) But whether you agree with him or not, there's no question about just how splintered the Japanese geek community has become in recent years. Okada and Karasawa's comments and complaints synch near perfectly with those of my own circle of thirty- and fortysomething pals after they've had a couple of drinks.

I just don't get these ero-ge playing, gashapon-collecting, cosplaying, maid-cafe-patronizing kids anymore, they say. The internet has made it so easy to zero in on others with your own interests that we've raised a generation of nerds mired in their own tiny spheres of influence. Fans of a given genre use information technologies to surround themselves with like-minded people in impentrable cliques. The thought of a broader society beyond their own tiny subculture never occurs to them. Call it the "otaku singularity" worldview.

It wasn't like this back in the golden age, they continue, thumping their glasses of shochu on the countertop for empahsis. Otaku of different stripes hung out together (thunk)! There was an exchange of ideas (thunk)! The military otaku and PC otaku and anime otaku and Gun-pla otaku all shared ideas, created things they wouldn't have been able to do on their own. It was like... like... an otaku utopia! That's why this new generation won't ever amount to anything (thunk)! And waitress, we need another bottle over here! Hey, anyone mind if I finish that yakitori?

Not having lived in Japan during the "Otaku 1.0" era (late '70s - late '80s), it's tough for me to tell how much of this idyllic "cross-pollination" really happened on a regular basis. But it's a seductive image and one mirrored in Okada's autobiographical film Otaku no Video, in which a house full of freaks with wildly different interests pools their talents to launch their own company.

The really ironic thing here is that to a lot of people, Evangelion, an anime created by the company Okada helped found, signalled the fundamental shift from the science-fiction-centric operatic storytelling that defined the high points of "old-school" anime and tokusatsu to the inwardly-focused, repressed sexuality of the moe era. It's as though the older otaku are victims of their own success; at one point Karasawa even muses that "these days, if you define otaku simply as 'someone who watches anime,' you're describing half of the people on the planet."

Only time will tell if the moe crowd is truly less collaborative and creative than their otaku predecessors. Even though a great many recent Japanese pop culture trends leave me cold, I find it hard to believe. But one thing is clear: the torch has been passed to a new generation, and nobody can quite figure out where those damn kids are running with it.

Comments

[Dan Hager]

In high school, I hung out with a bunch of nerds. That meant a fairly diverse, yet still vanilla bunch of misfits with varying degrees of social skill. Anime, AD&D, video games, comics, SF/fantasy movies and books were our common ground. There were just so many topics we didn't, or couldn't discuss: lousy home situations, sexual orientation, why popularity, class and race divided our school, acne and obesity. Escapism attracts people for whom life looks like a prison. Maybe anime saved my life, in a way. Any discussion about otaku, nerds, or whatever has to start with the people themselves, and not the stuff they obsess about. And what about class and race? I'm just talking about thinking about otaku as if they are members of the human race, like everyone else, even if it breaks the nerd commandment: thou shalt not talk about personal stuff.

[wildarmsheero]

I think that the otaku of today have something of a creative spark. I'm not sure how collaborative of an effort it is, but that spirit of creation is there. Just take a look at all the doujin events there are. It's no longer restricted to books either-- there are doujin games, doujin music and things like garage kits. Take the Touhou series for instance, that's one the most eleborate doujin projects ever, I think (sadly, I don't know too much about it outside of IOSYS's CDs and Flash animations. I have played some of the original games, too)

Some of these guys are even making their way into the industry. A number of popular doujin artists usually end going into manga professionally, or are hired by companies to do character designs. Recently a series of doujin games, Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni was adapted into a 26 episode TV anime.

Of course, I'm not actually there (I live in America) but I speak to people who are and visit a number of websites regarding things such as this. I don't know how they stack up against the first generation of otaku, and I don't know much I'm romanticizing them, but I'm sure they all don't sit on their butts doing nothing but watching Precure.

[Matt]

It's not as though Karasawa and Okada (or my pals) really believe moe fans are incapable of creativity. No doubt there's more than a little of the rose-tinted glasses and "when I went to school, I had to walk uphill both ways" sort of flavor to the comments made by Otaku 1.0. It's more about a sense of a "graduation."

Otaku 2.0 enjoy their hobbies in such different forms from the first generation of otaku that it's becoming easier and easier for old-schoolers to say "I don't get it, and I don't feel the need to even try to get it" about new trends. Whereas once it was possible (and even neccesary) to try and follow every new thread.

At its most fundamental level I don't see this as criticism at all but rather an attempt to come to terms with "growing up": middle age is smacking a lot of these perpetual man-children in the face and they're starting to pay the price for lifetimes spent inhaling garage-kit resin fumes, pulling anime all-nighters, and consuming nothing but Dennys for years on end. ("My otaku friends have started dying off," remarks Karasawa at the beginning of one chapter.)

[Mr.Dandy]

Back in the early 90s I was in college, and I attended the first several Anime Expos in California (San Jose, Oakland). Back then anime fans were, almost to a soul, college aged people. Anime wasn't shown on every channel back then, and there were very few translated manga. It took some money, resourcefulness, and an interest in the obscure to know what anime even was, let alone hunt it down and buy it, and the related paraphenalia.

Fast forward to about 3 years ago, after I'd gotten myself established in the somewhat related field of toys. When I came back to the AX to peddle my wares in the artist alley, I was in for a shocker. I had gotten 10 years older, and the fans all got about 10 years younger. Clearly the saturation of anime on the airwaves, and the aesthetic in general on art and design made it far more accessible and appealing to the younger set.

But also, it does seem that these kids are far more focused in their interests. There was a lot of cross-polination in the stuff offered in the old dealer's hall-- you could find samurai swords, Atari games, Blade Runner props, anime-ish comics, resin kits of all stripes, and some stuff that was just unclassifiably cool. My best finds were always the things I didn't know I was looking for..! These days, a kid comes looking for a shitajiki of Rurouni Kenshin, but wearing the blue shirt, not the red.

I dunno, maybe these new kids are the real otaku?

[Steve Harrison]

I am at that bar. I am one of those people.

I'm not at all sure the NueFen have the energy, with their "I want it for free!" attitude, to be the next creators.

[Strawberry]

I don't really agree. I'm part of the older gang from the otaku 2.0, so to speak. From my point of view I'm seeing something completely different. I'm located in Sweden, as far away from any major otaku area as you would probably get. We had two major problems in our area (Sweden) 1. we had to expensively import stuff from America and 2. nearly only guys where interested. With the otaku 2.0 it shifted, there are lots (maybe more then guys) of girls reading manga, the entire japan otaku scen shifted from men to women being the driving forces and we now have more then 44(!) different manga titles translated to Swedish in just under 6 years! What I'm seeing is the market here is going from passive, we'll take what we get, to active where they demand specific titles. The different groups are to small to survive on their own, so they use the Internet to connect with each other and cosplayers, gamers, Swedish mangakas, manga readers and anime fans group together geographically in the clubs or cons. So there is plenty of gross pollination going on and what not. You are just not looking in the right place anymore, it's morphed. What I'm really waiting for is what American and European otakus will morph Japanese culture into. I'm starting to see bits of it like yaoi mangakas from Spain and America, and Swedish goth culture remaking gotic lolita.

I really enjoy your blogg! Keep it up. ^_^

[Matt]

I notice a lot of non-Japanese fans seem to be taking Otaku Ron's comments personally, but it's important to remember that Karasawa and Okada are talking purely about domestic Japanese otaku here. The Japanese and foreign otaku experiences are quite different; the former created the subculture, whereas the latter mimic it, so it's really almost an apples and oranges situation.

I think the place where the two diverge most strongly is in a desire for attention. Most Japanese otaku tend to prefer anonymity, to remain in the shadows. It's often quite hard to get them to go on camera or on record; Patrick Macias mentioned that many of them covered their faces and refused interviews when his Tokyo Eye crew approached them at WonderFest earlier this year. Many foreign otaku, on the other hand, seem to crave and in some cases even demand personal recognition; it's more of a social scene. It's an interesting divide.