Introduction: New Formulations of the Otaku

. . . but additionally, there was also information that was important to making sure of our fellow feeling. That was more of a topic than knowledge for the sake of social life. Yes: that is, the knowledge we obtained from TV, radio, shōnen magazines, manga and such. From there we obtained topics for discussion, we discovered methods of making our play more interesting, and we experienced the aura of the metropolis.

—Yonezawa Yoshiro and Shikijō Kyōtarō, Gindama sensō no hibi

In Andrea Horbinski’s translation of a chapter from 2B-dan: Gindama sensō no hibi (Squad 2B: The days of the silver ball gun wars) by Yonezawa Yoshihiro and Shikijō Kyōtarō we see the beginning of a new world, Japan in the 1950s. This was a world only recently separated from the regimented society of World War II Japan where young boys coming of age would be facing military service rather than experiencing the joys of “play.” In the new postwar Japan information and knowledge were not necessarily related to school, current events, or military prowess, but rather to the creation of “fellow feeling,” the dawning sense of being a special community. This community was young and the knowledge they were gaining from the varieties of new media around them helped them reject older authority. As the authors put it, “To outsmart all the adults together, we had to grasp that information tightly.”

Seventy years later, that generation are now elderly adults who have themselves been supplemented by several waves of young people who share the special “fellow feeling” of being part of this community. At the same time, the community itself has expanded across cultures and nations, diversified across gender and race as it also became a significant component of late capitalism, became more publicly known and, at some moments, more controversial. What has not changed perhaps are two foundational elements: the love of knowledge and information that created a specialized cultural capital and the love of getting ones’ hands on tangible and intangible) links to this knowledge, such as model kits, T-shirts, toys, VHS tapes, DVDs, and streaming services.

What is this community? I speak, of course, about the subject of this issue—the “otaku” and their close relative, the “fan.”

What is an “otaku?” For the Japanese the word “otaku,” originally a term of address, took on a pejorative taint in the 1980s, indicating someone heavily into manga, anime, and other pursuits that seemed slightly weird to mainstream society. Then came the late 1980s, with the infamous “Miyazaki Incident” in which news photos of the apartment of Miyazaki Tsutomu, a man who had murdered six little girls consistently highlighted his apartment apparently littered with pornographic anime and manga. The “Incident” tainted the notion of otaku with oppressively sinister connotations. This changed somewhat in the early twenty-first century with the media sensation Densha Otoko (Train man) book, film, manga, and television series based on a supposedly true story appearing in real time on an internet channel. Densha Otoko celebrated not only the otakudom of its main character, a cute and cuddly guy who actually gets the girl, but also his comrades on 2-channel, ranging from artists to railroad fanatics, who came across as, at worst inoffensive, and at best charming and sweet in their own particular otaku persuasions.

In the West, or at least in English-speaking countries, the word otaku probably first became widely known thanks to the cyberpunk writer William Gibson. In his futuristic novel Idoru, Gibson uses the term otaku in introducing a major character, Masahiko, a young techy in Tokyo. While Gibson translates the otaku as “technofetishist,” Masahiko himself is kind of a techy knight-in-armor, aiding and guiding Idoru’s female protagonist, Chia, in her search for the truth behind what initially seems to be a bizarre internet meme gone wild.

Gibson had spent time in Japan and his association with otaku, idols, the internet, and late capitalist Tokyo turned out to be eerily prescient from the perspective of today’s media-saturated society. It is not technology but fandom that ultimately rescues Chia and Masahiko...