$TERMINAL@ADDICTION Want to know the tyre width of a certain Soviet tank, the Latin name for a tropical fish, or the Bay City Roller's Seventies tour dates? Japan's computer-obsessed "Otaku" kids can't tell you because they don't like talking to other people, but plug into their networks and you'll find a mine of useless information. Article from "The Face" October 1992 issue, by Christopher Seymour and Karl Taro Greenfeld. Written down by MADNESS, I find this quite fascinating if you have any further information please put out a textfile, get in touch with me on any of the MAIN boards, or write me at the following address: P.O. Box 156, 114 79 Stockholm, Sweden - greetings to all that deserve it! Ok here we go: Three years ago the serene Tokyo dormitory town of Hanna was shaken by a series of grisly crimes. Four pre-teen girls were abducted, molested and mutilated in a seriel killing spree the "New York Times" descrived as very "un-Japanese". But the perpetrator, who had sent bone and teeth fragments to the grieving families, couldn't have been more Japanese. Tsutomu Miyazaki enticed the children to his tiny suburban studio apartment, then molested and murdered them, recording hte gruesome details of his deeds on the hard-drive of his computer. When police caught up with him, they found the 27-year-old living in two realities. By day he was a sullen apprentice at a local print shop. By night he lived out the fantasies he had internalised from avidly watching his collection of over 6.000 slasher videos and pornographic "manga" comic-books. Miyazaki's attorney's defence of his warped client was that, for Miyazaki, video and reality had merged; he couldn't tell gory fact from gory fiction. After Miyazaki's much-publicised trial, one thing was clear: a new generation of anti-social, nihilistic whiz- kids had arrived. The "otaku" are socially inept, informationcrazed, often brilliant, technological shut-ins. Their name derives from the most formal way of saying "you" in Japanese, the implication being that there is always some kind of barrier between people. First identified by Japanese lifestyle magazine SPA! in 1986, the "otaku" are Tokyo's newest information age product. These were the kids "educated" to memorise reams of context-less information in prepartion for filling in multiple choice school entrance exams. Now in their late teens and twenties, most are either cramming for college exams or still stuck in cramming mode. They relax with "sexy manga" or violent computer games. They shun society's complex web of social obligations and loyalties. The result: a burgeoning young generation of 100,000 hard-core "otaku" who are too uptight to talk to a telephone operator but who can kick ass on the keyboard of a PC. Zero, 25, a self-proclaimed "otaku", flunked out of the maths department at Tokyo's Keio University because he didn't like being ordered around by teachers to whom he felt superior. "They couldn't deal with someone like me," he says. "Now I'm independent and I don't need to deal with anyone like them" His life revolves around computer games: he only ventures out of his in the Tokyo suburb of Kawagoe to acquire more gameboards, the green, maze-like "minds" of arcade games. At home, he plugs them into his own console, analyses and dissects for bugs and flaws. Zero is dressed in a plain white T-shirt and ill-fitting jeans rolled up about six inches. He doesn't look you in the eyes when he talks; he answers quietly with head bowed. His face has gentle features but is sickly pale. He makes his living as a software trouble-shooter, looking for problems in new software before it hits the market, earning 350,000 yen (#1,500) a month. He works in his murky home, where the windows are permanently covered with yellowing newspaper to block out sunlight. "I've always liked playing games. As a boy I preferred video-games to other kids," Zero says. "So I understand technology. I'm more comfortable with computers than human beings. Finding the malfunction of a computer programme or game is thrilling because I'm basically exposing the phony computer experts who invented the game in the first place." Zero threads his way over the straw mat floor, a high-tech junkyard of old computer circuit boards, obsolete monitors, five-inch disk drives and a spluttering coffee-maker. He strips down to his T-shirt and striped boxer shorts. Now he is in his element. Zero sits on a swivel office chair and clicks on his Quadra 900 Macintosh PC with 240 megabytes of memory and a keyboard which he has remodelled to conform to his own idea of how a keyboard "should have been laid out in the first place". As he waits for the computer to load up the programmes, he scans the rolls of newly arrived faxes. The first is from his "buddy" Kojak. It's a chart of mid-Seventies Bay City Roller tour of Japan, including tour dates, attendance and play lists. Zero is impressed. Another from a character called Piman announces he is selling a rare 1978 edition of "Be Bop High School" for 50,000 yen. Zero thinks it's overpriced. He casts them aside to read one from Batman in Nagoya, who claims that the "Thunder Dragon" and "Metal Black" video games employ the same game-matrix with different graphics and scoring systems. Seventeen pages of notes support this hypothesis. Zero is not impressed. He's known this since "Metal Black" hit the market way back last Tuesday. Zero gets busy. Flashing on terminals all over Japan, he disseminates his latest data through modem, warning other "otaku" on the Eye Net computer network to be on the look out for some poser named Batman pushing stale info. For those few moments, as Zero's invisible brethren attentively scan and store his transmitted data, he is no longer a wimp. He's a big gun, a macho man in the world of the "otaku". Information is the fuel that feeds the "otaku"'s worshipped dissemination systems - computer bulletin boards, modems, faxes. For "otaku", the only thing that matters is the accuracy of the answer, not its relevance. So no piece of information is too trivial for consideration: monster "otaku" may collect the names of the various actors who wore the rubber suits in an episode of "Ultraman" (a trashy humanoid vs monster Japanese TV show, still watched on endless reruns) and who were CONSPICUOUSLY SHORTER than in other shows; "idol" "otaku" may discover what university the father of Seventies teenybop star Hikaru Nishida attended. Anything qualifies, as long as it was not previously known. Although he spends most of his waking hours exchanging information with fellow "otaku", Zero only know his tribe through the computer bulletin board. He has never met any of them. He doesn't even know their real names. Zero speaks of Kojak, who he has also never met in their five-year, digitally-driven "friendship". Besides being a computer-game "otaku", Kojak is an idol "otaku". Idols are the interchangeable performers who form the bread and butter of the music business in Japan. Every year 40 or 50 idols appear to satiate pre-ten musical tastes. Some, like the still popular singer Seiko Matsuda, become fantasically successful. Others quickly vanish. But Kojak isn't interested in the successful idols. He doesn't care that the music sucks. Today he wants all the information he can get about Miho Nakayama - a cute-as-a-button, up-and-coming idol. Of course he needs to know the obvious data like her star-sign, bloodtype, favourite foods and what her father does for a living. But he will delve much further for arcane and perverse factoids like her bra-size (30A) or any childhood diseases she may have had (chicken pox). Kojak scours celebrity magazines. He accesses a Nifty-Serve bulletin board which may carry idol information deposited there by other "otaku", and he desperately seeks a way to hack into the mainfram of Nakayama's record company wit^a code-cracking programme he designed himself. There, in the company computer, he imagines he will find tons of choice titbits such as upcoming record store appearances or release dates for new singles - information that will make him a real idol "otaku" king when he transmits it over the networks to other idol-loving "otaku". The point for Kojak will not be the relevance of the information, nor the nature of it, but merely that he has it and others don't - that's what makes it valuable and Kojak a computer stud. Their obsession with gather may, at first glance, seem no different than the fanticism of collectors of rare books or woodblock prints. But it is as if, instead of trading actual items, book collectors were to trade only information about a particular novel. ("Did you know that Hemingway's original manuscript of "For Whom The Bell Tolls" was returned because of insufficient postage?") The objects themselves are meaningless to "otaku" - you can't send Ultraman through a modem. But you can send every piece of information about him. "The "otaku" are an underground but they are not opposed to the system per se," says sociologist and University of Tokyo fellow Volker Grassmuck, who has stuided the "otaku" extensively. "They change, manipulate and subvert ready-made products, but at the same time they are the apotheosis of consumerism and an ideal workforce for contemporaty capitalism. The parents of "otaku" are from the Sixties generation, very democratic and tolerant. They want to understand their children, but to kids purposely look for things their parents can't understand. In a sense, the parents themselves are immature and childish. In Japan there is probably no obvious image of what a grown-up is." Grassmuck believes that this communication barrier between parents and children led to a series of killings of parents by their songs. The Kinzoku Bat Murderer, for instance, bludgeoned his mother and father to death with a baseball bat in the early Eighties. Five or six other kids - who, says Grassmuck, would probably be called "otaku" today - carried out copycat crimes in the following months. Then there's the murderous Miyazaki, but he had communcation problems of a different sort. He was an outcast of the "otaku" community as well as with his own family. Every "otaku" emphasises that Miyazaki is the strange exception to an otherwise peaceful, constructive movement. "Miyazaki was not really even an "otaku"," says Taku Hachiro, the 29-year old author of the book "Otaku Heaven". "If he was a real "otaku" he woudln't have left the house driven around looking for victims. That's just not "otaku" behaviour. Because of his case, people still have a bad feeling about us. They shouldn't. They should realise that we are the future - more comfortable with things that people. That's definitely the direction we're heading as a society." Many "otaku" make their livin with technologyrelated fields, as software designers, computer engineers, computer graphic artsts or computer magazine editors. Leading high-technology corporations say they are actively recuriting "otaku" types because they are in the vanguard of personal computing and software design. And some "otaku" entrepreneurs have already made it big. Self-proclaimed "Otaku Mogul" Kazuhiku Nishi is the founder of the ASCII corporation, a software firm worth a quarter of a billion pounds. "Lots of our best workers are what you might call "otaku"," says an ASCII spokesman. "Maybe as many as 60 per cent of our 2,000 employees. You couldn't want more commitment.," However, Abiko Seigo, a manager with the same corporation, complains that "otaku" types easily lose sight of company goals beyond the project before them. They can also be lousy team players, unable to communicate verbally with their co-workers - and in the corporate world, the team mentality still pervades. If Taku Hachiro is right, and the "otaku" is the man of the future, how will these chronically shy people reproduce? What about the sex-lives of people who admit their terror of psyical contact with another human being? "Masturbation is better than conventional sex," claims Hachiro, a self-confessed virgin. "I guess I'm frightened of sex. I watch a lot of videos and read "manga", and that's about as far as I want to go. I don't know if it's fear so much as a matter of getting along with objects better than people. If it were possible tø have sex with objects, then that would be a different matter." It is therefore not surprising that "otaku" are fascinated with new technology such as virtual reality or digtal compression as it connects to pornography. The sales potential for technology-driven, ultra-real pornographic and violent experiences via the computer is so great that computer engineers are furiously designing software that will satisfy an "otaku"'s "sexual" needs. Though some "otaku" wait - no doubt breathlessly - for the development of sexy technology they can plug into their underwear, blackmarket programmers all ready sell "seduction" and "rape" fantasy games through "otaku" networks. In December, a software firm in Osaka whose product was deemed "obscene" by the powers that be was raided and its stock of ultra-graphic porn "games" confiscated. Perhaps police have good reason to worry. Showing pubic hair is illegal under Japanese obscenity laws, but international computer networks like CompuServe are already on-line as efficient and low-risk international smuggling routes for sexually explicit pornographic images. The police are only now beginning to crack down on this type of smuggling. The Osaka Police Department says plans are on the board to increase monitoring a computer bulleting boards used to distribute and sell illegal pornography. But they are not optimistic "Much obscene material is already being transmitted by facsimile over phone lines and is therefore virtually impossible to monitor," a police spkesman explains. "However, we can choke distribution of some pornography by censoring the bullet¡n boards." The Osaka police department has considered one strategy to clamp down on "otaku" pron networks: hire "otaku" policemen. "We would probably be more effective in combating cr¡me if we could train reformed "otaku". But unfortunately we don't have the budget right now." The police believe that Tsutomu Miyazaki case was an exception, not an omen for the future. But the case has ensured that, for the time being, "otaku" are likely to remain a fringegroup perceived by the public as anti-socical computer kooks or, worse, potential serial killers. But as things stand, the "otaku" are indeed making their mark as work-loving employees in high-technology industries. And, as the constant stream of new hardware and software becomes crucial to competitveness in all business fields, the ascension of "otaku" maybe be inevitable. Or, as Zero confidently predicts from his gloomy lair in Kawagoe: "One day, everyone will be an Otaku". [EIGHT WAYS TO BE AN INFO FREAKO ]Monster Otaku Love everything and anything about the monsters in trash Japanese TV fodder like Godzilla, The Smog Monster, Gamera, Rodan and Ultraman. The shows may have been made aeons ago, but endless reruns have ensured kitsch classic status for information obsessives. Most elusive factoid: who or what exactly Godzilla mated with to produce Son of Godzilla. ]Military Otaku Construct replica models of everything from F-15 fighter plans to World War I British infantry corned-beef rations. Special treat: surrounding themselves with plastic ship models and watching Tora! Tora! Tora! on video. ]Jeans Otaku Can spot a difference between Levi's and Lee at 100 metres. The obsession for vintage denim, both genuine and reproduction, has added a new twist to the syndrome & depleted bank balances up&down the island. Washing tip: clean jeans only once a year - without soap. Tropical Fish ]Otaku Can distinguish between the average lifespanof an angel fish in captivity in the northern and southern hemi- spheres. Futile pastime: memorising the Latin names of 150 fish species when they've never even owned a gold- fish. Nothing to do with surrealism. ]Manga Otaku Specialise in collecting and trading underground, hard-to-find "manga" comic-books like "Angel", "Uncoloured" and "Blind Logic". Puts those strange beings who hang out in London's Forbidden Planet to shame: at the big bookstores in Tokyo's studen district, some will stand there reading "Rapeman" for eight hours on end. ]Idol Otaku Have got real problems. Not content with being obsessive about failed British pop performers like Belouis Some and Matt Fretton (who, as they will always tell you, were "big in Japan"), these star victims get all steamed up about their home-grown talent-free singers, which the record companies churn out year after year. Dream: to see all the way up Miho Nakayama's skirt (don't ask us why). ]Cartoon Otaku Are beyond help. Wayne's World may have made Scooby Doo hip, but we're talking serious addiction to cartoon characters than even your five-year-old sister would think are naff. You might think Pluto is cute; they want to know which brand of dog-food he eats. ]4Imperial Otaku Make our royal watchers look like rank amateurs. Hello! readers with knows on, they can tell you the length of Emperor Hirohito's reign down to the second. Most coveted item: a fax of Princess Michiko, daugther to current emperor Akihiro, with a blemish on her forehead. IPspkisboC