What is an otaku? This is a question that has bothered me for the last four years.
I used to run a website called Otaking, but I closed it because I didn’t feel I could run a site with that name without having a proper definition of what an “otaku” is.
According to Wikipedia, an otaku is someone with consuming interests in anime, manga, video games, or any other enthusiastically pursued hobby. In other words, an otaku is an enthusiast, a hobbyist—a fan at heart.
In many cases, otaku are NEETs and hikikomori, or are hikikomori-adjacent. So, it could be said that for an otaku to work, to be “productive,” is to lose. This definition puts emphasis on the consumption of media, not the creation.
Does that mean someone who is making content for otaku is necessarily not an otaku? I think it depends on whether they are doing it to be a productive member of society, or out of a sense of needing to strive for excellence through their own self-indulgence. I think there is a conflict, though, between self-indulgence and excellence that needs to be resolved.
An otaku is someone who has something they care about more than social status, more than face, more than how they are perceived by others. This is what I mainly admire about otaku. By placing self-indulgence above
In modern society “Productivity” is synonymous with moral virtue. And I believe what otaku existence brings into question is whether being a productive member of society is the same as being a good member of society, let alone an excellent one. In many cases, it’s not clear how our labor results in other people’s lives being improved. But obviously, if you are doing a job—even though it’s abstracted at some point—your labor will result in improving other people’s material well-being on some level. Unless you’re doing something criminal.
But I wonder if what otaku are doing is kind of something criminal as well, in a sense. Because by indulging in otaku hobbies, you are not being a “productive” member of society. You’re not creating more capital for the group. So, does that mean otaku are egoists or selfish? I would say so. But then, I would say that most people who create and consume art are doing it for selfish reasons as well.
On the other hand, you could say there’s a reason we need productivity. It’s not just for mere survival. We shouldn’t turn mere survival, or the accumulation of capital for the sake of ensuring mere survival, into a virtue. Rather, the reason people are productive in the first place is so they can have culture and leisure time. By that logic, then the things people do in leisure time are actually more valuable than the things they do when they work—even though people as a whole wouldn’t be able to have leisure time if nobody worked.
So, I think the issue there still is that it makes the artist class, the otaku, and the NEETs sound like they are subsisting on the labour of others. That is certainly an issue. But I wonder whether the labour most people do actually increases the amount of capital or material well-being anyway. Or rather, if most people are just working so hard not to ensure survival now, but because they think they will be able to have happiness and security in the future through wealth.
But I wonder if the accumulation of wealth actually results in happiness by itself. Because, self-evidently, looking at modern society, that is not the case. Having said all this, at the end of the day, most otaku art is commercial art too, even if a lot of it fails to make a profit. Would anyone deny that Jujutsu Kaisen, Frieren and Attack on Titan are commercial art? The only way out is to look at works where the self-indulgence of the artist actually hurts the mainstream and therefore the commercial appeal of the work.
There’s also, of course, the distinction between the otaku and the casual fan. Everyone starts as a casual fan, so maybe you shouldn’t hate them too much. Although I feel like a lot of people who think they know about anime or manga don’t really know much at all, partially because they are only consumers. The only way to get a full picture is to be a producer as well. If you don’t know what goes into the sausage, you’re just fantasizing about the ingredients.
So, is an otaku just a critic? Just a consumer? That’s another question. Let’s say we’ve established that culture is more valuable than the means of achieving culture (industry, a “productive” society). That still leaves a division of labor within culture itself: the people who create art, the people who consume it, and within the consumers, you have critics who supposedly know more than passive consumers. All these categories are kind of a mess.
But I think it is a mistake to look at otaku culture as a way to improve yourself as a member of society, to be more productive, or to have a better reputation. I feel that goes against the whole thing about otaku culture—what I consider to be both low and high culture at the same time, essentially covering the whole of human thought if you want to be a bit pretentious about it.
So, what is an otaku? It is a question that leads to many different discussions. I’m not sure even if I am an otaku anymore, or if I ever was. Part of being an otaku, I think, isn’t just about consuming a lot of anime or manga; you need to be an aficionado. You need to know who directed what, or maybe know about different artistic and literary techniques authors use. I really don’t know any of them.
But at the same time, I’m kind of worried that if people go and look at anime from an academic perspective, the problem is that the academy is all about face, social status, and that sort of thing. Academics have a higher social status. A good yardstick to measure whether something is bound up with social status is to ask: what kind of jobs would you be fine with your daughter’s husband having? Basically, all the jobs you consider “good” are bound up in people doing them for the high social status it brings.
And with seeking status, you also get into all kinds of corrupt morality, where people say things just to seem moral. Or, on the other hand, you have people who react against that and don’t talk about morality at all because they don’t want to be bound up in it. Because of that, they just end up saying things with no substance, concerning themselves only with objective techniques—literary techniques—and they get lost in abstraction, analysing what words sound like while missing the forest for the trees. They miss the major themes of what the work is trying to say.
It’s difficult, and I don’t know what the solution is. The closest to a solution, or what I suggest people do, is to keep an open mind about the things which are there just because of self-indulgence, but which do not look good on paper—like fan service, for example. If those things are there, then that means there’s something genuine about it. Then again, you don’t want to fall into the self-deprecating trap of saying things like, “anime is trash and so am I,” in the hopes that if you criticise yourself first, then others can’t criticise you. Simply put, there needs to be something good about the story as well, something which is integrated with and inseparable from the elements which are there for the author’s self-indulgence. This self-indulgence is what binds the author and the consumer in a way, because ideally, in otaku works, the creator and consumer have similar tastes. In reality, it is possible that for example, a light novel author felt pressured to add a panchira scene to make the novel sell more copies.
There are other aspects which could be discussed when it comes to defining otaku, such as waifuism or idol culture, which are both things I’m not into. I’ve never been into them, so that’s another reason why I find it difficult to call myself an otaku. When it comes to waifuism—you know, “who’s your waifu?”—I think it’s something more than “best girl.” Saying someone is “best girl” doesn’t necessarily mean you would want to go out with them if they were real, whereas a “waifu,” I think, implies that. Unfortunately, I rarely can see characters as existing outside of a story, let alone in a real-life romantic context. Regardless, I think it has something to do with people seeing themselves reflected in these characters.
As for idol culture, I don’t know. I just don’t see what people get from it. It feels too parasocial—and I know that’s not the problem in itself—but I just don’t see what the people consuming idol content, and Vtuber content (which comes downstream from idol culture), are getting from cheering financially in such a one-sided way.
So, having said all that, where does this leave the otaku? Should an otaku even say what his likes and dislikes are, or should these be a secret even to himself?
