At first glance, there’s not much to distinguish Koota Umeda from the millions of other Japanese salarymen. When we meet for a beer in a Tokyo bar, the personable 23-year-old is wearing a smart new suit and presents his business card with impeccable manners (he works for a major Japanese tech company). But the unfashionable side part in his hair hints at secret proclivities. The proof comes when he whips out his digicam to show me photos of his enormous, meticulously organized collection of manga, which he keeps in his bedroom at his parents’ house.
Umeda is a self-confessed otaku, one of Japan’s growing legion of men obsessed with anime, comics, action figures, and videogames. And when Umeda claims otaku status, it’s no idle boast. “Here’s the real evidence,” he says, producing a certificate and ID that confirm his standing as “otaku elite.” He earned this rank by getting a very high score on a rigorous National Unified Otaku Certification Test last summer.
The exam was something of a Japanese obsession, despite having been available only as an insert in Elfics magazine, which features cheesecake drawings of scantily clad, underage girls on the cover. The 15-page quiz demanded a staggering knowledge of minutiae, from the names of obscure videogame villains to fluctuations in the stock price of toy-robot manufacturer Bandai.
Umeda breezed through most of it, but he had to make a field trip to answer a question about a landmark in Akihabara, also known as Electric Town. Tokyo’s shopping mecca for high tech gadgets is also replete with comics, videogames, action figures, and porn, and the term akiba-kei – a denizen of Akihabara – has become nearly synonymous with otaku. Umeda mailed in his answers, and two months later he had documentation proving that he had not only outscored all the other members of his college anime club but was among the top 100 scorers on the planet, the crème de la geek.
Umeda’s command of pop culture trivia is astonishing. But what’s just as surprising is the pride he takes in being otaku. When the word emerged in the 1980s, it was a pejorative for nerdy young men more interested in model kits and Godzilla movies than in girls and good jobs, a pariah class that had opted out of traditional male roles in business and family life.
But legions of dedicated otaku have turned what was once a marginal subculture into a thriving industry and a trendy lifestyle export. Umeda says he devotes about three-quarters of his disposable income and nearly all his free time to his otaku hobbies. A recent report estimated the value of the manga and anime markets in Japan alone at more than $900 million.
“Otaku have joined the mainstream to become a major cultural icon,” says Tokyo journalist and social observer Kaori Shoji. “They’ve been lurking on the edge of hip for some years. Now they’ve gone completely legit.” In a recent column for the Japan Times, Shoji wrote about women who were desperately trying to land otaku boyfriends and the trouble they were having competing with the ultrageeks’ preferred romantic companions – racy images of anime idols freely available online.
I ask Umeda if he has a girlfriend; he concedes that he doesn’t, though many of his otaku friends do. But he’s certainly benefiting from otaku’s new cultural cachet. When Umeda got his first job after college, he kept mum about his life outside the office. Before long, however, he discovered that his boss was also an otaku. “Now, if I want,” he says with a grin, “I can get a day off to go to the comics convention.”
– Tony McNicol
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Meet the Geek Elite
