neighborhood of Tokyo is a popular gathering place for otaku.]] is a derisive term used to refer to people with obsessive interests, particularly anime and manga.
Etymology
Otaku is derived from a Japanese term for another's house or family ( otaku) that is also used as an honorific second-person pronoun. The modern slang form, which is distinguished from the older usage by being written only in hiragana (???) or katakana (???), or rarely in r?maji, appeared in the 1980s. It appears to have been coined by the humorist and essayist Akio Nakamori in his 1983 series , printed in the lolicon magazine Manga Burikko, who observed that this form of address was unusually common among geeks and nerds. It was apparently a reference to someone who communicates with their equals using (unnecessarily) the distant and formal pronoun, and spends most of their time at home.The term entered general use in Japan around 1989, and may have been popularized by Nakamori's publication in that year of . I