So, I’m editing the final draft of my final paper, and besides the usual formatting, grammar, spelling and all that, I keep coming across the “one last thing” issue. When I decided to do my paper on otaku culture, I had one idea in mind on how it would turn out. To me I thought it was going to be this, I don’t know, decorative narrative of anime and manga culture, how it fit into my life and why it wasn’t what people thought it was.

It turned out, that it wasn’t what I thought it was either, in a good way. Just the research alone for my project pushed me to expand past what I knew to be otaku culture. I mean, anime and manga helped bring me out of isolation back where I was from, and here it has helped me push the boundaries I had kept for myself for so long.

Like, religion and spirituality. Nothing in particular, just not being fearful to actually learn about and actually understand other cultures beliefs without that colonial fog in the way. And not just in the scope of my own project with Shinto and folklore such as yōkai, I already lean more toward Buddhist practices personally, but in this class.

If I hadn’t taken this class, I don’t know if I would have thought on my own to view the beliefs, I’m using the term broadly, that before were always presented to me as false or wrong in the church I was made to go to growing, to view them as true. Not just acknowledge that others have different beliefs but comprehend and, I don’t know what word to use but, that feeling, that thought where you go, I get it. What this person or group or culture, what they think and feel and believe is just as real, maybe even more real, and just as important as what I think and feel and belief.

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