Looks like my new book OTAKU IN USA is finally going off to the printers. Actual release date, still unknown. Hopefully in May or early June.
Tomo asked me to add a new postscript because "that's Japanese style." Since I already put up the introduction here, I figured it would make sense to go full circle. Dig.
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December 6th, 2005…
I’m sitting inside the Royal Milk maid café in Akihabara sipping ice coffee through a straw. The maids that surround me dash about the place, primping themselves, making sure there are no creases in their uniforms, and that their fine black and white stockings do not sag even a tiny bit. I’m checking my handwritten notes over and over, hoping I won’t stutter too much or be at a loss for words once the cameras start to roll.
At any moment, Shaku Yumiko, Matsumoto Kazuya, and Patrick Harlan are going to come through that door. Then they will begin to interrogate me about What It All Means: the questionable trinity of Otaku, Moe, and Maid Cafes. The resulting segment will wind up on a special New Year Day episode of the NHK TV program Eigo de Shabera Night. By then, my tourist visa will be all used up and I’ll be back in San Francisco, a black and white Kansas compared to the Oz of Tokyo I’ve dreamed of since childhood.
A few weeks after the episode airs, I get an email from a Japanese woman asking me where I got my Death Records T-shirt, from Phantom of the Paradise, the one that I wore on TV. She says, “that was kinda funny seeing Japanese people asking an American about Akihabara and otaku stuff.”
She’s right. I hadn’t even begun to see any irony in the situation. I’d finally lost all perspective regarding culture, time, and place. One minute, I’m a little kid on a Christmas morning in 1978 unwrapping a Godzilla playset. The next second, I’m 33 years old and trying to explain to Shaku Yumiko – the star of a Godzilla movie herself – that, yes, Americans sure do love anime and manga too. What proof do I have? Well, nothing really. My book, entitled Otaku in USA, hasn’t even come out yet. Will it ever?
This work originally began back in 2003 as a series of articles for Eiga Hi-Ho magazine’s USA Report. In 2004, I began writing a similar column for Figure Oh magazine. By 2005, I’d moved to Tokyo where I spent the summer furiously trying to create more pages to meet the proposed Fall ’05 publication date.
My editor and guide throughout this whole process was Tomohiro Machiyama. I was finishing up my third book TokyoScope when we first met in San Francisco in 2001. He was then the nicest guy in the world, freely offering advice and help without any demands of his own. But as we started to work more closely together on writing projects, like the Hi-Ho and Figure Oh column and a book for an American publisher, I couldn’t help but notice a dramatic change taking place in the relationship.
After sending him the first draft of an article, he would reply with emails like “"no one cares about your opinion or your stupid jokes!" and “Your articles are flat, dry, and lack of vivid and lively details…your style is boring, pretentious, and slow.” One time, after I delivered what Tomo believed to be a particularly “boring and pretentious” article, he angrily slammed down the phone on me (maybe it will happen all over again when he reads this one…).
I thought this was THE END: that he would never talk to me again, and that my writing career in Japan, which had only just begun, was over. My American friends said, “what an asshole, dude,” probably because people just don’t behave like that in mellow-to-a-fault San Francisco. Peace Bro! But I didn’t think it was as simple as that either. It took my then-girlfriend, The Goddess Kannon, to explain it to me “You are now in a sempai-kohai relationship. If he didn’t treat you like that, it means he didn’t care.”
Suddenly, it all made sense. I’d entered a world I’d only seen before in manga and anime. I had a point of comparison. It was like the way Tange and Yabuki Joe trained for the boxing ring in Ashita no Joe, punching each other out before the bell even rang. Or the way Ittetsu Hoshi beat the shit out of his son, Hyuma to make him a better ball player in Kyojin no Hoshi.
No. I don’t now proclaim myself to be some kind of great writer because of any of this, or to be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. It’s just that Tomo made me try a little bit harder than I probably would have otherwise. And to a lazy high school dropout like me, that means a lot. So thanks Tomo, for all your hard work editing and translating my boring and pretentious articles…but no thanks for taking so long to edit this goddamn book, which is nearly a year overdue at the publisher! For shame, dude!
Other people deserve some major thanks too. Primarily, I’m thinking of Murikami-san of Ohta Shuppan, the staff of Eiga Hi-Ho and Figure Oh for taking a chance on a hen na gaijin like me in the first place. Also, thanks to Aki Kameda, who often helped out with translations in a pinch. And lastly, a lifetime of gratitude to Honda Masaya who gave me a place to stay in Tokyo, which might just be nicest thing, anyone has ever done for me. My wildest fantasies all seem to be coming true...
Back on NHK, Shaku has changed into a maid outfit and prances around making heart shapes with her hands. Patrick Harlan leans in and asks me The Big Question with a note of suspicion in his voice, “Patrick, are YOU an Otaku?”
“I’m an Otaku about Otaku,” I say, only partially dodging his question. The problem is that the definition for what is Otaku, and what isn’t, especially when we talk about American Otaku, is always changing, forever in flux. What will future evolutionists make of the decades long trail from Fred Patten, to Kojiro Abe, and finally to this recent news just coming off the wire?
“Sunday, April 16, 2006
Associated Press
PURCELL, Okla. — A slain 10-year-old girl's body was found with deep saw marks on her neck, said authorities who alleged Saturday that her killer had planned to dismember her and eat the flesh. Kevin Ray Underwood, 26, was arrested Friday after investigators found Jamie Rose Bolin's body in the closet of a bedroom in his apartment, authorities said.”
CNN dubbed Underwood a “bizarre blogger” who “put his violent thoughts online.” But the mayhem and gossip-starved kids on the Internet picked up a side to the story that the mainstream totally passed over.
Underwood was an American Otaku.
On his Yahoo! Profile he listed his interests as "Anime, Manga, anything to do with Japan, and ummm, other stuff.” On the same blog where he warned, “my fantasies are just getting weirder and weirder. Dangerously weird," he’d also written earlier "I realized today what I want to do. I want to open my own store. A Japanese store, sell Manga, and Anime, and toys and stuff from Japan, and all those fantastic Japanese snack products like Pocky and some of that Lotte Black Black gum that's supposed to keep you awake for hours. But I don't have the money, or the skills to start and run my own business.”
Underwood, who worked a dead end job at fast food restaurant Carl’s Jr must have needed every escape route from reality he could get. "I just sit here at the computer every minute of the day, when I'm not at work.” He wrote. “A week or so ago, I spent my day off sitting here at the computer, barely moving from the chair, for 14 hours." Anime and Manga just happened to be there for him, like it has been for a lot of us.
I don’t mean to end this book on a bum note by pinning all American Otaku down as a sleeper army of killers in waiting. Nor do I want to try and wrap up on a forced note of “Japan Ichiban!” optimism. I guess it’s more fair to say this book wound up more like a big lesson on the Law of Unexpected Consequences – a primer on how 2-D fantasies imported from Japan have somehow led Americans to eat the neighbors for lunch, dress up like a Sailor Scout regardless of gender, or to try and relocate to another country (one that seems to hate would-be immigrants) in search of giant monsters and space battleships.
It sounds like some corny ass shit out of a Hollywood movie, but one of my first editors, Sandy Close of Pacific News Service, once said it to me on the subject of why she always wanted me to write about Japan over and over. “You sometimes spend years writing the same story…sometimes the story winds up writing you.”
It’s a nice day outside. I think I’ll go to Shinjuku, could be Koenji, possibly even Asakusa if I'm feeling ambitious.
-Patrick Macias
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