Otaku began as a stiffly polite way of saying you
Before it meant an obsessive anime fan, otaku was an honorific word for someone else's home, used as a distant, courteous you. Fans meeting at conventions adopted it in the 1970s, an essayist turned it into an insult in 1983, and by 2013 over 42% of surveyed Japanese teens claimed the label.
The fandom took shape in the 1960s around Astro Boy. In the 1970s admirers of Space Battleship Yamato began drawing their own amateur comics, known as doujinshi, and swapping them at events such as Comic Market, where strangers addressed one another with the formal pronoun. The critic Eiji Ōtsuka suggests the word appealed precisely because it let new acquaintances keep a comfortable distance. Other theories credit the science fiction writer Motoko Arai, or fans of the Gainax studio, some of whose founders came from Tottori in western Japan, where the word is common.
The humorist Akio Nakamori gave it teeth. His 1983 series in the magazine Manga Burikko mocked fans for their clothes and looks and presented otaku as the term junior high pupils used for each other at conventions. The label darkened further in 1989, when a serial murder case was linked in the press to the subculture, and hostility stayed intense into the mid-1990s. The sociologist Kaichirō Morikawa sees the scene as a product of Japanese schooling, where clubs offered a refuge from rigid pecking orders.
Attitudes then softened. The writer Hiroki Azuma notes that between 2001 and 2007 otaku culture gained real recognition: Hayao Miyazaki won an Academy Award for Spirited Away in 2003, and the Japanese pavilion at the 2004 Venice architecture biennale was devoted to it. The Nomura Research Institute split fans into twelve groups in 2005 and valued their spending at up to ¥2 trillion, about US$18 billion. Marie Kondo has credited her own otaku streak with teaching her deep focus.
English speakers met the word largely through the 1988 anime Gunbuster, whose heroine is teased for her habits, and through debates on the Usenet group rec.arts.anime; William Gibson used it in his 1996 novel Idoru. In Tokyo, Akihabara, with its maid cafés and collectors' shops, remains the pilgrimage site, alongside Otome Road in Ikebukuro.
Source: Otaku
