ON ANY GIVEN night, the neon-lit streets of Akihabara, an entertainment district in central Tokyo, are packed with visitors. Inside windowless shopping malls, they flock to stalls selling used Hello Kitty or Astro Boy figurines, Pokémon trading cards and vintage video game consoles. At the idol bars and theaters — venues dedicated to musical acts like AKB48, which was named after the area — they wave glow sticks in colors that correspond to their favorite performers. And at the maid cafes, they pay to take pictures with young waitresses in petticoats and pinafores, many of whom hope to become stars themselves one day. Since the Japanese anime boom of the past few decades, Akihabara has been a refuge for the otaku — someone who would “go beyond the lengths of any normal person to pursue their interests,” according to the 2004 documentary film “Otaku Unite!” Kaede, 29, a member of F5ve, a girl group based on the 1990s manga series “Sailor Moon,” calls the neighborhood their “holy land.”
Fandom didn’t originate in Japan. Toward the end of the 19th century, literary tribes had begun to form across Europe: So-called Janeites worshiped Jane Austen and, in 1893, some 20,000 angry readers canceled their subscriptions to The Strand Magazine after it published Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “The Final Problem,” in which the author wrote Sherlock Holmes off a cliff. (Partly because of their collective outrage, Doyle would decide later that he had only faked his detective character’s death.) By the middle of the next century, Beatlemania was a worldwide phenomenon. But Japan, long before the advent of social media, venerated connoisseurship, a higher level of fandom, encouraging the pursuit of micropassions, whether pour-over coffee, selvage denim or milk bread. Out of a culture where anyone and anything — no matter how strange or marginal — can have an evangelist emerged the otaku. The term, which means “you” in English, was popularized by the writer Akio Nakamori, who used it in a 1983 issue of Manga Burikko magazine to disparage fans of manga and anime’s cute-girl characters, and has since come to represent obsession more broadly. It’s hard to imagine podcasts, BookToks or album drops without the otaku, and where once such individuals might have been looked down on as stunted or creepy — the slobbering man-boys of Nakamori’s essay — their rise has recoded nerdy enthusiasm as something cool and even integral to the entertainment business, elevating the stature of the fan and leading to a world in which audiences not only respond to the culture but are actively shaping it.
“THERE ARE YOUNG people in every country and field who are absorbed in their own specialized hobbies,” says the social anthropologist Eiji Otsuka, 66, Nakamori’s former editor, who notes that “otaku” has become Western shorthand for all that’s considered weird in Japan. “It has no more meaning than the Japanese equivalent of ‘geek.’” But others think that Japan’s emphasis on collective identity has been what encouraged fandom as we now know it: In a rigidly mannered system, it provides a way to fly one’s freak flag in a socially acceptable fashion. “There’s a deeply rooted awareness of how others perceive you, which can lead people to hold back on expressing themselves too much or standing out,” says the photographer and filmmaker Mika Ninagawa, 52, a frequent chronicler of Tokyo’s cosplay community. “That’s exactly why so many people secretly long for a place where they can become someone different.”
Susan Napier, a professor in the Japanese program at Tufts University in Boston, traces the origins of the otaku to the Edo period. Beginning in the early 17th century, sanctioned red-light districts known as pleasure centers were built in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka as sites for courtesans to entertain men; other areas were designated for enjoying Kabuki theater. “You had the development of a fan culture with people who loved a particular courtesan or actor,” says Napier, who adds that, within those protected walls, the four-class social hierarchy of that era, which put samurai above farmers, artisans and merchants, was far less rigid. “People did interact much more freely,” she says. Although very little remains of the original pleasure centers, newer versions exist. In Golden Gai, a mazelike network of alleyways in Shinjuku, Tokyo, many of the roughly 300 bars, most with no more than a few seats, have their own unique themes: death metal, Troll dolls, slasher movies, even Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster Cycle” film series.
Being Japanese today can mean having to uphold multiple identities at once, says Napier. Ever since the rapid modernization of the Meiji Restoration in the late 19th century, wearing traditional clothing has involved a sense of performance; a kimono alone makes a statement. “You’re one kind of person at the office and another kind of person at home,” adds Napier, who argues that Japan, more than other cultures, is a nation of compartmentalization. In 2022, Irwin Wong, a 41-year-old Australian photographer who has been based in Tokyo for the past two decades, co-edited “The Obsessed: Otaku, Tribes and Subcultures of Japan,” a book that documents some of the country’s most intense hobbyists, from collectors of homegrown phenomena (Nintendo memorabilia, “Dragon Ball Z” action figures) to those who’ve embraced international exports (such as the greaser style of certain bosozoku, or biker gangs). “Japanese people will take something that they see from overseas and ratchet it up to the nth degree beyond all sense and reason,” he says. “Their attention to detail spurs them on to almost compete with each other, to see who can outdo everyone the most.”
Around 2010, the Japanese government began financing Cool Japan, an initiative to drive economic growth by championing the country’s cultural products, further propagating the otaku way abroad. Japan’s former Prime Minister Taro Aso admitted to reading between 10 and 20 comics a week; Marie Kondo, who made her fortune as a tidying guru, has referred to herself as an “organizing otaku.” In 1975, an estimated 700 people participated in the inaugural Comic Market, a semiannual convention in Tokyo for creators of fan fiction; more recently, attendance was about 750,000. In his 2019 book, “Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan,” the Tokyo-based anthropologist Patrick W. Galbraith writes that at one point more paper was manufactured “to publish manga than to make toilet paper in Japan.”
FANDOM ALSO HARKS back to Japanese art traditions, from tea ceremonies to ikebana — “participatory culture,” according to Haruo Shirane, 73, the vice chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University in New York. “Everyone forms groups, and you make stuff, usually with a teacher or someone with more knowledge,” he says. “Otaku is a part of that: You become a character, or you create a variation. The animators and the manga magazines have contests where amateurs send in their stuff, and future stars are born from this process.” The intensity with which some people have devoted themselves to someone else’s work is its own craft, requiring adherence to a regimented set of rules.
As a teenager, Misako Aoki started modeling Lolita fashion, a style with many variations — Gothic Lolita, Sweet Lolita, Punk Lolita — characterized by frilly clothes and bonnets. Now 41, she almost never leaves home in anything other than her doll-like uniform. But even in her “armor of confidence,” as she calls it, or maybe because of it, Aoki, who also works as a night nurse, is careful to conform in other ways. “Wearing Lolita fashion is like being a princess,” she says. “You can’t also be indecent or rude.” Wong and others make a point to address what he calls “the elephant in the room”: an undercurrent of female sexualization that began with manga and which, in what’s still a rather male-dominated society, extends to the broader world of otaku. In 2013, it was discovered that AKB48’s Minami Minegishi had spent the night with a member of the boy band Generations From Exile Tribe; later that day, AKB48’s management released a video of Minegishi, her head newly shaved, begging for forgiveness, and she was demoted to a supporting role in the band.
In the past decade or so, fans worldwide have gone from being worshipers of cultural products to co-directors of them. Thanks to an online fund-raising campaign, “Veronica Mars,” a detective series that was canceled in 2007, was brought back as a feature in 2014. In 2015, what started as a piece of “Twilight” fan fiction, E.L. James’s novel “50 Shades of Grey,” became its own blockbuster film. And in 2021, fans’ persistence led to the release of “Zack Snyder’s Justice League,” the director’s four-hour cut of the 2017 superhero movie, which was thought to have been marred by studio interference. And that’s just in America. Wong traces this collective power back to Hideaki Anno’s “Neon Genesis Evangelion” (1995-96), one of the most popular animated series of all time. “It really put anime on the map,” says Wong. “From there, otaku started to reclaim the label as something to be admired.” With his dystopian vision of Japan, where teenagers operate giant humanoid robots to fight a common enemy, Anno, 64, who describes himself as “otaku through and through,” was able to explore themes of alienation and mental illness — topics that are seldom openly discussed in Japanese society. “Animation has the unique ability to translate abstract images and moods that cannot be put into words in a new form,” says the director. After the original series aired, his most passionate followers, disappointed with the final two episodes, pressured Anno to redo the ending in a subsequent film trilogy.
Shirane attributes the complicated relationship between an otaku and their star to what he calls Japan’s “master-disciple system.” Initially, he says, one might join a club to learn from an elder. But over time, the student — or otaku — gains confidence, and control. “Fandom is imitation,” he says, “and then it becomes a channel to escape into another world,” where the right to be worshiped must be earned and can never be taken for granted. “Once someone loses their status in Japan,” says Kaede, whose former band, E-Girls, had 31 members at one point, “it’s hard to return.” There’s always someone else to fixate on instead.
