This is the opening chapter / introduction of my new book, OTAKU IN USA, to be published in Japan in October. I'm sure Tomo is going to demand mad rewrites and more blood and guts before he translates it, but here's what came out on the crapper.
Also, I bought *this* shirt and *this* belt. Now, there's glitter everywhere...
(please note back cover of Fred Patten's book in the upper right-hand corner)
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Somewhere on planet Earth there is a picture of my first grade class taken in 1979. I haven’t seen the photo in a few years. I’ve moved around a few times since then, most recently to Tokyo, so maybe it’s gone from my life forever. No problem. The memory of it is crystal clear.
We’re a mixed bag of kids, living in a middle class suburb of Sacramento, the capital city of California located on the northern end of the state. The majority of students are white, some are Asian, a few are black, and some of them are just plain hard to pin down. One or two, like me, have black hair and brown skin. We could be from anywhere…anything.
“What are you?” people tend to ask me, as if I just dropped in from outer space. If you want something specific, my relatives came to America from Mexico two generations ago. Sometimes, when filling out an official form, the US census for example, they make me fill in a little box that says “Mexican-American.” But the way I see it, I’m simply American, same as the rest of my first grade classmates. I mean, there’s no Mexican-American embassy to clean up the mess if I get in trouble abroad. Maybe someday, they’ll even have a few more boxes to check off to help file us all away once and for all, new categories like “Nerd,” “Geek,” and “Otaku.”
Back in that first grade class photo, Hubert Wong wears enormous Coke bottle glasses with thick black frames that are too big for the size of his head, which is topped with an ill-kept mop of curly hair. I guess you could say he looks like a real smart guy except for the fact that, this being picture day when you have to look your very best, his parents have dressed him up in a conservative purple sweater vest. It covers a tight white shirt that is buttoned to the top. He’s the only one dressed this way.
Hubert is flashing a classic little kid grin, beaming with pride maybe because he’s the smartest kid in the class. I can safely assume that all his report cards for the rest of his scholastic career will be much better than mine. But Hubert already has his share of problems. For one, he isn’t very popular. No one wants to play with him during recess and he goes straight home after school solemnly where it can be safely assumed that his parents make him study until they tuck him into bed. It’s not really his fault, since he’s only trying to do his best, but there’s already resentment building up against him from the other kids. Since this is only first grade, the rest of the kids don’t yet fully understand what Hubert’s problem is. But by 6th grade, we will have the perfect word for it.
Hubert is a nerd, a big old nerd. And Hubert is an Asian nerd, which in the American pecking order is only slightly better than being a black woman. He has a double helping of minority status. The Asian kids always seem to better than the rest of us in school. They raise the bar for achievement that the rest of us struggle to get past. So a line has to be drawn somewhere. Thanks to guys like Hubert, Asians (with the exception of Bruce Lee) are just not supposed to be cool, masculine, or sexually desirable.
Of course, nerds of all races and creeds have been around before, as long as human beings first gathered to study in organized groups, I’d imagine. But they didn’t have a name for the look until the mid-twentieth century. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the first recorded use of the word “nerd” appeared in the Dr. Seuss’ children’s book “If I Ran to the Zoo,” published in 1950. But in the book, a nerd is just one of many made-up creatures that Seuss came up with to populate his work with. The name is only nonsense.
In a 1957 issue of the Glasgow, Scotland, Sunday Mail newspaper, a humor column called "ABC for SQUARES" (a square being beatnik slang for a dull, uninteresting person) finally provided a working definition: "Nerd -- a square, any explanation needed?"
Then there are unsubstantiated claims that the word originated in 1947 at the Northern Electric Research and Development Laboratories in Ottawa, Canada. The guys there, with the big brains and pockets overflowing with pens and pencils wore badges that actually read N.E.R.D.
By the 1960s, the nerd had wormed his way into popular culture. Woody Allen, with his nervous tics and runty appearance, rose to fame using the image of the classic nerd. Brains from Thunderbirds was a nerd’s nerd, and the Tracey family would have died a thousand deaths without him…. but pardon the digression. I’m being a geek.
By the nineties, the title of the 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds would be eerily prophetic. One day, Bill Gates, the textbook portrait of the adult male nerd, is tinkering around in a garage with a few circuit boards and a soldering iron. A few years later, he’s a billionaire who the led the personal computer revolution, and inspired countless other nerds to become entrepreneurs.
I don’t know what became of Hubert. I’d like to think he became a doctor, or a scientist, and he’s working on something useful like a cure for cancer or a zero point energy source. I wish him well. Ok, so maybe I made fun of him a few times too, but now, as I sit in this café in Nakano Broadway typing away on a laptop computer with Windows XP pre-installed, I fully acknowledge his nerdy kind make the world a better place.
Behind Hubert in the picture stands grinning square-jawed Scott Moak, wearing a blue and gold football shirt. Scott loves sports. In fact, his dad is the coach at a nearby high school. Scott is going to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a jock (named after the jock strap, underwear for sports players). In first grade, Scott is cool with everyone, but in a few years he is going to turn on the nerds like Hubert, like wild animals in search of weak prey to feed on. Maybe he does it to impress Valerie Cortopassi, the prettiest girl in class. We used to be close friends until Jr. High. But just friends, mind you. She liked new wave and punk music, as I did, and we used to make mixed tapes for each other. But that all stopped when she hit high school. She became a cheerleader and began shaking her pom-poms for the home team. She stopped hanging out with me. Last I heard, she got a boob job and moved to LA to become an actress or a model. And in some weird way, that’s normal. Hell, Scott and Valerie, the jock and the cheerleader form a central part of the American dream, the fantasy of social success we’re all supposed to be insanely jealous of. Yes, even you.
Of course, I’m there in the picture too, wearing a red polo shirt much like the ones I see for sale in vintage clothes stores in Tokyo. I guess my fashion sense hasn’t changed too much since then. If there was an X-ray that could show you the inside of my first grade brain, you’d find pretty much the same stuff that’s in there now: Star Wars, comic books, kaiju monsters, and images from a million science fiction and fantasy films.
Then as now, I’m a geek. As much a big old geek as Hubert is a big old nerd.
The geek is the closet thing we Americans have to Japanese Otaku. Whereas nerds are more interested in actual science, geeks instead crave science fiction and fantasy. And whereas most people sit down and watch a movie for ninety minutes and then move on with the rest of their lives, the geek becomes stuck. They want to know everything: who the director was, who the key grip was, what the differences were between the stereo and mono audio mix. The geek is a victim of the information age, a product of too much media. They cling to the good feeling, the rush of happy chemicals, a movie, a TV show, or a manga gives them, and like a drug addict, keep trying to get the first high all over again. But before you start feeling too sorry for them, you should also be aware that the geek can also be a magician with the power to change the world…even if it’s only their own.
The word “geek” seems to have its modern basis in the US military term “General Electrical Engineering Knowledge.” But it goes back even farther to a well known circus sideshow act. The geek was a guy who sat in a pit and bit off the heads of chickens for the amusement of horrified patrons. No wonder it took such a long time for the geek to get some respect. But it eventually, as with the nerd, it came to pass…
The TV series Star Trek was a watershed moment for the geeks known as “Trekkies.” When Star Trek was rudely yanked from the airwaves after only two seasons in 1968, the geeks began a letter campaign to resurrect their favorite show, and eventually sent one million letters to the NBC home office who were convinced to bring Star Trek back for a third season. In 1977, Star Wars, made by a hot rod and Republic serial geek named George Lucas, would show Hollywood that material once only seen fit for kids and a minority of SF fans could actually bring in insane amounts of money. Having shown their power to studio suits, the geeks would finally get the upper hand in the nineties when websites like Aint It Cool News gave fans the power to mold public awareness (i.e. buzz) about a movie before it even opened. And thanks to the gun wielding geeks, like Neo in The Matrix and the Doom-addicted Columbine shooters, geeks (especially ones in black trench coats) could actually inspire fear among ordinary American citizens.
Fast forward to a possible future, maybe one where Arnold is the president. They hand me the new census forms to fill out. I now have to have to choose between the boxes for nerd, geek, and yet another category...otaku. And it’s a tough call on which box to check off.
I know I’m not a nerd. I’m just not smart enough, and I like playing TV games more than trying to program them. I’m certainly a geek, sitting here typing this with a “Famous Monsters of Filmland” T-shirt on. But where I’m typing this is pretty telling…I’m in Tokyo, where I’ve always wanted to be. I’ve run away from the boring old USA in search of my own private Japan.
So maybe I’m an otaku. Not Japanese otaku as you know them, but a new breed of beast; a Frankenstein monster of sorts, something that shouldn’t exist, but came about purely by accident…
An American otaku.
I worship Gojira and Ultraman. I know the words to the opening theme of Uchu Senkan Yamato. I dream of some day helping to make a sequel or a prequel to Uchu Kara no Messeiji. I scan the shelves at Mandarake on a weekly basis, looking for toys, comics and pop culture artifacts that were never intended for me to covet.
The nerd, the geek, and the otaku…I don’t know what magic power it is that makes them who the are; if it’s a single traumatic event, like a bump on the head, or if they dream of building crystal radios or collecting comic books while still in the womb.
But I think I know how I became an otaku.
One Saturday afternoon, when I was six years old, my dad told me that a movie called Godzilla was going to be on TV. Since he knew I liked monster movies and dinosaurs, he figured I might like it too. I did. A lot. Since then, Godzilla has been a major obsession.
The same year, my dad, who worked for the state of California, went on business trips to San Francisco and Los Angeles. He came back with a pair of gifts from Japan Town and Little Tokyo, respectively. One was the Bullmark die-cast figure of Gigan. The other was a soft vinyl figure of Ultraman Leo. When I was seven or eight (around the time of that first grade picture) he took me with him to visit Japan Town in San Francisco for myself. There, I bought my first kaiju dictionary and flipped through my first manga.
By the age of ten, I was the only kid in my school that knew (or cared) who Eiji Tsuburaya, Ishiro Honda, and Tomoyuki Tanaka were. I also knew that the cartoons that we all watched after school, like Speed Racer, Battle of the Planets, and Star Blazers, had originally came to us from Japan. But my growing knowledge was not just coming from tokusatsu movies and anime shows. I watched The Shogun mini-series when it first aired on TV. I even remember seeing the Pink Lady and Jeff show in 1980, and still get natsukashi for the sight of Mie and Kei stepping into a hot tub.
What an awesome place Japan must be, I figured. Sacramento, and America by default, were pretty boring by comparison. We didn’t have a Chikyu Boegun or a Monster Land. We still don’t as a matter of fact. Yet it seemed like no one in my daily life really seemed to care about all this cool, exciting, vibrant stuff coming out of Japan but me.
When I was a teenager, I began attending Japanese language classes at a local Buddhist temple in Sacramento. A few of the students were there because they were Japanese-American, and their parents wanted them to learn the old language. But at least two teenagers, a black guy and a white guy, were fellow anime and manga geeks. They bought import copies of Animage and Newtype magazine and had pen pals in Japan who sent them tapes of the latest anime like Otomo’s AKIRA, and classics like Captain Harlock. Even better, they told me they had other friends like themselves who met in person once a month just to watch anime.
The group turned out to be the Sacramento branch of the C/FO, the Cartoon Fantasy Organization, which Fred Pattern (read about him on page 401) had helped to establish. I was thrilled about going to the first meeting. It felt like prom night or something. Maybe I’d even meet a cool otaki version of Valerie and fall in love.
I’ll never forget what I saw…it was like an opium den for geeks. Huge bottles of 7-UP and Dr. Pepper were everywhere. Bags of potato chips lined the floors. Women and men lay sprawled across sofas and reclining chairs looking like beached whales. Some seemed to speak only in lines of dialogue from SF TV shows and movies. Some lacked the social skills to talk much at all. I didn’t think I was any better than them, but at least knew who my peers where and the sort of company I’d have to keep from now on if I wanted to stay in touch with what was going on in Japan.
When I was nineteen, I moved to San Francisco. A news syndicate who ran ‘youth perspectives’ in major US newspapers asked me to join their staff. Soon, I began contributing film reviews to a weekly paper in San Francisco. Eventually, in 1997, a friend helped me land a job at a place called Viz Communications in San Francisco.
Viz, then a subsidy of Shogakukan, was one of the first publishers of translated manga in the US. They had a loyal following for titles like Ranma ½, Guyver, and my favorite of the bunch, Crying Freeman. Viz also released anime on US home video, including Ginga Tetsudo 999 and numerous works by Takahashi Rumiko. Back then in the late nineties, sales of anime and manga in the US were done mostly to comic shops and through direct mail. The market for manga alone was only 10% of the total US comic market.
Then the Pokemon craze crashed into the American mainstream. Gundam Wing gripped teenage girls. And the Internet was helping to connect generations of US anime and manga fans who before had been separated by vast and silent distances. Japanese pop culture, like Neo-Tokyo in Akira, was on the verge of exploding in America.
Working as a writer and editor of Viz’s flagship in-house magazine, Animerica, I began to notice that US anime and manga fans were becoming both younger, enthusiastic, and better organized than we were back in the late eighties. They did cosplay, wrote fan ficition and made dojinshi about their favorite characters, and made it their duty to keep tabs on the latest trends coming out of Japan. Instead of just lying around and watching videos all day, they were active and wanted to make stuff...to participate. To this end, they were doing everything they could to follow the Japanese model of what fandom was supposed to look like.
Back at the C/FO we didn’t have a name for what we were. We figured we were just what the other SF fans regarded us as: a bunch of geeks who were into weird cartoons from another country. But this new generation had seized upon a new name for themselves and wore it like a badge of honor.
They called themselves “otaku,” pure and simple. They didn’t get the name from the Miyazaki murder case, along with its negative connotations, but rather from Studio Gainax’s manifesto Otaku no Video. I used to read the fan mail as it came into the Viz offices from all over the world: from small towns in America, South America, Europe, even Saudi Arabia. If I only had 100 yen for every one that began “I am an otaku,” I’d be able to buy myself a plasma TV to watch Yamato yo Towa ni on. Which I guess makes me otaki too…
Every one of these foreign otaku has a different story to tell: what their first anime or manga or exposure to Japanese culture was. But it’s my feeling what motivates them is almost always the same. The global otaku is fundamentally dissatisfied with his, or her, own surroundings and, like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, is looking off to the horizon in search of freedom and adventure. Japan is A New Hope.
I know just how they feel. American culture has become like Tatooine, repressive and conservative: a hostile environment to dreamers and people looking for alternatives. By contrast, Anime and manga shows Americans how to move beyond our social limitations: how to get past the old games of the jock and the cheerleader, how fluid sexuality and gender can be, and how there can be more to the range of human experience than just antiquated notions of “good versus evil.” And so, American otaku look to Japan for guidance and knowledge. And increasingly, Asians aren’t just nerds anymore, but high priests of cool and cutting edge. How can we be more like you? By making cartoons and comics that imitate the anime style? By listening to J-pop songs and memorizing the words? By dating Japanese boys and girls?
Pop culture, no matter where it comes from, may look like disposable garbage most of the time. But when it ignites a burning fire within the human imagination, first in an individual and then spreading to a group, it has an immense power for change. Maybe it seems strange to you that Americans would be so willing to embrace a culture so unlike their own. But I guarantee, if you spent a few years bored out of your mind in Sacramento or an even more backwater US city, you might begin to see the light and maybe even find yourself taking a train over to Nakano Broadway or Akihabara.
It’s pretty obvious that being a geek, and then becoming otaku, fundamentally changed my life. If I hadn’t have gotten stuck on Godzilla when I was a little kid, I don’t think I would even be here now, in Tokyo at the beginning of the 21st century, having a Cola Float on a hot summer day, writing this.
And why am I writing this? Because it is my duty to introduce you to the Otaku in USA. I guess that's what this has all been leading up to. I hope you are willing to embrace them as lovingly as they have already embraced you.
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