On Being a Recovering Otaku, Part II

As I mentioned previously, only a small percentage of the anime produced in Japan are picked up for distribution in the United States. However, even these numbers would have been vastly reduced if the fan community in the 80s and 90s hadn't taken matters into their own hands by creating fansubs. Fansubs are fan-produced versions anime that have been translated, subtitled, and distributed by fans. Before the Internet, they were traded on VHS tapes, and later digital files. Fansubs are technically illegal, but they were initially helpful to the domestic anime industry, and tolerated for a long time, because they helped raise awareness and interest in certain titles - shows aimed at girls, romantic comedies, and more oddball anime. My college anime club had a collection of VHS fansubs that were openly traded for years. To date, fansubs are still the only way to see many older series like "Rose of Versailles" and "Goldfish Warning."

The trouble with fansubs is that they became a gateway to all out piracy, especially when the Internet came on the scene. Digital files allowed for better quality and faster sharing, which lead to the fansub versions of many shows stealing away the domestic audiences for the legit releases. There was an honor system in place that called for a halt ot the distribution of fansub files for shows that had been licensed by a domestic company, but I found it was getting much too easy to lose track of which anime fell into which category, and there were far too many kids out there who were failing to make any sort of distinction. Eventually I made myself quit all fansubs cold turkey a few years ago and stuck to domestic releases, exiting the larger anime fandom in the process. However, fooling around with digital fansubs taught me a lot. I learned peer to peer filesharing, torrents, IRC, how to work a dozen different media players, how to juggle audio and video codecs, and even a little encoding. This came in handy later when it came to tracking down public domain films and content in copyright limbo.

However, I got even more out of the fandom that came with the fansubs. Anime was my first real experience with entertainment from a totally different cultural context. I quickly fell in with the purists who had been burned by too many anime distributors of the 80s and 90s hacking and mangling favorite shows into subpar kiddie pabulum. I started paying attention to translation issues, quickly learned the benefits of watching subtitled as opposed to dubbed anime, and picked up some of the little cultural quirks like honorifics and idioms. Unedited anime is more fun to watch the better you know the culture and language. I never went so far as to take Japanese language or literature classes as I knew some anime fans did, and never became especially enamored of Japanese society, but I got into the habit of enjoying the differences instead of recoiling at them. For a while I shunned American localizations as inferior, but over time the pendulum swung back the other way, and I learned to appreciate many of the adaptations as they improved during the late nineties.

A lot of this carried over when I started watching foreign films. It was much easier watching Kurosawa's samurai epics and Ozu's domestic dramas already being familiar with many of the differences in behaviors and mannerisms that might have been distracting otherwise. I'd gotten so attuned to the little nuances of Japanese productions, I actually had a tougher time with Chinese films, even though I speak Mandarin and I'm far more familiar with the culture. Once I'd gotten my head around Japanese media, it's wasn't hard to make the leap to movies in Korean, Swedish, Farsi, or Afrikaans. I think anime makes a particularly good starting point for exploration into foreign media because Japan is totally industrialized and viewers will always have clear points of reference, but the Japanese culture and social norms remain largely non-Westernized. Also, anime is a uniquely Japanese phenomenon. No other country does animation quite like the Japanese do it, and though they were influenced by a lot of different sources, the strength of anime is that its aesthetic and values are identifiably Japanese, through and through.

It is very easy to be caught up in the anime world once you get past the initial barriers to entry. My tragic flaw is that I am a completist. I wanted to finish every series I started, was easily caught up in the hype about any title that was held in any sort of esteem, and I was always on the lookout for the less commercial, artsier fare that wasn't as popular or well-known. When I first started out, there wasn't any broad consensus of the must-see titles, reviews were always scatter-shot, and in most cases the only way to figure out if you liked a series or not was to watch it. So I did. I usually figured that if someone had taken the time to sub a series, then it must have been worth the time to watch. I ended up seeing a lot of pretty miserable anime over the years, but I also found those few, amazing shows that no one else was paying attention to. And the experience was fun while it lasted. It takes significant time and energy to be a true otaku, a superfan who can keep up with the pace of the industry and all the new titles, while expanding their knowledge of the classics. I know from experience now that there are a very few shows each year that are truly worth my time to watch, but I'm no longer keen on paring down the field myself. My interests and priorities have shifted, so I leave it to the younger fans to pick up where I left off.

These days I'm off chasing Godard and Fellini and Kiarostami and Assayas and Zhang Yimou. I've turned in my otaku badge for a shot at being a real live pretentious movie fan, but I still count myself as an anime fan. They'll pry my "Cowboy Bebop" boxset form my cold, dead hands. Tomorrow I'll finish off this series with a couple of recommendations of obscure titles I think deserve more attention.