Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Eight: Chapter Twelve: Otaku Imaging
As you will probably recall from reading the selections from Notenki Memoirs, Okada Toshio, self-proclaimed king of otaku or ‘otaking,’ was one of the original team that contributed to organizing the Osaka SF convention and to making the Daicon Opening Animations. He was thus one of the founders of Gainax Studios. He was also one of the first to realize the potential for sales of figures and ‘garage kits’ (assembly kits for anime characters and mecha), founding General Products. It is appropriate then that the table of contents for his 1996 book, Introduction to Otakuology presents the contents of the chapters in exploded projection.
This use of exploded projection is appropriate because Okada sees otaku in terms of an ‘evolutionary’ transformation in perception suited to the new age of media, and in effect, he links this new kind of perception to what I have called the distributed field and to exploded projection.
