vit_r

The otaku culture is a sort of the collective expression of post-war Japanese nationalism, although their surroundings in reality are thoroughly invaded and traumatized by American pop culture.

Неделю думал, надо ли тут это выставлять. Всё-таки решил сделать небольшую выжимку, но сперва про американскую культуру.

Поклонники Бурановских бабушек и сарафанов с кокошниками, шаманских плясок и прочей самобытности любят говорить про безликую американскую масскультуру. Ругают её за любовь к длинному доллару и за бездуховность. Говорят о падении, загнивании и деградации.

А между тем, американская культура - это то, что создавалось самыми передовыми, самыми талантливыми и самыми смелыми творческими людьми, которые привезённый из-за океана национальный опыт развивали и двигали вперёд. Очищали от шлака и плесени, сдували пыль, отскребали ржавчину, находили суть и выращивали новое.

Где закостенелым дилетантам видятся признаки американизации, там на самом деле идёт процесс роста и развития. Как в Америке, так и по всему миру, ставшему после массовой интернетизации глобальным информационным пространством.

Статья «Superflat Japanese Postmodernity» by Hiroki Azuma (1 и 2) оказалась как раз той деталькой пазла, которая очень хорошо встала в картину мира. Я теперь спокойно могу смотреть аниме любой степени идиотизма (правда не более десяти минут), потому как это превращается из пустого времяпровождения в увлекательную игру. Даже там, где сюжет и рисовка полный швах, остаётся код, которым создатели общаются с аудиторией отаку. Остаётся только декодировать канал управления и выявить скрытые команды.

Что такое японская культура, природа отаку, почему эта зараза так легко распространяется по миру и прочие интересности в избранных цитатах идут ниже.

Для сбережения душевного равновесия заглянувших сюда любителей аниме, спрячу их под кат.

Про японские корни

Since the end of the World War 2, the Japanese have long suffered from a serious difficulty to evaluate and be proud of their cultural tradition straightforward. There are two reasons. One is political; in Japan, any affirmative attitude towards Japanese identity has been likely thought to be a political right-wing expression as the action of forgetting or liquidating Japanese military "crime" in the war. This atmosphere still exists, and this is very serious for any intellectuals or academics.

The other is more sociological; the so-called "Japanese tradition", for example the literature, fine art or the Emperor system is in fact the historically new construction after Meiji Revolution, and now Japanese society has been so deeply Europeanized and Americanized that any nostalgic return towards its traditional, original, or "pure" Japaneseness, seems a fake. You can easily find how Japanese typical landscapes actually are in contemporary films or comics, those filled with Seven-Elevens, McDonalds, Denny's, comics, computers and cellular phones...they are all of American origin.

In addition, my point here is that it is the otaku culture that reflects most clearly this mixed, hybrid, bastardized condition; that is, the paradox that we cannot find any Japaneseness without post-war American pop culture. I guess most Japanese intellectuals are feeling a strong psychoanalytical resistance towards admitting this condition.

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However, the reality is more complicated. However attractive or persuasive the similarity between Edo culture and otaku culture seems, we should not forget the simple fact that otaku culture could not have existed at all without the influence of American subcultures. Manga, anime, tokusatsu (SFX movies), SF novels, computer games, all are of American origin and imported from the US with its post-war occupation policy. The otaku culture should not be seen as a direct successor of Japanese premodernity, but as a result of the recent "domestication" of post-war American culture, which was developing just at the same time with Japanese rapid economical growth and the recovery of national self-confidence in 1950s and 1960s. In this sense, otaku culture is essentially "nationalistic" though its characteristic and expression are far from those of traditional ordinary nationalism.

Про базу данных и симулякру

Jean Baudrillard, a French sociologist, makes the other point. He argued that the modern distinction between the original and the copy, the real and the image, is already lost, and that everything becomes simulacrum in the postmodern era.

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Our society is losing the grand Narrative but constructing the grand database in its place and the simulacra covering the postmodern surfaces are actually controlled and regulated by the database. As postmodernists often say, all the postmodern works (not only fine art but literature, music and many pop cultural works) are created not by being led by an idea, not an authorship nor an ideology, but by deconstructing and reconstructing the preceding works or re-reading them in a different way. In other words, postmodern artists or authors prefer dismantling the preceding works into some elements or fragments and reassembling them repeatedly rather than expressing their own authorship or originality.

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Their design is typically directed through a combination of several otaku elements like green hair, cat ears, rabbit ears, bells, housemaid clothes, school uniforms, a cat tail and large hands and feet etc. You can easily find all those elements in any ordinary anime films. Those three characters are designed by intentionally emphasizing and expanding their grotesqueness. Therefore, we can say that they are constructed as a kind of malicious parody of the entire situation of the otaku culture where any new work is made only from the combination of the already existing elements. It is a kind of irony that it put the success in commerce.

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In one hand, otaku is addicted to and absorbed in the given simulacra imagery. They often say that they feel stronger realities in the imagery than in the real world. We can call it a "wet" and exclusive desire. They can satisfy it alone without any social communication with humans. However, in the other hand, otaku is perfectly "dry" towards the works in the level of database. They rather feel big zeal in decomposing the unity of the given work or character into types and elements, rearranging them and making another new work or character. The big amateur market called Comike is supported by this desire. On this level, the otaku behaves in a sociable and communicative manner because it is indispensable for them to exchange their information about the new fashion of database. They love the favorite character but also love to decompose and recompose it. Therefore we can say otaku is both wet and dry, both introversive and extroversive, both maniac and schizophrenic.

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Here is an interesting contradiction. The novel games have plural ends in definition. It means that the player should do love with plural heroines while each of them is claimed to be his lifelong partner partner.

This contradiction proves that there exist two kinds of desires towards these novel games. One is a romantic fantasy with which otaku players read them. The other is an insisting zeal to analyze, decompose and rearrange all the data included in the games. Consumers of novel games are often provided with an abundant knowledge of computer and a hacker-like character. They voluntarily develop and circulate many free softwares which decrypts the data pack of the games and extracts the raw images and texts from there (as I am using one of them to make this chart).

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Otaku culture consists of two layers of simulacra and database. The former is visible and the latter is invisible. Seeing an illustration of a certain anime character, an otaku does not only appreciate the superficial design aesthetically. He or she immediately decomposes the image into many elements and feels zeal to reassemble them up into another character. The superficiality of otaku culture is so complicated. There is the database instead of the camera eye behind it. We can say that the "super" of "superflat" means this database depth.