Otaku
Otaku (Japanese: おたく, オタク, or ヲタク) is a Japanese subculture of people with consuming interests in hobbies that lie at the juncture of science and fantasy, especially media, productions, and pastimes such as anime, manga, video games, virtual reality, and cosplay. It began forming in the 1960s, took on its name within the subculture in the 1970s, and was popularized by a 1983 essay by Akio Nakamori in Manga Burikko.
Otaku subculture is a central theme of various anime, manga, documentaries, and academic research. The subculture took shape in the '60s with the release of the manga series Astro Boy and by the '70s led fans of anime such as Space Battleship Yamato to create their own manga, called doujinshi, which they began sharing at conventions such as Comic Market, addressing one another by the formal term otaku (you or your home). In the '80s, social changes promoted otaku traits even in Japanese schools, including juku, but increasingly left otaku resigned to being stereotyped as social outcasts and finding refuge in fictional worlds typified by the anime series Mobile Suit Gundam. The rise of the internet and 1989 creation of the Web furthered the otaku subculture, spreading more anime, video games, and other such media, and the term's definition expanded into numerous classifications.
Otaku may be used as a pejorative, and discrimination against it was particularly intense between 1989 (when a serial murder suspect, Tsutomu Miyazaki, "The Otaku Murderer," was arrested) and the mid-1990s. More recent studies, however, reveal an increasingly benign view of the subculture, and a growing number of people, especially the young, now identify themselves as otaku, both in Japan and elsewhere. Out of 137,734 teens surveyed in Japan in 2013, for example, 42.2% self-identified as a type of otaku. In 2005, the Nomura Research Institute divided otaku into twelve groups and estimated the size and market impact of each of these groups. Other institutions have split it further or focused on a single otaku interest, such as anime, manga, gaming, photography, electronics, J-idol, and automobiles. In 2005, the economic impact of otaku by this broad characterization was estimated to be as high as ¥2 trillion (US$18 billion).
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