Japan's comic-book nerds are proud to be a serious economic force

WITH a self-deprecating wave, Toshiyuki Takano tries to avoid the compliment before admitting that, yes, he really is in the top 5 per cent of Japan's growing legion of geeks.

While the labels geek, nerd or anorak are pejoratives to be avoided in most socities, Japan's otaku are proud - in a bashful way, naturally - of who they are.

A social movement that can trace its roots back to 1983, when the term was first coined in a magazine article to describe people attending a comic book convention, is finally becoming mainstream. Japan boasts an estimated three million otaku, with a recent research institute report putting their annual spending power at 400 billion yen (366 million).

With pockets that deep, geeks are an economic force to be reckoned with.

"I'm personally not into collecting model figures from animated movies or computer games, but some of my friends are," says Mr Takano, a 19-year-old student of human sciences at Tokyo's Waseda University. "I'm more interested in buying parts and building my own computers or audio devices, and I'm always the first on the scene when new gadgets go on sale.

"I also like playing computer games and spend a lot of time in online chat groups, making new friends and exchanging information."

The Tiara Cafe is a typical establishment in Akihabara, the home of myriad electronics shops that has become a mecca for hard-core otaku. In keeping with the fantasy animation theme of the shop on the ground floor of the building, Tiara is what is known as a "maid cafe" - where all the staff are female and wear French maid outfits as they serve drinks.

"The costumes are very cute and places like this are popular because the girls who work here look very young," says Mr Takano. "But I don't think I could ever ask one for anything more than a drink."

He carries a manga comic book with him everywhere and has a vast collection of animated DVDs at home. Ask him who provided the voice for an obscure character in Evangelion - the defining movie for otaku - and he replies without thinking.

It is this skill that earned him a remarkable 84 per cent in the first Otaku Certificate exam. Organised recently by Biblos, which publishes dozens of manga titles every month, the test was initially seen as little more than a lighthearted quiz.

"We had no idea it would be so popular," said Ryota Ishizuka, the editor who devised the exam. "We had expected maybe 1,000 people to take part but our computer broke down due to the number of people trying to access the website."

Nearly 500,000 attempted to access the site in two weeks, with questions on the exam ranging from the outlandish to the obscure. Such as...

How many more people attended the Tokyo Comiket Manga convention in 2002 than in the previous year? What "cosplay" (costume play) outfits are not permitted at fans' gatherings? And true or false: a timed incendiary device was planted at a Comic Market event between 1996 and 2002?

"It was tough in places," says Mr Takano. "But I have been living this life for five years and I just seem to know stuff. I guess that makes me a natural otaku."

Takenori Emoto nods in appreciation of his fellow geek's achievement.

"This is more than a hobby for me; it's more like a lifestyle choice," says 22-year-old Mr Emoto, a student of programming at Tokyo's Nihon University. "The Dragonball animated TV series and games started got me hooked 11 years ago.

"I got 82.2 per cent on the test, which I was quite pleased with because there are some areas of specialist otaku knowledge that I know very little about," he said. The highlights of his year are the twice-yearly Comiket Manga exhibitions, which attract around 600,000 devotees.

"For me, there's nothing better than wandering around comic markets on a weekend, and there's always one somewhere in Tokyo every weekend," he said. "I also love animated films. Eba is the classic, of course, and my mother likes it so much she has lots of models of characters from the movie. She's a real otaku mum."

Every spare centimetre of space in the average otaku's home is taken up with characters that come as gifts with drinks or sweets, and wall space is devoted to large pictures of Gundam or Studio Ghibli's animated cult classics. But it is their very obsessions that have turned nerds into a new type of fashion icon, even becoming a staple of novels and TV dramas.