In recent years, otaku culture has emerged as one of Japan’s major cultural exports and as a genuinely transnational phenomenon. This timely volume investigates how this once marginalized popular culture has come to play a major role in Japan’s identity at home and abroad. In the American context, the word otaku is best translated as “geek”—an ardent fan with highly specialized knowledge and interests. But it is associated especially with fans of specific Japan-based cultural genres, including anime, manga, and video games. Most important of all, as this collection shows, is the way otaku culture represents a newly participatory fan culture in which fans not only organize around niche interests but produce and distribute their own media content. In this collection of essays, Japanese and American scholars offer richly detailed descriptions of how this once stigmatized Japanese youth culture created its own alternative markets and cultural products such as fan fiction, comics, costumes, and remixes, becoming a major international force that can challenge the dominance of commercial media. By exploring the rich variety of otaku culture from multiple perspectives, this groundbreaking collection provides fascinating insights into the present and future of cultural production and distribution in the digital age.
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"This is the first comprehensive book to examine the full range of practices we associate with Otaku culture. The range of material covered here - from train watchers to cosplayers, from model builders to fansubbers - is really spectacular, helping us to move beyond encrusted stereotypes of the isolated Otaku to a much more nuanced understanding of the Otaku subculture."—Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (Henry Jenkins )
About the Author
Mizuko Ito is Professor in Residence and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Chair in Digital Media and Learning, Department of Anthropology and Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine. Daisuke Okabe is lecturer in psychology, Tokyo City University, Japan. Izumi Tsuji is associate professor of sociology at Chuo University, Japan.
Product Details
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Yale University Press (February 28, 2012)
Mizuko Ito is a cultural anthropologist of technology use, examining children and youth's changing relationships to media and communications and is Professor in Residence and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Chair in Digital Media and Learning at the University of California, Irvine, with appointments in the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Informatics. Her work on educational software appears in Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children's Software. In Japan, her research has focused on mobile and -portable technologies, and she co-edited a book on that topic with Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda, Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. She has led a three-year collaborative ethnographic study, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, examining youth new media practices in the US, and focusing on gaming, digital media production, and Internet use. The findings of this project are reported in Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Youth Living and Learning with New Media. She is co-editor and contributor to a book on fan culture, Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World.
Continuing this work on informal learning with new media with the support of the MacArthur Foundation, she is Research Director of the Digital Media and Learning Hub at UC Irvine and Chair of a MacArthur Research Network on Connected Learning. In addition to her current work funded by the MacArthur Foundation, she has been awarded grants by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, Intel Research, the Abe Fellowship Program, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and is the recipient of the Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies from the American Educational Research Association. Her web site is at http://www.itofisher.com/mito.
I heard that Fandom Unbound was an interesting book before acquiring it but once I bought it I realized how true that statement was.... it not only has essays on different topics regarding fandom but also covers up topics, such as cosplay, that are hard to find... I used it as base material on my graduation thesis and thanks to it I discovered some points of view that I hadn't thought of before... I highly recommend it
