Japanese otaku have long built virtual identities separate from physical reality, not out of escapism but as deliberate choices to encode their values. As the line between real and fake blurs, this intentional construction of alternative selves will reshape how everyone understands identity.
Chapters
And again, I come back to this question about, you know, who and what is real, and who and what is fake? But again, I think that question in the future misses the point, because it's not really going to be a binary physical world and virtual world, real character and virtual or pretend or imaginary or fictional character. And when I was researching the book, I did look at and speak to lots of experts working in Japan and with Japanese manga and anime, and I looked at the otaku as a bit of inspiration here because obviously the otaku are heavily into characters and kind of know how to navigate their way around all of the different elements, or the moe elements if you like, that make up a character, so not just the character itself all the different arrangements of characteristics that make up a character, and you can kind of mix and remix and play with them. And as I said, the narrative really has become decoupled from reality, and what that means is that we can create virtual selves and artificial selves that coexist with and around us. And I think the otaku have been doing this for a long time. And one of the interesting things is that people tend to think that, oh, it's a bit of a default, or it's a bit— aren't they a bit naive? They don't really understand the real world, they get stuck in this fictional world. But what's underplayed is that this is a choice. And as Hiroki Azuma says in his book, the otaku choose fiction over social reality not because they cannot distinguish between them, but rather as a result of having considered which is more effective for their human relations. This is purposeful, and it's because they feel that the real world is dysfunctional. And so why not construct their own alternative world in which they can encode and build their own values and beliefs. And I think that's what we are going to be doing in the very near future. And we won't think it's a fictional world, it'll just be a world in which we have encoded into it better or more fitting values and beliefs.
