S P E E D T R I B E S
F R O M T H E C H A P T E R " S N I X : T H E O T A K U "
BY KARL TARO GREENFELD PHOTOS BY LEON A. BORENSZTEIN
Modern-day Tokyo is a society in symbiosis with the machine. Exactly where human beings end and technology begins can become confusing in a city that resembles, more than any other city on the planet, a neon-lit circuit board writ gigantic.
Grandmothers in kimonos bow in gratitude to their automated banking machines. Young couples bring hand-held computer games along for romantic evenings out. Workers on a Toyota assembly line vote their robot coworkers into the Auto Workers Union. A woman calls the Matsushita Denko kitchen design showroom to complain because her kitchen doesn't look like the model kitchen she saw in a virtual reality walk-through demonstration. "I was expecting more vivid oranges and pinks. Something more cartoony," she complains.
Voice-activated elevators. Cars that tell you to slow down. Houses that adjust internal temperatures themselves. Vacuum cleaners that alert you when it's time to clean. Toilets that know when to flush. CD to DAT to DCC to Mini-Disc. The march of progress, Tokyo-style. The most automated city in the world.
The cultural ground in Japan has always been fertile for new philosophies and ideologies to take root and flourish. There is no absolute, objective moral code. Confucian ethics, adapted from China, encourage an intricate but subjective morality. The concepts of tatamae and honne, meaning, respectively, public and private face, allow for different interpretations of truth and falsehood depending on context. There is no one reality. Instead you take your choice of what reality suits you. Japan has come to resemble Total Recall more than the oft-cited Blade Runner; truth is a memory implant: take a package trip to Paris where you will never speak to a non-Japanese and never eat any indigenous cooking. That other place, with the French people and heavy sauces, that's someplace for French people. Paris, for Japanese, is the implanted place, with Japanese people and sushi.
Compared to the United States and its relatively rigid Judeo-Christian ethical system, Japan is a moral donut you can fill with whatever pleases your fancy: Buddhism, Christianity, top hats, industrialization, fascism, the Beatles, pacifism, or McDonald's. The Japanese have come to each of these with the fervor only a people without a strict, all-encompassing moral code could generate. The emperor is divine. The emperor is not divine. (Or again, maybe he is. No, he's not, etc.) Dianetics. Beaujolais Nouveau. Pyramid games. Air Jordans. Trends. Turendo. Booms sweep over Japan like the seasonal typhoons. The hula-hoop boom. The imported car boom. The Guns N' Roses boom. The Guns N' Roses suck boom. (We have already witnessed the disastrous effects of the boom mentality when the boom is a militaristic impulse to subjugate Asia or a sudden upsurge in the popularity of whale meat.)
And now, into this society so eager for a better boom, for a later trend, for a newer way of life, comes technology.
The computer boom.
Unlike hula hoops or tiramisu, the computer boom will have a lasting impact. In that sense, the computer boom resembles the Confucius boom of the seventh century or the Buddhism boom of the ninth. This is a boom that will leave as its residue a new way of being Japanese.
The computer has transformed Japan in different ways than it has the United States. America has the great computer visionaries like Jaron Lanier and Marvin Minsky. America also has the legendary computer entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. But Japan, unlike America, has become thoroughly computerized in all segments of society. Not only in banks, schools, factories, offices, and children's bedrooms, but in the psyche as well. Shintoism, a religion unique to Japan that is a mixture of animism and pantheism, is a "lite" faith devoid of heavy ritual or demanding liturgy. Worship is meditative, requiring contemplation of nature spirits and our oneness with these spirits. In other words, man and nature are one. Animistic religion precludes making a distinction between the human sphere and the sphere of nature.
Thus Japanese maintain a different relationship with their technology than the West. They simply view their PC or television as another object, like a rock or a tree or a kimono, which is of nature and hence of themselves. One big Summer of Love between man and machine, because there is no man distinct from machine. This outlook, resembling particle physics put through a Tao of Physics food processor, has a proponent in University of Tokyo sociologist Volker Grassmuck: "The Japanese feel less at home with other people than with machines, materials, and information. They tend toward a sort of in-animism."
And no one will ride in-animism, or the meshing of technology and humanity, farther and harder than the Japanese. Real-life simulation games about child rearing, going on dates, cheating on exams, stamp collecting, and even games in which the object is to design successful, best-selling games (games within games) proliferate. Dogs and cats are viewed as inanimate toys, like Ultraman dolls or remote-controlled miniature four-by-four jeeps: when the dog is boring or annoying it can be discarded like an out-of-favor toy. (Every year the Tokyo metropolitan police department sets a new record for dogs destroyed.)
Virtual starlets are created. Yui Haga is a phantom comprised of different bodies and different voices. At concerts her face remains obscured and her voice is prerecorded. For television she is portrayed as an animated doe-eyed cutie. At a booksigning party for a recently published photo book, there were three girls at the autograph table. Fans could garner the signature of whichever of the three most closely resembled their interpretation of Haga-chan. Everybody knows Yui Haga doesn't exist. Therefore she can be all things to all people. She lives only as a media creation and Information Age phenomenon. Strip away the technology, and there is no starlet.
The line between reality and technology begins to blur. Or else it never existed. While individualism as practiced in the West throws up obstacles to technological proliferation, groupism as practiced in Japan encourages the march of progress.
The average Japanese is more comfortable with a new fuzzy-logic toaster than his preternaturally skeptical American counterpart. The new product has been made, tested, and approved by the powers that be and therefore must be kosher (after all, Japan has the highest quality control standards on the planet). So slide the toast in and put it to work. And trust. Have faith: you and your toaster are part of the same group, part of the same big cosmic oneness. Yes, that's right, you and your toaster are one. So why shouldn't your toaster know that you like your toast light brown at 7:34 A.M. except on Sundays?
Though Japan is the only nation ever to have suffered the effects of man's most destructive technological achievement, the atom bomb, a sinister view of technology has never evolved to the extent that it has in the West, where technology, science, and the military industrial complex are sometimes viewed as an evil cabal in cahoots to destroy humanity. If technology in Japan has any moral imperative, it is as a positive influence. Television is ubiquitous, and the ranting of Western parents about children watching too much television would seem totally out of place in a society that watches more television than the United States. In Japan technology is seen as life-saving, like arthroscopic surgery. As helpful, like the bullet train. Or as adorable, like "Hello Kitty." Technology is your companion. Technology is your teacher. Technology is your friend. Technology is your livelihood.
Ultimately, technology becomes your reality.
This blurring of man and machine, of reality and what comes in over the VDT, is spawning a generation of Japanese kids who are opting out of the conformity of Japan, Inc., in favor of logging on to computer networks. They have been dubbed the otaku by the Japanese media, from the most formal way of saying "you" in Japanese, the implication being that there is always some kind of technological barrier between people.
The otaku came of age way back in the eighties with Paleolithic 186 computers and Neanderthal Atari Pac-Men as playmates. They were brought up on junk food and educated to memorize reams of contextless information in preparation for multiple-choice high school and college entrance examinations. They unwound with ultraviolent slasher comic books or equally violent computer games. And then they discovered that by interacting with computers instead of people, they could avoid Japanese society's dauntingly complex Confucian web of social obligations and loyalties. The result: a generation of Japanese youth too uptight to talk to a telephone operator but who can go hell-for-leather on the deck of a personal computer or workstation.
First identified by Japanese lifestyle magazine SPA!, the estimated 350,000 hard-core otaku are Japan's newest Information Age product. "These are kids unlike any who preceded them in Japan," Lap Top magazine editor Abiko Seigo says of the subculture of sixteen- to twenty-five-year-olds. "Where they are coming from is a world where all the usual perspectives - such as whether something is good or bad, smart or stupid, et cetera - are irrelevant because all of those things are judgments based on social relations. If you don't socialize, you don't have much sense of morality. The only thing that matters to them is data. How much do you have and how much can you memorize."
That's hardly surprising, given the otaku's years in schools that emphasize rote memory over creativity and analysis. "Data is practically worshiped in the Japanese school system," Volker Grassmuck explains. "The exams test and reward those who can process the most data."
Information is the fuel that feeds the otaku's beloved dissemination systems - computer bulletin boards, modems, faxes. There are otaku cliques devoted to manga (comic books), weapons, monsters, videos, pornography, and teen idols. Monster otaku may collect the names of the various actors costumed in rubber suits as Ultraman who were conspicuously shorter than usual. Military otaku may know the tread width of the German Pzk Mark IV tank and the velocity of the armor-piercing ammunition it fired. Everything - the blood type of comic book artist Osamu Tezuka, the number of casualties at the Battle of Midway, the age of pop star Miho Nakayama - is just more contextless information, to be memorized, processed, and stored in the brain or, more efficiently, on the hard drive.
Data, the newer the better, is status. Acquiring it may require akisu (hacking) into corporate data vaults or tapping into a fax line. (Among otaku, it is a matter of pride not to buy or sell information.) Their obsession with gathering may, at first glance, seem no different than the fanaticism of collectors of rare books or baseball cards. But it is as if instead of trading actual cards, card collectors were to trade only information about cards. ("Did you know that Hank Aaron had to pose seven times for 1970 Topps baseball card number 500 before they were happy with the shot and that the bat he was holding actually belonged to Eddie Mathews?") The objects themselves are meaningless to otaku - you can't send Ultraman or a German tank through a modem, but you can send every piece of information about them.
A dropout from the prestigious Keio University's mathematics department, Snix (a computer network sobriquet) used to be an idol otaku. Throughout high school and college he was obsessed with data about idol singers. But Snix wasn't interested in the successful idols, nor did he care that the music is repetitive and juvenile. He wanted all the information he could get about Chisato Moritaka - a cute-as-a-button up-and-coming idol. He needed to know the usual fanzine data such as her zodiac sign, blood-type, favorite foods, and what her father did for a living. But he delved much further for arcane and perverse info-bits such as her bra size (75-A), any childhood diseases she may have had (chicken pox and mumps), or which assistant sound engineer would have been used on the "Seventeen" single if he had been available. Snix scoured celebrity magazines, he accessed the Nifty Serve bulletin board that carried relevant information deposited there by other idol otaku, and he finally devised a way to hack into Warner Music Japan's mainframe with his own FM Zoom system and modem. There, in the Warner Music computer subconscious, he found a vault of previously inaccessible information about upcoming record store appearances and release dates for new singles, which made him an idol otaku hero when he sent it out over the computer networks. The important point for Snix was not the relevance of the information, nor the nature of it, but that he had it and others didn't.
Throughout Snix's adolescence, his achievements in gathering data and hacking into mainframes, his technological expertise, were what he was praised for by other otaku. In psychological terms, his first positive reinforcements were messages sent to him on a computer bulletin board. Snix was a hot-shot idol otaku, renowned from Kyushu to Hokkaido for his ability to akisu data vaults and find factoids about his favorite idols. He thrived in the networks, was lord of the nerds. They were a subculture of kids, trading information, trivia, and corporate passwords in their bedrooms via modem while their parents downstairs thought they were studying. But they weren't studying. They were so immersed in the world of computer networks, cracking corporate security codes and analyzing algorithms, they could never come back. And all this just so they could be the first to disclose an upcoming record store appearance by idol-singer Seiko Matsuda.
A funny thing happened when these kids grew up: they had to make a living. For Snix it happened when the dean of the Keio University mathematics department called him into his once and said he should consider transferring to the night school. In Japan, this is the equivalent of being asked if you've ever considered joining the marines. Snix got the message and dropped out of college.
"That wasn't my scene anyway," Snix recalls. "A bunch of professors talking theory. I was into practice, into being on-line and breaking into a computer system and finding something that no one else had ever seen. The feeling you get when the screen blanks for a moment and then a program boots and you see the data falling in a neat, even row, like a waterfall, down the screen. How could I tell some dean what that felt like? How could I sit and listen to a math teacher talk about differential equations?"
But once out on his own, Snix had other worries. Like how could he make some yen?
"I was an otaku." Snix shrugs. "I only knew how to do one thing Ñ get information."
It was time to put away childish things; he was done with idols. Snix went underground. His first job was to find out which questions would be on the entrance exams for various universities. Certain jukus (cram schools) had promised to reward him handsomely for this service. Ironic, because those same tests had given him so much trouble as a student, but he had never bothered to hack for the answers. He easily broke through academia's nonexistent computer security and found the test questions. His career took off. Snix found himself in demand by everyone from Yakuza thugs looking to tap into bank accounts to companies looking to gain an edge on the competition.
Snix's small Koenji apartment is a shrine to arcade-game and computer technology - a panoply of VDTs, circuit boards, battered decks, burned-out hard drives, busted joysticks, first, second, and third generations of everything from eight-digit LCD calculators to DCCs (digital compact cassettes). The door to his tiny apartment is quadruple-locked - a small slot like a doggy door allows delivery boys to drop off pizzas or ramen noodles and pick up their payment.
Snix dresses in standard otaku garb: jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, and either sneakers or desert boots. The elements of his wardrobe are all interchangeable, like some dingy, nerdy version of the Geranimals line. His hair is long, stringy, and greasy. Though he is twenty-five, his acne appears to be of a particularly resilient strain, and his diet of chocolate bonbons and potato chips doesn't help.
Snix laughs out loud as he reads a fax from one of his employers. He eats a chocolate bonbon with a pair of chopsticks instead of his fingers so as not to dirty his keyboard. The two Sharp fax machines behind him have been whirring and beeping steadily for the last hour. He turns from his keyboard to the machines every thirty seconds and strains to read the Japanese characters as they are fed from the machines upside down.
The fax that has him chuckling concerns a large insurance company. Snix has promised to deliver to his employer a list of the company's wealthiest customers. Snix's employer will pay him, for a list of fat cats, one thousand yen per name. So if Snix can akisu into the insurance company's computers and find a thousand people who pay premiums equivalent to one hundred thousand dollars a year, he will receive a million yen. His employer wants the names for a mailing list that he will sell to political organizations, right-wing fundraising groups, and investment brokers.
Snix is laughing because he did hack into the insurance company data bank and found, instead of fat cats, a list several hundred names long of Japanese women who have had silicon breast implants in the last two years. He wonders what a specialty skin magazine or malpractice lawyer would pay for that list.
Japanese computer security is still very lax. Computer hacking is a relatively new phenomenon and very little is being done to interdict otaku such as Snix who choose to exploit Japanese computer networks like ASCII and Nifty Serve and rummage around in privileged corporate or government mainframes. "It's a joke," says Hitoshi Yamaguchi of Sega Enterprises. "We're at the point the United States was at ten years ago in terms of computer security." For those otaku who are pioneering the criminal side of computer hacking, it's as easy as finding the correct password by running a standard dictionary search-and-match program for a few thousand kanji (Japanese characters).
When the job is done, Snix will give his employer one hundred sample names, occupations, addresses, and phone numbers from the insurance company's data vaults and give him the number of names he has for sale. His employer, a man known to him as Yoshida, with whom he communicates exclusively via fax, will check the list's authenticity and, if everything is in order, will deposit (YEN SYMBOL)l,OOO per name into Snix's bank account via computer transfer. Snix will check his account through his home computer and when he sees that the money has hit his account, he will fax through the remaining names. No handshake. No tedious and embarrassing face-to-face meetings. Just business. And money. And he never has to leave the house.
"I don't understand morality," Snix says, chomping on another bonbon. "This is my hobby and my living and everything about me. This is my world. This screen. This modem. There are simply no rules in computers, only games. I play games for a living. What could possibly be wrong with that?"
But for every otaku like Snix who can program and decipher passwords and auction off the results, there are thousands of harmless kids who just love gathering and passing on information. Very few elevate themselves to Snix's level of computer subterfuge. Most are obsessed with every piece of trivia regarding their particular field and don't get much further than happily reading computer bulletin boards.
"The otaku are an underground, but they are not opposed to the system per se," says Volker Grassmuck. "They change, manipulate, and subvert ready-made products and ideas, but at the same time they are the apotheosis of Japanese consumerism, and an ideal work force for contemporary capitalism. When you have a society where the best test-takers go to the top, and the tests are all fill-in-the-blank sort of things, then you end up with a society more comfortable with data than analysis. That's an otaku society."
Indeed, many otaku already have legitimate careers in technology-related fields as software designers, computer engineers, computer graphic artists, and computer magazine editors. Leading high-technology corporations say they are actively recruiting 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 $500 million. "Lots of our best workers are what you might call 'otaku,' " says an ASCII spokesman. "Maybe as many as 60 percent of our two thousand employees. You couldn't want more commitment."
Another company widely known as "the otaku company" is Gainax Corporation, whose (YEN SYMBOL)500 million animated fantasy film Oneamisu Tsubasa grossed more than (YEN SYMBOL)2 billion. (The film, about what the world would look like if pneumatic and steam technology had been developed instead of electricity and internal combustion, set off a craze for whimsically shaped steamdriven models.) Located in Kitchi-joji, a posh suburb to the west of Tokyo, Gainax creates adult animation and fantasy-role-playing computer games. Founder and president Toshio Okada, a dropout of the Osaka Institute of Technology, boasts that all fifty of his employees are otaku. Gainax's offices are a mass of empty pizza boxes, piles of floppy disks, and dozens of game designers and graphic artists all bathing in the glow of their terminals, headphones on and one hand on their mouse, as they happily program, design, and engineer tomorrow's computer games. Employees like twenty-three-year-old Yohji Takagi, a game designer developing a role-playing game in which the player attempts to cheat on entrance exams to prestigious universities, love their work. And during his leisure time Yohji plays computer games - a variation of computer golf is his current favorite. Or he scans the Asahi Pasocon computer network for otaku data regarding his favorite subject: tropical fish. For Yohji, like most otaku, the difference between work and play is a matter of software.
"We otaku are the ideal information age work force," Snix believes, "totally at one with technology."
Snix taps his own chest. "Look at me. Maybe I am the future."
If Japan has a future.
When asked if he has ever had sex, Snix stares at the ceiling for about thirty seconds. He breathes deeply.
"That depends on your definition of sex," he says.
Intercourse with a human, male or female, he is told.
He shakes his head.
Taku-hachiro, a prominent otaku and author of the best-selling Otaku Heaven, claims the otaku are largely uninterested in sex. He puts it this way: "I watch a lot of videos and read comic books so I know the mechanics of it, but I guess I'm frightened of it. I love to watch sex - and I love masturbation. But I'm terrified of skin contact with another person. You see, in the end, masturbation is really much better than sex. It's so much more . . . efficient."
Snix agrees with Taku-hachiro: "I get along with objects and data better than people. If it were possible to have sex with machines, then that would be more interesting."
The otaku may be the final stage in the symbiosis of man and machine. Their points of reference are all derivative of computers, mass communication, and media. And their technology-generated world is unfamiliar terrain, a new frontier where the morality and ethics of the old world no longer apply. Their behavior may serve as a warning of what awaits us in the cyberspace frontiers of technologies such as virtual reality, digital compression, and three-dimensional television. "There is no law out there," says Gabin Itoh, editor of the computer magazine Log-In. Itoh says that otaku morality meets virtual reality at "the final existential frontier. There is no reason to feel inhibited."
Taku-hachiro dreams that some confluence of virtual reality and digital compression technologies will allow him to have cybersex-sex with an object, in this case through some sort of sensor-laden, penis-reactive condom. (International computer networks such as CompuServe are already used 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 illicit commerce.)
Yet the otaku are divided over the significance of new technological applications such as virtual reality. Masataka Ohta, a computer researcher at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, feels it has great potential, especially in the area of arcade games and fantasy-role-playing games. Others, such as computer-game otaku Yoichi Shibuya, believe that virtual reality is an attempt to humanize technology, make it "softer," and he despises that sentiment. "We shouldn't make technology behave like we humans would prefer it; instead we should conform to technology. We already have a 'virtual reality.' It's in the bulletin boards and computer networks and mainframes. Just jack in and you're there - I don't need to wear some stupid helmet and pretend to walk around in some imitation kitchen. That's like having two TVs showing cartoons taped to my face."
However, the sales potential for ultra-real sexual, pornographic, or violent experiences via the computer is so great that computer engineers - free-lance otaku as well as corporate programmers - are furiously designing software that will satisfy an otaku's "sexual" needs. Although some otaku wait - no doubt breathlessly - for the development of sexy technology they can plug into their underwear, black-market programmers already sell "seduction" and "rape" fantasy games through otaku networks. Last year, a software company in Osaka whose product was deemed "obscene" by the National Police Agency was raided, and their stock of pornographic games was confiscated.
The prospect of ultra-real pornographic or violent experiences in cyberspace is making some mainstream Japanese product designers consider the moral implications of what they are developing. An ethics department has been added to Sony's R&D division because of the potentially disturbing nature of three-dimensional television combined with digital compression and virtual reality technologies. "It could be psychologically damaging - and confusing for some people - if they're watching people being chopped up in three dimensions," says a Sony spokesman, "Or, even worse, if they're there, with them, doing the virtual chopping."
Hold on.
Is a murder committed in virtual reality- of a virtual person who is, for all intents and purposes real and tangible and impacting on your life - a real crime or a virtual crime?
"Chop her up," Snix says, "and let's see if anyone files charges."