Otaku* in Love

My firstborn Asparagus and his girlfriend M spend a lot of time in my apartment, because they don’t have easy access to a kitchen or a TV/living room. This arrangement suits all parties : I get to see them almost every day and they have complete, uncensored, free use of my place with all its comforts and amenities.

As with many young couples, they tend to fight frequently and for what seems to me like frivolous reasons. One minute they’re exchanging bitter words and the next they are cooing at each other like turtledoves. I try my best to remain uninvolved, but sometimes I cannot help stumbling into a dispute where I get tricked into taking side for one or the other. I really hate it, because no matter what I say, I will end up upsetting somebody. I don’t want my son to feel betrayed by his own mother, nor do I want M to feel like we’re ganging up on her.

The thing is, I can see where most of the fights are going, based on my long life experience and my own battle scars. But one’s experience is only useful to oneself and there is no point in trying to explain or to warn the younger generations. Every person has to make his/her own mistakes and hopefully learn from them.

So to my two young otaku in love, I’m saying this : Go ahead, love, fight, break up, make up, etc.. Whatever you do, do it with honour and compassion. That’s all I’m asking of you. That and to clean up the kitchen counter after you’re done cooking.


From Wikipedia :
*Otaku
In English, an otaku (plural usually otaku, since Japanese words are not pluralized using an "s") is a variety of geek (or an overly obsessed fanboy / fangirl) specializing in anime and manga. A simplistic English translation might be 'culture hermit'.

The word is a loanword from the Japanese language, in which it is derived from an honorific term for another's house or family that is also used as an honorific second-person pronoun. The modern slang form appears to have been coined by the humorist and essayist Akio Nakamori (Nakamori Akio) in the 1983 series "An Investigation of Otaku" (Otaku no kenkyū), who observed that this form of address was unusually common among geeks and nerds.

In modern Japanese slang, therefore, an otaku is an obsessive fan of any one particular theme, topic, or hobby, sometimes to the point of mental instability. Perhaps the most common uses are anime otaku (one who sometimes enjoys many days of excessive anime watching with no rest) and manga otaku (a fan of Japanese comic books). Japanese culture has many other varieties, such as pasokon otaku (personal computer geeks), gēmu otaku (playing video games), and otaku that are extreme fans of idols, heavily promoted singing girls.

Otaku culture outside Japan often makes extensive use of Japanese loanwords. This can create an effect that is similar to Engrish, where the otaku will use Japanese phrases in conjunction with English. Such "reverse Engrish" can lead to the loanwords taking on different meanings from their original Japanese use (for example, otaku). Use of these loanwords are sometimes known as otakuisms, and they are (ideally) used when precise English equivalents to concepts or terms either do not exist or sound awkward.

Anime and manga are two words that were once solely otaku vocabulary, but are becoming more and more common in everyday English.

[The title of this post comes from the English title of the Japanese film «Koi No Mon» http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0435107/]