Preamble

This page is an extensive anthology and research piece of otaku-related quotes, excerpts, sources, references, & analyses, organized by reliability & year with the purpose of describing what I identify as the development of otaku culture from it’s birth, to it’s death and to it’s rebirth.

The purpose of compiling a large page of quotes & references classified by date is to make it easier to put otaku culture into a historical context by tracing the evolution of it and how it was understood by critics of the time.

This page is sorted by chronology to allow tracking the flow of causality and references over time, and help highlight changes. So the date is whenever a source was created, not when it was published or otherwise disseminated. Within each year, entries are further categorized by level of involvement:

Primary is material from someone who actively worked on an object of interest to otaku from that era: eg. Hideaki Anno, the team behind the early SF conventions such as Daicon.

Secondary are sources from first-hand otaku reports: e.g. commentaries from fans attending events.

Tertiary is any source further removed than that ー mainstream news coverage, academic analysis, etc.

Source is based on the ultimate origins of information, not proximate; an email forwarding an anonymous fan translation of a Azuma interview in a Japanese book is considered primary, not tertiary.

Timeline

00s

Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals

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Database Consumption

To summarize the discussion up to this point, there is no longer a narrative in the deep inner layer, beneath the works and products such as comics, anime, games, novels, illustrations, trading cards, figurines, and so on. In the multimedia environment of the 1990s, it is only characters that unite various works and products. The consumer, knowing this, moves easily back and forth between projects with a narrative (comics, anime, novels) and projects without one (illustrations and figurines). Here, the individual projects are the simulacra and behind them is the database of characters and settings. At yet another level, however, each character is merely a simulacrum, derived from the database of moe-elements. In other words, the double-layer structure of the simulacra and the database is again doubled, forming a complex system. The otaku first consume individual works, and sometimes are moved by them. But they are also aware that, in fact, the works are merely simulacra, consisting only of the characters. Then they consume characters, and sometimes feel moe in them. But they are also aware that, in fact, the characters are just simulacra, consisting only of combinations of moe-elements. In my observation, Di Gi Charat is a project created with a high degree of self-awareness of the doubled (and perhaps even tripled) consciousness of the otaku. Therefore, to consume Di Gi Charat is not simply to consume a work (a small narrative) or a worldview behind it (a grand narrative), nor to consume characters and settings (a grand nonnarrative). Rather, it is linked to consuming the database of otaku culture as a whole. I call this consumer behavior database consumption, in contrast with Ōtsuka’s “narrative consumption.” In the shift from modernity to postmodernity, our world image is experiencing a sea change, from one sustained by a narrative -like, cinematic perspective on the entire world to one read -up by search engines, characterized by databases and interfaces. Amid this change, the Japanese otaku lost the grand narrative in the 1970s, learned to fabricate the lost grand narrative in the 1980s (narrative consumption), and in the 1990s, abandoned the necessity for even such fabrication and learned simply to desire the database (database consumption). Roughly speaking, such a trend may be surmised from Ōtsuka’s critical essay and my own observation.

20s

Auction Core

The Product means someone Made It. by Sprite Bonkler 💫

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Don’t fuck with my Hypercitational Nu-Otaku Bijin-Maxi Post-Scarcity Slice-of-Life Panty-Shot Sonoracore Peace Extremist Mindset. ー Milady Teresa Television