Wrong About Japan by Peter Carey Read Free Book Online

your work are far more complex. I think of the way in which individuals are cut off from society, isolated within these suits. Do these readings of the imagery make any sense to you?
“Naturally, I think of children and trauma of war, of their inherent powerlessness. One then can see these suits as offering a protection that is never available in the horrors of real-life war.
“I look at the sculpture of Kenji Yanobe and see individuals enclosed within postapocalyptic survival vehicles. I wonder if you know Mr. Yanobe’s work and if you feel any connection with it? You were both children when the atomic bombs were dropped, when Tokyo was firebombed. Could you comment on this?”
By the time Charley and I got to Japan, I was also coming to see the Mobile Suits as a metaphor for a curiously elusive personality type called an otaku . An otaku is often described as someone who lives alone in a small room and connects with the world only via computer. Of course, this touched on my own concerns about my son and the cell phone, my son and the ticket machines, my son and the Destructor Simulator, please insert two tokens.
As it happens, the first time Charley and I encountered the term was in the glossary of the show at the Brooklyn Museum: “Otaku: an anime fan. The term literally means ‘you’ in a very formal sense. In Japan, it has come to mean people who are obsessed with something to the point where they have few personal relationships. The nature of the obsession can be anything from anime to computers. In Japan otaku has the same negative connotation as nerd. In America, however, it refers specifically to hardcore anime fans, without any negative connotations.”
Yet no definition of otaku was ever completely satisfying and by the time we left Japan, I had asked perhaps twenty people to define it for me; few of them agreed, and some answers were more disturbing than others.
This is an excellent example of how perplexing Japanese culture can be, and a reminder of why Kosei Ono’s warning is worth heeding. Better to know nothing than a little, for the more you try to pin down otaku , the more wriggly it gets. Lawrence Eng, the author of The Politics of Otaku , comments that otaku means, literally “your house,” and more generally is a distant, formal way of saying “you.” Later he suggests the term originated amongst the collectors of animation pictures. “The basic idea,” he writes, “is that the word is used to explicitly indicate detachedness from who you are speaking to. For example, a dedicated and experienced collector of eels [the transparent plastic sheets on which animators paint] will have a vast network of connections to aid in his or her search for rare eels.” These contacts would be at once familiar and far from intimate.
But as so often is the case in the Japanese language, just when you think you may almost understand a word, hopeless complications destroy it anew. In the late eighties a man named Tsutomu Miyazaki kidnapped and murdered four little girlsand the police found his apartment crammed with anime and manga and videos, some of them pornographic. From this time the word otaku became associated with sociopaths, serial killers.
In an article written with his colleague Timothy Blum, my New York friend the sculptor Jon Kessler complicates it further: “Otaku are the generations of kids raised to memorize volumes of context-less information for university entrance exams. Somewhere a glitch occurred and they are stuck in information mode, hoarding and exchanging information about the seemingly useless obsessions of otaku , such as the bra sizes of idols, to information about Levi’s 501 jeans, as well as secrets about their mischievous break-ins to data-banks…. Otakus are socially inept information junkies who rarely leave their homes, preferring to interface with the world via data-banks, modems and faxes.”
And what about my own dear son? Well, back in Sega World his face was washed by