〈Opening the Black Box of the 1989 Otaku Discourse－Björn-Ole Kamm〉

1. Introduction: Assembling otaku
   In this chapter, I will show how both advocates for and critics of otaku were very much entangled and co-produced a distinct way of making truth claims about otaku in 1989 and 1990, which is still the prevailing ‘mode of ordering’.
   And answer the following questions: Which elements of the network ‘mass media’ made the connection between Miyazaki and otaku? Which actors called out misrepresentations and black-boxed the murder, media and the relation between the two?
2. Point of entry: Qualitative content analysis
1. Qualitative content
   Qualitative content or data analysis is not interested in retrieving and reconstructing supposed or hidden meanings, but rather is an evaluation strategy without a priori formulated theoretical criteria, which would be typical for quantitative methods
3. Otaku and the mass media
   The first question I ask is thus how the communicators (journalists) came to know the term otaku and what connections they drew between Miyazaki Tsutomu and the term.
    In most cases of relating the narrative of otaku bashing, the columnist Nakamori Akio coined the term otaku in this small-scale lolicon magazine in 1983. How was the term then transferred from a niche-market magazine to ‘the mass media’?
   
   The journalists coerced the father to open his son’s room and, in so doing, he also inadvertently opened the door to the answer that the mass media would provide (at least according to the standard way of telling the history of otaku: Miyazaki did this because he was an otaku. 
   During the trial, Miyazaki’s room and his video collection would play their part in attempts to explain his behaviour and mental state
   
4. Tabloids and the Miyazaki reserve troops
   Until 17 August 1989, the use of otaku (either in hiragana or katakana) was limited to a form of address (‘you’), as is still common in certain contexts.Ōtsuka’s stance was republished in an article in Asahi on 24 August 1989.15 This is the first and only article in Asahi in 1989 in which the term otaku was used in this way. Yomiuri published three articles using otaku in the same year. The use of the term in both newspapers in conjunction with Miyazaki remained limited
   
   the term Miyazaki-yobigun on TV, it does not appear in print before 5 September, when the phrase was picked up in a Yomiuri column not by a journalist, but rather by the manga critic and playwright Takatori Ei who debates if Miyazaki was a symbol of the younger generations or an outcast even among otaku.
   So, in 1989 the child murderer Miyazaki was without a doubt of interest. However, even more newsworthy that year was the new value-added tax: even from August to September, directly after Miyazaki’s arrest, Nikkan Gendai had more front pages on the recently introduced tax than on him. In general, the tabloids had lost interest by September. Journals and magazines, on the other hand, had time to prepare and took over in October. Manga artists, critics, editors and media professionals would crystallize as the most vocal group in condemning or explaining Miyazaki.
5. Managing otaku
   Ōtsuka did this on several occasions in newspapers,41 but also in his own writings, which were published in journals as well as books (Ōtsuka, 1989b; Ōtsuka and Nakamori, 1989a, 1989b). As one important reason for his media engagement, Ōtsuka points to the magazines he saw in pictures of Miyazaki’s room, which included back issues of the lolicon magazine that he edited (Ōtsuka, 2004, p. 319). The objects – books, magazines and videos – in Miyazaki’s room enrolled commentators and established the network of people and ideas that should constitute the otaku discourse.
   
   Ōtsuka’s urge to defend him was born from the assumption that the mass media and police were only looking for a scapegoat and found a likely suspect in the horror movie collector. What put him off was how the media also wallowed in the gory details of the case, fabricating ‘narratively fitting’ facts and turning the incident into a horror movie in itself and Miyazaki into an alien
   Ōtsuka, less so Nakamori, sees a need to stand up for their generation, who were brought up in a time of media saturation (manga and anime, later games) and material affluence, but without father figures. This discourse mirrored the ‘societal’ explanations above and called the 1980s the ‘decade of boys’ crimes’ , which in their view resulted from parents treating their children as tools for the fulfilment of their own dreams. Thus, Miyazaki is a product of the post-war era
6. Establishing otaku
   A number of commentators declared Miyazaki a symbol of the times,49 even though they disagreed on what he actually symbolized. While the priming effect of violent media content was an issue, the trial proceedings and the strategy of the lawyers focused on family problems and bullying.50 For the jurists, and also some journalists, the otaku issue was not the main point of debate, and the ‘flight from reality’ was more of a symptom. Contrastingly and important to note, literary critics, authors, manga artists and editors intensively discussed the idea of a link between Miyazaki and otaku and the question of whether his crimes resulted from media use.
   
   a first gesture in most scholarly or critical treatises on otaku or Japanese popular media remains this self-declaration, self-positivisation, which then leads to the claim of offering a better understanding. Through the network of videotapes in Miyazaki’s room, his lawyers’ attempts to enroll specialists, and critics’ attempts to capture public attention, the question of ‘who is an otaku’ became a question of managing otaku culture by establishing the only ‘real’ otaku position describable within the discourse – that is, the position of denying otaku as antisocial, which first needs to declare otaku antisocial to make sense. In this way, critics such as Ōtsuka made a connection between Miyazaki and otaku even as they denied it.
7. Conclusion: Recursive modes of ordering 
   While journalists and jurists debated links between the crimes and the media found in Miyazaki’s room, manga and anime critics and producers, those who know better, gave them the key term for this controversy: before Ōtsuka used otaku in his discussion of Miyazaki and the wrong impression of otaku, or Takatori mused about Miyazaki and the otaku-zoku, no mainstream journalists had used the term in this way. Ōtsuka and others are the ones that made the connection.
   
   One of the major aims of this chapter has been to show that the rhetorical creation of single entities (for example, otaku culture) or single-point actors (‘the mass media’) out of heterogeneous and diverse networks does not bear much explanatory value
   The involved actors are very much entangled, which complicates the black-and-white picture of ‘the stereotyped’ (the driven) versus ‘the mass media’ (the drivers) – not to forget the videos and magazines that enrolled so many other actors, ‘drivers’ and ‘driven’ alike
   
   

覺得這篇文章想要討論什麼?
作者試圖對OTAKU的形象發展，提供一個紛雜、多元、交互的圖像，撇除過往單一、單向、施予的推測。
最終，作者認為給予OTAKU此形象的媒體，與試圖辯護的御宅批評家之間，共同鑄造了OTAKU的形象，畢竟在批評家出聲之前，OTAKU與宮崎勤的關聯還僅停留在娛樂雜誌上而已。

我覺得這篇文章有哪些重點?或是我的心得?
我覺得這篇的研究對我的專題會有幫助，雖然我討論的是前期OTAKU形象如何與犯罪勾搭，但這一篇算是後期，OTAKU犯罪形象如何為新聞媒體廣傳，進而留存於社會上。
我自己比較不滿的是，為何不打日文阿，偏要翻成英文，這樣找資料很麻煩阿，不知道這本是有英文翻譯還是只有日文原文。不然其實這篇的引用跟資料來源都滿豐富的。