A Pseudointellectual Reads a Whole Encyclopedia | "The Otaku Encyclopedia" by Patrick W. Galbraith, A Retrospective
A few years back when I first decided that I wanted to start researching otaku culture, I put together a list of all of the English written literature on the topic. The list included a few obvious choices; Otaku: Japan's Database Animals by Hiroki Azuma, Beautiful Fighting Girl by Tamaki Satou, Anime's Media Mix by Marc Steinberg, and so on and so forth. But the first entry at the top of that reading list was a short pop-encyclopedia by one Patrick W. Galbraith. I was no stranger to that name, as it had come up several other times on my list of texts, as well as in a series of interviews with the YouTuber Pause and Select. But I put his late 2000s encyclopedia project at the very top of my list, ahead of his other works like The Moe Manifesto and then recently released Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan, and even ahead of other introductory texts like Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World. And I did it for one simple reason. I wanted to start with the
