Charisse Mae C.

Berco Med-LT 2 December 2, 2016

Teaching Reading in Bilingual Context Dr. Velma Labad

The Beautiful Fighting Girl

I am not into anime or manga either. And having this task gave me a hard time.
It's definitely a heavy book. It took me a while to dig through a lot of the terms and
definitions and vocabulary words were mind blowing since I am not academically
involved with psychology. But I'd like to say it's worth reading, but it left me with a lot of
questions but also with a lot of ideas for further research.

I think Beautiful Fighting Girl was a really fascinating that helped stimulate my
own thoughts about otaku sexuality. Saitos argument that otaku culture is rooted in
sexuality is something I find intuitively appealing.

The first part of the book is basically defining otaku: a sexually driven subculture;
and setting up the framework Japan compared with the West for the core argument that
the "beautiful fighting girl" is a culmination of the desirable perversions in its many forms
fostered by Japan's fondness for fantasy over reality.

In the first chapter, titled The Psychopathology of the Otaku, Saito aims to
analyze these people who seem to be so entranced by anime and manga. He goes into
the etymology of the word otaku, discussing its origins in the early 1980s and how other
writers such as Toshio Okada, Eiji Otsuka, and Masachi Osawa have discussed and
tried to define otaku. Saito argues that the otaku's interactions with media and fictions
are positive things. It isn't that otaku are withdrawing from reality into their own little
worlds. On the contrary the way otaku interact with the media is a way of adapting to
lifestyles that have become saturated with media and fictions.

The second chapter, for instance consists almost entirely of excerpts from letters
written to Saito by a Japanese otaku to try to explain how he sees himself and his
relation to beautiful fighting girls. In the third chapter, Saito presents the results of his
online interactions with foreign otaku.

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Charisse Mae C. Berco Med-LT 2 December 2, 2016
Teaching Reading in Bilingual Context Dr. Velma Labad

Chapter four takes us even farther away from the Japanese case into the work of
an American named Henry Darger. In the themes and art style, Saito sees a connection
between Darger's work and the beautiful fighting girls found in Japanese popular
culture.

The fifth and sixth chapters bring us back around to the task at hand. Chapter
five proposes a genealogy of the beautiful fighting girl, tracing her from
1958's Hakujaden all the way through the late 1990s. In addition to presenting this
development chronologically, Saito divides the beautiful fighting girls into thirteen
different categories in order to better understand how such heroines function in their
stories namely, Splash of Crimson, Magical Girl, Transforming Girl, Team, Grit and
Determination, Takarazuka, Satorial Perversion, Hunter, Alien Girl Next Door,
Pygmalion, Medium, Other world and Hybrid.

In chapter six, Saito gets back to discussing in more depth the reasons for why
Japanese anime and manga have beautiful fighting girls, but first he needs to stop for
yet another comparison with the US, this time with our comics and animation. This is
key in his discussion to differentiate a particularly Japanese space and concept of time
used within anime and manga.

In this final chapter, Saito weaves elements he has discussed in previous

chapters together with his psychoanalytic theories to arrive at the conclusion that otaku,
far from being deluded nerds living in fantasy worlds, are perhaps the ones who are the
best adapted to live in our contemporary media spaces. In his conclusion, Saito writes,
I fully affirm the otaku's way of living. I would never try to lecture them about getting
back to reality. They know reality better than anyone.

This is definitely one of those books that I think I'll find myself reading again and
again, my understanding hopefully would deepen each time I do. It's certainly far from
perfect, but this book made me figure out why young people get hooked into anime and
manga. It has deepened my understanding about their subculture which I actually took

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Charisse Mae C. Berco Med-LT 2 December 2, 2016
Teaching Reading in Bilingual Context Dr. Velma Labad

negatively since I find them weird, that would help me relate with our 21 st century
learners better and would in a way or the other equipped me on how I can deal with
them effectively.

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