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The word is a loanword from the Japanese language, in which it is derived from an honorific term for another's house or family (お宅, otaku) that is also used as an honorific second-person pronoun. The modern slang form, which is distinguished from the older usage by being written only in hiragana (おたく) or katakana (オタク), appeared in the 1980s; it appears to have been coined by the humorist and essayist Akio Nakamori (中森明夫, Nakamori Akio) in the 1983 series "An investigation of otaku" (おたくの研究, otaku no kenkyu), who observed that this form of address was unusually common among nerds. It entered general use in Japan around 1989, and may have been popularised by Nakamori's publication in that year of "The age of M" (Ｍの時代, M no jidai), which applied the term to the recently caught serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki, who turned out to be a loner obsessed with horror movies.
In modern Japanese slang, therefore, an otaku is an obsessive fan of any one particular theme, topic, or hobby. Perhaps the most common uses are anime otaku (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), gemu otaku (playing video games), and otaku that are extreme fans of idols, heavily promoted singing girls. While these are the most common uses of otaku, the word can be applied to literally anything. Thus, you could have music otaku, martial arts otaku, cooking otaku, et cetera.
A subset of Otaku are the `Akibake`, men who spend a lot of time in Akihabara in TokyoTokyo (; Tokyo lit. eastern capital) is the capital of Japan as well as the most populous conurbation in Japan, and the world's largest metropolitan area by population with 33,750,000 people living within its urban influence. A little more than 12 million and who are mainly obsessive about anime, idols and games
While in Japanese the term otaku has strong negative connotations, among English Japanophiles it generally lacks these, and some American anime fans even use the term proudly of themselves.
See also: anorakIn British slang, anorak has come to mean " geek" or " nerd", originally from the use of anoraks as the invariable wear of train spotters, and then by extension to refer to anyone with an unfathomable interest in detailed information regarded as boring by.
Otaku culture outside JapanJapan (, Nippon/Nihon literally "the origin of the sun") is a country in East Asia situated on a chain of islands east of the Asian continent on the western edge of the Pacific Ocean. The largest of these islands are, from north to south, Hokkaido , Honsh often makes extensive use of Japanese loanwords. This can create an effect that is similar to EngrishTokyo in the year 2000 Engrish is a slang term which refers to an English language phrase that arose through poor translation from another language (usually Japanese), or sometimes, to poor translation of English into another language followed by good tra, where the otaku will use Japanese phrases in conjunction with English. Because many otaku loanwords come from the Japanese "feminine" vocabulary (especially words usually reserved for very young girls/women), this has the amusing effect of causing male anime fans to sound like small girls.
Anime and manga are two English words that were once solely otaku vocabulary, but have become common English. Before the term "anime" was adopted into English, they were simply called cartoons (e.g. Speed RacerThe Speed Racer media franchise of animated cartoons started as the 1967 Japanese anime Mach Go Go Go (GoGoGo). The central character was a young stock car driver named Go Mifune ( Mifune Go . The M logo on the hood of his race car and the front of his he).
List of common otaku loan words:
The term " glomp" (to latch onto or hug with much enthusiasm) is often used in anime fandom. The word is said to come from the anime series Ranma ½, where the character Shampoo would at times overzealously hug the main character, Ranma Saotome; the onomatopoeion of said hug would be "glomp".