Otaku Influence On Japanese Culture

As we learned and discussed in the course of this semester, we were able to know that translating is not just changing words into other languages. Words not only carry meanings but carry various emotions and culture. Language is deeply related with culture and history of each region which make translation not an easy job. Therefore, translation becomes a very complex process. Each countries in the world has its own unique culture and tradition which some cannot easily be understood by outsiders. In order to truly understand other languages, you must first have various knowledge of the country. Meanwhile, in most of the cases translation is made without these requirements which cause misconception of how languages are received. Those

Over the past few decades, Japan has increased its influence as a culture sending out anime and otaku culture in various ways. Although, pop culture is one of the main aspects of culture the influence have resulted in mixed feelings. The otaku culture known for anime and manga have skyrocketed its popularity in recent decades. Manga now days surprisingly have almost the same amount of readers in Japan and the foreign countries. There are less lags "there isn’t much of a time lag between what sells well in Japan and what sells in the United States," according to Furukawa comparing business in Tokyo and Los Angeles. There are many other ways the otaku culture spreader across the world varying from large anime conventions to anime cartoons on TVs. Those increases of public visibility have made tremendous influence to the minds of foreign people and also influenced the image of Japan as a whole. From my personal experience living abroad, people tend to think of me as not outgoing who likes to watch anime just because I was from Japan. This type of stereotype is strongly made and could be a negative in some prospective. Since foreign countries tend to receive the otaku culture often nowadays than other traditional culture of Japan, it creates an image of Japan being not what really is. Those issues related to country’s image often occurs in many countries such as popular dishes like pizza and sushi has lost its original forms in foreign countries losing what truly is. Those public image issues seem to continue as anime popularity is increasing every year and the advent of Pokemon-Go which recently became a huge-hit across the world. It is important to have a balanced image of a country. That could be said for Japan as population of otaku does not cover up the whole nation and it also has rich traditional culture that could be sent to the