The Densha Otoko Controversy of Two Decades Ago, and the Culture Wars of Tomorrow

Back in 2004 there were (we are given to understand) a series of postings in an Internet forum by an individual telling the (supposedly) real-life story of a twentysomething "otaku" who becomes romantically involved with a woman he rescued from a groper on the train, over the course of which postings sympathetic readers helped him with advice along a path that led him to put otakuish things behind him and join the mainstream in order to be with here. Novelized as Densha Otoko (translatable as Train Man), the book became a bestseller that quickly launched a popular multimedia franchise that included a TV series, a feature film, and several manga adaptations.

All this may sound innocuous enough to Americans hearing about it, the man who has "failed to grow up" (which is how the "geeky" and "nerdy" tend to be seen in America) but finds love, puts away "childish things" and remakes himself according to mainstream standards (getting a "good" job if he doesn't already have one, getting a "makeover," just like that somehow) is a standard plot formula, and indeed well-worn cliché, as a result of its use as the basis of any number of independent films, Judd Apatow comedies, etc.. However, it was not received that way by Japanese otaku, who unlike their counterparts in supposedly less conformist America attacked the conformist message of this narrative formula--the view that otaku are not what they ought to be, that they can, should and must abandon their interests and pleasures and join the mainstream in any and every way, "because reasons." Indeed, the furor was sufficient that a previously obscure man named Toru Honda became famous on the basis of his version of the critique (apparently, a bestseller as these things go), which held that like everything else love had dissolved in capitalism's cash nexus, which also devalued human beings who do not meet its standards and serve its purposes (those without money and other desired traits)--and that it was entirely valid for those who had no place in that order (who did not, because they could not, work and have children) to find their satisfaction in those "childish things," and even take "2-D love" with fictional characters in place of a "3-D" relationship with another human being that, even when it was attainable, was not necessarily more "real," and perhaps less so, certainly less pure. (In spite of his references to capitalism Honda as his taste in philosophical reference--Plato, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, etc.--makes clear, inclines to the idealist-subjectivist view in ontology, and the individual's "getting along" as best they can in society as they find it, rather than any prospect of social change, with his one hazy reference to Marxism as "in decline" appearing pretty dismissive of such ideas.)

All of this has had little attention in the West, both Densha Otoko, and the outpouring of writing that followed it, even his best-known works remaining without any authorized translation, and secondhand discussion slight. (Indeed, a single 2005 Asahi Shimbun interview, and an essay by Mr. Honda in Patrick Galbraith's 2014 The Moe Manifesto, seem the only significant professionally published sources for Honda's thought for English speakers, with, a scattering of brief references apart, the rest a limited quantity of material referencing at best a portion of Honda's work on comparatively obscure blogs.) This is, I think, partly because of the extreme disinterest of American cultural commentators in social life in other countries (i.e. save when they can use it to show the "badness" of some state policy elites want to designate as an enemy), but also because his ideas offend against those of the mainstream in multiple ways, and even seem too "bizarre" for them to take seriously. Indeed, looking at the comment threads on blogs discussing Honda's ideas I constantly found Honda dismissed as a "pseduointellectual" wrapping up retrograde thinking in "first year philosophy student" references--with the fact that this reading was asserted rather than argued, and rarely challenged, confirming the ease with which many incline to this view. Still, given how many of the relevant issues--growing questioning of a vision of adulthood that seems less attainable and perhaps less desirable to young people in the straitened times, the country's fraught gender politics, and even advances in artificial intelligence that may well make it a source of companionship for many--we may yet see argument for views like Honda's become part of cultural controversy in America.