We’re All Otaku Now
I recently finished reading Hiroki Azuma’s book Otaku: Japan’s Databse Animals, a study of the group of social miscreants and deviants known as otaku, and it was like reading a prophecy. In the West the term “otaku” has been used to refer specifically to dedicated fans of manga and anime, but in Japan it refers to obsessive and socially withdrawn fans of everything from video games to trains. Azuma argues that what defines their otaku is not their level or choice of obsession, but rather their way of consuming media. He suggests that rather than relating to the emotional or thematic content of a story, otaku are attracted to particular characters and tropes which can be endlessly reiterated and re-contextualized. For Azuma this approach stems from the disappearance of master narratives such as religion and ideology in postmodernity, and leads people to be less “human” (invested in larger ideals) and more “animal” (invested in immediate and superficial satisfaction.) Azuma borrows his peculiar use of these terms from the French philosopher Alexandre Kojeve, but the pejorative term of the designation of otaku as “animals” is hard to avoid.
Azuma’s book was published in Japan in 2001, upon which it became a bestseller. Despite the seventeen-year gap, however, I found myself constantly shocked with the contemporary resonances. In part, this may be because I am something of an otaku myself. When Otaku came out in 2001, I was in the midst of a love affair with Pokemon and Digimon that would lead me towards an obsession with Japanese cartoons, comics and video games that persists to this day. I certainly have the antisocial and obsessive part of otaku-dom down. And as for being a database animal, you only have to look at my spreadsheets of movies and television sorted by grade and length to realize that I am, at the very least, a methodical consumer of media.
Beyond my own personal circumstances, the otaku media world that Azuma describes is very reminiscent of mainstream Western (and increasingly global) culture. It’s not just outcasts who see media as collections of familiar fragments that can be combined into a database — it’s aggregator sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, which by virtue of their seeming objectivity now dictate large swathes of consumer choice and critical debate. And popular films, particularly franchise blockbusters arranged into “cinematic universes”, are increasingly catering to a world that consumes them in otaku-like way.
When we go to see a franchise film, we are not looking to appreciate the story as a whole — the plot is usually generic and the character arcs gestural at best. Rather, we are looking for fragments that appeal to us. They can be moments of recognition, such as familiar characters, beloved actors or minority representation, or they can be moments of pleasure, such as the witty quips that Marvel movies are jammed full of. These fragments quickly become isolated from the supposed whole and re-circulated as memes and references.
As in Azuma, these fragments are placed not in a conventional narrative arc but a greater database-like non-narrative — the cinematic universe, the review aggregators, or the culture war. The latter example may be surprising, but evaluating a text by its external relationships — how its’ fans behave, whether a writer is a dick on Twitter, how it deals with particular elements that are not its focus — is exactly the kind of otaku-like approach that Azuma defines. Mass culture is now otaku culture, and the otaku have nothing left but social isolation and their resentment.
Despite its seemingly prophetic nature, I found it hard to get fully on board with the argument of Otaku. For one thing, I think Azuma overstates the novelty of this way of consuming and producing texts — is there anything more consciously artificial and fragmentary than the 1940s Hollywood musical? It’s also worth noting that otaku culture, rather than descending into an unending pit of referentiality, has also evolved quite a bit over the years, with the paradigm genre shifting from mecha (70s-80s) to harem romance (90s) to moe cute-girls-doing-cute-things (2000s) to isekai in-another-world fantasies(2010s.) Of these genres, the moe that Azuma clinicizes is in my opinion actually the least pernicious and most frequently avoids misogyny and power fantasy.
My biggest bone to pick with Azuma, however, is the overly moralistic way in which he presents otaku as unemotional “animals.” Like Frederic Jameson, Azuma sees postmodernity as a kind of tragedy, a cross-cultural loss of innocence that deprived people of the nice sentimental, human narratives they had been enjoying and lead them into an age of affectless cynicism. But in my experience otaku are the exact opposite of robot-like consumers who receive everything at two removes. Here, for example, is a brief passage from Azuma:
The otaku themselves called this new consumer behavior “chara — moe” — the feeling of moe toward characters and their alluring characteristics. As previously mentioned, here the otaku coolly consumed only the information that was behind the works without relation to the narrative or message of those works.
The way Azuma describes it, any set of traits could have been used for building the database. However, otaku attachment to anime tropes is anything but cool detachment. It’s often rooted in deep emotional relationships and trauma, usually that of the isolation so commonly associated with otaku lives. For instance, the high school setting is so universal in otaku-friendly anime and manga because it represents the last time the otaku was immersed (involuntarily) in a web of rich social relations and structure. The character of the sister is fetishized because it’s likely to be the shut-in viewer’s strongest connection with someone of the opposite sex from the same generation. Japan’s deeply-entrenched gender roles are also deeply involved in the type of anime characters that become popular. In other words, the attachment to these tropes is anything but unemotional and non-ideological.
And then there’s the fact that those same qualities that lead me to diagnose myself as an otaku — my obsessiveness, compulsion to organize, and social indifference — lead a psychiatrist to diagnose me with Asperger’s Syndrome in my teens. Azuma’s description of otaku-dom sounds a lot like a description of autism, which is often defined by a lack of conventional affect and a tendency to fixate on nerdy, subcultural hobbies. If we accept this, then his description of database consumption as “animal” and sentimental investment in narratives as “human” becomes not just needlessly moralistic but cruelly ableist. To define otakudom in opposition to humanity, presumably defined by the ability to make smalltalk and cry at a good tearjerker, is to cast non-neurotypical people as not just abberrant but indicative of social decay.
As noted above, I think the mode of interpretation and consumption that Azuma describes is real, and increasingly prevalent. But rather than seeing this prevalence as a decline from some era of humanistic compassion, I think we should recognize that the database-driven approach of consumption has its own merits, and humanistic interpretation (which certainly has not gone way) its weaknesses. I’m of the view that the more tools we have in the interpretive toolbox the better. So we may simply have to accept that some people watch television looking for a good story and others do it looking for a compelling fragment. But I don’t think my view will be very popular. After all, what’s less otaku-like than agreeing to disagree?
