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In Japan, obsessive adult fans and collectors of manga and anime
are known as otaku. When the underground otaku subculture first
emerged in the 1970s, participants were looked down on within
mainstream Japanese society as strange, antisocial loners. Today
otaku have had a huge impact on popular culture not only in Japan
but also throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States. Hiroki
Azuma's Otaku offers a critical, philosophical, and historical
inquiry into the characteristics and consequences of this consumer
subculture. For Azuma, one of Japan's leading public intellectuals,
otaku culture mirrors the transformations of postwar Japanese
society and the nature of human behavior in the postmodern era. He
traces otaku's ascendancy to the distorted conditions created in
Japan by the country's phenomenal postwar modernization, its
inability to come to terms with its defeat in the Second World War,
and America's subsequent cultural invasion. More broadly, Azuma
argues that the consumption behavior of otaku is representative of
the postmodern consumption of culture in general, which sacrifices
the search for greater significance to almost animalistic instant
gratification. In this context, culture becomes simply a database
of plots and characters and its consumers mere "database animals."
A vital non-Western intervention in postmodern culture and theory,
Otaku is also an appealing and perceptive account of Japanese
popular culture.
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