I was in my college’s central library looking up introductory biomedical engineering texts when I decided to take a break… to read a sociology textbook (Sociology by Paul B. Horton, Chester L. Hunt sixth edtion ISBN 0-07-Y6639-4). Yeah I could have just chilled out at the perk point or something, but because I am Otaku and can be considered some sort of deviant and thus am quite interested in sociology. In fact, I plan to take 2 sociology modules later in the year to satisfy the unrestricted elective requirements towards my degree. Specifically, they are Making Sense of Society (which doubles as a business related SARTOR accredited module for engineers), and Sociology of Deviance. So I figured it wasn’t such a bad idea to do some minor preparation in advance for those modules.

The introduction to sociology part was freaking boring, so I quickly skipped forward to the part titled Social Control. The first subsection that I encountered was titled Social Control through Socialisation, and I was like, omgwtfbbq. In order words, the act of socialising is a form of social control.

According to the textbook, society is broken down into primary groups and secondary groups. Primary groups are small, intimate, informal groups such as families, cliques, circles of friends, and military squads/sections. Secondary groups in society serve utilitarian purposes and examples include companies, labor unions and church congregations. In the opening paragraph of the subsection:

“Fromm [1994] remarked that if a society is to function efficiently, ‘its members must acquire the kind of character which makes them want to act in the way they have to act as members of society.’” (pg 156)

Within primary groups, control is informal, spontaneous and unplanned. Despite the informality, the grip of conformity within primary groups is so binding that controlled sociological experiments have shown that:

“…many people will even alter an observation which they know to be correct rather than oppose the group.” (pg 159)

I think this statement basically explains Hitler’s rise to power lol.

What has this got to do with Otakuism? As proven in a previous blogpost, modern western media has failed in many areas of cross-media adaptions while modern Japanese media has suceeded exceedingly well and YET, the soft power of western media is so much more overwhelmingly strong worldwide than that of Japanese media. Sure, there are lots of people who think Bush is a dumbass for invading Iraq but when it comes to movies and TV shows and even cartoon shows (Simpsons or Kim Possible anyone?), the western ones still reign supreme. In fact despite this, some Otaku still engage in emotional self-mutilation which when backed by the pressure of primary groups, are uncannily convincing despite being horribly wrong.

Despite the power that primary groups weld in society, why does deviance occur? So strong is this interest in deviance that there are not one, not two, but seven different sub-theories that attempt to answer this question. There are probably multiple text books for each theory so, errr, I won’t be going into that. In fact, I bet some sociologists are investigating Otaku subculture even as I type this blogpost.

A deviant is a failure of social control and I proudly declare myself as an epic failure in the convoluted hands of social control. However is all deviation bad? The answer is *drum roll*… no. Sociologists have arrived at the general consensus that non-extreme forms of deviation do possess some hidden good. For those who are thinking Otakuism is an extreme form of deviation, the sociological answer is no. Extreme deviants are murderers, serial-killers, terrorists, pyromanics and what not. And its rather obvious that these forms of deviation are not useful to society at all.

Deviation acts as a force of social change. For example, Christianity is widely established today, but early Christians had to endure persecution and oppression, but they accepted it with stoic calm. Other examples would be the change from the large families of the past to today’s nuclear family (it would be unthinkable in the past to only have 2 or 3 kids). I’ve had to endure all kinds of crap for pursuing my interest in modern Japanese visual culture from my parents and some platoon mates, but here I am still blogging here today

It is a fact that modern Western culture has failed in more than one major area, which I believe all non-Japanese Otaku have realised some point of time in their lives. The sudden realisation of this failure is not enough. To overcome the barrier of untruths fabricated by pressure exerted by primary groups, one has to gather social courage to accept that modern Western culture has indeed failed, and subsequently but tactfully, deviate from the social norm.

So is the future Otaku? Having experienced and being immersed in modern (and I stress the word modern) western culture for a good 18 of the 20 years of my life (as most Singaporeans grow up to be immersed in) I would say that the failures are so obvious to me now that eventually, Japan’s ever-growing soft power will bring about drastic change in how the world views 2 dimensional Japanese modern visual subculture.

P.S. Singaporeans, check out today’s headlines for another article on Japanese soft power as well.