Living in Another Dimension

July 8, 2009 in Codex, Death Note, Gundam, Japan, Otakuism, Science
Tags: Gundam, Odaiba, Otaku Dimension, Otakuism, Patrick Galbraith, Yoshiyuki Tomino

When Dreams Come True

Patrick Galbraith, ethnographer at the University of Tokyo, and author of The Otaku Encyclopedia: An Insider’s Guide to the Subculture of Cool Japan :

Gundam is a flashpoint in otaku. These guys were so interested in this world that they started making their own encyclopaedias, their own model figures, their own world here. They took a cartoon on television and fleshed out an entire universe around it. “That kind of intensity is really what it means to be an otaku in Japan.”

“Otaku people are people who have an ideal of the future, who have an ideal of technology that’s so strong and so important to them that they’ve moved far away from the bounds of reality,” he added.

Giant Gundam robot stalks Japan, BBC, Ben Sutherland, 8 July 2009