Anime and manga fans are often accused of being NEETs. In Internet parlance: neck-beards, otaku, slacker, hobo. But what is a NEET? NEET is an acronym for an English (as in British, the acronym started in the UK) expression: Not in Education, Employment, or Training. The acronym started in July 1999 in the report “Bridging…
Category: Otaku Culture
Cat Idols in Japan
The Angry Cat isn’t the only famous cat on the Internet. Cats have overtaken dogs as the most popular pet in Japan within the last few years (Yamamura, 2016). Each year, Yokohama features Neko-Break, an exhibition of cat-themed photography and merchandise. As Japan often does, there’s a market for cat-otaku. Otaku, in the Japanese sense…
Understanding Anime Fan Service
I get it, some of you like fan-service, but fan-service has become a blight on anime as a whole. It’s fine when it appears in genres you fully expect to see it in: ecchi and hentai. Let it remain there. However, the mentality behind fan-service has leeched most categories of anime. Breast jokes have no…
The Dangers of the Anime Community Moving to Corporate-Ran Platforms
In the old days of the anime community (okay, not to old, old VHS days. Rather, the days before social media), private blogs and forums dominated. This wild-world of shanty-websites huddled across the various oases of fandoms had their own sheriffs and rules. People often traveled between these towns as word (pingbacks) spread of interesting…
Anime Virtues: Quiet Confidence
I’ll admit it’s odd to associate quiet confidence with anime. After all, anime teems with loudmouthed, impulsive heroes. However, if you look beyond protagonists, you will see the strongest type of confidence: quiet confidence. Why do I consider this type of confidence the strongest type? Well, confidence describes the state of being self-assured and comfortable…
Anime Virtues: You Don’t Need a Reason to Help Someone
Stories shape how we view the world and how we treat other people. While I’ve gotten into anime too late in life for it to really shape my morality, it has changed how I think about some topics. In this article, I will pull from Zen and Christianity (and indirectly from Judaism) in addition to…