Otaku

Otaku

Japan’s Database Animals

Hiroki Azuma

Translated by Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono

A publishing event—the highly influential best seller in Japan translated into English

200 Pages, 5 x 9 in

  • Paperback
  • 9780816653522
  • Published: March 25, 2009
BUY
  • Hardcover
  • 9780816653515
  • Published: March 25, 2009
BUY

Details

Otaku

Japan’s Database Animals

Hiroki Azuma

Translated by Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono

ISBN: 9780816653522

Publication date: March 25th, 2009

200 Pages

8 x 5

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 database 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.

Shion Kono is assistant professor of literature at Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan.