Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals

For those of you out there who have had issues with the concept of “otaku” and wish to go deeper into its implication for (post-)modern mass media consumption, this new book is for you! Hiroki Azuma, one of the most prominent young Japanese literary critic and philosopher, has been writing about Otakus for some years now.  However, as with many academic essays on the sociocultural significance of the Japanese audiovisual industry, they often never jump over the language barrier.  Now, a translation by Jonathan E. Abel finally makes his 2001 book on otakus, Otaku Kara Mita Nihonshakai, available to all of us who can read English. Entitled Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, it will definitely change your way of thinking about this subculture. As Takayuki Tatsumi, author of  Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America,  states it:

Abandon every preconception, all ye who enter! In this mind-boggling book on Japan’s postmodernity, Hiroki Azuma conjures the ghost of the famous post-Hegelian Kojève, whose theory gets revived and even ‘animated’ here to reinterpret the anime-saturated realism that dominates our global Japanized reality studio. No one has more tactfully intertwined post-Derridean philosophy with Otaku-centric subculture studies than Azuma.

This should make a really interesting reading!