Cruising the Anime City : An Otaku's Guide to Neo Tokyo by Patrick Macias and Tomohiro Machiyama (Stone Bridge Press)

Any book on pop culture is sure to go out of date almost as soon as it’s published. It is no different with Patrick Macias and Tomohiro Machiyama’s book Cruising the Anime City which was first published twenty years ago. A lot has changed since then. 

Even the word otaku, which was once used as a euphemism for young males who were seriously into games and anime. What we in the States would call “nerds”. Geeky boys who couldn’t get a girl to talk to them if they tried. 

In 1989, Tomohiro Machiyama wrote a book called おたくの本 (Otaku no Hon) and would like to take credit for popularizing the term. Unfortunately、 a young man named Tsutomu Miyazaki was arrested the same year. He kidnapped and raped three little girls. 

Machiyama describes Miyazaki as a “walking worst-case scenario otaku. With messy long hair, a pale face, and geeky glasses”. He was twenty-seven at the time of his arrest and was still living with his parents and was unemployed. 

The police found a large number of anime videos and Lolicon (Lolita Complex) manga. Machiyama also states that “because the case was so sensational, many Japanese people began to wonder what kind of lifestyle had created such a monster. 

Otaku no Hon just came out and people “connected the dots and came to the conclusion that otaku were dangerous perverts”. It would be many years later that the astigmatism attached to otaku would be reversed. 

The change came about due to a former anime creator who became a social critic. He was a self-proclaimed “Ota-king” and would explain otaku culture in layman’s terms to economists and academics. He championed the otaku subculture as it was the otaku who “through their purchasing power, supported technological advances in Japan”. 

Macias and Machiyama’s book on pop culture covers manga, the Japanese comic, toys, idols, anime, games, movies, cosplay (people who dress up like their favorite anime or game character), Comiket (comic market), and pla-mo (plastic models). 

Although manga was still popular when I first moved to Japan in 1995, the market had changed in just a few years. When Macias made his first trip to Japan in 1999, he didn’t see people reading mangas on the trains or the buses. By 2004, when this book came out, people were reading manga on their smartphones. 

That doesn’t mean the manga has lost its popularity. The print production of the omnibus comics may have gone down but manga is alive and well in Japan. Just go to any Mandarake or Yorozuya shops and you will find manga and other manga and anime-related goods for sale. 

The Comiket or Comic Market is still a strong event as ever too. It is held twice a year at Tokyo Big Sight and draws millions of comic and anime fans. It is also an event where you will see many cosplayers as well. 

Another interesting aspect of Japanese pop culture are idols. Idols mostly being cute young girls who dance and sing and are commercialized through merchandise and endorsements by talent agencies. When Cruising the Anime City came out, at the top of the idol chain was a group called Morning Musume. 

Tsunku, the vocalist of Japanese rock band Sharan-Q was looking for a new singer and held auditions on a televised program called [Asayan]. Morning Musume was formed by five of the candidates who were dropped. Tsunku produced a single for them on an independent label and gave them the task of selling 50,000 copies in five days or they would have to go back to their ordinary lives. 

The five members were able to accomplish the mission and debuted on a major label in January of 1998. Their rise to fame was quick and the group grew from five members, to eight, to eleven to who knows how many now. The group is still going strong even today but has been shadowed by another idol group that emerged in 2005, called AKB48. 

Although the subject of the book is quite dated now, it still makes for an entertaining read. I mean, how many of us old-timers remember what it was like to buy our first record or LP, or cassette tape for that matter. If you’ve lived in Japan through the nineties or if you’re just interested in Japanese pop culture of the past, you will be sure to enjoy this nostalgic trip into the past. ~Ernie Hoyt