Wabi-Sabi-Moe

Takashi Murakami: Morikawa-san will present an exhibition about otaku and moe⁸ [literally, “bursting into bud”] at the architecture bienniale in Venice in 2004_22ya.⁹ Your association of otaku with architecture is unique. Please tell us about it.

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Toshio Okada: I was most impressed by your phrase, wabi-sabi-moe, in the exhibition thesis.

Moe is not an easy concept to comprehend, but when you linked the three ideas linguistically, it made a lot more sense.

Those who are unfamiliar with the concepts of wabi and sabi [meaning “the beauty and elegance of modest simplicity”] must surely wonder what’s appealing about feigning poverty.

Likewise, with moe, until you get the concept, I’m sure people question the origins of this seeming obsession with beautiful little girls, bishojo.¹⁰ But once you get it, you start to feel like moe might become a megaconcept, exportable like wabi and sabi.

Kaichiro Morikawa: The truth is, I made up that phrase to pitch the show. But suddenly it was a headline in the Yomiuri newspaper.

T. Okada: That’s awesome. The fact that it became a headline means everybody can understand it.

K. Morikawa: It’s a play on something the architect Arata Isozaki¹¹ did in his exhibition, Ma,¹² in Paris in 1978_48ya. He provided logical English explanations for such traditional concepts as wabi and suki [meaning “sophisticated tastes”] on exhibition panels.

The key Japanese words—such as wabi, sabi, and suki—were inscribed in classical calligraphy and accompanied by lengthy English explanations printed in Gothic fonts.

I decided I’d do the same with moe.

There is a huge gap between people who know the word moe and those who don’t. Every otaku person knows moe. For them, it’s so basic. But it’s not like all young people know the term. While at graduate school, I asked my colleagues about moe but almost none of them knew it.

It dawned on me that most mainstream people just don’t know it.

T. Murakami: That disparity is really intriguing.

KM: It clearly corresponds with another gap between those who know that Akihabara¹³ is now an otaku town and those who don’t.

Those who do know couldn’t care less that others

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are finally catching up, while those who don’t know

Akihabara today still think of Akihabara the way it’s been portrayed in commercials for household-appliance stores. This gap reflects the state of Japanese culture and society today.

To those who are unfamiliar with moe, I only half-jokingly explain, “In the past, we introduced foreigners to such indigenous Japanese aesthetic concepts as wabi and suki. These days, people abroad want to know all about moe.” A lot of people respond, “Oh, is that so…”

TM: Morikawa-san, I’d like to ask you, then: What prompted otaku to gather in Akihabara?

KM: Otaku are self-conscious about being condescended to, when they go to fashionable places like Shibuya.¹⁴

But they feel safe in Akihabara, because they know they’ll be surrounded by people who share their quirks and tastes.

Over time, the focus of otaku taste shifted from science fiction to anime to eroge¹⁵ [erotic games], as young boys who once embraced the bright future promised by science saw this future gradually eroded by the increasingly grim reality around them. I think they needed an alternative.

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TO: I think kawaii¹⁶ [literally, “cute”] is the concept Murakami-san exported throughout the world.

Granted, Murakami-san’s kawaii is alarming enough. But I wonder why I was further alarmed by Morikawa-san’s formulation of wabi-sabi-moe. In a previous conversation we had for a magazine article, you said, “Otaku is about the vector toward dame.”

As a way of expanding on that, when otaku choose this orientation, they head in the direction of becoming more and more pathetic. At the same time, they enjoy watching themselves becoming increasingly unacceptable. If you think about it, in a very, very loose sense, this is wabi and sabi.

I suspect this orientation is inherent in Japanese aesthetics. If you look for a Western equivalent, it would be Decadence, or the Baroque, though theirs is a tendency toward excessive decorativeness. I imagine such people think of themselves not in terms of “See what we’ve done. We’re amazing,” but more like, “See what we’ve done! How pathetic we are!”

TM: I have said this many times, but I am a “derailed” otaku.

Neither of your situations applies to me.

When I am talking to Okada-san, I remember feeling like I could never keep up with the distinctive climate of the otaku world.

So, I now want to explore the real reasons why I escaped being an otaku.

TO: Probably because otaku standards were so high when you tried to join them. Besides, I bet you wanted to go right to the heart of otaku, didn’t you?

The closer you tried to get to the heart of the otaku world, the farther you had to go.

TM: That’s not just true with otaku, though. The world of contemporary art is exactly the same. If you can’t discuss its history, you won’t be taken seriously and you won’t be accepted on their turf. I kept being reminded of this while listening to you two talk.

TO: In other words, just as you once had to know the history of contemporary art, now you have to understand moe, right?

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Otaku Vs Mania

Takashi Murakami: This may be a frequent question, but what is the difference between otaku and mania¹⁷?

Kaichiro Morikawa: In otaku studies, we often argued about this distinction. Generally speaking, three differences have been articulated.

First of all, mania are “obsessives” who are socially well adjusted. They hold down jobs and love their hobbies. In contrast, otaku are socially inept. Their obsessions are self-indulgent. This point is raised mainly by the self-proclaimed mania, critical of otaku.

The second point concerns what they love. Mania tend to be obsessed with, for example, cameras and railroads, which have some sort of materiality (jittai), while otaku tend to focus on virtual things such as manga and anime. In other words, the objects of their obsessions are different.

The third point relates to the second one. A mania tends to concentrate on a single subject—say, railroads—whereas an otaku has a broader range of interests, which may encompass “figures,”¹⁸ manga, and anime.

Taken together, I would say—although Okada-san may disagree with me—that someone who is obsessive about anime likes anime despite the fact that it’s no good, dame. That’s mania. But otaku love anime because it’s no good.

Toshio Okada: Mania is an analogue of otaku. Obsessives are adults who enjoy their hobbies, while otaku don’t want to grow up, although financially, they are adults. These days, you’re not welcome in Akihabara if you aren’t into moe.

I was already a science-fiction mania when otaku culture kicked in. I can understand it, but I can neither become an otaku myself nor understand moe. [Laughs]

T. Murakami: And I’m nowhere near Okada-san’s level. I failed to become an otaku. Period. [Laughs]

T. Okada: I believe otaku culture has already lost its power. What you find in Akihabara today is only sexual desire. They all go to Akihabara, which is overflowing with things that offer convenient gratification

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of sexual desire, made possible by the power of technology and the media.

K. Morikawa: But I think the sexual desire in Akihabara is different from that in Kabuki-cho.¹⁹

TO: Kabuki-cho is about physical sex.

Because the heart of otaku culture shuns the physical, it has renamed seiyoku [sexual desire] as moe.

Sexual fantasies are becoming more and more virtual and “virtual sexuality” proliferates in Akihabara.

KM: Many otaku think they like what they like even though they know these things are objectionable, when in fact they like them precisely because they are objectionable. This gap between their own perception and reality has made it difficult to distinguish otaku from mania.

If we define otaku through this orientation toward the unacceptable, it’s easy to explain the three differences between otaku and mania. Because if you like something that’s socially unacceptable, you will appear antisocial.

Another consideration is that material things are considered superior to the immaterial. So if you are interested in the debased, you naturally gravitate

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toward the virtual.

In addition, otaku don’t just purely love anime or manga, they choose to love these things in part as a means of making themselves unacceptable. That is why their interests are so broad.

This dame-orientation is evidenced by the history of otaku favorites. Up until the 1980s, people who watched anime—any kind of anime, be it Hayao Miyazaki²⁰ or Mamoru Oshii²¹ or whatever—were all considered otaku. Today, Japanese anime is so accomplished that one film even won an Academy Award. As a result, grown-ups can safely watch, say, Miyazaki’s anime without being despised as otaku.

The upshot of this is, as soon as anime and games earned respectability in society, otaku created more repugnant genres, such as bishojo games²² and moe anime,²³ and moved on to them.

TM: Morikawa-san, you’re saying the essence of otaku is their orientation toward dame, the unacceptable.

KM: Yes, yes. But dame does not define something as bad or low quality. It’s the self-indulgent fixation of otaku on certain things that is socially unacceptable.

TO: I totally disagree. Morikawa-san and I have two vastly different conceptions of who are the core tribe of otaku.

Morikawa-san, your otaku are “urban-centric”; they are the hopeless otaku who roam about Akihabara. That’s why you say otaku are dame-oriented. You have to remember that only about fifty thousand people buy Weekly Dearest My Brother.²⁴ It’s wrong to define them as core otaku.

In my experience, otaku like science fiction and anime not because these things are worthless, but because they are good. Otaku are attracted by things of high quality.

Some otaku obsessions become hits, others don’t. But according to Morikawa-san’s definition, the question of “quality” becomes irrelevant in otaku culture.

But what’s survived in otaku culture hasn’t become unacceptable. It’s survived the competition because its quality has been recognized.

Once something like a bishojo game achieves a certain level of quality, you buy it even if you don’t actually like bishojo games. I feel otaku are tough

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customers who demand high standards. As a producer of video and manga magazines, I was keenly aware of their standards and thought, “They make me work really hard because they won’t fall for cheap tricks.”

Generational Debate

Takashi Murakami: I have to confess, I don’t think I fully understand the moe sensibility.

Toshio Okada: The moe generation is mostly made of otaku 35 or younger.

I myself belong to the previous otaku generation, so frankly I don’t understand moe.

The generational shift is abrupt. Some people below a certain age know what moe is about. But those of us above that age can’t figure out why they like bishojo so much. It seems to us that they like anything involving beautiful young girls.

There is a general debate. The liveliest topic in the otaku world these past few years has been this generational debate.

Among themselves, otaku refer to belonging to this generation or that.

Kaichiro Morikawa: I’m not that interested in the generational debate. Once you have a clear definition of otaku, then you can have a generational debate. But there is no generally accepted framework for understanding otaku. So it’s futile to subdivide otaku

T. Okada: Morikawa-san, what is your definition of otaku?

K. Morikawa: If you track the central focus of so-called otaku through the generations, Okada-san’s generation focused on science fiction, followed by a generation that favored anime, which was in turn followed by another interested in moe anime and bishojo games. How did this evolution take place? Manga provide a handy example. Before I was born [in 1971_55ya], college students reading manga on the trains were considered a serious social problem.

Back then, manga were for children. Grown-ups were supposed to watch TV dramas. Foreign TV dramas were better than domestic ones, and films were even better than that. And European films were considered more sophisticated than Hollywood

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movies. There was a clear cultural hierarchy, and manga were at the bottom. The spiteful label of otaku was attached to grown-ups who had unacceptable tastes and still enjoyed kids’ stuff.

As far as society is concerned. today’s otaku taste for moe is more repugnant than watching porn. Eroticism is not the only motivation that informs their fascination with moe. They have a strong urge for what is unacceptable.

Otaku who buy Weekly Dearest My Brother not only feel affection for toy figures, but also enjoy being the kind of people who “buy embarrassing, tasteless things.”

TO: Otaku are bashful. They are intelligent but so bashful that they’re more comfortable with children’s anime than with regular movies. They can shed their reserve if a serious idea is filtered through a “Made for Children” label. I suspect that people who love toys and figures, manga, and anime love them because they can see the world through this filter of reticence.

Otaku consume this stuff because of the twist that indulges their shyness.

At any rate, I have never seen an orientation toward the unacceptable among otaku.

For example, Space Battleship Yamato²⁵ dates from the first half of the 1970s, followed by Mobile Suit Gundam²⁶.

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Now, Morikawa-san, would you say Gundam was more unacceptable than Yamato? I don’t think so.

The more examples I show you, the less solid your theory becomes.

KM: Well, let me repeat myself. Being no good, dame, doesn’t mean the quality is poor. On the contrary… the quality is very high, but it’s a matter of self-consciousness on the part of otaku. They are concerned that their self-indulgence appears socially unacceptable.

TO: Well, then, do you mean from the mid- to late 1970s, things got progressively more unacceptable from Yamato to Gundam, and then Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind?²⁷ I don’t think so.

An inclination for dame appears to exist because otaku have shifted to bishojo these past few years. Within this limited context, you may have a point, but veteran otaku have to disagree.

KM: Generally speaking, I see a downward spiral.

Aum Shinrikyo²⁸ was influenced by Genma Wars.²⁹ In the 1980s, otaku dreamt of Armageddon; they fantasized about employing supernatural powers to create a new world after the end of the world.

But Aum’s subway attack in 1995_31ya thoroughly shattered the post-apocalyptic otaku dream of creating a new world in which they would be heroes.

After their apocalyptic fantasies collapsed, they steadily shifted to moe. Before their Armageddon obsession, there was science fiction, which provided otaku with an alternative to the actual future. In the broadest terms, moe has replaced the “future”.

TO: But your definition of science fiction is narrow. In Japan, science fiction was viable as a literature of alternative futures only through the 1930s. From the 1960s onward, science fiction became socially conscious, a lens into alternative societies.

In Japan science fiction was associated with the future only during the brief period between World Wars I and II. As you know, Japan Sinks³⁰ by Sakyo Komatsu, a blockbuster in 1973_53ya, wasn’t a story about the future. Futuristic science fiction never took off here.

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T. Murakami: Morikawa-san, how do you define the “future”?

KM: The future is not merely a time yet to come. It’s a vision of the world based on scientific understanding.

TO: Again, that is true only through the 1940s. Even the visions of the future presented by Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov were discredited by the harsh attacks from the New Wave movement.³¹

Whether we’re talking about science fiction or anime, our views are so divergent. I don’t see things the way you do, Morikawa-san. Not at all.

KM: You mean, we have an unbridgeable gap?

TO: Not necessarily. I am sympathetic to your observation that Expo ’70³² prefigured an otaku landscape, and that today’s otaku are fascinated with moe. But as far as your definition of otaku is concerned, I think you are wrong. Because we are reading different “texts”.

TM: I’m beginning to see a crucial generation gap between Okada-san and Morikawa-san. Speaking from my generation, I, too, find otaku more compelling than moe.

TO: Murakami-san, I know you are preoccupied with otaku, but I don’t think otaku will generate anything more interesting than moe.

I belong to a group of model-tank makers. When I meet with them, I can’t tell them apart from the guys who obsess about moe. They carry backpacks and wear sweatsuits. They look like stereotypical moe enthusiasts, but you never know which toy figure—bishojo or model thank—they’re going to pull out of their backpacks.

If we refer to them as a “tribe”, they all belong to the same tribe, but the model-tank guys are never into bishojo. Actually, they hate bishojo.

KM: How are they different from mania?

TO: To answer your question, I have to go back to my own definition of otaku. The sole difference between mania and otaku is their social acceptability. Otaku are mania who are socially rejected. Conversely,

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the hobbies of mania are those that are socially accepted.

For example, the moment girls decide that motorbikes aren’t cool, motorbike mania become motorbike otaku. It’s just a matter of societal labeling. That’s the only difference between mania and otaku.

KM: Doesn’t that mean they are oriented toward the unacceptable?

TO: No, it doesn’t. Even if a motorbike mania suddenly becomes a motorbike otaku, he doesn’t become an otaku because he is unacceptable. He only becomes unacceptable because society says he is.

Let’s use an extreme example. It’s possible that one day the Japanese people will suddenly be defined as unacceptable. Say we become the enemy of the world for some reason.

Would you then say we Japanese are inherently unacceptable? I don’t think so. It boils down to the question of societal labeling.

KM: In that case, let’s suppose that one day anime is legitimized and enters school textbooks. Would otaku obsessed with anime today still love anime then? I think not. That’s not plausible.

Okada-san, if we accept your definition, otaku should love anime regardless of how society values it.

If anime became so wonderful that schoolteachers recommended it to their students, would otaku still seek out anime? I seriously doubt it.

TO: I can prove you wrong. Some otaku works are socially accepted, others are not. Anime films by, say, Hayao Miyazaki or Mamoru Oshii are respected. Have otaku lost interest and quit watching them? No.

I don’t think societal labeling affects what they are attracted to. In fact, many otaku support Mamoru Oshii’s latest animated film, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence.³³

Morikawa-san, when you talk about dame, the unacceptable, aren’t you talking about “literature” (bungaku)? For practitioners of jun-bungaku³⁴ [literally, “pure literature”], literature was about becoming unacceptable. After Evangelion³⁵ came out as a TV anime series in 1995_31ya, everybody fell in

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love with dame.

Until then, literature was relevant only within the realm of pure literature. Some rock musicians may have liked it a bit. But, thanks to Evangelion, ordinary people, young people enthusiastically embraced it. Eva made it OK for the main character to be pathetic. By the standards of conventional anime, it’s inconceivable that Eva’s main character doesn’t try harder. But that’s precisely what makes him so appealing today. While literature used to shock and surprise us in the past, anime shocks and surprises us today. A dame-orientation is not a new thing; in the old days, a dame-orientation was called literature.

KM: Don’t you think Gundam got a similar reception? The main character was a computer geek.

TO: In Gundam, one thrust of the story was the main character’s desire to be recognized by others. So Gundam and Eva are completely different.

KM: As I said before, the 1980s-era fascination with the apocalyptic was shattered by Aum. I think moe emerged as an alternative, to fill the void.

TO: I see. To me, Eva was all about “Since I can’t do anything about changing the world, I will do something about myself.” Don’t you think “robot anime”³⁶ is all about “trying to change the world”?

Morikawa-san, you talked about the apocalyptic. One step before that is “social reform” (yo-naoshi). One of the key concepts for understanding otaku is “a child’s sense of justice”. The reason grown-ups are enthusiastic about Kamen Rider³⁷ and the “warrior team” genre (sentai mono)³⁸ is because that basic sense of justice, which we abandoned in society long ago, is still meaningful in the world of these TV shows.

Of course, there’s also the terrific monster designs and pan-chira [the fleeting display of girls’ panties], but that’s not enough to keep the boys interested. That basic sense of justice worked until Eva. But with Eva, it became clear that no one could save the world. And Eva complicated the whole thing, raising issues such as “Maybe I should at least save myself” and “What’s wrong with me, thinking only”

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“about saving myself?” Eva marked a turning point. Whatever we discuss today, we cannot avoid Eva.

KM: After Eva, a genre called sekai-kei [literally, “world-type”] emerged, and it’s very popular now. In this genre, private feelings and emotions are directly linked to the fate of the world.

TO: She, the Ultimate Weapon³⁹ is the definitive sekai-kei.

KM: And Eva.

TO: Reading just a couple volumes of She, the Ultimate Weapon will give you a sense of the sekai-type sensibility.

In the typical logic of sekai-kei, the same weight is assigned to one’s private emotions and the end of the world. In She, the world comes to an end. The main character witnesses the annihilation of the world, which happens to be caused by his girlfriend. His love for her and his despair over the destroyed planet are expressed through the same emotion.

But making a sekai-kei ends artists’ careers.

KM: You mean, like Hideaki Anno,⁴⁰ who created Eva?

TO: That’s right. Anno-san has been in rehabilitation ever since [by getting away from anime and working on live-action films].

By Way of Conclusion: Otaku And Art

Takashi Murakami: While listening to you, it dawned on me that otaku is much like Pop in the art world. There are many kinds of Pop, each of which is generationally defined.

The otaku Okada-san believes in is comparable to the serious medium of “painting” in art, while the otaku defined by Morikawa-san is akin to my work, as a “failed otaku”.

Toshio Okada: Right. Murakami-san, you marketed shokugan⁴¹ [literally, “food toys”] last year. I think the toy figures of Weekly Dearest My Brother are far more otaku than yours, precisely because you are a failed otaku. Their work is more creative, whereas your shokugan are very commercial. If you ask me

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which is “art”, I would say those of Weekly Dearest My Brother.

But the problem is that your work is more recognized socially as art—which makes it so hard for me to understand art.

T. Murakami: In today’s discussion, a few things became clear: the huge gap between those who know moe and those who don’t, as Morikawa-san told us; the generational debate among otaku; and the three different positions we have—that is, I am in art; Okada-san, in otaku; and Morikawa-san, in moe.

Kaichiro Morikawa: Okada-san, I don’t know if it’s a fair categorization, but generationally speaking, your otaku experience was from a time when people respected otaku for their achievements.

I had the opposite experience, belonging to the generation that suffered otaku-bashing.⁴² In our discussion, I emphasized the unacceptability of otaku, and you said I was “completely wrong”. I wonder if this reflects our contradictory experiences.

T. Okada: For argument’s sake, let’s assume you define otaku as the self-proclaimed fans of gyaruge⁴³ and bishojo figures, who are about thirty or younger today. If you say this group of people have such and such dame-orientation, I would have to agree.

But I don’t think otaku are limited to this group. Otaku encompass many diverse types. That’s why I can’t agree with you. And this brings me back to my initial statement, which is that I quit otaku studies, because I thought that there were no more otaku.

TM: We’ll have to reconvene some other day to discuss more about the relationship between otaku and art. Morikawa-san and Okada-san, thank you so much for today’s discussion.

(March 31, 2004_22ya)

The translator wishes to thank Toshio Okada, Kaichiro Morikawa, and Yoshiyuki Mashimo for their assistance in compiling the notes.