Otaku: Japan's Database Animals (review)

The art and artifacts exhibition, "Little Boy," held at the Japan Center in New York in 2005 and curated by the artist Takahashi Murakami, detailed some of the milestones of otaku culture. The anime cartoons Akira and Neon Evangelion! Personified chara advertising characters! Gojiro, a.k.a. Godzilla! It also demonstrated these cultural phenomena's influence upon notable Japanese visual artists under 50 years of age, with examples of their works.

What, or who, are otaku? They're nerdy young men, socially challenged and obsessed with popular culture. Yet the successful globalization of anime and manga tropes (noticeable in the enthusiasm for them among my own mid-American undergraduate art students) have positioned and elevated otaku as early adopters and innovators. Hiroki Azuma's intriguing book delivers Japanese applications of postmodernist theory to this population. There's a philosophical meaning behind antenna-hair and floppy socks on disturbingly sexy young cartoon "database animals" that appear in various novel games in Japan's cyberspace. "Hyperflatness," the concept with which Murakami has explained the style of his and his contemporaries' Pop paintings, is aptly applied by Azuma to computer screen design as well.

Azuma's concept of the database is that of a continually shifting authorship of moe (distinct fan-favorite elements, often yanked out of context) taken from "the grand non-narrative" of otaku stories in various media. Sometimes these are rewritten and reassembled by the original authors—including computer game designers—or sometimes by the fans themselves. Authority and authorization; derivation, variation and vision; official and bootleg versions all have been blurred in this cultural stew called the database—but what does the otaku care, as long as he's entertained and the fun keeps coming? Azuma applies Jean Baudrillard's procession of the simulacra, from imitation to something weirdly sui generis, to the database. Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is also cited as a historical precedent of this analysis, especially in noting the disappearance of the "aura" of a unique artwork (weird momentary reverie: I want to see a lifelike Walter Benjamin Japanese robot, perhaps unpacking and repacking his library of manga in a busy department store). Yet it is Azuma's provocative application of the ideas of Alexandre Kojève that is most interesting. Kojève described a posthistorical realm where material issues of survival have been overcome, which thus allows finicky attention to the aesthetic realm. While Kojève speculated that post-World War II America (where hamburgers sizzle on an open grill night and day) was this slightly effete promised land, Azuma argues that the otaku's Japan circa Y2K fulfills the posthistorical utopia most appropriately.

The appropriately brief and thoughtful book, with its screenshots and theoretical diagrams, is worthy of multiple readings. The translators, Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono, have been conscientious and thorough in providing an introduction that establishes the context of Azuma's work, as well as endnotes of particular subtlety, pointing out shadings of interpretation within the Japanese language. Not having visited Japan since 2002, I am quite happy to have Hiroki Azuma's 2001 appraisal of his nation's cyberscape and happily anticipate (especially if put into English by these scholarly translators) more of the Japanese cultural critic's subsequent writings. Perhaps I await them with an eagerness that could be called otaku-like.