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WIRED 1.1
The Incredibly Strange Mutant Creatures Who Rule the Universe of Alienated
Japanese Zombie Computer Nerds
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(Otaku to You)
By Karl Taro Greenfeld
Three years ago, the serene Tokyo bedroom community of Hanna was shaken by
a series of grisly crimes. Four pre- teen girls were abducted, molested
and mutilated in a serial killing-spree The New York Times described as so
"un-Japanese." But the perpetrator, who had sent bone and teeth fragments
to the grieving families, couldn't have been more Japanese.
The murderer enticed the children to his six-mat in Saitama, then molested
and murdered them, recording the gruesome details of his deeds on the
hard-drive of his computer.
When police finally caught up with Tsutomu Miyazaki, they found the
27-year-old living in two realities. By day he was a sullen apprentice at
a local print shop. By night he lived out the fantasies he had
internalized from avidly watching his collection of more than 6,000
slasher videos and pornographic manga, or Japanese comic books.
In defense of his warped client, Miyazaki's attorney claimed that video
and reality had merged; Miyazaki couldn't tell gory fact from gory
fiction. After Miyazaki's much-publicized trial, one thing was clear: A
new generation of anti-social, nihilistic whiz-kids had arrived.
Dubbed the otaku-zoku, or otaku for short, these are Japan's socially
inept but often brilliant technological shut-ins. Their name derives from
the highly formal way of saying "you" in Japanese, much like calling a
friend "Sir."
First identified by SPA! magazine in 1986, the otaku are Tokyo's newest
information-age product. These were the kids "educated" to memorize reams
of context-less information in preparation for filling in bubbles on
multiple-choice entrance exams.
Now in their late teens and twenties, most are either cramming for college
exams or stuck in cramming mode. They relax with sexy manga or violent
computer games. They shun society's complex web of social obligations and
loyalties. The result: a burgeoning young generation of at least 100,000
hard-core otaku (estimates of up to 1 million have been bandied about in
the Tokyo press) who are too uptight to talk to a telephone operator, but
who can kick ass on the keyboard of a PC.
Zero, 25, is a self-proclaimed otaku who flunked out of Keio University's
math department because he didn't like being ordered around by teachers to
whom he felt superior. "They couldn't deal with someone like me," he
recalled. "Now I'm independent and I don't need to deal with anyone like
them."
Zero's life now revolves around computer games. He only ventures out of
his six-mat in Kawagoe to acquire new game-boards, the green, maze-like
"minds" taken from commercial arcade games like Galaga or Space Invaders.
At home, he plugs these circuit boards into a special adapter on his own
console, analyzes and dissects them for bugs and flaws that allow one, for
example, to glimpse a Space Invader's after-image as it scuttles across
the screen or to change the color of a yellow Ms. Pac-Man to purple.
Zero often dresses in a plain white T-shirt and ill- fitting jeans rolled
up about six inches. He doesn't look you in the eyes when he talks; he
answers quietly with his face to the floor. His face possesses gentle
features, but it is sickly pale.
He makes his living as a software trouble-shooter, looking for problems in
new software before it hits the market, earning 350,000 yen (about $2,800)
a month. He works in his murky home, where the windows are permanently
covered with yellowing newspaper to block out the sunlight.
"I've always liked playing games. As a boy, I preferred video games to
other kids," Zero offered. "So I understand technology. I'm more
comfortable with computers than human beings.
"Finding the malfunction of a computer program or game is thrilling
because I'm basically exposing the phony computer experts who invented the
game in the first place," Zero says.
He threads his way over the tatami floor, which is a high-tech junkyard of
old computer circuit-boards, obsolete monitors, archaic disc drives and a
spluttering coffee-maker. He strips down to a white T-shirt and striped
boxer shorts - dressed for company, though you wouldn't know it.
Zero sits on a swivel office chair and clicks on his Quadra 900 Macintosh
PC with 240 megabytes of storage attached to a keyboard which Zero has
remodeled to conform to his own idea of how a keyboard "should have been
laid-out in the first place." As he waits for the computer to boot, he
scans the rolls of newly arrived faxes.
The first is from his "buddy" Kojack. It's a chart of a mid-seventies Bay
City Roller tour of Japan, including tour dates, attendance and play
lists. Zero is impressed. Another, from Piman in Aomori, announces he is
selling a rare 1978 edition of "Be Bop High School" for 50,000 yen ($400).
Zero thinks it's overpriced.
Zero casts them aside to read one from Batman in Nagoya who claims that
the Thunder Dragon and Metal Black video games employ the same game-matrix
with different graphics and scoring systems. Seventeen pages of notes
support this hypothesis. Zero is not impressed. He's known this since
Metal Black hit the market way back last Tuesday.
Zero gets busy. He disseminates a warning through his computer modem that
flashes on terminals from Hokkaido to Kyushu. He warns other otaku on the
Eye Net computer network to be on the lookout for some poser named Batman
pushing stale info. For those few moments - as Zero's invisible brethren
attentively scan and store his transmitted data - he is no longer a wimp.
He's a big gun, a macho man in the world of the otaku.
Information is the fuel that feeds the otaku's worshiped dissemination
systems - computer bulletin-boards, modems, faxes. For otaku, the only
thing that matters is the accuracy of the answer, not its relevance. No
piece of information is too trivial for consideration: For instance, for a
monster otaku - an otaku into TV and manga monsters - the names of the
various actors who wore the rubber suits in an Ultraman episode where
Ultraman is conspicuously shorter than in other shows is precious
currency. For military otaku, it's the name of the manufacturer of 55mm
armor-piercing ammunition for the PzkIII Tank. For idol otaku - fanatics
who follow the endless parade of cute girl pop singers - it's the specific
university the father of darling idol Hikaru Nishida attended. Anything
qualifies, as long is it was not previously known.
Although Zero spends most of his waking hours exchanging information with
fellow otaku-zoku, Zero only knows his tribe through the computer bulletin
board. He has never met any of them. He doesn't even know their real names.
Zero speaks of Kojack, who he has also never met in their five-year,
fax-driven "friendship." Besides being a computer-game otaku, Kojack is an
idol otaku. Idols, those interchangeable performers, are the bread and
butter of the music business. Every year, 40 or 50 idols appear from
nowhere to satiate pre-teen musical tastes. Some, like singer Seiko
Matsuda, become fantastically successful. Others quickly vanish.
But Kojack isn't interested in the successful idols. Nor does he care that
idol music sucks. All he really wants is all the information he can get
about Miho Nakayama - a cute-as-a-button, up-and-coming idol. Of course he
needs to know the obvious data like her star-sign, blood- type, favorite
foods and what her father does for a living. But he will delve much
further for arcane and perverse factoids like her bra-size (75A -
relatively small), any childhood diseases she may have had (Chicken Pox),
or which assistant sound engineer would have been used on the "Sugar Plum"
single if he had been available.
Kojack scours celebrity magazines, he accesses a "Nifty Serve" bulletin
board which may carry idol information deposited there by other otaku and
he desperately seeks a way to hack into the mainframe of Nakayama's record
company with a code-cracking program he designed himself. There, in the
company computer, he imagines he will find tons of choice tidbits such as
upcoming record store appearances or release dates for new singles. These
will make him a real idol-otaku king after he transmits them over the
computer networks to other idol-loving otaku.
The point for Kojack will not be the relevance of the information, nor the
nature of it, but merely that he got it and others didn't. That's what
makes the information valuable and will elevate Kojack's status as a
computer stud.
Their obsession with gathering may, at first glance, seem no different
than the fanaticism of collectors of rare books or ukiyoe woodblock
prints. But it is as if instead of trading actual items, book collectors
were to trade only information about a particular novel. ("Did you know
that Hemingway's original manuscript of For Whom the Bell Tolls was
returned because of insufficient postage?")
The objects themselves are meaningless to otaku - you can't send Ultraman
or a German tank through a modem. But you can send every piece of
information about them.
"The otaku are an underground (subculture), but they are not opposed to
the system per se," observed sociologist and University of Tokyo fellow
Volker Grassmuck, who has studied the otaku extensively. "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
capitalism.
"The parents of otaku are from the sixties generation, very democratic and
tolerant. They want to understand their children," Grassmuck continued.
"But the kids purposely look for things their parents can't understand. In
a sense, the parents themselves are immature and childish. In Japan there
is probably no obvious image of what a grownup is."
Grassmuck believes that this communication barrier between parents and
children led to a series of killings of parents by their sons. The Kinzoku
Bat Murderer, for instance, bludgeoned his mother and father to death with
a baseball bat in the early eighties. Five or six other kids - who,
Grassmuck said, would probably be called otaku today - carried out copycat
crimes in the following months.
Then there's the murderous Miyazaki, but he had communication problems of
a different sort. He was an outcast of the otaku community as well as with
his own family. Every otaku emphasizes that Miyazaki is the strange
exception to an otherwise peaceful, constructive movement.
"Miyazaki was not really even an otaku," says Taku Hachiro, a 29-year-old
otaku and author of Otaku Heaven, who appeared on the scene to offset the
negative otaku image which the Miyazaki case had created. "If he was a
real otaku he wouldn't have left the house and driven around looking for
victims. That's just not otaku behavior.
"Because of his case, people still have a bad feeling about us. They
shouldn't. They should realize that we are the future - more comfortable
with things than people," Hachiro said. "That's definitely the direction
we're heading as a society."
Many otaku make their living in technology-related fields, as software
designers, computer engineers, computer graphics artists or computer
magazine editors. Leading high-technology corporations say they are
actively recruiting otaku types because they are in the vanguard of
personal computing and software design. And some otaku-entrepreneurs have
already made it big. Self- proclaimed "Otaku Mogul" Kazuhiku Nishi is the
founder of the ASCII corp., a software firm worth a half-billion dollars.
"Many of our best workers are what you might call otaku," explained an
ASCII corp. spokesman. "We have over 2,000 employees in this office and
more than 60 percent might call themselves otaku. You couldn't want more
commitment."
However, Abiko Seigo, a manager with the same corporation, complains that
while they excel in front of the computer, otaku-types easily loose sight
of company goals beyond the project before them.
They can also be lousy team-players, unable to communicate verbally with
their non-otaku co-workers - and in the corporate world, the team
mentality still pervades.
If Taku Hachiro is right, and the otaku are the men of the future, how
will these chronically shy people reproduce? What about the sex-lives of
people who admit their terror of physical contact with another human being?
"Masturbation is better than conventional sex," claimed Hachiro, a
self-admitted virgin. "I guess I'm frightened of sex. I watch a lot of
videos and read manga, and that's about as far as I want to go.
"I don't know if it's fear so much as a matter of getting along with
objects better than people," hachiro said. "If it were possible to have
sex with objects, then that would be a different matter."
It is therefore unsurprising that otaku are fascinated with new technology
such as virtual reality or digital compression as it connects to
pornography. The sales potential for techno-driven, ultra-real
pornographic and violent experiences via the computer is so great that
computer engineers - freelance otaku as well as corporate programmers -
are furiously designing software that will satisfy an otaku's "sexual"
needs.
Although some otaku wait - no doubt breathlessly - for the development of
sexy technology they can plug into their underwear, black-market
programmers already sell "seduction" and "rape" fantasy games through
otaku networks. In December, a software company in Osaka, whose product
was deemed "obscene" by the powers that be, was raided and their stock of
ultra-graphic pornographic "games" was confiscated.
Perhaps police have good reason to worry. International computer networks
like CompuServe are already online as efficient and low-risk international
smuggling routes for sexually explicit pornographic images - showing pubic
hair is illegal under Japanese obscenity laws.
The police are only now beginning to crack down on this type of smuggling.
A spokesman at the Osaka Police Department says plans are on the board to
increase monitoring of computer bulletin boards used to distribute and
sell illegal pornography. But he is not optimistic.
"Much obscene material is already being transmitted by facsimile over
phone-lines and is therefore virtually impossible to monitor," the
spokesman explained. "However, we believe that we can choke distribution
of some pornography if we can censor the bulletin boards."
The Osaka police department has considered one strategy to clamp down on
otaku porn networks: hire otaku policemen. "We would probably be more
effective in combating crime if we could train reformed otaku," the
spokesman said. "But unfortunately we don't have the budget right now."
The police believe the Tsutomu Miyazaki case was an exception, not an omen
for the future. But, for the time being, the case has ensured that the
growing ranks of the otaku will likely remain a fringe group perceived by
the public as anti-social computer kooks, or worse yet, potential serial
killers.
But as things stand, the otaku are indeed making their mark as work-loving
employees in high-technology industries. And, as the constant stream of
new hardware and software becomes crucial to competitiveness in all
business fields, the ascension of otaku may be inevitable.
Or, as Zero confidently predicts from his gloomy lair in Kawagoe: "One
day, everyone will be an otaku."
#####
SIDEBAR
The different flavors of otaku fetishism
Manga Otaku
specialize in collecting and trading underground, hard-to-find manga like
angel, uncolored, cupid or blind logic. hangout: the haga bookstore in
kanda.
Monster Otaku
love everything about godzilla, the smog monster, gamara, rodan, ultraman
and that one with three heads, green scales and wings. most elusive
factoid: who or what exactly godzilla mated with to produce baby godzilla.
Military Otaku
construct models of everything from f-15 fighter planes to WWI british
infantry issue chipped-beef rations. special treat: surrounding themselves
with plastic ship models and watching videos of "tora! tora! tora!"
Tropical Fish Otaku
can distinguish between the life-span of an angel fish in captivity in the
northern and southern hemispheres. Favorite pastime: memorizing the latin
names of 150 fish species, without ever owning a goldfish.
Imperial Otaku
debate the lengths of the meiji and showa reigns down to the second. most
coveted item: a fax of Princess Michiko with a blemish on her forehead.
Cartoon Otaku
believe that somehow, somewhere, the "hello kitty" cartoon character has a
mouth. Raging debate: Chibi Maruko-Chan's favorite foods.
Idol Otaku
believe that it really matters who was the assistant sound engineer on
harumi inoue's b-side "you me and taro." wildest dream: to see all the way
up Miho Nakayama's skirt.
* * *
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