otaku

DPH has a bit on Luis Vuitton bag design by Takashi Murakami. I'm familiar with his work, but haven't put a name to the pieces I'd seen. Check this interview with Murakami for one artist's struggle with the public perception of his obsession.

There was a piece in a model show in Tokyo about 10 years ago, of a robot that looked like a young girl. She was nude, and broken into pieces, obviously having been forcibly destroyed by some malevolent force. Lying there in the snow, dead/deactivated, I read the title: "This is why otaku are hated."

The term is a perjorative here in Japan, with none of the "reclamation" that has occurred for "geek" or "nerd" in the United States. It can only conjure the image of the smeagol-like unwashed, the terminally obsessed. It's a stereotype, and like many stereotypes, it has manifested based on consensual perception of a subgroup. Like any stereotype, it also gracelessly fails to address portions of the phenotype that don't exhibit the behavior of the gross mean, and in doing so limits its own accuracy as a categorization, while simultaneously relegating the "abnormal" portion of the group to its main body, preventing understanding of the actual breadth and diversity of the stereotyped group.

Further obsessives: execrator: grotesque photomanipulations of simulated damage and experimentation (from DPH), Gentarou Araki, the creator of the model I mentioned, anyone who contributed to the list of all fighting game characters, ever, people who learn to speak Klingon (or Romulan), and anyone who practices cosplay.

Strange coinky-dinky: the TV is showing a special on a low-ranking Japanese "tarento" who has been sent to China to study insect-based cuisine. She is an insect otaku, and has just eaten a live kuwagata on camera. One of the viewing panel, a more successful actor than she, is a young man who is also an insect otaku. Except he just keeps kuwagata as pets. He was visibly distressed at watching her eat one of his potential pets while it was still wiggling. "I don't even want to talk to you anymore." Hey, bub -- neither would I.