Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan's Database Animals

摘要

Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan's Animals. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 144 pp. Softcover. ISBN 978-0-8166-5352-2. $17.95. Despite being originally published in Japan in 2001 and then subsequently translated into Korean and French, Hiroki Azuma's compact and dense exploration of otaku culture is well timed for the rise in interest the subject has received in the United States and Europe. While otaku initially began as a subculture of 1970s Japan--whose members were usually male, eighteen to forty years old, read science fiction, were attracted to computers, and collected manga, anime, and derivative merchandise associated with these works as well as producing fan art--it has blossomed as a multi-billion dollar global market in the years between Azuma's two editions. Nevertheless, despite the economic might of otaku culture, it retains many markers of its position on the fringe of society. Even as Japanese animation, comic books, video games, toys, and technological hardware are distributed around the world, those who enjoy these cultural products casually are much different, in Azuma's estimation, from the otaku who function as database animals or new types of consumers in the postmodern information era who look for grand nonnarratives--i.e., eschewing structure and ideology--instead of the normative mode of consumption longs for the existence of and searches for deeper meaning (xvi). Azuma bases his animalization of the human otaku as a particular type of postmodern condition that is derived from his reading of Alexandre Kojeve's interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), and this is further filtered through the historical associations between the United States and Japan in the postwar period. As Azuma sees it, one of the particular influences that helped to create the conditions for the making of otaku culture was American subculture, especially animation and sf literature, that in turn encodes otaku artifacts with a sort of distorted familiarity that finds some appeal with American consumers, not only through the appeal of the products in their design or narrative but also through the simple connection of global commodification and consumption. 2009 English edition has been updated with a new preface by Azuma and an extended introduction by the translators Jonathan Abel and Shion Kono. general structure of the work, however, remains the same. Azuma organizes his study of otaku culture into three unequally weighted sections: The Otaku's Pseudo-Japan, Animals (which is twice as long as either the first or third section), and Hyperflatness and Multiple Personality. Each section is further subdivided into key topic areas; for example, Animals has highlighted specific areas such as The Simulacra and the Database and The Dissociated Human. Finally, Azuma provides an extremely detailed set of endnotes for his text. These notes are equivalent in length to sections one or three and provide a very rich resource for readers of the book as Azuma ranges widely in the examples he chooses, which become increasingly complex and interrelated as the book continues; in the span of a few pages, Azuma can move from robot anime to Zizek's Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) to Masachi Osawa's Postwar Intellectual Space (1998) to adult-only computer girl games in discussing otaku culture. In the first section, The Otaku's Pseudo-Japan, Azuma begins simply enough by noting that the quiet build up of an otaku culture happened over several decades before a number of important events put the otaku more squarely in the public eye including: the proliferation of the Internet beyond the closed online communities of the 1980s; the crimes committed by otaku Tsutomu Miyazaki from 1988-89; the smash success of Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995); and the publication of An Introduction to Otaku Studies (1996) by Toshio Okada. Understanding the rise of the otaku in the 1990s requires some backtracking, and Azuma fills that in through