Origins Of My Otaku: A Search For Culture- Part 1

Recently I’ve been going through another one of my self-explorations, trying to understand more and more about myself by asking questions about why I do or enjoy certain things. After watching Densha Otoko (a fun and original Japanese drama series), I started to wonder… Why exactly DO I like Japanese culture so much?

Throughout my life, I had given myself lots of reasons to appreciate Japanese culture and they all had to do with my living in Japan at an age where I was too young to remember what it was really like. For instance, my childhood was filled with the re-telling of stories from my mother about how the Japanese “saved my life”.

As the story goes, when I was younger, I came down with Meningitis and I needed surgery in order to be saved. However, the American military base in Okinawa where my parents lived did not have the resources to perform the surgery, so I was taken to a Japanese hospital that did. In addition to needing surgery, being that I was less than a year old, I also needed a blood donor. Unfortunately my parents had recently come down with the flu and decided it was best not to give me blood in their condition, so the Japanese had to find a semi-rare AB+ blood donor from the population, and fast!

In the end, the operation was a success (obviously) and at my most vulnerable and impressionable moments of life, I had been rescued by and blood sealed with the Japanese people.

For most, this might be reason enough to appreciate them. I admit it is one of the factors, but it is not the major one.

As I grew up and continued to hear more about my seminal life in Japan, I became more interested in the idea of growing up in a far away place. Our house was garnished with relics and portraits, dragons and kanji, statues, katanas, and straw furniture. Its influence was everywhere around me and if these objects had an origin in Japan, then that origin must be like my second home.

The Allure of Anime

During my early school years, I didn’t think much about it. I was too young to understand culture and to compare my own with that of anyone else, so people in general just kind of blurred together; as kids we would be more biased against outstanding oddities, such as overweight classmates, cooties, and the sort of playground drama that forever scars fragile minds. It wasn’t until late middle school/early high school that I would come face-to-face with Japanese culture again, in the form of anime.

I remember the day exactly. My friend Kevon and I were board and wanted to rent something from the Video World down the street. At the shop, we tried to sneak over to the X-rated section as we had always done, just to sneak-a-peek. However, on our back route there, we came across an isle we had never seen before. Stopping to take a glance, I picked up a box with a blue-green, power-ranger-monster looking character on the front. The title was “Genocyber”.

My friends and I had just come out of that power ranger, Fox TV phase, but the art on the box looked so cool we just had to check it out.

After taking it home and watching it, our jaws were officially one with the floor. What, what, what? There’s cursing, and blood, and sex, and violence! OMG! This is AWESOME!!! Our hormone heavy, teenage minds were engaged to anime from that moment onwards. (I should note that this anime was unmarked when we rented it in the store, but later, I found that it was suppose to be in a section for NC-17, oh well ^^”).

As with most habits developed at a teen age, our indulgence of anime became second nature (obsessive compulsion if you will); we rented anime almost daily. After a year or two, all my friends and I had seen just about every anime of every type that was out in the U.S. at the time. We couldn’t get enough.

It would be less than a year before anime would start making waves in America, mainly with the introduction of Dragon Ball Z. It was now an integral part of our little culture and even Wu-Tang and other rap groups were making references to anime like Ninja Scrolls and the well known western releases. It was hard not to find someone from our local community who wasn’t interested or didn’t know about anime (and games).

Formalizing the Fad

In high school, anime and games became my pastime and the past time of the people around me. It wasn’t something we even thought about and it didn’t interfere with other perceived “social necessities” of the time, such as sex, parties, and drag racing. Just as one would wake up, eat, and carry on with daily activities, it was just as natural to come home, flip the switch on the Playstation or pop in a new anime to relax.

For most people, the buck stops there. They either go off to college/get married /get a job and don’t have time for as many leisurely activities or they remain in the same mediocre cycle carried over from their high school days. I, on the other hand, was about to experience a renaissance in my consumption and appreciation of media that would revolutionize my perspective of it.

Being who I am, I decided to pursue game design as secondary education. I have heard many horror stories about people who made the same choice and winded up getting shafted by sorry school curriculums just looking to make money off of a new fad. Fortunately, that was not my experience at all. I had amazing teachers, friends, and an exceptionally dream like adventure while I was in college (the details of which you can find here).

One of the major changes that took place for me however, was the cross over from Occidental culture to Oriental culture. By the time I returned from Canada I was an Otaku in the sing-along, pose and dance, Japanese-everything kind of way; not just of anime, but of everything; lifestyle; mannerisms; and all the features of the society and what it was projecting.

The ‘Hyper’ Thesis

What happened? Well, too much to tell, but in short, I had been exposed to a large amount of Asian culture and media while in college, to such a great degree that I began to predominantly empathize with that culture. This makes sense; the more you expose yourself to something, the more it influences you and becomes a part of you. It’s subconscious really.

This is all well and good. However, what I truly didn’t understand was why it added to my happiness and sense of peace. Why did sushi make me feel all warm and cozy inside? A year or so earlier and I would have barked at the idea of eating raw fish. I hated learning Spanish and found foreign languages all together cumbersome and alien. Why then was I plowing on the Pimsleur and performing karaoke in a language so marked with innuendo and allusion? Why!? Why!? Why!?

The answer is not simple and there are many factors that influenced me, but there is one major factor that recently came to mind. It is one that I haven’t fully touched upon yet and might explain why I have grasped Asian culture the way I have.

I think I have an exceptionally strong interest in Japanese culture due to the lack of any perceived, equivalent value in my own culture— the “African American Culture”.