This is one for the students in my fall Japanimation and Manga class. A movie theatre just outside of Tokyo is offering discounts to customers who declare themselves 'otaku' or nerds (well, nerd isn't quite the right translation). From the Mainichi Daily News:
Theater offers otaku cheap ticketsDeclaring you're an otaku might get you strange looks in some places. But a Japanese movie theater is offering outspoken nerds something positive: a discount....
Otaku culture has become a legitimate field of research in Japan, and a study last year estimated that sales generated by goods targeted at the country's 2.8 million nerds totaled 258 billion yen.
"Densha Otoko" takes so-called geeks into a genre they're not usually associated with: romantic love. The 22-year-old otaku hero turns to a favorite geek refuge in search of girlfriend advice -- the Internet.
Anyone who has ever been to an anime convention can bear witness to the rabid commercialism that is The Otaku. American companies would do well (and some most certainly have) to harness the power of such a consumption engine. Some people laugh at the idea of spending ones entire paycheck on pillows with drawings on them, but to a capitalist economy that kind of ethos is better than anything it could ask for...people that don't need to be persuaded by advertising to shell out their life savings on cheaply produced and otherwise worthless junk.
This has been a confession of a jaded former otaku in rehab.