A pile of discs stacked in one’s own room, the pleasure of a collection shown to no one, a mouth that will not stop once the favourite subject comes up. There is a breed peculiar to this country, looked on with strange eyes by society and in time named with pride around the world.

Otaku denotes people deeply devoted to fields of hobby such as anime, manga, games, and idols, absorbed in specialist knowledge and collection. Born as a slur, it reversed its meaning over nearly half a century into a self-designation and a term of pride, and now passes as the international word “otaku,” a symbol of Japanese pop culture.

Etymology

The starting point was the column “A Study of Otaku” that the columnist Nakamori Akio ran in 1983 in the magazine Manga Burikko. Nakamori noticed that anime fans, participants in doujinshi markets, and railway enthusiasts addressed one another with the second-person pronoun otaku (your house), and used the word to mock their manner. The editor at the time was Otsuka Eiji, and the column was cut short after reader backlash. The naming was an act of typing a particular group from outside, carrying a discriminatory implication from the start.

Stigmatisation

The word spread nationwide and was decisively marked with a negative image in 1989. When a man arrested for a series of murders of young girls was found to have a room piled with videotapes, and his subscription to anime magazines and attendance at doujinshi markets was widely reported, “otaku” came to be spoken of in connection with bizarre crime. Through this coverage, a negative social stereotype formed against anime and manga hobbies themselves. For some time after, “otaku” functioned as a word inseparable from prejudice, “gloomy,” “unclean,” “communicatively impaired,” and an atmosphere long persisted in which those concerned hesitated to declare their hobbies.

Internationalisation and the reversal of meaning

From the late 1990s, as Japanese anime and games were received in earnest abroad, the situation changed. In the English-speaking world, “otaku” began to be used positively as a self-designation by fans devoted to Japanese pop culture. At home, through the active redefinition of “otaku” by figures such as Okada Toshio and the accumulation of critical discourse represented by Azuma Hiroki’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (2001), otaku were repositioned as bearers of the leading edge of consumer culture. In the 2000s, with the Densha Otoko boom and the visibility of Akihabara culture, “otaku” were recognised commercially as a core consumer base of the subculture market, and the word reversed into a value-neutral or positive term, referenced even in the government’s “Cool Japan” policy.

Contact with sexual culture

Otaku culture has been bound to sexual representation from its starting point. At doujinshi markets, adult creative work forms a major genre, and the bishoujo game (eroge) developed as one of the basic media supporting otaku culture. Saito Tamaki’s The Psychoanalysis of the Fighting Beautiful Girl (2000) analysed psychoanalytically the structure by which otaku desire turns toward fictional characters, placing the two-dimensional character as a sexual object on the table of academic discussion. Practices such as cosplay, figure collecting, and attachment to characters (moe) shape the bodily and material breadth of otaku culture while crossing the boundary between the sexual and the non-sexual.

The mode peculiar to otaku culture, directing sexual desire toward fictional characters, has been an object of debate as a form of desire that passes by no living other. Some criticise it as flight from real relationships; others affirm it as a new form in which the object of desire can be freely designed. Either way, sexual representation and otaku culture are inseparably bound from the start, and the two cannot be discussed apart.

Orthography and nuance

The implication shifts subtly by writing: the hiragana otaku carries the context of Nakamori’s original coinage, the katakana otaku a more neutral and general usage, and the wotaku spelling a net-born self-mocking and affectionate usage. Abbreviated as wota, it is subdivided by field, as in “anime-wota” or “idol-wota.” In recent years it has connected with the oshi (favourite-supporting) culture that affirms devotion to a particular field, and being an “otaku” is increasingly spoken of as proof of enthusiasm. The trajectory of a word born as a slur turning, over half a century, into a word that carries the value of devotion mirrors the changing social place of subculture itself.

See also

• Doujinshi
• Bishoujo game
• Coupling (CP)