Forum - View topicAnswerman - Are There More American Otaku Than Japanese Otaku?
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3 Next Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | ||
|---|---|---|---|
walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
|
||
|
Exactly, that's 700k in a market of what, like a billion or more between most of Europe, North/South America, Oceania, and parts of Non-Japan Asian?
|
|||
|
|||
|
H. Guderian
Posts: 1255 |
|
||
|
these numbers can be hard.
I know a guy that will rant to you that no one understands that Otaku doesn't mean what we think it means. I keep wanting to ask him if he ever studied the language (he hasn't) so he can back up his claim. He is, btw, Otaku, by every meaning meant for a person. Even with multiple beings of Otaku, he'll deny it. Yet he also never buys anything - So you can't count him via sales. I can't remember the last time he streamed a show. He sometimes torrents shows, as he doesn't watch a whole ton - and its never the popular show of the season. I feel there are many like him, and that makes counting the total to be rather impossible. |
|||
|
|||
Mr. Oshawott
 Posts: 6773 |
|
||
|
I don't think we'll really ever have any way of knowing how many anime otaku are in either country. Even in Japan, many people that become anime fans on one instance may eventually lose interest and move on in the next.
|
|||
|
|||
Polycell
 Posts: 4623 |
|
||
A) The population of Japan is incredibly compressed, to the point where most of it is capable of taking a simple train ride to those places(Honshu's only 88 thousand square miles and has 80% of the population); the US population is incredibly spread out, with the two most populous states each being vastly larger and having less than three quarters the population combined. B) American fans are cheap to the point of being downright niggardly in comparison to their Japanese counterparts. You know how everybody bitches about Aniplex of America and Ponycan's pricing? That's half off the going rate in Japan, yet it's treated as highway robbery here. Between these two factor's there's just not the money in otaku holy grails in America. If they weren't true - if the US had a dense population and the Aerican otaku were willing to spend more - we could easily see crap like shamelessly authentic flourishing, but they never will in reality land. |
|||
|
|||
Paul Soth
 Posts: 140 Location: Columbus, Oh |
|
||
Don't shatter my dreams. |
|||
|
|||
|
WingKing
Posts: 617 |
|
||
But again, Crunchyroll isn't exclusively for anime/manga fans. They also have live-action Japanese and Korean TV shows and some J-pop stuff, too. And there are probably some paying members who just hang out and talk on the forums and seldom actually read or watch anything, because every site has people like that. |
|||
|
|||
Wandering Samurai
 Posts: 875 Location: USA |
|
||
|
There is no way to tell. Plus, the word "otaku" while related to anime, is applied to other fandoms in Japan. Train otakus are an ever growing group, such as some people will get into the train tracks to get pictures of on coming trains. Fandom in general is so extensive, and anime conventions isn't really restricted to anime products. You will get vendors who sell products that are fandomish but not animeish. You get Star Wars cosplayers at an anime convention and you will get it vice versa at Comic Con. Unless you were to take a poll, you can't really gauge hard numbers. You can really only tell by what people say they do, for right now. And I have seen some pretty hardcore otaku types in the US too.
|
|||
|
|||
relyat08
 Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
|
||
|
I literally asked almost this exact question, in reference to the size of the DVD buying Otaku market, like, 6 months ago...
Well, I guess it's good to have an answer either way. I was starting to get the impression that the US market was substantially larger, person to person, than it was in Japan. It's interesting that our sales numbers are that comparable. I wonder what Attack On Titan sold... |
|||
|
|||
|
krpalmer
Posts: 32 |
|
||
|
I'd been wondering myself about how many people in Japan "just watch anime on TV" as opposed to what the now-familiar disc sale figures make us think; I even submitted an Answerman question about that, but didn't want to keep pushing once it seemed it couldn't be answered... This isn't quite the same question, but it's interesting anyway.
|
|||
|
|||
GVman
 Posts: 729 |
|
||
|
There's also the fact that people still regularly use video rental stores over there. You can have a guy who owns every Super Robot Wars game but doesn't own a robot show featured because he just rents 'em from his local video joint. I know back in the days of VHS they'd even let customers make copies in the stores, though I don't know if that continued on into the DVD era.
|
|||
|
|||
|
FloozyGod
|
|
||
|
I would say US has the most fans overall, but Japan has the most Hardcore fans
|
|||
|
Mikeski
Posts: 608 Location: Minneapolis, MN |
|
||
Which is the correct answer. |
|||
|
|||
|
Genos
Posts: 12 |
|
||
|
First of all, while "otaku" is a term associated with people who like anime and manga, "otaku" inherently does not have to do with anime: you can be an otaku in regards to anything. Second of all, "otaku" is negative because of the negative influence these kinds of fans have on shaping the industries that they are consumers of.
As Americans, we simply do not have as much influence on Japanese pop culture, specifically anime, as the Japanese consumers do. We are less likely to buy merchandise, and are more likely to only buy content that is distributed here in the US (not as a rule, but as a generalization because shipping from Japan, language barriers, disc localization, etc). Therefore, I think that this question/answer is sort of skirting around an issue that can't really be addressed in the way it's been phrased? If the questioner is asking if America has more anime fans than Japan, that seems to be the actual discussion taking place. But otaku? There are a lot of Americans who are negatively obsessive about particular 'things,' so while we do not have an English word for "otaku" so much as the phrase "obsessive fan to the point of negatively effecting and industry," ... yeah, there are a lot of otaku in America. By and by, the word otaku shouldn't be thrown around the way it is on these sort of websites; it's basically being used a substitute for "varying degree of anime fan" when it isn't, as a concept, attached to anime. It refers to a systemic problem in Japanese pop culture industries that, as an anime fan, it's kind of annoying to be lumped in with. |
|||
|
|||
Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1779 Location: South America |
|
||
|
Manga sales (2010)
US: 12 million volumes Japan: 1.7 billion volumes and magazines I still would guess there are more Otaku in Japan.  The US has "anime" fans but in Japan Anime is only a way to advertise a manga, it's just a side media product and not thr main course. The core element of otaku culture is Manga itself. Anime is an American thing: it is the way Americans consume manga.
Fans of animation in particular are called "aniota" and it's indeed a possibility that there are more aniota fans in the US than in Japan though. But certainly not more manga otaku: Manga fans are obviously much more numerous in Japan. |
|||
|
|||
|
zmx2513
Posts: 4 |
|
||
|
Is it just me or are the questions on this panel getting really unintelligent these days?
|
|||
|
|||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group