\n<\/p>\n
ON ANY GIVEN night, the neon-lit streets of Akihabara, an entertainment district in central Tokyo, are packed with visitors. Inside windowless shopping malls, they flock to stalls selling used Hello Kitty or Astro Boy figurines, Pok\u00e9mon trading cards and vintage video game consoles. At the idol bars and theaters \u2014\u00a0venues dedicated to musical acts like AKB48, which was named after the area \u2014 they wave glow sticks in colors that correspond to their favorite performers. And at the maid cafes, they pay to take pictures with young waitresses in petticoats and pinafores, many of whom hope to become stars themselves one day. Since the Japanese anime boom of the past few decades, Akihabara has been a refuge for the otaku \u2014 someone who would \u201cgo beyond the lengths of any normal person to pursue their interests,\u201d according to the 2004 documentary film \u201cOtaku Unite!\u201d Kaede, 29, a member of F5ve, a girl group based on the 1990s manga series \u201cSailor Moon<\/a>,\u201d calls the neighborhood their \u201choly land.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Fandom didn\u2019t originate in Japan. Toward the end of the 19th century, literary tribes had begun to form across Europe: So-called Janeites worshiped Jane Austen and, in 1893, some 20,000 angry readers canceled their subscriptions to The Strand Magazine after it published Sir Arthur Conan Doyle\u2019s short story \u201cThe Final Problem,\u201d in which the author wrote Sherlock Holmes off a cliff. (Partly because of their collective outrage, Doyle would decide later that he had only faked his detective character\u2019s death.) By the middle of the next century, Beatlemania was a worldwide phenomenon. But Japan, long before the advent of social media, venerated connoisseurship, a higher level of fandom, encouraging the pursuit of micropassions, whether pour-over coffee, selvage denim or milk bread. Out of a culture where anyone and anything \u2014\u00a0no matter how strange or marginal \u2014 can have an evangelist emerged the otaku. The term, which means \u201cyou\u201d in English, was popularized by the writer Akio Nakamori, who used it in a 1983 issue of Manga Burikko magazine to disparage fans of manga and anime\u2019s cute-girl characters, and has since come to represent obsession more broadly. It\u2019s hard to imagine podcasts, BookToks or album drops without the otaku, and where once such individuals might have been looked down on as stunted or creepy \u2014 the slobbering man-boys of Nakamori\u2019s essay \u2014 their rise has recoded nerdy enthusiasm as something cool and even integral to the entertainment business, elevating the stature of the fan and leading to a world in which audiences not only respond to the culture but are actively shaping it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cTHERE ARE YOUNG people in every country and field who are absorbed in their own specialized hobbies,\u201d says the social anthropologist Eiji Otsuka, 66, Nakamori\u2019s former editor, who notes that \u201cotaku\u201d has become Western shorthand for all that\u2019s considered weird in Japan. \u201cIt has no more meaning than the Japanese equivalent of \u2018geek.\u2019\u201d But others think that Japan\u2019s emphasis on collective identity has been what encouraged fandom as we now know it: In a rigidly mannered system, it provides a way to fly one\u2019s freak flag in a socially acceptable fashion. \u201cThere\u2019s a deeply rooted awareness of how others perceive you, which can lead people to hold back on expressing themselves too much or standing out,\u201d says the photographer and filmmaker Mika Ninagawa, 52, a frequent chronicler of Tokyo\u2019s cosplay community. \u201cThat\u2019s exactly why so many people secretly long for a place where they can become someone different.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Susan Napier, a professor in the Japanese program at Tufts University in Boston, traces the origins of the otaku to the Edo period. Beginning in the early 17th century, sanctioned red-light districts known as pleasure centers were built in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka as sites for courtesans to entertain men; other areas were designated for enjoying Kabuki theater. \u201cYou had the development of a fan culture with people who loved a particular courtesan or actor,\u201d says Napier, who adds that, within those protected walls, the four-class social hierarchy of that era, which put samurai above farmers, artisans and merchants, was far less rigid. \u201cPeople did interact much more freely,\u201d she says. Although very little remains of the original pleasure centers, newer versions exist. In Golden Gai, a mazelike network of alleyways in Shinjuku, Tokyo, many of the roughly 300 bars, most with no more than a few seats, have their own unique themes: death metal, Troll dolls, slasher movies, even Matthew Barney\u2019s \u201cCremaster Cycle\u201d film series.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Being Japanese today can mean having to uphold multiple identities at once, says Napier. Ever since the rapid modernization of the Meiji Restoration in the late 19th century, wearing traditional clothing has involved a sense of performance; a kimono alone makes a statement. \u201cYou\u2019re one kind of person at the office and another kind of person at home,\u201d adds Napier, who argues that Japan, more than other cultures, is a nation of compartmentalization. In 2022, Irwin Wong, a 41-year-old Australian photographer who has been based in Tokyo for the past two decades, co-edited \u201cThe Obsessed: Otaku, Tribes and Subcultures of Japan,\u201d a book that documents some of the country\u2019s most intense hobbyists, from collectors of homegrown phenomena (Nintendo memorabilia, \u201cDragon Ball Z\u201d action figures) to those who\u2019ve embraced international exports (such as the greaser style of certain bosozoku<\/em>, or biker gangs). \u201cJapanese people will take something that they see from overseas and ratchet it up to the nth degree beyond all sense and reason,\u201d he says. \u201cTheir attention to detail spurs them on to almost compete with each other, to see who can outdo everyone the most.\u201d<\/p>\n Around 2010, the Japanese government began financing Cool Japan, an initiative to drive economic growth by championing the country\u2019s cultural products, further propagating the otaku way abroad. Japan\u2019s former Prime Minister Taro Aso admitted to reading between 10 and 20 comics a week; Marie Kondo<\/a>, who made her fortune as a tidying guru, has referred to herself as an \u201corganizing otaku.\u201d In 1975, an estimated 700 people participated in the inaugural Comic Market, a semiannual convention in Tokyo for creators of fan fiction; more recently, attendance was about 750,000. In his 2019 book, \u201cOtaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan,\u201d the Tokyo-based anthropologist Patrick W. Galbraith writes that at one point more paper was manufactured \u201cto publish manga than to make toilet paper in Japan.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n FANDOM ALSO HARKS back to Japanese art traditions, from tea ceremonies to ikebana \u2014 \u201cparticipatory culture,\u201d according to Haruo Shirane, 73, the vice chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University in New York. \u201cEveryone forms groups, and you make stuff, usually with a teacher or someone with more knowledge,\u201d he says. \u201cOtaku is a part of that: You become a character, or you create a variation. The animators and the manga magazines have contests where amateurs send in their stuff, and future stars are born from this process.\u201d The intensity with which some people have devoted themselves to someone else\u2019s work is its own craft, requiring adherence to a regimented set of rules.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n As a teenager, Misako Aoki started modeling Lolita fashion, a style with many variations \u2014 Gothic Lolita, Sweet Lolita, Punk Lolita \u2014\u00a0characterized by frilly clothes and bonnets. Now 41, she almost never leaves home in anything other than her doll-like uniform. But even in her \u201carmor of confidence,\u201d as she calls it, or maybe because of it, Aoki, who also works as a night nurse, is careful to conform in other ways. \u201cWearing Lolita fashion is like being a princess,\u201d she says. \u201cYou can\u2019t also be indecent or rude.\u201d Wong and others make a point to address what he calls \u201cthe elephant in the room\u201d: an undercurrent of female sexualization that began with manga and which, in what\u2019s still a rather male-dominated society, extends to the broader world of otaku. In 2013, it was discovered that AKB48\u2019s Minami Minegishi had spent the night with a member of the boy band Generations From Exile Tribe; later that day, AKB48\u2019s management released a video of Minegishi, her head newly shaved, begging for forgiveness, and she was demoted to a supporting role in the band.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In the past decade or so, fans worldwide have gone from being worshipers of cultural products to co-directors of them. Thanks to an online fund-raising campaign, \u201cVeronica Mars,\u201d a detective series that was canceled in 2007, was brought back<\/a> as a feature in 2014. In 2015, what started as a piece of \u201cTwilight\u201d fan fiction, E.L. James\u2019s novel \u201c50 Shades of Grey,\u201d became its own blockbuster film. And in 2021, fans\u2019 persistence led to the release of \u201cZack Snyder\u2019s Justice League,\u201d the director\u2019s four-hour cut of the 2017 superhero movie, which was thought to have been marred by studio interference. And that\u2019s just in America. Wong traces this collective power back to Hideaki Anno\u2019s<\/a> \u201cNeon Genesis Evangelion\u201d (1995-96), one of the most popular animated series of all time. \u201cIt really put anime on the map,\u201d says Wong. \u201cFrom there, otaku started to reclaim the label as something to be admired.\u201d With his dystopian vision of Japan, where teenagers operate giant humanoid robots to fight a common enemy, Anno, 64, who describes himself as \u201cotaku through and through,\u201d was able to explore themes of alienation and mental illness \u2014 topics that are seldom openly discussed in Japanese society. \u201cAnimation has the unique ability to translate abstract images and moods that cannot be put into words in a new form,\u201d says the director. After the original series aired, his most passionate followers, disappointed with the final two episodes, pressured Anno to redo the ending in a subsequent film trilogy.<\/p>\n Shirane attributes the complicated relationship between an otaku and their star to what he calls Japan\u2019s \u201cmaster-disciple system.\u201d Initially, he says, one might join a club to learn from an elder. But over time, the student \u2014 or otaku \u2014 gains confidence, and control. \u201cFandom is imitation,\u201d he says, \u201cand then it becomes a channel to escape into another world,\u201d where the right to be worshiped must be earned and can never be taken for granted. \u201cOnce someone loses their status in Japan,\u201d says Kaede, whose former band, E-Girls, had 31 members at one point, \u201cit\u2019s hard to return.\u201d There\u2019s always someone else to fixate on instead.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n