>We're talking here about a new humankind, a shin jinrui. Nothing more, nothing less. At the very least it's a new kind of humans, if we chose to read it shinjin rui. Well, if nothing else they're new and they're one of a kind. Nothing more is certain about the otaku, even their humanness is being doubted. They might very well be from outer space.
>Their phenomenology varies widely. Some otak hunt for photographs of music industry's synthetic starlets, some are fanatically into computer games, many are immersed in comic-books most of their waking day, others are plastic model maniacs, and yet others fancy hacking into car-telephone conversations. Otak is not concerned with a certain subject matter, but is rather a mode of being. There are magazines catering to them, fairs, pornography, videos, and computer-networks, and there is the "Book of Otaku". According to an estimation of the editor of "Do-Pe", one of the otak-magazines, there is a hard core of 350,000 of them around, but, he says, how many 'light otak' exist, nobody knows.
>If you ask different people for a definition of the term otaku you get contradictory answers. In different phases of its dissemination it changed in meaning, and people look at it from different angles at any given time. What is the smallest common denominator? Otaku are teens or twens. Mostly boys. They usually wear jeans, T-shirt and sneakers, which might not sound very characteristic, but in fashion-crazy Japan it is. They despise physical contact and love media, technical communication, and the realm of reproduction and simulation in general. They are enthusiastic collectors and manipulators of useless artifacts and information. They are an underground, but they are not opposed to the system. They change, manipulate, and subvert ready-made products, but at the same time they are the apotheosis of consumerism and an ideal workforce for contemporary Japanese capitalism. They are the children of the media.
>This image comes close to the one TSUZUKI Kyoichi draws, an ex-journalist for the Yuppy magazine "Popeye" and today an art editor, who introduced me to the more hidden corners of the extensive otaku-world: "In the beginning otaku was used in a very negative sense and meant someone who doesn't look good, who has no girl friend, who is collecting silly things, and is generally out of the world. As a definition I would say that an otaku is a person who is into something useless. Idol-, manga- or whatever-otaku means he does not have anything else. But in that he really indulges. It's a silly way of spending time, from a normal business point of view. They play games with the same seriousness others use for business.
