The Obsession of the Otaku : Japan’s Techo Kids Have Fashioned a World Driven By Trivia--and Barren of Human Contact

The march of progress, Tokyo-style: Vacuum cleaners alert you when it’s time to clean. Grandmothers in kimonos bow in gratitude to their automated banking machines. Workers on a Toyota assembly line in Toyoda City vote robot co-workers into the auto workers’ union. Elevators stop where you tell them to.

A woman calls the Matsushita Denko kitchen design showroom to complain because her kitchen doesn’t look like the model she saw in a virtual reality walk-through demonstration. “I was expecting more vivid oranges and pinks,” she says. “Something more cartoony.”

This blurring of man and machine, of reality and what comes in over the video display terminal, is spawning a generation of Japanese kids who are opting out of the conformity of Japan Inc. in favor of logging onto computer networks. They have been dubbed the Otaku by the Japanese media, from the most formal way of saying you in Japanese, the implication being that there is always some kind of technological barrier between people.

The Otaku came of age way back in the ‘80s with “prehistoric” 186 computers and Neanderthalic Atari Pac-Men as playmates. They were brought up on junk food and educated to memorize reams of context-less information in preparation for multiple-choice high school and college entrance exams. They unwound with ultra-violent slasher comic books or equally violent computer games. And then they discovered that by interacting with computers instead of people, they could avoid Japanese society’s dauntingly complex Confucian web of social obligations and loyalties. The result: a generation of Japanese youth too uptight to talk to a bank teller, but who can go hell-for-leather on the deck of a personal computer or workstation.

First identified by the Japanese lifestyle magazine SPA!, about 200,000 hard-core Otaku are Japan’s newest Information Age product. “These are kids unlike any who preceded them in Japan,” Lap Top magazine editor Abiko Seigo says of the subculture of 16- to 25-year-olds. “Where they are coming from is a world where all the usual perspectives--like whether something is good or bad, smart or stupid, etc.--are irrelevant, because all of those things are judgments based on social relations. If you don’t socialize, you don’t have much sense of morality. The only thing that matters to them is data. How much do you have, and how much can you memorize.”

That’s hardly surprising, given the Otaku’s years in schools that emphasize rote memory over creativity and analysis. “Data is practically worshiped in the Japanese school system,” University of Tokyo sociologist Volker Grassmuck explains. “The exams test and reward those who can process the most data.”

Information is what drives the Otaku’s beloved dissemination systems--computer bulletin boards, modems, faxes. There are Otaku cliques devoted to manga (comic books), weapons, monster videos, pornography and teen idols. Monster Otaku may collect the names of the various actors who were costumed to portray “Ultraman” or try to figure out Godzilla’s exact parentage. Military Otaku may know the tread width of the German Pzk Mark IV tank and the velocity of the armor-piercing ammunition it fired. Everything--the blood type of comic book artist Osamu Tezuka, the number of casualties at the Battle of Midway, the age of pop star Miho Nakayama--is just more context-less information for the Otaku, to be memorized, processed and stored in the brain, or, more efficiently, in the hard drive.

Data, the newer the better, is status. Acquiring it may require akisu (hacking) into corporate databanks or tapping into a fax line. (Among Otaku, it is a matter of pride not to buy or sell information.) But in their single-minded quest to find and trade data, they resemble American trivia buffs or nostalgia collectors rather than computer hackers. This obsession with gathering may, at first glance, seem no different from the fanaticism of collectors of rare books or baseball cards. But it is as though instead of trading actual cards, card collectors were to trade only information about cards. (“Did you know that Hank Aaron had to pose seven times for the 1970 Topps baseball card No. 500 before they were happy with the shot, and that the bat he was holding actually belonged to Eddie Mathews?”)

This subculture of kids trades information, trivia and corporate passwords in their bedrooms via modem while their parents downstairs think they are studying. But they have abandoned schoolwork, sometimes becoming so immersed in the world of computer networks, cracking corporate security codes and analyzing algorithms that they can never come back. And all this just so they can be the first to disclose an upcoming record-store appearance by a low-level pop singer. “We are the future--more comfortable with things than people,” says Taku-Hachiro, the 30-year-old author of the book “Otaku Heaven” and a self-proclaimed Otaku. “That’s definitely the direction we’re heading as a society.”

A DROPOUT FROM PRESTIGIOUS KEIO UNIVERSITY’S MATHEMATICS department, Snix (a computer network sobriquet) used to be an Idol Otaku. Throughout high school and college, he was obsessed with data about singing idols, Japanese versions of Marky Mark or Debbie Gibson, and the bread and butter of the Japanese music business. Every year, 40 or 50 of these generic, mind-numbingly dull acts appear on the scene with major-label backing. Some, like Seiko Matsuda, become fantastically successful. Others quickly vanish. Snix wasn’t interested in the successful idols. He was obsessed with Chisato Moritaka--an up-and-coming idol.

He needed to know the usual fanzine data about her likes, dislikes and family background. But he delved much further for arcane info-bits, such as her bra size and medical history. Snix scoured celebrity magazines, accessed the Nifty Serve bulletin board that carried relevant information deposited there by other Idol Otaku and finally devised a way to hack into Warner Music Japan’s mainframe with his own FM Zoom system and modem. There, in the Warner Music computer subconscious, Snix claims, he found a vault of previously inaccessible information, like future record-store appearances and marketing plans for new singles. “I knew about her upcoming release dates before she did,” he says.

“Her singing wasn’t as important as how she walked and danced”--just as the important point for Snix was not the relevance of the information, nor the nature of it, but that he had it and others didn’t. He was an Idol Otaku hero when he sent it all out.

Throughout Snix’s adolescence, his achievements in gathering data and hacking into mainframes were what other Otaku praised him for. A psychologist might say that his first positive reinforcements were messages sent to him on a computer bulletin board. Snix was lord of the nerds, renowned from Kyushu to Hokkaido.

Eventually, though, he had to make a living. The moment came when the dean of Keio’s math department called Snix into his office and suggested a transfer to night school. In Japan, that is like being asked if you’ve ever considered joining the Marines. Snix got the message and dropped out of college.

And now, how could he make some yen?

“I was an Otaku,” Snix says with a shrug. “I only knew how to do one thing: get information.”

Snix went underground. It was time to put away childish things. His first job was to find out which questions would be on the entrance exams for various universities. Certain jukus (cram schools), he recalls, had promised to reward him handsomely for this service. Ironic, because those same tests had given him so much trouble as a student, but he had never bothered to hack for the answers.

There is still little being done to interdict Otaku like Snix who choose to exploit Japanese computer networks and rummage around in privileged corporate or government mainframes. “It’s a joke,” says Hitoshi Yamaguchi of Sega Enterprises, a leading computer-games manufacturer. “We’re at the point the United States was at 10 years ago in terms of computer security.”

Snix easily found the test questions, and his career took off. He was in demand by everyone from Yakuza thugs looking to tap into bank accounts to companies looking to gain an edge on the competition.

SNIX’S SMALL APARTMENT IN KOENJI, A SUBURB OF TOKYO, IS A SHRINE to arcade-game and computer technology, a panoply of VDTs, circuit boards, battered decks, burned-out hard drives and busted joysticks. The door to his tiny apartment is quadruple locked; a small slot like a doggie door allows delivery boys to drop off pizzas or Ramen noodles and pick up their payment.

Snix dresses in standard Otaku garb: jeans, a hooded sweat shirt and either sneakers or desert boots. All the elements or his wardrobe are interchangeable, and he looks like some dingy, nerdy version of the Geranimals children’s clothing line, in which any shirt would go with any pair of pants. His hair is long, stringy and greasy. Though he is 25, his acne appears to be of a particularly resilient strain, and his diet of chocolate bonbons and potato chips doesn’t help.

Snix laughs out loud as he reads a fax from one of his employers. He eats a chocolate bonbon with a pair of chopsticks instead of with his fingers so as not to dirty his keyboard. Two fax machines behind him have been whirring and beeping for the last hour. He turns toward the machines every 30 seconds and strains to read the Japanese characters as they emerge upside down.

The fax that has him chuckling regards client lists for a large insurance company; Snix has promised to deliver to his employer a list of the company’s wealthiest customers. Snix’s employer will pay him, for a list of fat cats, 1,000 yen per name. So if Snix can akisu into the insurance company’s computers and find 1,000 people who pay premiums equivalent to $100,000 a year, he will receive a million yen (about $9,500). His employer wants the names for a mailing list that he will sell to political organizations, right-wing fund-raising groups and investment brokers.

When the job is done, Snix will give his employer 100 sample names, occupations, addresses and phone numbers from the insurance company’s data vaults and tell him how many names he has for sale. His employer, with whom he communicates exclusively via fax, will check the list’s authenticity and, if everything is in order, will deposit 1,000 yen per name into Snix’s bank account via computer transfer. Snix will check his account through his home computer, and when he sees that the money has hit his account, he will fax through the remaining names. No handshake. No tedious and embarrassing face-to-face meetings. Just business. And money. And he never has to leave the house.

“I don’t understand morality,” Snix says, chomping on another bonbon. “This is my hobby and my living and everything about me. This is my world. This screen. This modem. There are simply no rules in computers, only games. I play games for a living. What could possibly be wrong with that?

FOR EVERY OTAKU LIKE SNIX WHO CAN PROGRAM AND DECIPHER passwords, there are thousands of harmless kids who just love gathering and passing on information. Very few elevate themselves to Snix’s level of computer subterfuge. Most are obsessed with every piece of trivia regarding their particular field and don’t get much further than happily reading computer bulletin boards.

“The Otaku are an underground, but they are not opposed to the system per se,” says sociologist Grassmuck. “They change, manipulate and subvert ready-made products and ideas, but they are the apotheosis of Japanese consumerism and an ideal work force for contemporary capitalism. The parents of the Otaku want to understand, but the kids look for things their parents can’t comprehend. “When you have a society where the best test-takers go to the top and the tests are all fill-in-the-blank sorts of things, then you end up with a society more comfortable with data than analysis,” he says. “That’s an Otaku society.”

Indeed, many Otaku already have legitimate careers in technology-related fields, as software designers, computer engineers, computer-graphics artists or computer-magazine editors. Leading high-tech firms say they are actively recruiting Otaku types, who are in the vanguard of personal computing and software design. Not surprisingly, these are not Idol Otaku or others who limit themselves to tracking down trivia but Computer Otaku, who might specialize in using archaic operating systems or finding data about bugs in programs and computer game designs.

Some Otaku entrepreneurs have already made it big. Self-proclaimed “Otaku mogul” Kazuhiku Nishi is the founder of the ASCII corporation, a software firm worth $500 million. “Maybe as many as 60% of our 2,000 employees” are Otaku, says an ASCII spokesperson.

Another company widely known as “the Otaku company” is Gainax Corp., whose 500-million-yen animated fantasy film, “Oneamisu Tsubasa,” grossed more than 2 billion yen. (The film, about what the world would look like if pneumatic and steam technology had been developed instead of electricity, set off a craze for whimsically shaped steam-driven models.) Located in Kitchi-joji, a posh suburb west of Tokyo, Gainax creates adult animation and fantasy role-playing computer games. The founder and president, Toshio Okada, a dropout from Osaka Institute of Technology, says that all of his 50 employees are Otaku.

Gainax’s offices are a mass of empty pizza boxes, piles of floppy disks and dozens of game designers and graphic artists bathing in the glow of their terminals--headphones on and one hand on their mouses as they happily program, design and engineer tomorrow’s computer games. Employees like 23-year-old Yohji Takagi, who is developing a fantasy role-playing game in which the player attempts to cheat on entrance exams to prestigious universities, love their work. And during his leisure time, he plays computer games. A variation of computer golf is his current favorite. Or he scans the Asahi Pascon computer network for Otaku data regarding his favorite subject: tropical fish. For Yohji, like most Otaku, the difference between work and play is a matter of software.

“WE OTAKU ARE THE IDEAL INFORMATION AGE WORK FORCE,” SNIX BELIEVES, “totally at one with technology.”

Snix taps his own chest. “Look at me. Maybe I am the future.”

If Japan has a future. When asked if he has ever had sex, Snix stares at the ceiling for about 30 seconds. He breathes deeply.

“That depends on your definition of sex,” he says.

“Intercourse with a human, male or female,” he is told.

He shakes his head.

“Otaku Heaven” author Taku-Hachiro claims the Otaku are largely uninterested in sex. He explains his own outlook. “I watch a lot of videos and read manga , so I know the mechanics of it, but I guess I’m frightened of it. I love to watch sex, and I love masturbation. But I’m terrified of skin contact with another person. You see, in the end, masturbation is really much better than sex. It’s so much more . . . efficient.”

Snix agrees: “I get along with objects and data better than people. If it were possible to have sex with machines, then that would be more interesting.”

It is not surprising that Otaku are fascinated with new technologies such as virtual reality, digital compression or three-dimensional television as they relate to pornography. The sales potential for ultra-real sexual, pornographic and violent experiences via the computer is so great that computer engineers--free-lance Otaku as well as corporate programmers--are furiously designing software that will satisfy an Otaku’s sexual needs. Last year, a software company in Osaka whose product was deemed “obscene” by the National Police Agency was raided, and its stock of pornographic games was confiscated.

The prospect for ultra-real pornographic or violent experiences in cyberspace has led some mainstream Japanese product designers to consider the ethical implications of what they are now developing.

“It could be psychologically damaging if they’re watching people being chopped up in three dimensions,” says a Sony spokesperson, “or even worse, if you’re there with them doing the virtual chopping.”

Hold on. Is a murder committed in virtual reality--of a virtual person who is, for all intents and purposes, real and tangible--a real crime or a virtual crime?

“There is no law out there,” says Gabin Itoh, editor of the computer magazine Log-in. Itoh says that Otaku morality meets virtual reality at “the final existential frontier. There is no reason to feel inhibited.”

“Chop her up,” Snix says, “and see if anyone files charges.”