Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Akihabara

I went to Akihabara on the anniversary (plus one day) of last year's "Akihabara Massacre," in which Tomohiro Kato killed seven people and injured ten others. Japan doesn't have the rate of mass murders that we have in the US, but there are episodes like this almost once a year; last year this was the big Japanese crime of the season, with the added inflection of "otaku" culture.
"Otaku" is literally a second-person formal pronoun referring to "your [family] house," but in pop slang refers to an extreme fan. The term has negative connotations akin to "fanatic" or "obsessive," though "Otaku" is generally translated into English as "nerd."
Akihabara, associated with Otaku subcultures, seems to confirm the "nerd" association in its major businesses: electronic goods (ranging from gadgetry, bulbs, switches and transistors sold in small specialized booths, to stores selling full-fledged robots), manga and anime (in a slew of six- or seven-story shops), fantasy figurines and toys, and a range of sexual material.
And the district is noticeably dominated by men (somewhat as Shibuya or Harajuku seem dominated by women), making it seem all the more nerdish.
One of the business types there, too, is the "maidol cafe," in which women, dressed up as exaggerated maids, wait on customers with extreme obsequious behavior, servility, and formality--there are women at these shops, but most of the clientele is comprised of men between the ages of 20 and 50.
But "nerd" may give the wrong idea, easy as it is to interpret the community as full of techno-geeks with limited social skills. I think the western idea of the nerd is that of youngish men who cannot communicate well with others, who then spend all their time with computer games. But the Japanese concept seems to reverse that portrait: the men are so obsessive about their pastime that they communicate with others in different ways. They are not social, or are so only insofar as their sociability matches their lifestyle.
Thus the strange world of men with highly focused educations, alongside fantasy women or women enacting fantasies...an image that predominates in "Akiba."


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