Week 6 - ‘This place is full of Miyazakis’: Otaku as a Fringe Subculture and Media Construct

      In this week's readings, we had the opportunity to take a step back from the overview of Japanese consoles and games to focus on broader social issues that partly frame the consumption and discourses of video games. While we have discussed issues such as gender and gaming previously in the class, we now try to tackle the question of the Otaku consumer type. Who are they and how do they consume media differently than other people?

      While many writers tried to pin down what defines Otakus, we can identify several grand discourses that try to analyze them. First is what Thomas Lamarre (2009) defines as the Gainax discourse of fan empowerment, best represented by Okada’s writings. As Galbraith indicated, Okada’s Otakuology puts emphasis on seeing fans of visual medias as a form of new humans (shinjinrui) with enhanced capabilities for understanding preferentiality and visual details. While this reading of Otaku is very empowering, it does little to make sense of today’s Otaku culture and the importance of Moe for example. It also posits the Otaku on the fringe of society, excluding it from mainstream influence, but granting them agency to reinvent new way to deal with the world (social networks or masculinities). However, it seems to me that the promises of Otaku fall short to their potential as political or social mobilization of media consumers is very unlikely (Galbraith’s account of the Otaku demonstration in Akihabara is a testimony to that). Their potentiality, however, seems to be channeled in a different way.

      Clashing with this perspective of Otaku is the media and government’s harnessing of the international prestige and economic power of Otaku-related media. Japanese society has come a long way since it was first confronted with the Otaku movement; the mainstream media, anxious to make sense of horrible crimes committed in the 1990s such as the Miyazaki killings and the seemingly degraded state of the youth, created a image of Otaku that was more akin to sexual perverts than media enthusiasts. We now know that such media coverage were somehow manipulated (the journalist covering the Mizayaki incident later confessed that the shooting of Miyazaki’s room for television showing was manipulated to make it look like a very small part of his lolicon video collection made the majority of his media possessions) culminating in a famous media coverage of the Comic Market where journalists described the event as a place ‘full of Miyazakis’(Miyamoto, 2013). Nowadays, under the cool-Japan umbrella, the government has acknowledges the existence of Otaku as a form of economic resource and source of international appeal. However, this new appreciated is only the signal for yet another reconstruction of the representation of Japanese media fans. Densha Otoko, National Tourism AgencyOtaku Japan maps, the linking of Otaku and traditional Japan through Wabi-Sabi and late night shows involving Otaku as showcases of slightly unbalanced but sympathetic youth is still a misrepresentation of what Otaku are, but at least it is not as offensive as it previously was.

      Maybe an understanding of Otaku culture should involve a rethinking of our preconceptions of media fans as solitary individuals as well a close reading of their activity. What I have in mind is close to Galbraith’s recent research on Bishōjo games and their player where he demonstrates that Otaku’s patterns of communication is mediated by interactive texts put in networking situations (Galbraith, 2011). As he states, Love Plus finds its ultimate appeal by introducing each other’s girlfriend and discussing individual experiences with the simulation. 

Additional Sources 

Galbraith, Patrick. "Bishōjo Games: ‘Techno-Intimacy’ and the Virtually Human in Japan." Game Study: the international journal of computer game research volume 11.issue 2 (2011). [http://gamestudies.org/1102/articles/galbraith]. Online.

Lamarre, Thomas. The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. 2009.

Miyamoto, Naoki. Eroge bunkakenkyû gairon: Introduction to Cultural Studies Adult Games. Tokyo: Sôgôkagaku Shuppan, 2013. Print.