The Dark Side of the Cool Stuff U.S. author Patrick Macias explores jagged edge of otaku subcultures

Tom Baker Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

If your mobile phone suddenly went dead in your hand in Akihabara Station, Tokyo, not too long ago, you might have thought it ironic for such a thing to happen in the vicinity of the world's most famous electronics bazaar. But perhaps uber-otaku Patrick Macias was lurking nearby, testing out his new cell phone blocker.

Macias, a 31-year-old resident of San Francisco, is an American expert on Japan's manga, anime and digital subcultures who has been visiting Akihabara and other parts of Tokyo for research since 1999. He is the coauthor, with Tomohiro Machiyama, of Cruising the Anime City: An Otaku Guide to Neo Tokyo, published this month by Stone Bridge Press.

"One (purpose of the book) is to give you something to do once you get here," Macias says. "If you go to every place mentioned in this book you're going to have a pretty great trip. It'll be pretty shocking, it'll be pretty twisted, but it's definitely off the beaten path."

Manga and anime are taking off in the United States, Macias says, and this book is "a cultural map of the anime city" for English-speaking otaku--people who drench themselves in Japanese digital culture, sometimes to the apparent exclusion of external reality--who decide to hop on a plane and make a pilgrimage to the source.

Topics covered in the book include anime, manga, video games, hackers, Tokyo movie locations, cell phones that double as stun guns and "the idea that the video game is not just something you put quarters into, but the game is life itself. How to beat the odds. How to cheat on pachinko. How to guess what candy toy is in the box from reading the bar codes," Macias says.

The book is up-to-date, with features such as a look inside the Bandai Museum of robot characters that opened in summer last year.

But keeping current is hard, Macias admits. "I feel like in some ways we really should have put an expiration date on the cover, because I know some of the stuff is gone already...The speed of everything is lightning fast."

Why commit such ephemeral phenomena to a book? He explains that in addition to being useful in the short run, he wanted the book to function as a time capsule of otaku culture in the long run, a lasting snapshot of the way things are now--"an eternal thought in the mind of Godzilla."

Godzilla has been a thought in the mind of Macias since the 1970s, when the author was a school kid in Sacramento, Calif.

"California has a strong Pacific cultural influence," he says. "Ultraman was on TV, Godzilla movies--all my friends were watching Japanese cartoons and Japanese movies...At the time it was so unique to see cartoons in which people died, cried, and were two-dimensional drawings with 3-D psychological problems....superheroes with super hang-ups."

Watching TV after school, kids his age would "go from Daffy Duck to kamikaze spaceships. And some of us got stuck (on the latter). Some of us would follow that to untranslated Japanese animation."

As a result, "I have extremely otaku Japanese language skills. The first kanji I learned were like uchusenkan--'space battleship'--or daikaiju--'giant monster.'"

Macias' fascination with such things fit into an already incipient subculture of people trading tapes of their favorite shows. "And that movement eventually became an industry," he says. "Now I can go into a Tower Records in the United States and buy Japanese animation."

Macias has also written a book about live-action Japanese cult films, TokyoScope, published in 2001. "I don't want to say I'm the person who discovered those films, because I didn't," he says, "but let's just say that (when) Kill Bill came out two years later everyone in Japan and America was like, 'Oh, these old crazy Japanese movies sure are a lot of fun to watch.' Sonny Chiba and Kaji Meiko were suddenly back on TV showing their old clips and everyone was feeling so natsukashii (nostalgic).

"But at that time, it was marginal, those were cult films. People like good old Donald Richie thought I was stupid, basically. (Orthodox) Japanese film history coalesced around (directors Akira) Kurosawa, (Yasujiro) Ozu and (Nagisa) Oshima, and there was really no room for funky, weird B movies.

"So TokyoScope was an attempt to look at...the theater on the wrong side of the tracks. The old, beat-up theater with the dirty old men sitting inside all day...And to some Americans that's like a really romantic idea."

Cruising the Anime City similarly tries to shine some light into the darker, funkier corners of Japanese culture. "We're trying to attract people with the idea of, 'Oh anime--you know what anime is, right?' and then try to sneak in this other very subversive, very underground stuff," he says.

Macias maintains: "Americans like Japan because it's shocking, OK? They want to be shocked and electrified." The new book therefore aims to provide an authentically Japanese "tour through hell."

One hellish topic is the "virtual girlfriend simulator" that used to be found only on CD-ROM but now comes directly to your phone--"virtual girlfriends sending you virtual e-mails that you have virtual love affairs with." Some customers have gone so far as to call the company seeking the "real" girl behind the messages, Macias says.

The otaku guru himself, then, may have caused some virtual heartbreak after he bought his cell phone blocker: "I couldn't resist the temptation, so I immediately put a bunch of batteries in it and took it to Akihabara Station and turned it on."

It was as if a virus were slowly spreading through the station, he recalls, miming thwarted phone users looking around in befuddlement.

"It's like having the secret code to cheating on a video game; you're hacking the world," he gloats. "It's a cheap thrill."

Maybe, but does such a device have any legitimate use?

"Technology is amoral," he declares. "It's whatever you want it to do. It's there, it's a toy, it's a weapon...it's available to you.

"I don't get off on the feeling of power, but...it's (on the) fringe. It's like this lawless zone, and it's fun to step in there and see what it's like sometimes. If you stay there, yeah, you'll go insane and become like a supervillain or something and you'll go to jail eventually, because it's just too dark. But it's kind of fun to slip in and out."

But not everyone crosses the line easily. "Otaku are pretty depressing people sometimes; I'm not going to pretend that everyone's wonderful and rivers are made out of chocolate. Some of these are very lonely, disturbed people," Macias warns, before thoughtfully adding, "But they do make the world a stranger place."

To safely enjoy the otaku world, Macias says, "the key is to keep yourself informed, check your moral barometer every day, make sure you've got the whole good and evil thing balanced out, and have some fun." As for the line between fantasy and reality, "leave a little trail of bread crumbs" to find your way back.

"The dark side of this stuff is that, yes, you can get lost. You can get lost morally, you can get lost in fantasy," he says. "The plus side of it, though, is you're able to communicate with people from around the world who know the same stuff you do...There's this common culture that we share, even though it's junk culture."