Apparently the rising Western interest in Japanese culture, doesn’t sit well with many of the die-hard nerds, according to the Daily Yomiuri:
A dear friend of mine, a hardened Japanese otaku, says that the pressures of success have become oppressive. “Japan used to be a place where cool culture flew under the radar, but no more,” he tells me. “The government is taking us seriously, which means they don’t want anything unsightly or obscene happening. And that’s the death of creativity.”
This is all too much for writers to ignore. Patrick Macias, an American otaku and blogger extraordinaire, now bemoans the success of Japanese pop, even as he celebrates its expansion in the United States.
Macias writes: “Akihabara was the side effect of collective fantasy and private desire desperate to find expression through technology, through commerce, molded plastic, pixel, and drawing paper.”
For American otaku-types like Macias, Japan’s pop culture success has meant too much attention from outsiders. “Now,” he continues, “those [otaku] dreams are threatened by a dull and dreary reality.”
Plus, it’s harder to find all the good Harry Potter yaoi.
November 29th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
My quotes were taken from an article I wrote for the Japan Times a few weeks back. Link here:
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fo20070927pm.html
My basic beef is *not* that Western interest is killing Japanese pop culture but rather that corporate interests in Japan are behind massive changes in the structure of Akihabara itself.
I’m not against tourists in Akihabara, being one myself, nor do I think there is anything to be gained by keeping otaku culture some kind of secret. But whatever. It’s always fun to be taken out of context and re-framed to fit someone else’s article.
November 29th, 2007 at 6:34 pm
Isn’t it pretty much a given that, once anything becomes popular, it also starts to suck, even if it doesn’t change in any way?