オタクじゃないよ！
This is a bit of a personal post I’ve been meaning to write~ I apologize for the length! It’s been circling around my head for a while, affecting how I communicate with friends and coworkers and internet buds, and influencing what I write here (and how often/or not) so I thought I should bring the subject out in the open. I’ve struggled with this for a while, but I finally need to say: I’M NOT AN OTAKU~!!!!
I’ve often wondered if I was. Since “otaku” is a word and an identity that seems to have been appropriated from its largely pejorative Japanese connotations by the English-speaking anime fan community, and I have indeed loved anime and manga for most of my life. (I just found out recently that my favourite show as a child was actually an anime, who knew!) But though I have an undeniable life-long fascination with Japanese language and culture, there’s a lot about that same fan community that I don’t connect with. And I don’t just mean because I’m female and reasonably well-adjusted socially, haha.
Otaku is still a bad word to me. Though I love Japan, I’m not some kind of naive Japanese apologist who thinks that living in Japan would be much better than my home cultures in North America and the UK. I’m both aware of and concerned about the racism, sexism and problematic corporate culture I’ll have to face should I decide to live and work in Japan eventually. I don’t believe anime is magically WAY BETTAR than Western animation, I feel out of place at conventions where white kids in cosplay are screaming “KA-NEECHI-WAH!”, and truth be told I’m not a big watcher of sci-fi (Macross aside!), fantasy or fan-service anime whatsoever.
But as hard as I fight it I’m still a fucking huge Japan nerd… and more than ever I feel ashamed of this fact. I’ve been studying how to read, write and speak Japanese for years (though I’ll be the first to tell you I’m not yet fluent), along with practicing traditional Japanese cooking and reading pretty much every gaijin-living-in-Japan and nihonjin-living-overseas blog ever. I have a long-held research interest in Japanese-Canadian history and historiography, and have read heaps of literature about internment in British Columbia and Alberta and the redress movement. I watch an unhealthy amount of J-dramas, and am privately obsessed with shounen sports manga and shoujo/josei romance manga and their adaptations. I read Japanese fashion magazines (JJ and CanCam are my faves), shop at Japanese grocery stores, sing Japanese songs at karaoke, get my hair cut by a Japanese stylist, hell I’ve even recently been following Japanese baseball.
I might actually buy a kotatsu for my new living room. ~sigh~
I don’t really know what to do about the shame I feel over my interest in Japan, which likely borders on obsession, and the otaku identity which I see as fetishistic and ignorant. Lately I’ve been making new Japanese friends for language exchange, and I can’t bring myself to mention to any of them that I watch anime. The other night I was working late, reading manga online while my code built and when my coworker asked what I was reading I froze! Turns out he likes Gundam and wanted to know if I was into anime too but I didn’t want to admit it to him. I work at a video game company. It’s not like anyone would judge me. I’ve been writing this blog for just over a year now, but for over a decade before that my anime hobby was not something I really shared. Maybe I wish it was still a secret?
Even in North America where it’s distanced from the shame of Akiba-kei, I just don’t want to be called otaku. Not that there is anything inherently bad about American fujoshi fangirls who use Japanese honorifics in casual conversation, but I prefer I not be mistaken for one. Maybe in my heart I know I’m a nerd (hell, I’m a software engineer who plays with sabermetric stats for fun, I’m obviously a nerd) but I’m sorry - I can’t wave that nerd flag proudly.
It’s good to get these admissions off my chest. I’d be curious to know how other people feel about defining themselves as otaku (or not), and whether anybody else worries about revealing their hobbies the way I do.
Of course I will continue to write about the anime and manga I love as well as other aspects of Japanese culture that interest me on this blog. And in the spirit of a NON-OTAKU oriented interest in Japanese culture, I’d also like to share with you a couple of sites I’ve really been stoked on lately:
Lang-8: An amazing resource for language study, Web 2.0 style! It’s a community where you can post blogs in the language you’re learning, and have native speakers comment and correct you. (In return, you do the same for people learning your own language.) Because it’s online and everyone is nice and they’re all expecting you to make mistakes, it’s really helped me get over a lot of my hang-ups about using my Japanese. I’ve made quite a few posts there and learned a lot. A good way to make new friends too.
Yakyu Baka: Though there are some awesome fanblogs out there, it’s pretty hard to find up-to-date Japanese baseball news in English. I have trouble following Japanese sources because of all the names and tough kanji. Yakyu Baka is a reliable news source that not only covers NPB (in huge detail) and Japanese players in the MLB, it even has a deep highschool section! All posts link to Japanese sources for extra info. This is a treasure for me. I will definitely be following the spring Koushien via this site.
