Geeking Out with Josh Call

If you want to look at future trends in technology, look at Japan.

There is no question that many Asian countries, particularly Japan, are a few years ahead of us in terms of computerization and cell phone technologies. The Japanese make it an obsession to have more gadgets, faster trains, and, to often freaky results, more lifelike robots. But even more fascinating is their culture, which embraces technologies in a way that we have not — the Japanese people serve as an example of how we as people may become immersed and intertwined with our technology in ways that seem radical.

What we regard as the “hacker” culture, they refer to as that otaku, a growing class of technology-immersed people who live and breathe the technology around them. These otaku are anything from computer programmers to high school dropouts and they live for the thrill of cruising the internet, pursuing obsessions (everything from monsters to the latest manga) and hacking into mainframes for bits of information. In many ways, the otaku make a new identity for themselves online, one in which awkward teenagers can become the center of attention for hacking out the latest pop star’s dirty little secret. 

We have this as well in the English-speaking world. The movie-pirate aXXo is well known and almost worshipped among the online community for his — or what is most likely a full group — steady stream of high quality movie torrents. The message board 4chan, source of the famed lolcats, has gained some media attention for its spontaneous activism, such as its recent, almost terrorist-like campaign against Scientology.

But even on a more mundane level: our submersion into Facebook, Twitter and little games like Farmville has us indulging our obsessions more and more in the virtual world.
For the Japanese it is a little different because they do not have the classic value of individualism and staunch morality that we obtain from our traditionally Christian background. Confucian values are more open to creating one’s own ideas about right and wrong, which create some strange and wild obsessions among the Japanese.

More fascinating is how their classic Shinto notion of animism, the idea that everything has a spirit and that we are simply another spirit among nature, allows them to perceive computers as living entities.

Japanese anthropologist, Karl Taro Greenfield, notes in his book “Speed Tribes” that the otaku “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 ... because there is no man distinct from machine.”

In many ways this leads many Japanese to feel more at home with machines than with people. This has been a large theme in popular manga and anime, particularly movies like “Ghost in a Shell” and series like “Serial Experiments Lain,” in which the main character proceeds to meld with the Internet, shedding her physical body as unnecessary.

Although many people in the English-speaking world are becoming fascinated with the anime and manga pouring out from Japan, we still resist these strong notions of man-machine relationships. Our machines in our movies and shows are still out to take over the world, dehumanize us and kill us. But we must refrain from making hasty judgments about the nature of the otaku; our close kinship with our technology is something we will all have to mitigate daily for the rest of our lives as computing continues to saturate our lives more with each passing year. 

The Japanese may already be ahead of us in navigating this merging of technology and identities, but, in the end, it is something we will all have to face.