Overview
Aniota is a Japanese term designating a type of enthusiast or fan, formed from the word otaku. In Japanese usage, otaku (also written otaku in kana, or wotaku) refers broadly to a devotee of a particular hobby or subculture, a usage that spread out of Japanese subculture during the 1980s. The origin of otaku in its current sense — a word identifying the fans of a specific subculture — is traced to 1983, when the columnist Akio Nakamori used it to classify the young fans of science fiction, manga, and anime who gathered at Comic Market, mocking the way they addressed one another as “otaku.” From the late 1990s onward, otaku has often been used interchangeably with the plain words “fan” and “maniac.”
The word’s literal root is the honorific otaku, written with the characters for “honorable house,” originally a polite second-person pronoun for another person’s home or household. By the 1950s, under the influence of the student movement, young people had begun using it as an honorific way of addressing an individual, valued as a more distant form of address than anata or kimi. Before otaku came to be called otaku, however, its history is not much studied.
One account holds that the leap from SF to otaku was a reaction against the over-politicization of boys’ culture in the late 1960s. In the robot anime Super Dimension Fortress Macross, broadcast from 1982, the protagonist Hikaru Ichijyo addresses Lynn Minmay with the second-person otaku; fans are said to have imitated the usage at Comic Market and SF conventions, spreading the term among anime fans. By the time of an early Animate commercial in 1983, enthusiastic anime fans were still being described as “anime maniacs” — anime shops had already opened before enthusiastic anime fans were called anime otaku.
The current sense of otaku is generally credited to Akio Nakamori’s column “Research on ‘Otaku,’” which ran in the outpost corner “Tokyo Otona Club Jr.” within his series “Tokyo Otona Club” in Manga Burikko (published by Byakuya Shobo, then Self Shuppan) from the June through August 1983 issues. In it, Nakamori described the people who gathered at Comic Market as otaku in print. He grouped together such types as the person who goes out to photograph blue trains and nearly gets run over on the tracks (no word for “toritetsu” existed then), the person who lines up the day before an anime film opens, the science-minded boy in milk-bottle-bottom glasses loitering in a microcomputer shop, the one with a shelf of back issues of SF Magazine and Hayakawa’s gold- and silver-spined SF series lined up neatly, and the nervous “good boy” attending a famous cram school who would be reduced to a mere sardine-eyed fool if you took away his studies — labeling as otaku those boys and girls who were usually gloomy yet wildly excited at Comic Market, people poor at interpersonal communication. One theory holds that the term instead began when the Nippon Broadcasting radio program “Miyake Yuji’s Young Paradise,” broadcast from May 2, 1983 to February 2, 1984, called anime fans otaku.
Nakamori’s column drew a flood of angry and offended letters from readers for passages they took as discriminatory, among them lines asking whether it wasn’t gross that middle-school kids at Comic Market and anime conventions called out to their friends as “otaku,” and asserting that with that style, that way of talking, and that personality, there was no way they could get a girl. The series was suspended in the August 1983 issue, and in the September 1983 reader-submission column “Shinjuku Minor Club,” the editorial staff printed representative reader responses; editor Eiji Otsuka condemned Nakamori, saying that if you mock another’s position you must first account for your own, otherwise it ends as mere defamation, and that Nakamori’s unproductive writing was troubling and that he had been asking for improvement. Katsuhiro Ogata, editor in charge of the in-magazine “Tokyo Otona Club Jr.,” testified in a doujinshi interview that he had thought the piece left a bad taste but was otherwise fine, yet his partner Eiji Otsuka would not allow it and they argued; since he and Otsuka had divided the duties clearly, he felt it out of line for Otsuka to intrude on his pages, but Otsuka talked him down with the argument that you cannot print insults about readers, and Ogata characterized Otsuka’s conduct as meddling amounting to overreach beyond his role.
The Column Ends, the Word Does Not
“Research on ‘Otaku’” ran its course and was retired in the January 1984 issue of Manga Burikko. The word it had coined did not retire with it. In the June 1984 issue’s reader-submission column, Eiji Otsuka returned to the subject to state his position once more, writing that he had expressed his discomfort to the editor in charge every single time Nakamori’s column appeared, because Nakamori’s writing had looked to him like something aimed at discrimination rather than healthy criticism. He conceded the rest in the same breath: that in the end the series had been asked to step aside, but that what surprised him was how many supporters Nakamori’s writing had drawn, readers included. The emotional prose and the sheer aptitude of otaku as a discriminatory term, he wrote, had been more than enough to amuse the irresponsible. And so, he concluded, the word otaku had settled in completely.
It had. By two months after the book came out, everyone at Comic Market was already calling each other otaku. Kenjiro Takekuma, looking back with Katsuhiro Ogata, described the trajectory plainly: at first otaku was slang that otaku themselves used to mock themselves, and when the name attached to something people had only vaguely sensed, they could no longer avoid being conscious of it. Ogata noted that Nakamori consistently maintained he was not an otaku himself, which Ogata found deeply strange. Takekuma put it as a matter of naming: something murky had been floating around, and a name made it settle all at once. Takekuma and Ogata both counted themselves inside the category, and Ogata’s recollection was simply that Nakamori was inside it too.
1988, and Four VCRs
The word’s migration from self-mocking slang to slur has a specific address in the record. Recalling the period, Takekuma said otaku became generalized because of the Miyazaki incident seven years later, when the mass media picked the word up, and the impression was of it shifting from self-deprecation to discriminatory language. Ogata remembered Nakamori telephoning him around then, asking for Otsuka’s contact information, apparently intending to reach out to Otsuka himself; Ogata told him he did not know it at the time, and later said he was impressed that Nakamori would try, given that the column had been cut off years before.
The incident in question ran from 1988 to 1989: the serial child abduction and murder case in Tokyo and Saitama. The perpetrator’s collection of tokusatsu, anime, and horror film videotapes, manga, and anime magazines was taken up by the press, which reported sensationally that he could no longer distinguish reality from fiction and had therefore committed his crimes. His private room was shown on television — four VCRs and close to six thousand VHS tapes surrounding a bed left unmade — and that room was made to demonstrate the abnormality of the man. The designation otaku, not yet generally in circulation, took hold on the back of this coverage. Otaku themselves have long recognized that room as reflecting tendencies common to otaku rooms rather than something peculiar to a murderer.
The result was an image fixed in place: otaku equals deviant, a prospective criminal. The word spread as a term of ill repute. During this period NHK treated otaku as a banned word, one it could not use on air. The effect persists; even now there are reports linking otaku to sex crimes. These attacks became a collective memory, and within otaku circles a suspicion of the mass media and a sense of victimization hardened. That shadow falls across the present even as the prejudice around otaku has thinned.
A Commentator, a Wig, and a Magic Hand
With attention fixed on otaku by the incident, an unsigned freelance writer debuted in 1990 in Weekly SPA! as the otaku critic Takuhachiro. The following year, 1991, he appeared on television in a one-length long-haired wig, silver-rimmed glasses, a magic hand, an idol figure, and a paper shopping bag, leaving an outsized impression. Within what is called otaku history, Takuhachiro is discussed alongside the Miyazaki incident as having spread a mistaken image of otaku. Minoru Oizumi, who knew him for years, recalled that Takuhachiro wanted to promote the positive side of otaku, but that his method of advocacy was a mess, with something of friendly fire about it. The look was constructed; he dressed to look like an otaku and performed one. Oizumi said the people being called otaku could see straight through the performance, and that it was a nuisance — that within the history of otaku he was a flower that blooms and falls without bearing fruit. Oizumi also credited his book Ikasu! Otaku Tengoku with conveying to society a picture of otaku as people of exceptional ability concentrated in a particular field, at a time when the image was strongly negative, and said that had meaning.
Comic Market Versus Makuhari Messe
Into the first half of the 1990s the line that otaku equals deviant, prospective criminal, the socially maladapted still had its advocates. In 1991 came the Comic Market Makuhari Messe expulsion. Against that, exchange among otaku over personal computer networks produced more otaku willing to transmit information outward, of the kind associated with Toshio Okada, and with them the katakana rendering otaku and an image of the seeker. Okada described the otaku as a prisoner thrown into a concentration camp.
From the late 1990s, word gradually spread that Japanese manga, anime, and games were circulating abroad. In 1996 NHK BS2 began broadcasting BS Manga Night Chat, a program introducing and explaining manga, and Okada lectured at the University of Tokyo. Manga and anime began more often to be discussed on the same footing as novels and live-action film. Neon Genesis Evangelion, broadcast from 1995, became a hit described as a social phenomenon. Akira (1986) and Ghost in the Shell (1995) exercised a large influence on creators overseas, and the 1999 Hollywood film The Matrix, itself influenced by those two works, was a global hit — and on the back of that, Japanimation came to be appreciated in Japan in a reimported form. The tendency, meanwhile, was for the media to praise Japanimation and not anime.
Takekuma’s companion Ogata had already described the moment the name attached. What changed the word’s standing was not only the effort of otaku, Okada argued; the Japanese economy had run aground, and that too was a factor. Voices from the business world began expressing hope for otaku culture. The critic Hiroki Azuma likewise tied his analysis to the recession of the 1990s.
4,110 Billion Yen
The otaku market was estimated at 411 billion yen as of 2005, by Nomura Research Institute’s reckoning, and that figure was enough to make aniota conspicuous as a promising market. The route to that number ran through broadband. Internet use widened in the first half of the 2000s, and among younger users 2channel memes and Flash animations gained popularity. In 2005 the 2channel-born romance novel Densha Otoko, whose protagonist is an Akihabara-style anime otaku, was adapted into a film and into a Fuji Television drama in the golden-time slot; it was a hit centered on women and younger viewers, and it became one of the triggers that wiped away the negative image of otaku that had held since the Miyazaki incident. Only around this point did a picture of otaku that was not deviant or prospective criminal reach broad general awareness, and manga and anime gained something like citizenship as casual hobbies.
The backlash did not stop. Game Brain was proposed, along with the “figure moe tribe”; there was the uproar over a remark that anime songs should disappear. In the same year, “moe” and “maid cafe” were nominated for the new-word award. The word aniota itself had half fallen into banality: people said ota casually, and toriota and tokuota came to be used interchangeably with fan and maniac. Meanwhile moe, until then a secondary element, came to be regarded as a principal element of otaku culture, and prejudices took shape — otaku equals someone moe-ing over something, otaku equals someone who is in Akihabara — while the image of the otaku as an anime or idol otaku grew stronger still. The presence of foreigners strongly influenced by Japanese anime and manga gradually became known, and because otaku culture was seen to be drawing foreign attention, its standing rose again through a reimported valuation. In 2003, foreigners strongly influenced by otaku culture opened 4chan, the largest anonymous message board in the English-speaking world, and a large community devoted to anime and manga was born there as well.
From the second half of the 2000s, video-sharing sites including YouTube and Niconico Douga made “let’s play” game commentary and VOCALOID songs using Hatsune Miku popular, and with the late-night anime bubble of the same period as a tailwind, late-night anime such as the 2006 The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya won popularity on the internet. A 2007 survey of university students indicated a tendency to accept otaku, and awareness of otaku culture advanced. In the survey, more respondents said they had a hunch they might be otaku themselves and that they had friends with otaku-ish qualities, and the internal grouping of otaku was said to be progressing. In 2007, Foreign Minister Taro Aso conducted diplomatic activity representing Japan through subculture and created the International Manga Award for foreign manga artists. The 2007 broadcast of Lucky Star made so-called “sacred site pilgrimages” a boom, and local governments used them for town revitalization; this flow was sometimes called moe-okoshi, and pilgrimages and moe-okoshi became common for other works as well. Against this, Eiji Otsuka criticized the public’s view of otaku.
The Word “Oshi”
The idol booms around AKB48 and Momoiro Clover Z expanded from the end of the 2000s, producing a nationwide idol boom. With AKB48’s hits, the word oshi became general, used across genres — not only for female idols but for male idols and anime characters. iPhones and Android smartphones spread, the internet became more familiar still, and otaku culture diffused through electronic bulletin boards, video-sharing sites, Twitter, and other social media, deepening the exchange of maniacal topics. Browser games and social games featuring beautiful-girl characters came to occupy a principal position in otaku circles, while adult games, one of the central presences in otaku culture from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s, faced rising software prices and content diversification, and the decline could not be halted.
In 2011 the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica became an exceptional hit from a late-night slot. In 2016 the anime Your Name. and the tokusatsu film Shin Godzilla were major hits. Virtual YouTubers, beginning with Kizuna AI in 2016, became a boom and gained a presence as an otaku trend alongside anime, manga, and games.
A 2016 survey found that among favorite television programs for those aged 18 to 29, the genre that had grown most over ten years was anime, up by more than 20 points, while music and sports had fallen by more than 10 points. Young women showed the same pattern as men: anime was up sharply, while music and contemporary drama were down by roughly 10 points. Comparing young people’s favorite television programs with 2006, anime rose sharply for both sexes, while variety shows, music, sports, and television drama declined — a reversal in popularity between anime and mass culture such as sports and television drama.
From the second half of the 2010s, the rise of flat-rate video streaming services including Netflix and Amazon Prime Video increased opportunities to encounter filmed works, and more young people came to admire otaku. Mayumi Morinaga of Hakuhodo DY Media Partners analyzed the background as external pressure to be individual, under which more young people fret that they must force themselves to manufacture individuality, and gave as the reason that the “major” had vanished from the culture scene. With the major that once let you feel safe merely by belonging gone, what they are searching for is, in short, a place to belong — a place that feels fun simply by being in it. That, she said, is the attribute of being an otaku, and otaku doing oshi activity shine.