Garden-Variety Otaku

Some of my students cornered me this afternoon after English club and started to ask questions about America. Well, first they asked me if I had seen the ゴスロリ (gothic-Lolita, click here if you have no idea what I’m talking about) girl that has been spotted around our town. I haven’t, but I told them I had seen similarly-dressed girls in Osaka, especially around Ame-mura and Triangle Park, and my friends have pictures of the quasi-famous cosplayers in Harajuku, Tokyo.

Chihiro immediately expressed indignation over this. “The lolita girls are scary, they never smile! Also, why black? I would wear purple, it’s much nicer.” Haruka wanted to know if I was going to Akihabara, the electronics district, when I go to Tokyo later this year, and I said yes, and that I had been to Den Den Town in Osaka as well. They said have fun, look for used video games, et cetera, until Misayo shrieked, “Amanda, watch out for otaku!” and they all stated to laugh and nod their heads.

For those of you really not in the know, here’s your catch-up. An otaku in America is usually someone who is a fan of anime or manga (comics). They watch anime with friends, discuss the finer points of their favorite shows, have subcriptions to Shonen Jump to read serialized manga, etc. Otaku, in English, has about the same connotations as “geek” or “nerd,” but is specific to an interest in Japanese anime and/or manga.

In Japan, otaku conjures up a very specific image, one which my girls quickly related to me. Here is a list, according to my first-year students, on how to spot an otaku in Japan:

• Big glasses, unkempt or long-ish hair.
• Sometimes smelly. They are so into anime or manga that they may forget to bathe. (Otaku is a word for house, implying that these people don’t go outdoors)
• High-water, tight pants. Shirts (either flannels or anime t-shirts) tucked in very sharply.
• Gigantic backpacks, in which could be anything from manga books to their computers to anime figures.
• Shopping bags, especially from the big electronics/game stores. (Chihiro: “Especially from Sof Map.”)
• When they are close to something they like, Midori said “they will look a little crazy, and you may feel scared in your mind. But they won’t hurt you.”
• Basically they look like this guy, or the dude in the background here. (Note: both of these actors are playing the otaku Yamada in the movie and film versions – respectively - of 電車男 Densha Otoko, or “Train Man,” a story about an otaku that falls in love with a beautiful girl. I watched this when it was on TV last summer and it’s hysterical.)

I told them about people using otaku in a neutral or positive sense in America and they were dumbfounded. I also said that, while anime and manga are certainly gaining in popularity, that they aren’t everywhere like they are in Japan. “But don’t the kids watch Doraemon? Don’t they watch Detective Conan?” Misayo asked. Chihiro and Hitomi asked what manga girls their age commonly read, and the answer is that girls their age don’t commonly read manga. It’s just a different culture that way.

They were a bit miffed that the anime and manga that is more popular in the US is the boys’ stuff (shounen, like Naruto and Dragonball Z), instead of the girls stuff (shoujo, like NaNa, which I am reading in Japanese at the moment). They’ve demanded a copy of JUMP, the manga magazine, in English, and I’m sure they will pass judgement further on America once I bring back some artifacts from the States.