Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals

In Japan, obsessive adult fans and collectors of manga and anime are known as otaku. When the underground otaku subculture first emerged in the 1970s, participants were looked down on within mainstream Japanese society as strange, antisocial loners. Today otaku have had a huge impact on popular culture not only in Japan but also throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States.Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku offers a critical, philosophical, and historical inquiry into the characteristics and consequences of this consumer subculture. For Azuma, one of Japan’s leading public intellectuals, otaku culture mirrors the transformations of postwar Japanese society and the nature of human behavior in the postmodern era. He traces otaku’s ascendancy to the distorted conditions created in Japan by the country’s phenomenal postwar modernization, its inability to come to terms with its defeat in the Second World War, and America’s subsequent cultural invasion. More broadly, Azuma argues that the consumption behavior of otaku is representative of the postmodern consumption of culture in general, which sacrifices the search for greater significance to almost animalistic instant gratification. In this context, culture becomes simply a database of plots and characters and its consumers mere “database animals.” A vital non-Western intervention in postmodern culture and theory, Otaku is also an appealing and perceptive account of Japanese popular culture.

History

AZUMA, Hiroki

Asia

Univ. of Minnesota Press

In Japan, obsessive adult fans and collectors of manga and anime are known as otaku. Hiroki Azuma's 'Otaku' offers a critical, philosophical, and historical inquiry into the characteristics and consequences of this consumer subculture.

An inventive philosophical study that reconsiders the figure of the tourist.\nTourism is a characteristically modern phenomenon, yet modern thinkers have tended to deride the tourist as a figure of homogenizing globalism.\nThis philosophical study considers the tourist anew, as a subject position that enables us to redraw the map of globalized culture in an era increasingly in revolt against the liberal intellectual worldview and its call for the welcome of the "Other."\nWhy has the tourist proved so resistant to philosophical treatment, asks Hiroki Azuma. Tracing the reasons for this exclusion through the work of Rousseau and Voltaire, and subsequently in Kant, Carl Schmitt, Alexandre Kojève, Hannah Arendt, and Hardt and Negri, Azuma contends that the figure of the tourist has been rendered illegible by becoming ensnared in a series of misleading conceptual dichotomies and a linear model of world history.\nIn the widening gap between the infrastructure of globalization and inherited ties of local and national belonging, Azuma’s retheorization of the tourist presents an alternative to the choice between doubling down on local identity and roots, or hoping for the spontaneous uprising of a multitude from within the great networked Empire. For the tourist is the subject capable of moving most freely between the strata of the global and the local.\nWith explorations of the connection between tourism and fan fiction, contingency and "misdelivery," cyberspace and the uncanny, and dark tourism, Azuma’s inventive and optimistic philosophical essay sheds unexpected new light on a mode of engagement with the world that is familiar to us all.

Philosophy of the Tourist (Urbanomic / Mono)

Reference

Urbanomic

Stay informed. Talk about the issues. Always be engaged. Liberal societies have encouraged their members to take part—or at least interest—in politics. Yet, even in developed nations where it is said to work, the democratic process as we know it routinely fails to give voice, on the one hand, and to appeal at all, on the other hand, to a good number of citizens. Whatever countervailing hopes the worldwide web gave rise to in its dawning years, far from restoring the “public sphere” of yore, the internet has completed its fragmentation. According to Japanese thinker Hiroki Azuma, the way forward must be sought through what network technology is actually good at: aggregating and processing the traces we leave (without always meaning to) every time we wade into the world of connectivity. Harking back to Rousseau and his idea of the general will, dropping by Freud and his discovery of the unconscious, taking inspiration from Google and the tenor of its innovations, revisiting Christopher Alexander and his highway planning, and making curious bedfellows of Twitter, Rorty, and Nozick, General Will 2.0 is a wild ride bound to delight not just citizens who “care” but those who find doing so to be increasingly difficult and false.

General Will 2.0: Rousseau, Freud, Google

Computers & Technology

Computer Science

Vertical

Génération Otaku, les enfants de la post-modernité

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

HACHETTE LITT.

The fourth book in Kurodahan's well-received Speculative Japan series introduces new talents from Japan, and fresh new stories by some of the outstanding authors already introduced to the English-speaking world. From deep in the mountains of the Japanese countryside to the plains of frigid Pluto, from a warm South Pacific isle to a freezing mountainside, to Mars or inside a lonely psyche... a positive smorgasbord of speculative enjoyment, in English for the first time!
Contents:
<ul>
<li>ASAMATSU Ken "Genesis: Dark Birth - Shining Death"</li>
<li>AZUMA Hiroki "The Fish in Chryse"</li>
<li>HANMURA Ryo "The Sparrow Valley"</li>
<li>HORI Akira "Encounters on the Solar Wind"</li>
<li>INOUE Masahiko "Last Words"</li>
<li>KAJIO Shinji "Pearls for Mia"</li>
<li>KOBAYASHI Yasumi "Prototype No. 3"</li>
<li>MAKINO Osamu "Dancing Babylon"</li>
<li>MASE Junko "The Ebb and Flow of the Aurora Sea"</li>
<li>MINAGAWA Hiroko "Morceaux"</li>
<li>SUZUKI Miekichi "Nightfall"</li>
<li>TAKAHASHI Takako "Communion"</li>
<li>TSUKIMURA Ryoe "The Burning House"</li>
<li>UEDA Sayuri "Vermilion"</li>
<li>YAMADA Masaki "Matsui Seimon, on the Case"</li>
</ul>

Speculative Japan 4: "Pearls for Mia" and Other Tales

Literature & Fiction

Hanmura, Ryo

Asamatsu, Ken

Kobayashi, Yasumi

Kajio, Shinji

Inoue, Masahiko

Yamada, Masaki

Hori, Akira

Makino, Osamu

Ueda, Sayuri

World Literature

Kurodahan Press

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Books by AZUMA, Hiroki