As an otaku's network grows larger, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain close personal relationships with most of his or her contacts.
Cel traders, for example, don't need to become close friends with the various people they trade with. The social transactions in otaku networks tend to be impersonal, short-lived, and businesslike. Although they have many social contacts, the otaku are not intimately associated with most of them. One theory is that the anime otaku exist and participate in large social networks within which they trade goods and information. Less clear, however, is why the Japanese fans of anime and manga called each other "otaku" in the first place.
He wrote about those strange, unkempt, and obsessive fans who referred to each other using the word "otaku"-considered to be an overly formal way of saying "you". Journalist Akio Nakamori is frequently credited as being the individual who first publically wrote about the otaku-zoku ("otaku tribe"). Various accounts (Grassmuck 1990, Greenfeld 1993, Schodt 1996) have been vaguely consistent with each other regarding how the term "otaku" came to be associated with fans of anime, manga, etc. If the concept of otaku is new to you, please refer to some of the articles listed in the 'References and Recommended Reading' section of this paper. This is not a general introduction to otaku. It will also explore the implications of the historical details described here on the contemporary use of the term "otaku". This essay will discuss theories regarding the origin of the term "otaku" as it was used by Japanese enthusiasts of animation and manga in the early 1980s. The Origins of "Otaku" By: Lawrence Eng (11/04/03) Introduction For more information on that, please see Lawrence Eng's Anime Fandom Research In 2006, I completed my PhD dissertation on otaku culture, focusing on American anime fandom.