2.8 million otaku Options

[Roze]

Baismīgi

Call them introverted, call them obsessive, but don't call them thrifty.

Otaku, or addicts of such things as comics, cartoons, video games and young female singers, form a growth market that can no longer be ignored, a report released Tuesday by Nomura Research Institute said.

Otaku now spend 260 billion yen annually on the four hobbies, larger than both the markets for DVD recorders and digital cameras, according to the private think tank.

The report claims the number of otaku in the four areas has reached 2.8 million.

Although the term otaku has negative connotations such as ``reclusive'' in Japanese, their lavish spending habits mean they are ``no longer a target of niche marketing only,'' says the report.

The research institute defines otaku as ``people who spend much of their time and money on a focused area of interest.'' Based on the definition, NRI estimated the number and spending habits of people with a hard-core interest in the four areas, all typical otaku pursuits.

The institute also calculated how much the otaku spend in each of their areas of interest.

The excessive hobbyists are said to account for 11 percent of the 2.3 trillion yen in combined sales of the four segments each year.

The figure exceeds fiscal 2003 sales of digital cameras, at 250 billion yen, and of DVD recorders, at 150 billion yen.

The report found that otaku fans of anime (animation), comics and video games each spend an average of 100,000 yen per year, while aidoru (idols, or singing nymphets) otaku spend 75,000 yen.

The otaku that make up the largest proportion of their market are those who spend a combined 100 billion yen, or 16 percent of annual sales, on comic books.

To estimate the number of aidoru otaku, the researchers counted the number of core members in aidoru fan clubs.

To determine the number of comic otaku, they used the number of people attending large meetings where they buy and sell dojinshi, or comics they create themselves, and the number of the comics sold at such meetings

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