Proper explanation of the origins of the term “Otaku”

I have already branded myself as one but learned so much more about the term from a short post on a new Japan related blog I recently discovered. A somewhat straight from the dictionary meaning of the word Otaku that I recently posted is explained as “a Japanese pejorative term used to refer to a variety of geek particularly one obsessed with computers, or anime and manga.”

What of the origins of the word, this post explains it quite nicely. ^_^

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when anime and manga fans in Japan were meeting one another at domestic conventions, they began to recognize one another’s faces, though they did not know each other by name. By way of greeting, they said, “ota-ku,” roughly meaning “hey, you,” though with the more formal, less casual intimations of the French second-person address, “vous.” In American English, it might be more like, “Hello there, sir.” In 1983, when Japan’s economy was beginning its monumental rise, journalist Akio Nakamori wrote a serialized magazine story, “The Investigation of Otaku,” explaining the term to common readers. Japan’s manga/anime-obsessed nerds and geeks, he wrote, address one another by the following term: “Ota-ku.”

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[Via – neomarxisme.com blog]

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