Pedro Edogawa sits on top of a red Asahi beer crate across from the Roku-Za Cabaret in Asakusa. He flips open a note pad stolen from Muji in the days just after the war and begins to write on the charred and blackened pages…

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.

------------------------

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

Comments

[Carl Horn]

To paraphrase Thomas Harris, the words "crazy" and "evil" nowhere appeared.

But on Friday I shall receive the karma of my own pretention when I sit on a panel at a local symposium, the third of three speakers, where one and two shall have actual PowerPoint presentations on what otaku are. The fact that I am an otaku, for some reason, makes me very uncomfortable going around classifying and measuring them. It would make me sound, after all, as if I was certain who they are.

[J. Miller]

Is Patrick Harlan as mind-blowing in real life?? How do even talk to such a talented performer, who could objectively be a major star anywhere in the world!? A lot of people think he's the next Dave Spector, but they're wrong: he's the next Cary Grant.

[Steve Harrison]

No, Carl is the next Cary Grant.

That Star Blazers movie will never get made. the 'gentleman' pimping it is an ass. I say this without fear.

All these years, all this shame that yes, I AM otaku, possibly even in the actual Japanese sense, I've never felt the urge to kill someone, cut them up and eat them.

Not even once.

Could be because I never got into quasi-porn garage kits and gashapon figures of various anime girls. All I have is Space Ghost interviewing Capt. Kirk and Hellboy. Somehow this has great meaning to me.

Aside: Patrick, did you ever get my email confirming the OK to quote for the book? did it arrive in time? I never heard back, so...I mean, ya know, no biggie if you did or didn't use it and crap, I just feel bad if I blew the deadline because of iffy email on my end.

[Patrick Macias]

Steve, you made the cut. Thanks for the email, which arrived in time.

I didn't mean to suggest that anime and manga leds to people being killed. I guess I was being vauge out how it appeals to people who have a serious need for fantasy.

Tomo says I have no future in Japan as a talent since Pakun has already hogged the spot for "Patrick."

Enter, Pedro Edogawa.

[Carl Horn]

Well, these things do happen--they happened to me, except I was the one who might have been killed along that otaku road. Ironically, the motive for the armed robbery was the same as Kevin Ray Underwood's ambition--to steal stock in order to set up a store where they sell Manga, and Anime, and toys and stuff from Japan. O-T-A-K-U in the U-S-A, as John Cougar would say.

[danno!]

I couldn't help but think of Miyazaki the otaku killer when I read about Kevin Ray Underwood. Miyazaki's also the reason why I don't like the branding of OTAKU. I don't understand why people would want to be associated with the Tsutomu Miyazaki's and Kevin Ray Underwoods of the world. And I wouldn't associate friends like Steve Harrison with the likes of these freaks, either.

Yeah, OTAKU is a bad word in my book. Yeah, these are people who have a serious need for fantasy, as you put it. They wear their fantasies, they watch their fantasies, they eat, sleep and shit their fantasies. OTAKU means people who need to pull their heads out of their asses.

On that note, when I do go on that killing spree I'll make sure to mention Sonny Chiba and Nick Adams and your new book.
-d!

[Daryl Surat]

Good to know that you eventually saw what I was seeing with the Underwood story, Patrick. When I first sent it to you along with the Tsutomu Miyazaki-level similarities that I felt the media had completely glossed over, you seemed pretty hesitant to agree for the first hour or however long that conversation was until I sent you his "let's all learn Japanese together" blog.

Now it's being printed in your book for Japanese people to see. The dark secret goals of this podcasting gig are being fulfilled on scales I'd never considered.

For the record, my killing spree will be a Golan/Globus production.

[Carl Horn]

Daryl, will your spree include LOTS OF GUNS, LOTS OF SHOOTING, LOTS OF ROBOTS? Don't worry, just DO IT just DO IT!

[Steve Harrison]

Daryl can't, Carl...you have to have two first names that are used constantly, cf. Lee Harvey Oswald.

The Ameritaku was but a heartbeat from becoming a serial killer.

I'm glad nobody refers to me as Steven Richard.

Oh, wait....

[Kojiro Abe]

I figured the American equivalent of Tsutomu Miyazaki was bound to strike someday. I just didn't know it would be this soon.

The final nail in the coffin of my years long otakudom has been hammered in.

That said, the movie V For Vendetta has given me the occasional urge to blow up several political institutions I dislike while wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. It has nothing to do with anime, but it still kind of worries me.

[Daryl Surat]

Carl, at first I was concerned that my killing spree would have too many girls and a bit of a downer ending, so I prayed to my idol gods for a new one. Alas, every grunt, every groan, every eyeblink was accompanied by some noxious sound of Gigi, so I spent 48-72 hours blowing up 16mm footage of Pluto's murder scenes from the "Mightiest Robot on Earth" episodes of Astro Boy to 35mm, splicing that into my ballad of carnage, and then acting out the entire thing in lieu of an audio track. Now dees, dees iz CANNON FILM!

[Patrick Macias]

I'd almost forgotten until Alt-san showed me a bootleg. Robotech: The Movie begins with a Cannon films logo...

[Steve Harrison]

I promise that as I film my orgy of destruction, I will not use music from 'Pirates of the Caribbean' or 'Gladiator'.

Using a cut from Our Man Flint would be so cliche.

All kidding aside, I fear this is the start of the 'Blame anime and manga' cycle, just as D & D was the root of all evil back in the '80s.

I greatly fear what might happen at one of the summer cons. Too many chicks in skimpy cosplay projecting things/ideas/subcontext they really don't understand, combined with too many male children with no sense of self control or propriety.

And both thinking that actions just don't have any consequences.

Man, is that gloomy or what? sorry.

[Patrick Macias]

Well, the mainstream media ignored the whole anime-manga connection, so I think we're all safe. What really made him do it was BLOGGING.

[Steve Harrison]

Not...BLOGGING?!

NOOOOOO!

Wait...then that means..we all..

[Carl Horn]

Patrick, you may have known, but Daryl and I were passing forth lines from Carl Macek's personal account of the making (or more strictly speaking, splicing) of ROBOTECH: THE MOVIE. It beats most director's commentary tracks all hollow.