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Good Lord. I mean, just....you know.


Support group for female otaku offers Rent-A-Nerd service

Being an otaku in Japan has come a long way in Japan, with social acceptability now the norm where once geeks were widely shunted off to the sidelines of society and widely regarded as weirdoes.

Women have approached the otaku boom with a voracity every bit as strong -- if not stronger -- than men, but perhaps not as openly, with many keeping their otaku status a secret.

So, says Cyzo (August), for those women who know they're otaku but not quite ready to let the rest of the world know about it, an enterprising young Chiba businessman has come up with a solution -- the Secret Otaku Support Commission.

"We're an otaku dispatch agency that caters exclusively to a female clientele," Seiichi Hirokawa, the creator and operator of the Secret Otaku Support Commission, tells Cyzo. "Many women otaku don't have other women otaku to talk to and they can get pretty lonely. That's where we come in."

Hirokawa's Secret Otaku Support Commission requires female otaku with a yen to meet their own kind to look up its website and select a companion they think is most fit. For a charge of 12,000 yen per 2 1/2-hour session (and an additional 3,000 yen for every additional 30 minutes on top of that), the commission will send out a female otaku to cafes, family restaurants karaoke boxes and the like in Tokyo and neighboring prefectures so she can chat about otaku issues with other gals.

Some have criticized the hefty price for the services of a female otaku, but Hirokawa dismisses the claims.

"We've set the rate at such a high level because we're targeting Office Ladies and other people working," he says.

Cyzo rents out on of the women otaku, an 18-year-old girl in her first year at university, sets up a session with one of its reporters and recreates the conversation for the pages of its magazine.

Reporter: Hey, have you read Ribon's (early '90s) "Marmalade Boy?" It's like a Bible for every young woman.

Rent-an-otaku-girl: Er... I've never heard of it. I was a bit too young for that. Sorry.

Reporter: OK. Well then, what about "Sailor Moon?" It'd be a bit dorky to read that now, huh.

Rent-an-otaku-girl: Wrong generation again.

Reporter: Uh...

So, for the hefty rate of 12,000 yen for 2 1/2 hours, the hack got to meet somebody with whom she basically had nothing in common. Nonetheless, the young otaku did eventually introduce her to the wonders of "Boy's Love," the manga about homosexual love between pretty young men that provides the storylines for the comic books most widely adored by young Japanese women otaku today. (By Ryann Connell)

July 25, 2006

Mainichi Daily News



"...with social acceptability now the norm" Pshhh! Yeah...

Anyway, Mushi and BabyVash are standing by the hotline. Hey, they gotta pay for college somehow.