摘要：In 2001, the same year Azuma Hiroki published the first print of the book under review here in Japan, new media theorist Lev Manovich released The Language of New Media(MIT Press), which puts forward surprisingly similar ideas concerning databases, and which turned into a globally cited standard work on digital culture (featuring translations into Italian, Korean, Polish, Spanish and Chinese). Meanwhile, Azuma's book, despite becoming a bestseller in Japan, did not traverse the Japanese language border until its first English translation was published in 2009. This substantial delay for the translation of a key contribution to ongoing discussions about digital culture is another example of how existing global hegemonies of thought impact on transcultural scholarly dialogue.In order not to get tangled up in questions of plagiarism (which often merely re-enacts the geopolitical asymmetry described above), we will put questions of originality in this review aside. We will rather try to take both books (and the intentions of their authors) as local inflections of global phenomena such as the digitalisation of the world and the growing importance of popular cultures seriously and discuss Azuma's work on otaku culture in Japan as an autonomous perspective on questions of global interest. This review hopes to stimulate further thought on these questions and further aims to contribute to the overcoming of "Western"universalism, while at the same time developing a critical position towardsthe traces of "Japanese"essentialism (nihonjinron) found in Azuma's work
