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Just go to indeed.com slash show right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash show. Terms and conditions apply. Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast episode 561, The Otaku, Part 3. For our final episode on otaku culture, I want to cover what is, at least to my mind,
probably the single most interesting question there is to discuss on the subject. As we've seen over the last few weeks, otaku culture as a phenomenon is very much a product of the unique circumstances of post-war Japan, and yet... the things we associate with it are now international phenomena. Otaku culture has crossed national boundaries and become this international subculture over the span of just a few decades.
Indeed, I suspect a non-zero number of the people listening to this very podcast are doing so in part because they're either a part of one of those subcultures or adjacent to them in some way. I know that back when I was TAing at UW in the mid-2010s, an average of about half of one of my intro classes would be composed of people wearing Dragon Ball shirts. And to those people, I say, thank you for making sure I could afford groceries.
Anyway, all of this raises an interesting question. How the hell did that happen? How did a distinctly Japanese subculture become this border crossing cultural juggernaut? And the question gets even more interesting when you consider that the first... overseas otaku groups started coming together in the US really in the late 80s and early 90s in any sizable numbers, a period when the social stigma against otaku in Japan was at its overall peak.
Why was it at its peak? Well, it's time for us to talk about the otaku murderer. This was probably one of the biggest media sensations of the late 80s in Japan. In June of 1989, a young man named Miyazaki Tsutomu was caught by the father of two young girls in Hachijouji on the outskirts of Tokyo after Miyazaki lured away one of the girls to attempt to molest her. That father attacked Miyazaki and drove him off, and shortly thereafter, Miyazaki was apprehended by the police.
The investigation by the prefectural police revealed that Miyazaki was, in fact, behind the disappearance of four young girls over the past year or so, all of them from either Tokyo itself or neighboring Saitama Prefecture. He'd murdered all four girls and done some frankly pretty horrific things to them I don't really want to recount here, in addition to sending taunting notes to some of their families.
The arrest and these revelations, of course, produced a media sensation. Given the horrific nature of the crimes, that's not surprising. What's important for us is that as the police built their case, one of the details that emerged about Miyazaki was that he had a massive collection of anime, manga, associated figurines, and a great deal of animated pornography.
These details were amplified by Japanese media, creating a moral panic I have seen compared to the contemporary satanic panic in the United States. when otherwise apparently rational people began spreading the notion that there was this bizarre underground conspiracy of Satanists abusing children across the United States. Japanese media was flush with discussions of how Miyazaki, the child of wealthy but disinterested parents, had retreated into a fantasy world of manga,
leading him to an inability to distinguish his reality from fantasy, which had in turn helped contribute to his horrific actions. Of course, much like the satanic panic in the United States with the benefit of hindsight, we can see clearly that this was a moral panic in the classic sense of the term.
Discussions of Miyazaki's neglected childhood centered specifically on his mother and how her failure to devote herself fully to him, instead focusing on her career, had led him to retreat into manga. Discussions of Miyazaki's grandfather.
his closest personal relationship, focused on how said grandfather's death had triggered Miyazaki's descent into madness, symbolic of the passage of an older generation of Japanese, still devoted to traditional social values, and the lack of a new generation that was willing to step into that role. As one psychoanalyst interviewed by Japanese media put it, society was in danger from, quote, a whole generation of youth who do not even experience the primary two or three-way relationship.
between themselves and their mother and father, and who cannot make the transition from a fantasy world of videos and manga to reality. Again, if you're at all familiar with the satanic panic in the 80s US, this probably sounds familiar, with of course the exception that, so far as I know, nobody caught up in the American satanic panic ever actually killed anybody.
But again, just like the U.S., there was this big cultural backlash against the elements of youth culture that were seen as symbolic of the corruption of young people's morals and the social decay which had allowed these terrible things to take place. In America, this meant things like metal music or Dungeons and Dragons. In Japan, it meant the hallmarks of otaku culture. And again, much like the satanic panic,
Japanese media was very directly engaged in whipping this frenzy up. For example, newspapers like the Shukan Postal regularly ran headlines promoting the notion that otaku culture was undermining Japanese society. One example, today's elementary and middle school students, the otaku tribe, are eclipsing society. Other papers rushed to interview people, like Otsuka Eiji, who capitalized on the panic by producing a book,
M-kun no Naka no Watashi, or the Mr. M's as in Miyazaki, Among Us. One excerpt from that book to give you the flavor. It might sound terrible, but there are over 100,000 people with the same pastimes as Mr. M. we have a whole standing army of murderers. Of course, not all the press coverage was universally negative. There were some in the mass media whose coverage of otaku culture was a bit more sympathetic.
But the academic Okada Toshio, who grew up during this period and would later become one of those academics writing about his experience, recalled later in life that most of those articles came from a perspective he called holganbi-iki. Roughly, sympathy for losers. In other words, those articles were coming from a perspective of, hey, it's unfair to label all of these useless nerds as potential axe murderers. Most of them are just useless weirdos.
It's also worth noting that these very negative depictions of otaku as a concept were not purely the creation of mass media. Even before the Miyazaki murders, there had been more than a few people in otaku circles themselves. who'd helped define the term in a deeply negative way. For example, remember that guy Nakamura Akio we talked about in the very first episode of this series? He was one of the people who popularized the term otaku, possibly even the one who coined its modern meaning.
even though that's a bit controversial. I quoted you a bit of his first essay on the subject in the very first episode of this series, and you might recall that his tone towards otaku culture was pretty negative. But that's nothing compared to what came next. Nakamura wrote two more articles on the subject of otaku research in the same year that were so negative they ended up getting the whole series cancelled by the publisher due to fan backlash.
The second column was entitled, Otaku mo hitonami ni koi wo suru, or Do Otaku Love Like Normal People? Nakamura's answer, shockingly enough, was pretty clear. No. He classified male otaku as warped and, quote, definitively lacking in male skills, unquote, because of their obsession with idol singers and anime girls and concluded, quote, there's no way guys like this could ever get with a woman, unquote.
Along the way, of course, he mixed in plenty of casual homophobia in his railings against, quote, failed men. Nakamura's third column involved taking his then girlfriend to a manga and anime hangout space in Shinjuku and documenting what he claimed were her authentic reactions, quote, shrieking and shaking. when she saw the, quote, slugs and leeches of these otaku among otaku. Yes, those are all real words from the article, or at least translations of them.
His editors ended up canning the rest of the series, which was running in, let's not forget, a magazine called Manga Buriko that was aimed at fans of this stuff. One of the other staff writers did eventually publish one final follow-up, in which he wrote a more mild but still pretty damning statement of his views on otaku culture.
It was, he wrote, a sort of Peter Pan syndrome embraced by young men who were terrified by taking on the responsibility of adulthood, quote, Otaku absolutely refused to vector towards general psychological maturity. What I'm getting at here is that even in spaces that were nominally otaku-friendly, whatever that means, there was plenty of discomfort at even being associated with the term, so it's not that surprising the mass media picked up on this and ran with the whole
otaku murderer angle. Now, Miyazaki's case was a headline grabber in Japan for the next two decades. His trial took seven years, focusing... unsurprisingly, on the nature of his mental state and whether or not he was capable of taking responsibility for his actions. Ultimately, he was found to be mentally competent and sentenced to death, a sentence that worked its way through appeals up to the Japanese Supreme Court before being upheld.
In 2008, the death warrant was signed by the then-Justice Minister, at the time Hatoyama Kunio, a member of the long-standing Hatoyama political dynasty, and he was executed in June. In terms of the wider anti-otaku moral panic, however, Miyazaki quickly fell off the radar. He was just a symptom, so the thinking went, of this wider disease among Japanese youth.
The real issue was otaku culture itself, and so in the 1990s, there was this pretty intense crackdown against it, particularly against any material considered to be sexual in nature. And it is worth noting that as a subculture, the various sub-tribes of otaku do include some focus on sexual material that, frankly, I find pretty disturbing.
If you've been to Akihabara, which we talked about last week, that neighborhood in Tokyo, you've probably seen some of the sexualized images depicting very young girls. something referred to as lolicon that name is a contraction of lolita complex being derived of course from vladimir nabakov's novel
I have to admit personally, I tend to avoid large parts of Akihabara because of how prevalent that imagery is. I find it really gross. But it is also worth noting that the Moral Panic of the 90s didn't just target material like that. Komiket, for example, came under heavy pressure to restrict sales of doujinshi that depicted same-sex relationships, which were considered to be perverse.
The doujin circles of the time were one of the cultural spaces in Japan that were more friendly to queer people. One of the larger Tokyo bookstores that focused on doujinshi manga no mori was raided by the cops in 1991, who then got contact information for 15 different doujin circles, mostly ones specializing in queer relationships, and took in their members for interrogation. And...
By the way, under Japan's habeas corpus laws, you can be held for several weeks without charges, so being taken in for questioning is not a small thing. 74 people were interrogated in this way, thousands of volumes of unpublished work confiscated, And at the end of the day, nobody was ever charged with anything so far as I'm aware.
Eventually, of course, the panic did die down, but the social stigma remained. And I do find it fascinating that it's during this time of all times that this subculture started to spread overseas. Or maybe started is the wrong word. It's true, the term itself, otaku, was a late arrival in English. Lawrence Ng, an academic who specializes on this subject, traced down the first mention of the term in English, at least that he could find,
to a Usenet forum post from 1990, which is a type of early online discussion board for those of you too young to know what dial-up internet was. The post in question was a translation of a quiz from Famicom Sushin, a Japanese gaming magazine, supposedly to help readers determine what type of game system they should buy. One of the questions was, yes or no, otaku sounds kind of perverted. I hate that word.
Otaku is a word for someone who stays indoors all the time, for example, playing video games. So the term is a fairly late arrival in English as a language, but the subculture, so to speak, was not. Anime, of course, has a history in the US going back to the 1960s when American TV networks, which were under pressure to fill out longer and longer broadcast schedules, began syndicating shows from Japan, among other places.
Astro Boy, the English dub of Tetsuan Otomu, began broadcasting in the US in late 1963. However, most of the shows picked up in this way didn't have... anywhere near the same level of cultural staying power as Tezuka Osamu's work did. Many of these shows were total redubs with new scripts over the same animation, or had been substantially re-edited.
Sometimes that was for intellectual property reasons. For example, the Japanese show Tetsujin Niju Hachigo, or Iron Man No. 28, was renamed Gigantor in the US because another more famous Iron Man... had beaten the Japanese one to the trademark. Sometimes the changes were for cultural reasons. Another iconic early anime show in the US was Speed Racer, but the US release... changed character names and toned down the substantial violence of the Japanese original to make it more kid-friendly.
This is also probably a good point to note that from a certain perspective, anime has always been American. Many of Japan's most famous animators, from Tezuko Samu himself to another one you probably heard of, Miyazaki Hayao, would later note they were inspired to work in animation by American animated films from the 1940s and 1950s, particularly those, of course, produced by the House of Mouse itself, the Walt Disney Corporation.
I have literally no artistic talent, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt here, but I'm told if you know anything about drawing, you can recognize how early anime and manga drawing styles are clearly influenced by the Disney approach to animation. But again, personally, never made it past stick figures. Take that for what it's worth. The trend continued in the 70s and especially the 80s, which saw a fad for robot shows driven by the success of Transformers in the United States.
leading to a bunch of anime built around the giant robot premise being brought over to America. The 70s were also the period of the first fan groups in the US for anime, the first of which was called the Cartoon Fantasy Organization, or CFO, founded by sci-fi fans in Los Angeles in 1977.
These groups mostly organized screenings and shared information about new shows, as well as taking advantage of a hot new technology, the home video cassette recorder, the VCR, to make bootleg copies of their favorite shows to spread around. Not every show they screened, of course, had an English dub or subtitles even available. So in some cases at these meetups, there was a narrator literally translating as the show was going on.
In others, viewers were given printed scripts to be able to follow along with a translation. In the 80s, there were two big shifts in the fan culture. first anime or to use the phrase common among american fans at the time japanimation had gotten big enough to justify dedicated licensing and distribution companies the first of these streamline pictures
had its first big breakout hit with Robotech, released in 1985. Robotech's actually a pretty fascinating example of a show that was entirely transformed for the American audience. It's a mashup of three different Japanese shows that were re-edited by Streamline into a single narrative. The name Robotech actually comes from a Japanese model-making company that sold fan models from those three original shows.
Anyway, Streamline was huge for helping anime go more mainstream in the US. Thanks to their licensing deals, Streamline shows were a lot easier to get access to. You didn't have to know a guy who knew a guy who was willing to make you a VCR bootleg. And the translations, or in some cases dubs, tended to be of higher quality, though of course that's not the same as high quality.
Of course, the flip side of this was that Streamline's leadership was very devoted to the notion that sex and violence were the main draws of Japanese animation. and tended to focus its efforts on those shows, which did get viewers, but didn't do a lot for the reputation of the genre, so to speak. Second, the 80s are the decade of the first anime conventions in the US.
The very first one, from what I could find, took place in 1983 in Dallas, Texas. It was called Yamatokon, dedicated largely to the show Starblazers, the English title for Space Battleship Yamato. I am sure a more refined cultural studies person than myself could make great hay out of the first anime con in the US, being built off a franchise that was in turn constructed off nostalgia for a warship that was actually sunk by the American military.
created by a navy that the Americans then disbanded, but that's neither here nor there. Still, through the 80s, the anime and manga subculture in the US was still pretty small, but in the 90s... That started to change. Why? Well, a few reasons. First and probably most importantly, Remember, the 80s were when you started to see wider spread access to anime outside of those small hobbyist groups reliant on tape trading networks.
and that meant the first larger generation of fans who grew up with anime as kids would have entered college and become adults in the early 90s. That meant they were the first to start organizing, for example, college fan groups that could then network with each other to share translations or get access to some budget funding to buy tapes.
And then when they went out into the world to get, you know, jobs, they had money to spend on buying tapes, meaning the market for anime in general could grow further. As a result, both streamline and later competing distribution companies like U.S. Renditions and Animagol saw their profits growing consistently, which in turn led them to expand distribution.
Animeigo in particular actually grew out of the college anime club scene. One of its founding members and lead translators, Masaki Takai, had previously been the Cornell Japanimation Society president. And then... Of course, there was the internet. Now, I don't know how many of y'all remember the days of Web 1.0, but if perchance you're too young to remember...
It was pretty much just hardcore enthusiast types who were on the web in the 1990s. Congregating mostly on discussion boards run via things like Usenet, these early adopters were mostly just talking to each other via forum posts. It turned out there was a decent amount of overlap between the sort of folks interested in what was then a pretty niche animation genre and the sort of folks who were willing to spend an hour troubleshooting their Linux installation.
or battling against the glorious jankiness that was early Microsoft Windows to be able to get online. This was a little bit before my time, I was more of the Windows XP generation, but man, I remember those blue screens of death like they were yesterday. Anyway, by the mid-1990s, you had the basic infrastructure in place for an American anime fandom that was, in turn, thanks to the internet as well as college clubs and dedicated distribution companies,
way more plugged into goings on in the world of Japanese otaku culture. And at the same time, you saw a pretty big culture shift starting in Japan proper, driven by one of the biggest changes of the age. Pretty much every time we talk about anything that happened after 1990 in Japan, we end up talking about the collapse of the bubble economy in some form or another. Today, we'll be no different.
I think it's hard to understate just how important a moment this was in the political and social direction Japan has taken since. For a quick refresh since it's been a bit,
By the 1980s, Japan's post-war economic rebirth had succeeded beyond, I think it's fair to say, anyone's wildest imagination. In the span of just 40 years, Japan had gone from a poverty-wracked, impoverished nation, to the second wealthiest country on the planet, and more than a few educated folks were opining that it was only a matter of time before Japan overtook the U.S. and became number one.
And then in the early 90s, the whole damn thing blew up. It turned out that a lot of Japan's economic growth in the mid to late 80s had been driven by wildly unsustainable valuations of real estate. which big corporations had invested their profits into in order to continue boosting their own valuation and revenue. When it became clear how overvalued real estate was and how much...
Shaky accounting was driving some of this investing. Infighting between the Bank of Japan and the finance ministry... delayed any response, which resulted in a catastrophic financial implosion that basically torpedoed Japan's economy for a solid decade plus. Things have bounced back to a degree, but Japan's economic growth is nowhere near what it once was, and neither is its degree of economic dominance.
What's important for us today, though, is not so much to hit to the economy, though that was bad, but the hit to, for lack of a better phrase, the national psyche in so many ways. The downfall of the bubble economy undercut some of the basic premises of post-war Japanese society.
For example, the unelected elites of Japan's bureaucracy who were supposed to use their prestige and power to do what was right for everybody came off looking like useless idiots who first missed a huge problem and then spent more time fighting each other than actually trying to fix it.
The social pressures of the post-war system, work hard in school so you can get into a good college and get a lifetime employment gig at a good company, were totally undercut because nobody was hiring all those hardworking kids. who'd mortgage their youth to take tests, get into college, and climb the corporate ladder. Honestly, the closest comparison I can think of is the impact of the 2008 housing crash on my generation in the United States.
a whole bunch of kids who'd been sold on a certain promising vision of what their futures were quote-unquote supposed to look like, who then had the proverbial rug yanked out from under them. The two moments aren't precisely equivalent, of course, in large part because American economic policymakers in 2008 explicitly tried to avoid what they saw as mistakes by Japanese leaders in the aftermath of the bubble collapse, but...
That's a whole other episode topic. But to give some numbers that are applicable to our story here, in Japan, the youth unemployment rate was about 2.5% at the start of the 1990s. And as the post-bubble recessions dragged on, it peaked in 2002 at 5.5%. Of course, by comparison, after the 2008 housing crisis in the U.S., youth unemployment peaked in 2011 at a bit over 19%, but it then went downward quite a bit.
Fewer Japanese young people ended up unemployed, but that's largely because many of them found themselves in unstable part-time jobs, ones that came without the benefits, the salaries, and most importantly, the promises of lifetime employment. that had become the standard of post-war Japanese work culture. And it's really hard to overstate how much of a sense of having the rug pulled out from under you all this created.
The grand bargain of post-war Japan had always been, simply put, as a young person, you got to work your proverbial rear end off, do well on the college entrance exams, get into a good school. But from there, you could find a good job that guaranteed you career stability. Suddenly companies could no longer afford to offer those jobs because their finances were in disarray. And so to keep the promises they'd made to people that already hired.
They just stopped hiring younger people. The result was a so-called lost generation that came of age in the 1990s without the opportunities they'd been promised. There were jobs, yes, but part time hourly ones with no benefits. Not the sort of thing you can build a life around. In fact, given that the economic malaise of the 1990s didn't really start to turn around until the mid to late 2000s, and even then growth remained slow, it's really more accurate to say lost generations in the plural.
And for our story, this is important for two reasons. First, you have what, to be honest, I always refer to in my head as the avocado toastification of a generation in Japan. If you don't know what I mean by that... First, good job at not being as online as some of us. The internet is weird and nobody should go there.
Second, back in the early 2010s, it was fashionable among a certain older set in the United States to complain about American millennials, of which I am one, and our inability to do adult things like buy houses and start families. Famously, one out-of-touch millionaire pundit Australian blamed this on poor financial discipline and especially on young people spending too much money on coffee and avocado toast.
And to be fair, as a millennial myself, I did know some people who were not always the best about financial discipline. Fortunately, as a grad student, I had no money to waste at all. But for my friends who did, the attitude was generally it doesn't matter how much I save because in the post 2008 financial crisis economy, I'll never make enough money to buy a home and start a family.
So why not spend the money I do have on a fancy meal and some nice coffee that I'll at least enjoy? And I think you can describe aspects of youth culture in 1990s Japan in the same way. Among these disillusioned 20-somethings, there was an increasing attitude of it doesn't matter how much I save, my dead-end part-time job will never pay me enough, or offer opportunities for advancement.
Indeed, in Japan in the 90s, it was arguably worse than in America in the 2000s and 2010s because policies of lifetime employment meant good white collar jobs rarely opened up for mid-career employees. And that meant that in traditional economic terms, the conventional notion of success was off the table for these people.
So if that's the case, why not spend the money you do have on things that make you happy? On a box set of your favorite manga, or a giant figurine of your favorite character, or whatever? And so, as the rest of the economy contracted... The otaku economy continued to grow. Akihabara and its otaku catering businesses, of course, really came into existence in the 90s, as we talked about last week. New shows were getting made all the time. Many of them were wildly successful.
two of the big ones from this era being Neon Genesis Evangelion and Sailor Moon, neither of which I regret to inform you I have ever watched, but both of which still have very passionate fanbases down to today. Second, and relatedly, the growing fan culture for anime, manga, and other forms of Japanese cultural production overseas, and especially in the US, actually started making waves back in Japan.
In large part, this was thanks again to the early internet, which made it easy to see how these networks of college clubs and fan groups and conventions were coming together from a distance. And the fact that people overseas were enjoying this stuff, which, as many self-described otaku of the 70s and 80s whose work I've read for this series put it, they thought nobody else would like, that felt important.
Witness Okada Toshio, an academic and self-described otaku, who in the 90s offered some of the first sociology courses focused on the idea of otaku culture. As he put it in his own recollection of the decade, with the bursting of the economic bubble in 1991, Japanese lost the sense of self-esteem they'd had in the past. In the wake of this, Japanese started to feel whatever they did was useless. At the time, the feeling was Japan still has otaku, which might amount to something.
For this reason, the mass media was actually very positive about my course at the University of Tokyo. If I had said I was offering this course only a few years after Miyazaki Tsutomu's arrest and trial, the reaction might have been more like, What is all this about the University of Tokyo cultivating the Miyazaki reserve troops? From the end of the 1980s to the beginning of the 1990s, misunderstandings by parents, for example, that manga and anime fans were potential sex offenders,
were fading. He concluded by noting that by the late 1990s, if parents found out their kid was kind of an otaku, they liked manga or video games or whatever, they might say the kid was a handful in Japanese. But they would not panic or assume their child was now a serial killer. The statistical data also seems to back this up.
Professor Kikuchi Satoru points to a survey he performed of college students from 1998 and then repeated in 2007. One of those questions asked those students what their general impression of self-identified otaku was. In 1998, the responses were 62% negative impression, 21% other, and a mere 17% positive. By 2007, that had shifted to 41% negative.
25% other, and 34% positive. This is particularly interesting when you look at another question breakdown from the same survey, would you agree if someone else called you otaku? For this one, Professor Kikuchi also broke down the answers by gender. In 1998, for men, the answers were 10% I would strongly agree if someone called me an otaku, 33% I would slightly agree, 32% I would disagree, 24% I would strongly disagree. By 2007, that had gone to 17%, 32%, 24%, and 22% respectively.
which is a 6% jump in positive identification overall. For women, meanwhile, in 1998, the answer was 5%. I would strongly agree if someone called me an otaku. 33% slightly agree. 38% disagree, 23% strongly disagree. By 2007, it was 15%, 33%, 34%, 16%, a 10% jump in positive identification. I think this is really interesting to look at. I don't think I'd be shocking anyone here by saying that, generally speaking, women in Japan face a lot of intense social pressure around conformism.
As of 2004, Japan was 118th out of 146 countries on the Global Gender Gap Index. The next G7 country on that list is Italy at 79th. Given that reality, if 10% more young women are willing to claim the label otaku after just nine years, that's a big shift in how accepted the identity has become. Unfortunately, it's now 2005 and Dr. Kikuchi's data is 18 years out of date. I couldn't find a more recent survey, but I can't see any reason to think the trend isn't continuing.
And I think this is an interesting point to wrap the series on. Otaku was a term born out of stigma, even by people who might be described as otaku-adjacent, and it has become something, well, not quite more. There's definitely still stigma there, but it's also become more of an accepted subculture, thanks at least in part to overseas fans showing that the Japanese subculture was not alone in what they enjoyed.
Of course, those of you who remember the first episode of this series will also realize we still haven't actually dealt with one of our starting questions. What does otaku even mean? If anything, the question has become even more challenging today. because otaku subcultures themselves have proliferated substantially. You now have self-identified health otaku, cosmetics otaku. It's become this sort of catch-all for having a serious interest in a subject.
Definitions, too, have proliferated. We are well beyond Nakamura Akio's 1983 characters of slugs or those of his contemporaries referencing postmodern theorists. trying to make a case about otaku as a reaction to the collapse of dominant narratives. Today, there are a bunch of competing academic definitions of the term otaku, and to be fair, most of them aren't super complimentary.
Just to give you some examples, Dr. Nakajima Azusa has defined otaku as a type of communication issue that is resolved in engaging in a tightly knit subculture that has defined social rules. where Asaba Michiaki saw it as a manifestation of improper socialization. I've always been a little more partial to Miyadaishinji's definition of otaku as an imbalanced specialist,
who is so into a certain category of knowledge or a skill set that they're just not interested in developing others. I think that's a bit less judgmental. But to be frank, I don't think there is a correct definition, because finding one would mean figuring out a precise meaning for otaku subcultures in the modern world, and I don't know there is a singular fixed meaning to be found.
In the end, the common thread I see across these fan cultures is simply a passionate interest in something they love and a desire to share that interest. Like all desires, that can manifest in healthy ways or unhealthy ones, but as long as it's the former. Who are any of us to criticize? After all, you got just one life to live. Might as well spend it doing something you love. That's all for this week. Thank you very much for listening. This show is a part of the Facing Backward Podcast Network.
You can go to our website, facingbackword.com, to find out more about this show and our other shows. And you can support us on Patreon. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you next time. for the start of a multi-part investigation into the history of rioting in Edo period Japan.