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Otaku

otaku


Otaku (おたく or オタク, Otaku) is a Japanese term used to refer to people with obsessive interests, particularly anime and manga.

Otaku is derived from a Japanese term for another’s house or family (お宅, 御宅 otaku) that is also used as an honorific second-person pronoun. The modern slang form, which is distinguished from the older usage by being written only in hiragana (おたく) or katakana (オタク or, less frequently, ヲタク), or rarely in rōmaji, appeared in the 1980s. In the anime Macross first aired in 1982, the term was used by Lynn Minmay as an honorific term. It appears to have been coined by the humorist and essayist Akio Nakamori in his 1983 series An Investigation of “Otaku” (『おたく』の研究, “Otaku” no Kenkyū?), printed in the lolicon magazine Manga Burikko, who observed that this form of address was unusually common among geeks, nerds and most notably, animationist like Haruhiko Mikimoto and Shōji Kawamori.[1] It was apparently a reference to someone who communicates with their equals using (unnecessarily) the distant and formal pronoun, and spends most of their time at home.

Quotation from “Otaku” Wikipedia


Otaku spirit Akihabara vehicle-free promenade

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