Otaku Culture Research Articles

Fandom unbound: otaku culture in a connected world

Fandom unbound: otaku culture in a connected world

Change of Otaku culture in Vocaloid

Change of Otaku culture in Vocaloid

Murakami Takashi and the Hell of Others: Sexual (In)Difference, the Eye, and the Gaze in <i>©Murakami</i>

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)Preface: Otaku 101Otafyt is rubric applied to a set of young Japanese male, adult super fans of anime (animation films), manga (comic books), and related genres. Otaku literally means your home. It is used because these fans are geeks who spend their lives withdrawn from mainstream society, holed up inside their rooms consuming pile upon pile of comic books and watching anime on home monitors. Many of these otaku are simultaneously amateur authors of spin-off comics and stories based on, or inspired by, ones they have read. Rather than interacting with real friends or lovers, so story goes, otaku are most satisfied by solitary and masturbatory imagined relationships with comic book or animation characters. In fact, they contend that they love characters they fantasize about. Finally, otaku are also infamous for their appetite for pornographic comic books, with subgenres offering visual representations of a wide variety of sexual perversions or socially aberrant sexual practices.1 Psychoanalyst Saito Tamaki observes that otaku are stimulated by these genres because of their erotic orientation toward fantasy rather than reality.2This, of course, is a stereotype, that moreover slyly partakes of a lurking culturalist reductivism. This suggests very queerness of Japanese postmodern culture as an unfathomable otherness: Can you believe those Japanese prefer fantasy of sex with comic book characters to real thing? The term otaf(u homogenizes a widely divergent group of devotees of comics and animation. The artist Murakami Takashi would be a case in point. Critics, commentators, and Murakami himself have pointed out that his art is deeply referential to and inspired by otaku culture.3 His characters, such as Mr. DOB, Second Mission Project Ko2, figure of a girl-jet transformer, and diminutive Kiki and Kaikai, all incorporate citations to widely circulating animation or popular culture icons. For example, Mr. DOB Murakami's signature character who has appeared over and over in his work, taking various forms and transformations (his ears are marked with letters D and B, and his face is round O), is apparently culled from Doraemon and Sonic Hedgehog, both popular anime figures, as well as bearing some resemblance to Mickey Mouse.4 These fantastic, imaginary figures, some cute and well marketed by Murakami in various venues,5 some apocalyptic (such as huge Tan Tan Bo Puking [aka Gero Tan]), bear little, if any, relation to real-life forms, often hybridizing animal, human, cartoon, and robot all in one. In other words, these artworks display complete disinterest in verisimilitude. Instead, they take as their referente staple, stock images and themes circulated in popular culture animation and comic books, themselves without any referente outside of creative imagination, and offer up riffs or recombinations of these referente with no counterparts in real world.6At same time, Murakami reports that he has taken inspiration from early modern Edo period (1600-1868) artists because of way spectator's gaze travels over surface of paintings, in a process of acceleration and deceleration, or following a sort of zigzag pattern. According to Murakami, these eccentric artists' pictures control the velocity of observer's gaze, manner of gaze's scan, and attendant information content. And, their frequent use of a trick that makes viewer aware of painting's extreme planarity - a planarity with no discontinuities [literally: gaps, ... - is a special characteristic of these artists' compositional methodology.7The culmination of combining of these influences - of traditional planar Japanese art forms and contemporary, globally circulating, nonrealist, nonhumanist, anime-manga chimerical life forms - is, according to artist himself, notion of superflat. …

Considerations as to Cultural Systems Serving as Educative Support for Asperger's Syndrome : From the System of the Comic Market that is One of the Otaku culture

Considerations as to Cultural Systems Serving as Educative Support for Asperger's Syndrome : From the System of the Comic Market that is One of the Otaku culture

Maid Meets Mammal: The 'Animalized' Body of the Cosplay Maid Character in Japan

Maid Meets Mammal:The 'Animalized' Body of the Cosplay Maid Character in Japan Luke Sharp (bio) The true enjoyment of maid cafés is seeing the fictional characters of manga and anime come to real life. —Hayakawa Kiyoshi1 This article examines corporeality and the ubiquitous maid persona in Japan, paying particular attention to the phenomenon of "animalizing" her body in comic book simulacra, and the subsequent reification of this hybrid form inside maid cafés. In his discussion of the otaku2 subculture where he argues that the "grand narratives" of Japanese society have degenerated due to consumerism, critical theorist Azuma Hiroki draws heavily on the work of French philosopher Alexandre Kojève (Otaku 25-38). Azuma describes "animalization" as the process of humans rejecting their intersubjective desires and embracing the animal "need," which can be satisfied independently and is not contingent on the "other" (87). In a capitalist society this translates to the consumer need being fulfilled instantaneously, in a mechanical fashion, and devoid of high levels of social interaction. This communication deficiency is exemplified by fast food restaurants and sex workers accommodating the needs of everyday meals and sexual partners respectively, which, prior to the advent of the consumer society, were undertakings laden with inconvenient social exchanges. My use of the word "animalization" in this paper is far less metaphoric and allegorical than this construal, and refers to the addition of typically mammalian appendages to the body of the maid (such as tails and furry ears) to create a quasi-animal character. As we shall see, this type of animalization is discordant with Kojève's theory, and is in fact greatly dependent on the "other," particularly when it comes to the domain of the maid café and the interaction that takes place between patrons and quasi-animal maids inside them. I argue that animalizing the body of the maid in these establishments is an attempt to elicit both moe ("pseudo-romance," pronounced "mo-ay") and kawaii ("cuteness"). I also suggest that the principal objective of these responses is to mediate momentary escapism and to promote ease of communication between maid and customer. After providing a historical overview of the maid persona in Japan and considering the unadulterated human form of her body in erotic comic books, I introduce animal cosplay, moe, and kawaii, before discussing the body vis-à-vis the maid café. It should be noted that despite the maid character's being a salient icon of Japanese popular culture, she has been largely ignored by scholarly circles both at home and abroad. While the reasons for this neglect are not conclusive, the current state of affairs [End Page 60] of academia in Japan suggests several possibilities. Tomoko Aoyama claims the marginalization of women and children in Japan has resulted in an academic disinterest of them as research subjects (285), while Mark McLelland asserts there is a lingering reticence amongst Japanese scholars to regard sexuality as a serious topic (61). According to him, sex (which would indubitably imbue any discourse on maids) is a particularly ungainly subject in Japan, and its status as a type of asobi (play) renders it a topic that respectable people should refrain from openly discussing. The reserve of Japanese academics to approach the otaku subculture (on which characters such as the maid rest heavily) is also a likely cause of her neglect. While in recent years there has been a tremendous surge in studies examining the otaku phenomenon (perhaps due to the government's Cool Japan initiative to promote manga and anime3 abroad),4 Hiroki Azuma claims that for a large part of their history they were maligned by the mainstream press as perverted sociopaths and deemed an unwholesome topic of research (Azuma, Superflat). This was due solely to an infamous incident in the late 1980s when a manga aficionado was arrested for murdering four young girls.5 English-language research on maids is also profoundly scarce, due, perhaps, to Timothy Iles' claim that academics are discouraged by the potential of discussions on otaku culture to result in never-ending critiques of contemporary Japanese society (1). Nevertheless, this article aims to shed light on the stifled Japanese maid, and approaches...

Murakami's ‘little boy’ syndrome: victim or aggressor in contemporary Japanese and American arts?

This paper examines the ambiguous nature of Murakami's criticism toward the postwar Japanese condition – as the artist most effectively captured in his phrase ‘A Little Boy,’ which was also the title of his curated exhibition at the Japan Society of New York in 2005. As Murakami wrote in his introduction to the catalogue, demilitarized Japan after the Second World War underwent a collective sense of helplessness, and the metaphor of a little boy is intended to describe Japan's supposedly unavoidable reliance on its big brother, America. The name ‘Little Boy,’ in fact, originates from the code name used by the American military for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The proliferation of ‘cuteness’ in Japanese contemporary art, which draws upon youth culture, especially otaku culture, evinces a common urge among the postwar generation in Japan to escape from their horrible memories and sense of powerlessness. Murakami's rhetorical analysis of Japan's self‐image seems, however, contradictory, given his extremely aggressive business tactics, which can find no counterpart in the Western art world – not even in the efforts of Murakami's predecessor, Andy Warhol. Like My Lonesome Cowboy (1998), whose hyper sexuality defies its pubescent and immature appearance, his art, theory, and art marketing indicate the paradoxical nature of his theory of impotence. By focusing on his manifesto and writings published on the occasion of his 2005 exhibition and his style of managing Kaikai Kiki Ltd., this paper delves into the dual nature of Murakami's interpretation of postwar Japanese art and culture, particularly in relation to those of America.

Platonic Eros, Ottonian Numinour and Spiritual Longing in Otaku Culture

Less than a month ago I was in North Korea seeing the sights and engaging in some general research into the philosophical mood of its people. After exploring the desolate, zombie-like town of Kaesong, I happened upon a small shop selling such things as the North’s own brand of Coca-Cola, stamps with Kim Jung Il’s face on them, a myriad of different types of Chinese medicine and, of all things, a manhwa – the Korean name for manga – containing some of the most impressive art I had ever seen; indeed, to my utter surprise, the images in the North Korean manhwa filled me with a deep yearning for something quite inexplicable. Naturally, as a professor of philosophy, I felt obliged to investigate this phenomenon further.And as I did so, I started to realize that certain manga and anime – arguably, the two most sacred objects of otaku culture – have been stirring in me these kinds of feelings ever since I could remember. As a result of this, I immediately came to see that it did not matter whether the culture producing the anime and manga was largely atheistic, like North Korea, Shinto-Buddhist, like Japan, or Christian, like the USA: otaku culture produced anywhere and by any type of believer or nonbeliever seemed to be capable of awakening in me what Plato calls eros and Rudolph Otto calls the numinous.As I moved beyond my own personal reflections to see what scholars of otaku culture have already written on this subject, I found some precedent for my own ideas in the work of Teri Silvio, who has examined the relationship between religious icons and character toys in Taiwan, i Hiroshi Yamanaka, who has discussed “pop cultural spirituality” in the work of Hayao Miyazaki, ii and Susan Napier, who, influenced by Roger Aden’s book Popular Stories and Promised Land: Fan Cultures and Symbolic Pilgrimages, has written about western otaku making “pilgrimages to Akihabara” and has wisely labelled certain anime and manga chatrooms “sacred spaces.” iii Nevertheless, while I agreed with the insights of all these scholars, I felt they did not go far enough in linking their observations to larger philosophical issues. Thus, in this paper I would like to explore the idea of spiritual longing in otaku culture, firstly, by elucidating Plato’s eros and Otto’s numinous, and then, secondly, by examining a few examples from anime and manga which have instilled in me, or others I know, a deep desire for something that can only be described as mysterious, irreducible and spiritual.

Otaku: Japan's database animals

In Japan, obsessive adult fans and collectors of manga and anime are known as otaku. When the underground otaku subculture first emerged in the 1970s, participants were looked down on within mainstream Japanese society as strange, antisocial loners. Today otaku have had a huge impact on popular culture not only in Japan but also throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States. Hiroki Azuma's Otaku offers a critical, philosophical, and historical inquiry into the characteristics and consequences of this consumer subculture. For Azuma, one of Japan's leading public intellectuals, otaku culture mirrors the transformations of postwar Japanese society and the nature of human behavior in the postmodern era. He traces otaku's ascendancy to the distorted conditions created in Japan by the country's phenomenal postwar modernization, its inability to come to terms with its defeat in the Second World War, and America's subsequent cultural invasion. More broadly, Azuma argues that the consumption behavior of otaku is representative of the postmodern consumption of culture in general, which sacrifices the search for greater significance to almost animalistic instant gratification. In this context, culture becomes simply a of plots and characters and its consumers mere database animals. A vital non-Western intervention in postmodern culture and theory, Otaku is also an appealing and perceptive account of Japanese popular culture.

The Dissolution of Meaning: Towards an Aesthetics of Non-Sense

In this paper I will raise the issue of the relationship between text and interpretation in the case of texts whose ultimate purpose is utmost resistance to interpretation. Can a discipline such as hermeneutics, which has been traditionally associated with the analysis, construction, and interpretation of meaning, survive the challenges that postmodern art posits to the very notion of ”meaning”? The paper begins with a historical outline of efforts made by hermeneuticians from Johann Dannhauer (1603-1666) to Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) to explicate the concept of ”meaning. ” The relevancy of the hermeneutical project to an understanding of Japanese letters will be established by analyzing the work of Haga Yaichi (1867-1927) based on August Boeckh's (1785-1867) minute classifications of the philological sciences in his Enzyclopadie und Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften (Encyclopedia and Methodology of the Philological Sciences, posthumous 1877). The paper, then, turns to critiques of hermeneutics on the part of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Susan Sontag (1933-2004), and the challenges that the field is currently experiencing in the American academia for having been associated with conservative, male-biased, homogeneously non-hybrid, homophobic, colonial, capitalistic enterprises. Hermeneutics is increasingly seen as the mummified ”ancient” in the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. As an example of this quarrel I will discuss two Japanese poems composed by poets of the same generation, Aizu Yaichi (1881-1956) and Yamamura Bochō (1884-1924)-the first totally absorbed in the construction of meaning, the second devoted to its destruction. The question, then, arises, is there anything left for hermeneutics to do in an age in which the notion of ”meaning” as conceived within the frameworks of big narratives has been completely discredited? I will leave the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo (b. 1936) to answer this question by focusing on one of his first books - a book that is not very well known outside of Italy and which is not translated in English, Poesia e Ontologia (Poetry and Ontology, 1967). In this book, Vattimo calls for the need of an aesthetic of dis-identification - a disruption of the logic of continuity and identity brought about by the poetics of the 20th century. In other words, with modernity, and even more so in post-modernity, the artworks of the avant-gardes have dictated and inspired aesthetic/hermeneutical discourses, constantly forcing aesthetics and hermeneutics to re-think their basic premises. It seems to me that this need to redraw the maps of critical discourses is made urgent more than ever by contemporary trends in popular culture - trends that actually originate in Japan and East Asia. In the remainder of the paper I will examine works by the Taiwanese-American artist Shu Lea Cheang (b. 1954), and the Japanese artists Yanagi Yukinori (b. 1959) and Nagasawa Nobuho. I will also look at the ”Superflat” project of Murakami Takashi (b. 1962) and the Japanese Neo Pop - a project that has been particularly successful in the United States since its inception in the year 2000. Aside from the reaction that one might have to otaku culture, it is undeniable that these popular trends force us at least to imagine what an aesthetics of the absence of meaning (or non-sense) could be. My conclusions will be very speculative - an appeal to recover at least some portions of contested meaning.

Otaku world

Japanese youth are famed for their love of technology and fantasy imagery, but the rise of Otaku culture developing into an unhealthy obsession could hamper Japan's high-tech economy. The youths were drawn to Electric Town, with its lure of exotic consumer electronic goods, in the early 1990s. Today, many stores now cater exclusively to their tastes. These young people have had a huge impact on the business model of the large electronics companies. Yet there is a downside to the rise of Otaku culture. The number of young men who snub the workaholic corporate lifestyle is increasing and the number of salary men is in decline, which is threatening the foundation of Japan's economic post-war prosperity.

The Animalization of Otaku Culture

The Animalization of Otaku Culture