It’s Halloween night in Tokyo and, having been here only once before, I figured my best bet for an unguided tour of the freaks that come out at night is to visit Akihabara Electric Town. The area is hailed as one of the world’s biggest shopping centers for all kinds of gadgetry, PCs, videogames, and electronic parts ranging from thimble spools of copper wire to full-on motherboards. And then there’s all the Anime, Manga and other otaku delights … those are the real draw, especially if you’re a Westerner like me jacked up on green tea to power through the jet lag and looking for a good reason to rubberneck and maybe snap an interesting jpeg to email “Konichiwa, Mom.”
Otaku can be interpreted as the Japanese equival
ent to the All-American geek, obsessed with technology and nerdy humor, but in some cases with a pronounced dark side or otherwise fetishy underbelly. William Gibson, who many know to be the father of cyberpunk, or at least the first to sell the concept in mass paperback quantities with his Neuromancer, volleyed the term otaku Stateside in 1996 in the novel Idoru, and pegged an otaku as a ‘pathological-techno-fetishist-with-social-deficit’.
But in general it refers to an obsessive fan of anything, just more notably those who feast on Manga (Japanese comic books) and Anime, short for animation (if you didn’t know or guess), and often laser-focus their obsession on a particular title or zone like Gundam, or Transformers, or Miyazaki films, and even re-treads of such Holy Grails as our beloved Star Wars. Plus, there’s all the quote-unquote action figures and other anthropomorphic collectibles. This blog is at worst PG-13, so I won’t go into the objects of sexual obsession that are also quite prominent in the culture. (Therein lies the rub.) I will, however, admit mild disappointment that I didn’t see much of anything that could be categorized as startling. In fact, the most interesting obsession I found in Tokyo was the ubiquitous high-tech toilet.
Seriously, forget for the moment that having your toilet, public or otherwise, double as a biday isn’t exactly everyone’s bag, but why don’t we have at least some of these 21st Century features in the States? I mean, you open the stall door in a public bathroom and the lid automatically rises for you? And the seat is pre-heated to tropical levels? OK, sorry, yes, PG-13 here. Back to Akiba. Though the MPAA would likely cordon off some of the area’s shops with “no one 17 and under admitted,” those joints are really a very small minority, and typically back alley. It’s mostly good clean fun, less NC-17 and more NCC-1701 for all you Trekkie otakus out there (you know who you are). Just don’t try having Scotty beam you up from a Tokyo Toilet.
Posted by: Colin Mangham