Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 559, The Otaku, Part 1.

In my time doing this show for, at this point, over 10 years, there's been one topic that

has tended to make the top of the charts in terms of listener requests, which, by the way,

just to clarify, I do always take, even though I never guarantee I will actually produce

an episode on a given subject. It depends on what's available in terms of the research.

And this particular topic, well, actually I think the people who suggest it don't always

think of it as a singular topic. But when I get asked to do more on the cultural history of

anime or something on the video games industry or a quest for a history of Tokyo's unique

neighborhood of Akihabara, I see all of those things as connected to each other. What's

really being asked for, in essence, is something on a uniquely Japanese

phenomenon, otaku culture. Now, otaku is a term with a lot of meanings. I am legally obligated

to remind everyone whenever I talk about this subject that its original meaning is simply

one's home. The term can also be used

as a pronoun, and from there made this jump into referring to a whole subculture that covers

a variety of different kinds of media and represents a certain kind of attitude towards hobbies,

one might say, that it has become associated with.

When the word otaku first started to be used this way, in Japan in the 1980s, it had a very

negative connotation, sort of like the contemporaneous stereotypes from 1980s America of the

archetypal nerd.

And yet, just as nerd culture has risen up to conquer popular culture in the U.S.,

to such an extent that we all go to see comic book movies, that Star Wars is the most valuable IP in the universe,

and that movies featuring absolutely ludicrous characters like Doctor Strange and Crang

...