Japanese Otaku

The popular culture of Japan draws and consolidates fans from various geographical domains and multiple backgrounds. Its engagingly rich heredity and culture is much diverse and proliferates around comics (manga), games, animation (anime) and music. These various sub genres of Japan’s popular culture and the various terminologies associated with them and their audiences frame Western fandom. Cosplay (“costume play”) is a fan culture that has an active camaraderie where fans create their costumes which are inspired by fictional characters from comics, games, animation and music. Cosplay is a fine blend of both its origin terms: “costume” and “play” since a cosplayer portrays characteristics of both these words – dressing up as a fictional character and also enact the character’s life and situations with full realization that they are trying to capture the life of someone, temporarily, who does not exist in reality. In this process happens a blurring of reality, entry into the world of fiction, a creation of new identity through this narrative resulting in the birth of an entirely new persona which is supreme in itself. (Dorfman, 2007) According to Judith Butler, the practice of enacting various identities, genders and switching between them and trying new ones or performing multiple identities, like in Cosplay, allows individuals to redefine, discover, stretch and enhenhance their own sense of identity. Thus cosplayers slip in and out of identities by switching between costumes and perform their persona by enacting the “play”. Thus the concept of identity is in a constant influx where public and private realms merge creating a sense of fragmentation and decentered self giving rise to multiple conflicting identities.
This is a postmodern concept in all senses by creating a hyper-reality where there is a disruption of the dominance of high culture by popular culture formulating a hybrid culture. This signifies that we are living in the postmodern space of virtuality which defines hobbies and connections and we ourselves are unsure of our own structured identity defined by societal norms. In this technology driven age cosplay also allows a certain form of escapism and interaction with the physical world through conversion of hobbies from a screen-centric medium to a concrete physical world.

Resumen: En los últimos años, la industria del manga no sólo se ha convertido en un fenómeno cultural de gran proyección internacional, sino que también ha dado lugar a un amplio movimiento de aficionados que ha llegado a constituir su propia sub-cultura, la llamada cultura otaku. En este artículo se pretende repasar la historia del manga desde una perspectiva social, poniendo especial atención en la evolución de la cultura otaku desde el surgimiento del manga moderno hasta la actualidad. Palabras clave: Otaku, manga, cultura, historia, sociedad. Abstract: In recent years, the manga industry has not only become a cultural phenomenon of great international projection, but also has given rise to a large fan movement that has come to constitute its own sub-culture, the so-called otaku culture. This article aims to review the history of manga from a social perspective, paying special attention to the evolution of the otaku culture from the emergence of modern manga to the present day. Introducción. El manga es uno de los ámbitos de la cultura pop más reconocidos, tanto en Japón como en el resto del mundo. A pesar de ello, no siempre se le ha concedido gran importancia dentro del estudio de la sociedad japonesa y su cultura. Desde la importante figura de Osamu Tezuka hasta las convenciones masivas que celebran los aficionados de muchos países, propongo un repaso por la historia del manga centrado en la evolución tanto de la industria como de sus públicos y, en este contexto, averiguar cuál es la percepción que los japoneses tienen del manga y de sus aficionados, los otaku, y cómo ésta ha evolucionado desde que era un producto cultural autóctono hasta que trascendió las fronteras de todo el mundo.

Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete): https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey

Little Red Riding Hood is one of the best known fairy tales and its central villain - the wolf - a potent and recurring motif in contemporary popular culture, including Japanese manga. I am studying from a UK perspective a cluster of erotic manga genres (Boys’ Love or ‘BL’) which are produced and consumed predominantly by young women. The sine qua non of BL is the portrayal of romantic and sexual relationships between young men. Manga often presents characters as human-animal hybrids. Add to this the explicitly sexual nature of BL content, its homoerotic and transgressive themes, and the fact that it is created for and by young women, BL is interpretable as a site within which women are attempting to develop new ways of engaging with male sexuality. It is indicative of their psychological potency that European fairy tale motifs have been used as a vehicle in this project. The research question I will explore is: What happens when the fairy tale motif of ‘the girl and the wolf’ – that is, of the female’s initiation into the dangerous aspects of male sexuality – is queered? I will explore how this is presented in contemporary commercial BL manga, the readings this makes available, and the ways this might function for modern women. The explicit eroticism of BL invites a psychoanalytic interpretative lens. Specifically, the disjunction between the gender of the protagonists and audience makes pertinent a Kleinian understanding of defensive splitting and of projective identification. However, a purely psychoanalytic reading is possibly too individualistic and potentially pathologising, and I will draw also on queer theory to preserve my sense that BL can be read as exploring new ways of performing heterosexuality through the use of, often visual, metaphorical slippages and defamiliarisation. I will also pay attention to social and cultural context since I am studying ‘exotic’ texts in translation which are produced in a different legislative and socio-historico nexus.

Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete): https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey

Abstract: Boys’ Love (BL) is a genre of manga which portrays sexual and romantic relationships between young, often adolescent, men. Perhaps surprisingly, most BL mangaka (artist-authors) are female and most consumers are teenage girls and young women. However, despite a renowned artistic pedigree and global associated youth subculture - consisting of one of the most sexually-benign demographics - BL distributors and audience are vulnerable to prosecution under recent English prohibited images of children legislation (Coroners and Justice Act 2009). English child pornography laws have become increasingly stringent. Legislation was first against production and dealing and then extended also to possession; moved from a narrow, actual-age-based definition of ‘child’ to a wider, impression-of-age-based one; and expanded the type of prohibited image from the photographic to include also free-hand drawings of fantasy encounters which might involve imaginary beings. This paper argues that BL problematises key assumptions of the prohibited images of children legislation in that the law invites a literal, and privileges a singular, reading of such fantasy, erotic, visual texts. The legislation invites a literal reading through implying that given criteria coherent for the assessment of representational texts (e.g., photographs of real children) can be applied also to non-representational texts (i.e., fantasy drawings): specifically, that protagonist age can, within the ordinary everyday parameters of impression, be determined but also that a series of problematic foci (genitals or anal region) and acts can be described void of context and awarded moral status similar to that of the real. Perhaps even more problematic, the legislation invites a singular reading of texts through priming a search for the specified and reified elements by a defined audience (magistrates, District Judge, or jury) under the remit that a certain constellation may warrant prohibition. That is, it alerts hegemonically-empowered or hegemonically-representational groups to a paedophilic reading and disavows other possible readings as irrelevant if these groups can find that reading. Importantly, as an interpretative community, BL fans’ own reading practices and understanding of genre conventions are discounted. Hence, paradoxically, a demographic the legislation is designed to protect (young people) is now, under its auspices, potentially vulnerable to prosecution through their BL fanship.

Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete): https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey
Extract from draft:-
Almost Crying: The ‘Doll’ in Non-Fantasy Boys’ Love
In order to understand some of the specific affordances of the fantasy genre for BL, it is useful to compare Hybrid Child with a non-fantasy BL story with the same central ‘doll’ trope. Almost Crying by Mako Takahashi was first published in Japanese in 2002 and in English in 2006. It is a one-book manga consisting of eight separate stories all set in a seemingly contemporary Japan with improbable, but non-fantastical, plots. In Celluloid Closet , Takaido has lost his beloved doll and is overjoyed to find her in the Lily -look-a-like Sakurada.
Celluloid Closet: Sakurada and Takaido
No, not just like her. He is her! Ever since my Lily mysteriously disappeared from my closet, I’ve been searching for her! This is a fated reunion! Of course I had to hug her!

Sakurada has started working in a toy shop after school. Takaido comes in every restocking day to search the shelves. Sakurada asks if he is looking for something. To Sakurada’s horror, Takaido hugs him with joy: “Lily! I’ve finally found you!” A photo reveals that Sakurada does, indeed, look very like the lost Lily-doll and the security guard finds Takaido’s bag to be stuffed with toys: “They keep me from being lonely.” Takaido begins to work at the toy shop and is very attentive to Sakurada. Sakurada is annoyed but tolerates his ministrations, although this does not include wearing a Lily outfit that Takaido brings to work. Sakurada is overjoyed when he finds that the Lily-doll is being re-released and Takaido tries to be happy when he is told the news. However, Sakurada begins to feel despondent that he was “just a substitute for the doll” and begins to cold-shoulder Takaido. Takaido forcible carries Sakurada to his house where Sakurada discovers that Takaido has already found his Lily-doll but has not stopped loving him. Sakurada then accepts that they have a relationship. However he still refuses to wear Lily clothes.
The paranoid-schizoid position – stuck in a ‘good’ place
Whereas the Hybrid Child stories can be viewed as explorations of the depressive position, Celluloid Closet can be understood as a parody of a relationship founded on the paranoid-schizoid functioning of one partner. Young children’s object relations are often facilitated by a ‘transitional object’ – usually a blanket, doll, or soft toy - which acts as an intermediary between their internal good object and developing, more realistic but also increasingly, ambivalent relationships with external whole objects (Winnicot, 1964). Older children and adults can continue to use a transitional object invested with the qualities of the ‘loved object’ to provide reassurance, required less with increasing integration of a good object within the ego. Takaido’s Lily-doll appears to be such a transitional object.
What is unusual about this scenario is that, when Takaido misplaces Lily, he transfers the projection onto a stranger with similar physical characteristics in a particularly distorting way such that “the early primitive ideal is clung to, controlled and transfixed in its primitive, all-giving form in order to avoid reality” (Likierman, 2001, p.96). This is an extreme defence against depressive integration of good and bad part-objects and Takaido wards-off the loneliness of the ‘loss of the loved object’ through clinging to paranoid-schizoid forms of relating. Sakurada at first rejects the projection, then tolerates it, and eventually is worn down by the intensity of Takaido’s passion. Circumstances provide Takaido the opportunity to mature through developing an intense relationship with a person whose agency might catalyse modification of unconscious phantasy in the direction of more reality-based relating. However, the story ends with Takaido still largely unable to distinguish Sakurada from his internal loved object and omnipotent disavowal of his separate existence.