In 1989, at the end of the Showa Period a young man named Miyazaki Tsutomu was arrested for murdering and molesting four girls between the ages of four and seven. As the nation tried to make sense of these heinous crimes, much attention was given to the discovery in Miyazaki’s room of 5,763 videotapes, including anime and horror films. This was enough for media pundits to decry the serial killer as an ‘otaku.’ In the early 1990s, otaku came to mean people with an ‘unhealthy’ fixation on hobbies, which disconnected them from society and its norms. In a process of ‘moral panic,’ otaku became ‘folk devils’ that represented all that was wrong with the youth of Japan (Kinsella 2000: ch. 4). The figure of the otaku crystallised widespread anxieties about indulgent consumption and inappropriate psychosocial development. Not only were otaku seen as sexually immature, failed men (the Manga Burikko discourse), but, when conflated with Miyazaki Tsutomu, they were also seen as a threat to the reproduction of Japan, both biologically (refusing human partners, attacking children) and socially (not taking on adult roles and responsibilities, becoming antisocial).
In the media coverage and expert analysis of the ‘Miyazaki Incident,’ lolicon emerged as a keyword. Manga and anime featuring cute girl characters were found in his room, and it was revealed that he had produced fanzines and attended the Comic Market. Manga and anime, specifically those featuring bishojo characters and lolicon fanzines sexualising them, were positioned as the source ofMiyazaki’s deviance (Schodt 1996: 45—46, 49—59). Media, it was posited, were capable of warping the mind and encouraging criminal activity. Frederik L. Schodt notes that in the early 1990s there was a nationwide movement to ‘banish harmful manga,’ a movement made up of ‘housewives, PTAs, Japan’s new feminist groups, and politicians. Tougher local ordinances against obscene manga material were passed by various prefectures throughout Japan. Arrests of store owners found to be selling this obscene material increased dramatically’ (Schodt 1996: 56; see also Kinsella 2000: ch. 5). However, as Akagi Akira notes, even as otaku and lolicon were demonised in the mass media, bishojo imagery spread and became acceptable in manga and anime (Akagi 1993: 231). Consider Sailor Moon (1991-97), a shojo manga, which includes the word bishojo in its Japanese title (Bishojo senshi sera mUn). Adapted into a TV anime, Sailor Moon attracted a dedicated fanbase of adult men, in addition to the primary audience of young girls.
Looking back at what Sharon Kinsella (2000: ch. 4) calls the ‘otaku panic’ in the early 1990s, one important subtext is the proximity of girls and men as consumers of shojo manga and anime. Kinsella notes that the otaku panic was also a gender panic, which was triggered by concern for youth cutting themselves off from one another and from society by indulging in individualistic and insular consumption and play (Kinsella 2000: 138). This recalls the critique about the immaturity of otaku made by Ejisonta in Manga Burikko, but the gendered aspect is played up after the Miyazaki Incident. As Kinsella points out, in their immersion in fictional worlds, otaku are perceived to be rejecting social reality; they are not taking on social roles and responsibilities; no longer thus embedded, they have ‘no fixed identities, no fixed gender roles, and no fixed sexuality’ (Kinsella 2000: 137). Otaku appear as a queer existence outside of social norms of gender performance. A major source of anxiety was ‘men’ who could no longer be recognised as such. Otaku was used to refer to failed or feminised men, and it was used to refer to men consuming manga and anime for girls and participating in fanzine events associated with girls’ culture. Beneath the backlash against harmful manga, Kinsella detects anxiety about men migrating into the space of the ‘girl.’ What is unbearable is not necessarily the proximity of fantasy and reality, but the proximity of girls and men. This is not entirely fear of men desiring fictional girls and harming real ones, but also men becoming girls.
It is worthwhile to connect the otaku panic in the mass media in the 1990s to the original otaku debates in Manga Burikko in the 1980s. In Nakamori Akio’s first installment of the ‘‘Otaku’ Research’ column, ‘otaku’ is used to describe both male and female fans at the Comic Market. Nakamori writes of young men alongside young women ‘freaking out’ over favorite manga characters. A salient part of his critique concerns men sharing time and space, activity and material, with girls. Otaku reject images of ‘real’ girls in the pages of Manga Burikko and prefer manga or cute eroticism in bishojo forms inspired by shojo manga. Further, for Nakamori, otaku, lacking in ‘male performance,’ appear ‘feminine.’ Otaku was a label meant to contain the ‘feminine’ in manga and anime fandom and expel it. At a more abstract level, men were entering the space of the girl in the bishojo style. Recall that Azuma Hideo erased and parodied the male in his manga, while Hayasaka Miki drew a girl from the perspective of an older sister. The complexity of an orientation of desire toward fictional girl characters was lost in the association of lolicon which was reduced to pedophilia after the arrest of Miyazaki Tsutomu in 1989. The image of the sexual predator casts a long shadow over all subsequent discussions of otaku sexuality in Japan.
The national movement against harmful manga was propelled by concern for children, who were thought to be vulnerable and somehow threatened by ‘otaku sexuality.’ Though Okada Toshio, Taku Hachiro — and others began to write about otaku and even appear in the media as otaku spokespeople, they pointedly avoided talking about sexuality, which allowed for stereotypes to linger unchallenged. In 2000, a practising psychiatrist named Saito Tamaki published Sento bishojo no seishin bunseki (Armored Cuties: A Psychoanalysis), which was nothing short of an intervention. Given the public and political discourse, Saito highlights the difficulty of analysing otaku objectively, especially when it comes to men attracted to young girl characters. Such an interest is taken to be pathological, even when the character in question is purely fictional. In Sento bishojo no seishin bunseki, Saito argues that there is no evidence to support the hypothesis that the consumption of manga, anime and games leads to social/sexual deviance, let alone violent and/or sexual crime. Seeking to re-establish the otaku orientation of desire, Saito argues that otaku take fictional characters as sexual objects and can be fulfilled with them. That is, otaku desire the fictional character, not what it ‘represents.’ Reversing the stereotype, Saito advances that otaku, who engage with media over long periods of time, are not confused about the distinction between fiction and reality, but rather insist on it in their attraction to manga, anime and game characters as fiction (Saito 2011: 16—31). Saito concludes that otaku, despite their fantasies, are fully functioning individuals normatively oriented toward the opposite sex in the real world.
Despite Saito’s assurances that there is nothing to fear from otaku, whose ‘perverse tendencies’ are completely contained in fantasies and who display ‘‘healthy’ sexuality in daily life’ (Saito 2011: 30), suspicions persist. The first test came in the form of an obscenity trial involving manga. The work in question was Beauty Hair’s Honey Room (Misshitsu, 2002), which contains graphic and violent depictions of sex. The work was clearly for older readers (seinen) and did not reach massive circulation numbers. However, a father discovered in his son’s room an anthology of erotic manga, including the work of Beauty Hair, and sent it, along with a letter, to his Diet representative. The father’s letter read, in part, ‘Children who learn about sex from unhealthy, perverted, erotic-grotesque books about rape and incest will become sex criminals. … The bad influence that it will have on unsocialised youths is impossible to calculate’ (quoted in Cather 2012: 234). The Diet member forwarded the anthology to the police, who selected Beauty Hair’s work as the most objectionable. They arrested the president of the publishing company, Shobunkan, along with the chief editor and Beauty Hair. The latter two were given summary verdicts of 500,000 yen each, and Shobunkan’s president stood alone in a trial that began in 2004 and went all the way to the Supreme Court in 2007. Saito Tamaki was called by the defense as an expert witness, specifically to argue against the theory that readers are inspired to commit criminal sexual activity by manga.
Drawing on his work with otaku, summarised in Sento bishojo no seishin bunseki, Saito — testified that otaku make a clear distinction between fiction and reality and take the fictional character as a sex object in and of itself. In court, he expanded on this:
For otaku, manga won’t stir feelings of sexual arousal toward real women. They dissolve sexual desire with pictures and anime. … A special characteristic of otaku is that they will not try to do anything to real women. . The vector leading toward real women and the vector leading toward two-dimensionally drawn comics and anime are different. (Quoted in Cather 2012: 238-39)
By Saito’s estimate, it takes ‘training’ to be aroused by two-dimensional character images, which look nothing like humans. Saito and another witness argued that not only was Honey Room not meant for children, but it was also not for ‘normal grown-ups and adults, who would hardly be aroused’ (quoted in Cather 2012: 241). This gave the prosecution exactly the evidence it needed: even witnesses for the defense see that the readers of Honey Room are ‘abnormal’ and that sustained exposure to a certain sort of manga and anime will distort sexual desire. (Otaku are attracted to the ‘two-dimensional’, ‘vector’ differently and are not ‘normal grown-ups,’ which recalls Ejisonta’s critique in Manga Burikko.) In an interesting twist, the defense team for Sho — bunkan argued that manga and anime were spreading around the world and that otaku represented a respected subculture of Japan; they pointed out the Venice Biennale in 2004, where the Japanese pavilion was devoted to otaku culture. In her review of the case, Kirsten Cather suggests that this strategy also backfired, because the legitimacy of manga and otaku subculture meant that they needed to be more strictly policed and reconciled with the interests of the nation (Cather 2012: 246). Shobunkan lost its court case and was fined 1.5 million yen.
By calling the sexuality of otaku abnormal at a time when manga, anime and surrounding fan cultures were on the cusp of normalisation, Saito — and other witnesses for the defense made it easier for the court to ban Honey Room, because Japan did not want to encourage perverse desires (or be seen as encouraging them). Limiting encounters with ‘obscene’ manga would ensure that children would not develop an abnormal orientation of desire toward fictional characters, which is to say ‘otaku sexuality.’ Bear in mind that the father who originally protested the erotic manga Honey Room, the Diet representative who passed the complaint to the police and the judges in the Shobunkan case ‘professed a tolerance for nude photography,’ but the defense team attacked photography in contrast to manga, which they saw as less realistic and offensive (Cather 2012: 250—51). While this rejection of photography and realism resonates with otaku sexuality, the court found that nude photography has artistic value, while erotic manga does not. When the defense team brought up shunga, or erotic woodblock prints from the Edo Period, the judges posited that such works were part of ‘a fulfilling sex life primarily among married couples’ (quoted in Cather 2012: 258), which was more elevated than the prurient interests of readers of erotic manga. As the issue at the trial shifted from the effect of Honey Room on the adolescent male reader to the defence of otaku sexuality, the court determined that desire for fictional characters is abnormal and should be discouraged. Not only do manga like Honey Room need to be kept from those who should not see them (that is, youths) and unsuspecting passers-by who do not want to see them (normal people), but they also need to be kept from those who want to see them (otaku) (Cather 2012: 263).
A similar logic was at work in an amendment to the Healthy Youth Development Ordinance in Tokyo in 2010, which limited the distribution of manga featuring ‘underage’ characters in sexual and violent situations (McLelland 2011). Though this was an issue of zoning to decide where erotic manga can be sold, many feared that the threat of decreased sales would lead to self-censorship in the manga industry in order to secure a place in convenience stores and station kiosks. The revision of the Healthy Youth Development Ordinance came amid mounting pressure on Japan to curb the production and distribution of child pornography in both actual and ‘virtual’ forms (Cather 2012: 242—43, 268—70). As manga and anime continued to spread around the world, the Japanese government was increasingly invested in regulating the ‘content industry’ to bolster the image of ‘Cool Japan.’ Note that it does not matter that otaku, unlike the authorities out to curb child pornography, have actively sought to separate the actual and virtual. It does not matter that Azuma Hideo and readers of Manga Burikko rejected sexualised photographs of girls and desire fictional characters instead of the ‘real thing.’ Even if otaku do have a distinct orientation of desire toward fictional characters, the concern is with the potential for ‘cognitive distortions’ in individuals and society (McLelland 2012: 479). Otaku sexuality, as abnormality, is itself the problem.
Conclusion
From the debate about otaku among manga and anime fans in the 1980s to the otaku panic in the mass media in the 1990s to the disciplining of otaku by the courts in the interest of the nation in the 2000s, there are long-standing concerns in Japan about the orientation of desire toward fictional characters and sexual preference for them. In the first instance, ‘otaku sexuality’ is about inappropriate desire for fictional girls, or, as Ian Condry puts it, ‘an inappropriate desire by relatively grown men for (imaginary) immature girls’ (Condry 2013: 191). This desire is ‘inappropriate’ to the extent that it is not oriented toward human others; it is considered antisocial insofar as it takes one away from interactions with human others. However, this negative perception is off base. Among otaku, an alternative system of value has emerged based not on productive roles at work and home, but rather on consuming manga, anime and games and sharing affective responses and attachments to fictional characters (Condry 2013: 194—96, 200—201). This is not being ‘antisocial’ so much as social in a different way. As Condry puts it, at stake in sharing love and desire for fictional characters is ‘the emergence of alternative social worlds’ (Condry 2013: 203). The rapid inflation of norms is a response to these alternative social worlds and virtual realities which must be monitored and controlled.
Despite all this, the desire for fictional characters has recently become more visible than ever in Japan. With the growing interest in manga and anime culture and the subsequent proliferation of media targeting fans, self-identified otaku have a platform to claim their own sexuality. One example is Honda Toru, who publicly declares he is ‘married’ to a character from an erotic PC game. In a manifesto published by a commercial press, Honda advocates to his readers a ‘love revolution’ (ren’ai kakumei), by which he means throwing off the shackles of social expectations about masculinity, and overthrowing the system of ‘love capitalism’ (ren’ai shihonshugi), which demands that men be productive and pursue a partner in a commodified system of dating (Honda 2005). For Honda, the revolution begins by finding personal fulfillment with a fictional character and sharing that love with others. Numerous others have followed Honda’s lead — setting up an online petition for legal recognition of marriage to fictional characters, holding official-looking wedding ceremonies to celebrate the union of man and character and insisting on tables and rooms for two when out on a date with the character, which forces others to recognise its presence (see Condry 2013: ch. 7). Increasingly, otaku call favorite characters by pet names such as ‘my wife’ (ore no yome), ‘little sister’ (imOto) or ‘daughter’ (musume), appropriating and twisting the terms of kinship in pursuit of alternative intimacy.
In the case of otaku, the insistence on fictional girls from Manga Burikko to the present is not necessarily a rejection of real women, but rather a desire for something else. Judith Halberstam writes that ‘common sense’ is a form of hegemony, or an interlocking system of ideas that produces norms and persuades people of their rightness (Halberstam 2011: 17). There is a common sense to gender roles and sexual orientation, which must be navigated to achieve ‘success.’ As if speaking about the case of Japan, Halberstam argues that ‘success in a heteronormative, capitalist society equates too easily to specific forms ofreproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation’ (Halberstam 2011: 2). Reproductive maturity forces intimacy into the heterosexual couple and family, which become the most socially valued and recognised expressions of intimacy. While it is true that Honda Toru and other otaku also ‘marry’ fictional characters of the opposite ‘sex,’ the fact that the character is not human undermines ‘common sense’ notions about sexuality (Honda 2005: 142; Kam 2008: 77—79, 81). Indeed, as can be gleaned from the articles in Manga Burikko, otaku are not considered to be sexually mature (Ejisonta 2011) and the success of their gender performance is called into question (Nakamori 2008b). However, even if we accept that otaku are ‘failed men,’ Halberstam reminds us that in failure we imagine ‘other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being’ (Halberstam 2011: 88). In this way, otaku as failed men are imagining other ways of loving and living in a more-than-human world.