The following is a preview. For a limited time, the full article will be available to read for free on my Patreon, located, here. I have also uploaded my notes on the book here.
FURTHER READING – OTAKU CULTURE
Notes: Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals
Otaku are Dead, Long Live Otaku
FURTHER READING – DATABASE NARRATIVES
Gunparade March and the JRPG at the Turn of the New Millennium
Otaku Japan’s Database Animals. By Hiroki Azuma. Translation by Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono. University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 200 Pages. $17.95 Paperback.
Emerging in the wake of Japan’s “New Academism” movement of the 1980s, Hiroki Azuma arrived to the intellectual scene as something of an enfant terrible, initially being crowned as the successor to the postmodern thinker Asada Akira. At first, Azuma seems to have carried the torch of his forebears, making his scholarly debut in 1993 in Critical Space (Hihyō Kūkan), the journal of criticism founded by Akira and literary critic Karatani Kōjin. Azuma’s first essay, “A Study of Solzhenitsyn: The Texture of Probability,” (Sorujenītsuin shiron: kakuritsu no tezawari) focuses on the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and draws upon Jacques Derrida to examine how the mediation of death by probability eschews causal logic. This essay would thereby form the basis for Azuma’s overall philosophy and his first book, Ontological Postal: On Jacques Derrida (Sonzaironteki, Yūbinteki – Jakku Derida ni tsuite). That is to say, at the risk of oversimplification, Azuma’s concerns center on the breakdown of meaning, especially following World War II. In other words, in his early work, Azuma was a theorist engaging with postmodernity, later turning towards the likes of Jean-François Lyotard to analyze issues surrounding the collapse of “grand narratives.” Critical Space thus seemed to be the appropriate venue for Azuma to carry out his work.
However, by the late 1990s, Azuma began turning his attention towards subcultures, specifically, Japanese otaku, with this theoretical movement representing a larger shift in Japanese criticism (Kadobayashi, 2017). At this time, Azuma would also come to find Critical Space too stifling and would break from his contemporaries in an attempt to establish a new form of criticism that analyzes subcultures. Indeed, Azuma’s goal would be to use his writing to engage with the broader public while still retaining a certain intellectual rigor. As he would explain decades later in a Genron roundtable:
Azuma: I wonder. I don’t think I got on well with Karatani and the rest of them. Originally, I felt a kinship with readers of otaku and subcultures, and honestly, after writing Ontological Postal, I felt quite disappointed in Critical Space.
Fukushima: I think that during the second phase of Critical Space, their 21st roundtable in 1999, “Where is the place for criticism now?” symbolized that breakdown. It especially feels like Azuma and Kazuya Fukuda each went their own separate ways.
Azuma: To put it bluntly, to describe the period between Ontological Postal and Animalizing Postmodern as the jump from the ideas of 1980s New Academism to the 2000s otaku criticism would be convenient for our current discussion. However, as the author of these books, I want to emphasize that after Ontological Postal, I did not change. Since my debut, I’ve simultaneously written for both subculture and literary magazines. Back then, that was normal. Now it appears unnatural. It’s that exact discrepancy that I think perhaps demonstrates the rupture that occurred after 1995 or even 2001 which I touched upon earlier (Ichikawa, M., Osawa, S., Fukushima, R., & Azuma, H., 2016, trans by author).
These circumstances surrounding Azuma’s relationship to New Academism and Critical Space are important in so far as they influenced the publication of his fourth and most famous book. In 2001, Kodansha would publish Azuma’s Animalizing Postmodern: Japanese Society from the Perspective of Otaku (Dōbutsuka suru posutomodan ― otaku kara mita Nihon Shakai), thereby signaling the target audience as being the general reader rather than the niche academic. Animalizing would thus mark a new period in Azuma’s career in which he engaged with the otaku subculture while continuing to straddle the line between mass-market readers and academia[◇]—only two years later, he would become a regular writer in Kodansha’s Faust, a literary magazine ostensibly focusing on light-novels, a strand of otaku culture.
It would be the University of Minnesota Press that would first introduce Azuma to the broader English-reading academic community, [☆] publishing a conference presentation that would later become part of Animalizing. With a translation courtesy of Yuriko Furuhata and Marc Steinberg, “The Animalization of Otaku Culture” would appearin the second issue of Mechademia, the academic journal of Asian popular culture. An introduction by Thomas LaMarre positions Azuma as “one of the most important commentators on contemporary Japanese popular culture and subcultures, especially on anime and otaku” (2007, p. 176). LaMarre sketches the trajectory of Azuma’s career, including his work on Derrida and his subsequent push towards using deconstruction to examine the “emergence of a new structure of communication and control” (2007, p.176). While there is no point in rehashing the entirety of LaMarre’s excellent introduction, I bring it up because Azuma’s publication in English demonstrates a significant difference from his own original methodology, and the introduction properly contextualizes how Azuma’s work fits between theories of postmodernity and subcultural analysis.
It is only logical then that Azuma would first appear in Mechademia, and that it would also be the University of Minnesota Press (UMP) who in 2009 would publish an English translation of the entirety of Animalizing, now titled Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals—University of Minnesota not only boasts a rigorous Asian & Middle Eastern Studies department, but alongside Mechademia, UMP had also been publishing a number of texts on various strands of Japanese culture including Scott Nygren’s Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the Unfolding of History (2007), the edited collection Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams (2007), and Thomas LaMarre’s The Anime Machine (2009). This time around, the translation of Otaku would largely be handled by Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono with the translation of chapter one having been done by Julia Yonetani and Minoru Hokari, the latter being the person who had initially contacted Azuma to translate the book but tragically passed away.
The localized title of Otaku already presents a difference which subtly shifts how readers understand Azuma’s theoretical concerns. As Fabian Schäfer and Martin Roth write in a footnote in their own review of Otaku:
In this respect, the translation is imprecise. “Otaku culture” rather corresponds to the Japanese term otaku bunka. However, in his Japanese version, Azuma uses the term otaku-kei bunka, which should be translated as ‘otaku-like culture.’ This small but important differentiation should not be interpreted as linguistic nitpicking. Anime, manga, digital games and so on are not just a cultural form related merely to otaku. It is also difficult to describe them merely as subcultures, since they are an important of Japanese popular culture in general (2012, p.211).
Notably, the original Japanese title of the book is subtitled, “otaku kara mita nihon shakai,” or more literally, “Japanese society from the perspective of otaku” (emphasis mine). Recall that Azuma’s foray into subcultures emerged from his engagement with postmodernism. Azuma is then less interested solely in otaku culture than he is in using otaku culture to explore postmodernity and vice-versa in order to, “analyze the psychological structure of contemporary Japan (Azuma, 2009, p. vii). Grounding his methodology in such a way means that Azuma ultimately leaves room for applying his theoretical methods beyond Japan but also to the United States and Europe. Schäfer and Roth suggest that UMP’s titling of the book is part of a broader marketing strategy tied to notions of Cool Japan. “Database animals” are thus seemingly unique to Japan rather than being understood as a global and postmodern phenomenon. Furthermore, as Azuma would later himself point out, by the time of Animalizing’s original Japanese publication, his own views on otaku were already outdated since otaku had firmly become part of the Japanese mainstream (2024), which is to say nothing of the eight years it took for the book to be published in English.
I do not raise these points as a means to detract from the accomplishment of Otaku’s English publication but rather want to highlight that these differences do in fact shape how Azuma and his work is perceived abroad. Schäfer and Roth’s aim seems to be in recontextualizing Azuma within discourses surrounding the role of media (rather than strictly otaku culture) especially at the turn of the 20th century—their review opens with a comparison to Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media. This is precisely the point that Takeshi Kadobayashi explores, arguing that the period between “A Study of Solzhenitsyn” and Animalizing demonstrates Azuma’s development as a media theorist, writing, “…Azuma Hiroki is not necessarily regarded as a “media theorist” in Japan. This probably has something to do with the trajectory of his career as a critic…Nevertheless, Azuma’s career so far abounds with thoughts on media information and technology” (2017, p.81). Indeed, Azuma had originally conceived of Animalizing as being a larger book, one that combined his writings on cyberspace and otaku culture, tentatively titled “The Cultural Logic of the Postmodern World” (Azuma, 2016). However, according to Azuma, he ultimately opted to fragment the book, instead publishing smaller monographs and essays that could reach a wider audience. With all this being said then, as Azuma reminds us, we must approach Otaku as a book that is not strictly about otaku, and we must also keep in mind that while Azuma has written extensively on otaku subjects, he should not be considered solely as being an otaku scholar.