Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast episode 561, The Otaku, Part 3.

For our final episode on otaku culture, I want to cover what is, at least to my mind,

probably the single most interesting question there is to discuss on the subject.

As we've seen over the last few weeks,

otaku culture as a phenomenon is very much a product of the unique circumstances of

post-war Japan, and yet the things we associate with it are now international phenomena.

Otaku culture has crossed national boundaries and become this international subculture

over the span of just a few decades.

Indeed, I suspect a non-zero number of the people listening to this very podcast are doing so in part because they're either a part of one of those subcultures or adjacent to them in some way.

I know that back when I was TAing at U-dub in the mid-2010s, an average of about half of one

of my intro classes would be composed of people wearing Dragon Ball shirts.

And to those people, I say, thank you for making sure I could afford groceries.

Anyway, all of this raises an interesting question.

How to hell did that happen?

How did a distinctly Japanese subculture

become this border-crossing cultural juggernaut? And the question gets even more interesting

when you consider that the first overseas otaku groups started coming together in the U.S.

really in the late 80s and early 90s and any sizable numbers,

a period when the social stigma against Otaku in Japan was at its overall peak.

Why was it at its peak?

Well, it's time for us to talk about the Otaku murderer.

This was probably one of the biggest media sensations of the late 80s in Japan.

...