Otaku Culture

Today's subculture (otaku culture in Japan) chooses videogame wars over street-riot opposition, deviance over activism, solipsistic erotic fantasy over sexual freedom, and hollow identity over existential angst. This subculture has long abandoned the ideals of modern humanism, embracing instead what Yumiko Iida calls a postmodern "nihilistic nationalism" linked to a "highly media-permeated and technologically driven socio-cultural environment," which is "devoid of meaning, historical depth, and empirically grounded subjectivity."

-- (Takashi Murakami 村上隆, Little Boy: p256-7)

Otaku

“The otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today's interface of British and Japanese cultures. I see it in the eyes of the Portobello dealers, and in the eyes of the Japanese collectors: a perfectly calm train-spotter frenzy, murderous and sublime. Understanding otaku-hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic.”
--- Gibson, William. "Modern boys and mobile girls" The Observer 2001