At first glance, it appears incredible.

The idea that the far right conspiracy theory known as QAnon started by an anonymous internet

user in October of 2017 and prevalent among the crowd that stormed the United States

capital in 2021 could be traced back to consumerism in 1980s Japan that websites created by

anonymous teenagers to trade pornographic pictures of anime girls evolved into the alt

right movement in the United States.

This is the story of how a hyper complex, modernizing world gave birth to image board

or Chan culture and unexpectedly transformed Japan and the United States forever.

This is the story of how the internet became a vessel for a set of narratives created

by disaffected nihilists hoping for society swift collapse and how those narratives evolved

on mainstream social media platforms before coming to define our politics.

This is the story of QAnon.

It begins in Japan in the 1980s where a group of young people started opting for a new

way of life.

They were called Otaku and they dedicated their lives to the novel trends that were driving

Japan's unprecedented economic growth, electronics and consumerism.

Matt Alt is the author of Pure Invention, How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World.

Here's Matt explaining the origins of the term Otaku.

Otaku is the word in Japanese for a superfan of something, almost anything that they obsess

over to the exclusion and detriment of everything else in their lives.

The word Otaku first emerged as a descriptor for this type of people in the early 1980s,

which was at the peak of Japan's financial bubble when it was this kind of ascendant economic

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