“Otaku,” You and I: On Ōtsuka Eiji’s Response to Miyazaki Tsutomu

This article contemplates the continued significance of “the Miyazaki Incident” (formally Tōkyō Saitama renzoku yōjo yūkai satsujin jiken, casually M jiken), or the arrest of a serial murderer and eruption of media discourse in Japan in 1989. Many note the rise of “otaku bashing,” and the repetitive move to relate the murderer Miyazaki Tsutomu to “otaku,” whether connections were affirmed or denied, served to establish associations in the popular imaginary.¹ Despite consensus that this was a pivotal moment in understandings of “otaku,” there are few explorations of specific, situated responses. Moreover, there are those who refuse to forget the Miyazaki Incident and bring it up regularly, insisting that it is crucial for contemporary discussions of “otaku.”

Among these thinkers is Ōtsuka Eiji, a cultural critic as influential as he is controversial. In what he claimed would be his last writing on the topic of “otaku,” Ōtsuka reflects on the Miyazaki Incident, which “splashed cold water onto our wandering, vain thoughts.”² That is to say it ceased waggish “otaku” theorizing, which Ōtsuka himself seeks to do by keeping Miyazaki’s name in mind when speaking that word. This seems to go against the grain of defending manga/anime fans from spurious connections to a monster and asserting that “Miyazaki Tsutomu was entirely exceptional,” or not truly an “otaku.”³ Intriguingly, Ōtsuka went even further in his initial response to the news reports and speculation about Miyazaki, as recorded in a two-part, long-form dialogue with Nakamori Akio published in The Generation of M: Miyazaki and Us (M no sedai: Bokura to Miyazaki-kun, 1989). In their imaginary interactions with and relations to Miyazaki and/as “otaku,” Ōtsuka and Nakamori, key figures in the formation of that term as a label earlier in the decade, suggest an ethics of seeing the other in oneself rather than cutting it off, pushing it away or repressing it.⁴ They go on to propose the possibility of an “ethics of the abandoned,” and an ethics that would not abandon others.⁵

There are hints of something profound here, but also limitations that come with speaking from a particular position and in a particular place and time. If much of the talk around “otaku” ends up as “discourse,” which seeks to “define a historical moment, promote a set of objects, or establish an identity,” then we ought also to be keenly aware of how men have become “hypervisible subjects.” I mean this not only in the sense that men are often writing the histories of manga/anime fandom and hence skewing them toward their moment, objects, and identity, but also that men are often the ones spotlighted and scrutinized as problematic fans following events like the arrest of Miyazaki.⁶ The repetition of these images, interests, and concerns has resulted in severely blinkered views, for example, when a sociological study revealed that a set of non-“otaku” or “normal”-identifying young Japanese in 2005 found it “difficult, if not impossible, to think of ‘otaku’ as women.”⁷ What then of the facts about the early days of anime fandom in Japan in the 1970s—that surviving records suggest that the first club devoted to an anime series was dominated by women, that women were the overwhelming majority of participants at the Comic Market and drove innovation in anime character parody, that animators remember women traveling to visit studios and receiving cels and background art—and that throngs of female fans were more prevalent than ever in 2005?⁸ To those “normal”-identifying Japanese in the sociological study, these women are invisible, impossible “otaku.” This is, of course, not to say that women are not “otaku,” because no one essentially just is or is not. Likewise, the point of the Miyazaki Incident is not whether or not this man was an “otaku,” but rather that he appeared so to some in Japan at the end of the Shōwa era (1926–1989). There are conditioned ways of seeing people as “otaku,” and this needs to be approached carefully and critically.

Nevertheless, the...