consumer beast From what you’ve seen and read, are otaku really a new kind of consumer beast? What’s different about their relation to mass culture, especially by comparison to prewar ideas of the masses (in which everybody identifies with, and does, the same general things), and prewar forms of desire (in which everyone tends to be structured by the same consumer desires)? Is there now something truly new? (Iyashii, or moe desire, for example?) And to the contrary, are there similarities between otaku behavior and earlier prewar consumer behavior?