If you are a parent with kids interested in Japanese anime (cartoons) and manga (comic books), you need to be looking very closely at what your kids are into.
What is an otaku? Simply put, they are obsessive fans of pop culture, but I’m specifically writing about the ones involved in manga, anime, and video games. Of late, otaku has assumed negative connotations due to just how extreme the subculture has gotten. This is for very good reasons, which I will go into later. In the United States, the word mainly self-applied by fans of Japanese culture and hasn’t become such a negative term. Hopefully, it will become a negative term amongst parents given what I’ve run into online. There are far too many anime’s and manga’s that are pure sleaze masquerading as comedy or action.
I always wondered if the Japanese comic books and cartoons were really more intelligent and sophisticated than American efforts as their fans claimed. The other point I’d read and heard since the 1990’s was how more accepted they were in the culture and were, in fact, respectable. So as an ex-comic book collector and aficionado of things foreign, I decided to delve into the otaku world while going through two bouts of bronchitis earlier this year.
It wasn’t like I was a complete stranger to the genres involved, since I remember Robotech from the late 1980’s and Battle of the Planets from a little earlier. Due to glowing reviews everywhere, I watched Spirited Away and became an instant fan of Studio Ghibli. Younger friends had introduced me to Bleach, a typical fighting anime that at least had interesting characters. While I had Netflix, I sampled some anime series to get an idea what teens were into and did find some quality productions. In fact, that led to an automated recommendation that became the first anime box set I purchased, Area 88.
So I don’t come into this with a hatred for anime or manga as a format. Well done comics and cartoons can be just as emotional or complex as a novel or theatrical movie. In fact, I dare anyone to watch Grave of the Fireflies without shedding tears. But most of this, just like American comic books, is no longer for children. The main audience has become terminally arrested adolescents in their twenties to forties.
It is also a dwindling audience both here and in Japan. With the Japanese birth rate well below replacement rate, there simply aren’t enough children being born to keep things afloat and industry sales have decreased. Here in the states, the manga and anime boom peaked around 2005 and has imploded since then. Unlike Japan, those who consumed anime and manga outgrew it in their later years. So the great dream of mainstream acceptance went up in a puff of smoke.
There are consequences to shrinking markets in entertainment and one of the most interesting is what happens to a niche market. Just like comic books in the U.S., it shrinks to specialty shops and a ever smaller and more hardcore clientele. At some point, the whims of that small group begins to exert more and more control over the product put out. While not nearly as bad off in Japan as it is here, other cultural factors have produced an even more disproportionate influence by the hardcore fans over manga and anime.
I should note that video games are very intertwined with manga and anime. Many properties are adapted back and forth between all three media types. The peculiar popularity of dating and pornographic romance simulators in Japan is something we don’t have here in the States.
Why am I bringing this up? It has to do with many Japanese males dropping out of adult society, ones who have no real social lives, no wives, and no girlfriends. They spend their days as NEET’s, playing video games, reading manga, watching anime, and avoiding growing up at all costs. I’ve always liked the saying that “idle hands are the devil’s plaything” for good reason. Too many men with nothing to do is never a good thing. Combine a culture that is far more permissive in regards to sexual mores with pornography centered around school girls and you may get an idea of what I’m talking about.
To be a little more clear, we are talking about arrested adolescents who fantasize constantly about teen and, appallingly, preteen girls. With their disproportionate influence as very vocal consumers, the producers of anime and mange pander to this group constantly. This is called “fan service.” Jiggling breasts, sex jokes, nudity, and the ever popular camera shots of highly detailed panties are a staple of the medium.
But that’s just the beginning of the problems.
In the next post, I’ll go into how the themes of misogyny, incest, and pedophilia have become mainstream. Thankfully, the Japanese government has finally moved to do something about this but it still applies to what has been put out.
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