Otaku

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Otaku ( Japanese お た く , オ タ ク , ヲ タ ク ) refers to fans in Japanese who spend a lot of time on their passion and pursue it with great inclination. It is used similar to the English words nerd or geek .

Word origin

Otaku ( お 宅 ) is made up of the honorary prefix o ( お ) and taku ( 宅 ). It means something like house or apartment (a person who does not belong to the speaker's family).

Modern fan / nerd usage dates back to a fad among anime and science fiction fans in the early 1980s. In the 1982 anime Macross , the protagonist Lynn Minmay used Otaku as a salutation. The series was well received and some of its fans copied this overly polite form of address to one another.

Perception in Japanese Society

As a name for the fans themselves, "Otaku" was probably first used by Nakamori Akio in his column Otaku no Kenkyū ( Otaku Research ) of Manga Burikko magazine . (This usage is a pun: If you say your book , it means otaku no hon , what you as a result of the ambiguity of the Japanese grammar book by Otaku can interpret So he interpreted the word not as a pronoun, but as a name with which the. Fans addressed each other.) In the column he described the type of male fan who writes his own stories or mangas for his favorite series ( dōjinshi ), dresses up as his favorite character (see also Cosplay ) and attends events such as the Comic Market (Comiket for short) ) meets like-minded people. His impressions of these fans, as they met him on the comiket, were extremely negative; he describes them as unsportsmanlike couch potatoes, either underweight or overweight, wearing glasses, probably not very popular at school, and thus hits the typical nerd clichés.

This new term "otaku" became known to the general public mainly through the case of the serial killer Miyazaki Tsutomu , who abused and murdered four girls between the ages of 4 and 7 in the late 1980s. He had a huge video collection (over 5,800 cassettes), was a regular visitor to Comiket , made and sold dōjinshi himself, and was therefore identified by the media as an otaku. Whereas the word “otaku” had previously had a negative connotation with “gloomy couch potato”, it has now also become synonymous with “potential serial killer”.

The following public discussion about otakus presented this for a long time largely negative: Otakus are incapable of normal interpersonal relationships and therefore use the distant form of address otaku instead of names . The fixation of some otakus on young girls ( lolicon ), which had reached terrible proportions with Miyazaki, was just as suspect as the interest of many comiket visitors in Yaoi manga. Due to the extent of the otaku trend, the entire Japanese youth was soon referred to as the otaku generation . In addition to the alleged criminal energy of the otaku, the emphasis on their individual wishes is also in the crossfire of criticism. Individualism tends to be rated negatively in Japan, and otakus are accordingly considered to be self-centered and childish.

It was not until the 1990s that authors such as Toshio Okada and Kazuko Nimiya began to interpret the otaku phenomenon as a modern and positive youth culture and, instead of concentrating on exceptional cases, to come closer to reality. Okada is an otaku the first hour, was among the group later, the animation house GAINAX founded and taught from 1994 to 1996 at the University of Tokyo called Otakologie and his theory of otaku culture. He deals in detail with the effects of the new media on youth culture. Nimiya is primarily concerned with female otaku, who make up a good half of all visitors to the Comiket, but are often ignored by the public, and thus contradicts the simple idea of ​​otaku as a male potential criminal.

Expansion of meaning

Anime and manga are some of the most important topics on the comiket, but not all dōjinshi manga. Basically, they are fanzines, which can also contain stories, essays, interviews, reviews, etc. Accordingly, a variety of unusual hobbies are represented on the Comiket, the followers of which can be divided into different types of otakus. There are e.g. B. military otakus (who are enthusiastic about uniforms, do appropriate cosplay or play war in the forest on the weekend), PC otaku, soccer otakus (mostly female fans of certain players) or the classic anime / manga otakus, idol -Otakus (fans of pop singers), SF-Otakus etc. Even people who do not go to the comiket use the word “otaku” to designate themselves that way, e.g. B. as fitness otakus, history otakus or the like. When used as such, it has no negative connotations, it just expresses that you are a hobby (i.e. not professionally) dealing with a topic and are very familiar with it.

Use in the west

The self-proclaimed Otakus GAINAX published Otaku no Video, a self-deprecating company story in anime form, which was also published in the West. Many manga / anime fans initially adopted the self-designation otaku, meaning anime fan, without being aware of the negative connotations. With a time lag, however, the otaku's bad press reached the West, and some fans have given up calling themselves otaku. Ironically, otakus are no longer so negatively rated in Japan today, thanks in no small part to reports of Western fans proudly calling themselves otaku and the general huge success of Japanese comics and cartoons abroad.

In fact, the prejudices against otakus and nerds are not that different, but in the West only the fans themselves use the term otaku, and therefore almost always positively. In Japan “Otaku” is used by both fans and critics, which means it is now used both positively and negatively.

In the West, otaku is almost always used in the sense of manga / anime otaku.

literature

Video documentaries

Media

Web links

Wiktionary: Otaku  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ EX Taishū magazine , May 2006
  2. ↑ Nomura Research Institute 野村 總 合 研究所 (Ed.): Otaku Shijō no Kenkyū . Taiwan, ISBN 978-986-124-768-7 (Japanese: オ タ ク 市場 の 研究 .).