I'd like to meet:
OTAKU (Oh-tah-koo): Otaku is a derisive Japanese term used to refer to people with obsessive interests, particularly anime and manga. The modern slang form, which is distinguished from the older usage by being written only in hiragana, or katakana, or rarely in ramaji, appeared in the 1980s. It appears to have been coined by the humorist and essayist Akio Nakamori in his 1983 series An Investigation of "Otaku" ("Otaku" no Kenky), printed in the Lolicon magazine Manga Burikko, who observed that this form of address was unusually common among geeks and nerds. It was apparently a reference to someone who communicates with their equals using (unnecessarily) the distant and formal pronoun, and spends most of their time at home. The term entered general use in Japan around 1989, and may have been popularized by Nakamori's publication in that year of The Generation of M – We and Mr.Miyazaki. The term was popularized in the English speaking world in William Gibson's 1996 novel Idoru, which has several references to otaku. In particular, the term was defined as 'pathological-techno-fetishist-with-social-deficit'. In an April 2001 edition of The Observer, William Gibson explained his view of the term: The otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today's interface of British and Japanese cultures. I see it in the eyes of the Portobello dealers, and in the eyes of the Japanese collectors: a perfectly calm train-spotter frenzy, murderous and sublime. Understanding otaku -hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not. Another potential etymology for the term comes from the May 2006 issue of EX Taishuu magazine, which claims that use of the term started among the fanbase of the 1982 – 1983 TV series Super Dimension Fortress Macross, as the main character of the show had a habit of addressing others as "otaku", which fans started to emulate. Another source for the term comes from the works of science fiction author Motoko Arai. In his book Wrong about Japan, Peter Carey interviews the novelist, artist and Gundam chronicler Yuka Minakawa. She reveals that Arai used the word in her novels as a second-person pronoun, and the readers adopted the term for themselves.
