How did an all-American boy – born in Alaska and raised on a farm in Montana – end up living in Tokyo, giving tours of Akihabara, and dressing in his favorite manga and anime costumes as if every day were Halloween?

Meet Patrick Galbraith, author of the new book The Otaku Encyclopedia: An Insider’s Guide to the Subculture of Cool Japan. By day, Patrick is an ethnographer and journalist based in Tokyo. He’s also a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies at the University of Tokyo. By night, he pursues a self-admitted obsession with manga and anime.

Working as a freelance journalist specializing in Japanese popular culture since 2004, Galbraith writes a regular column for Metropolis magazine. Under the auspices of H.I.S. Experience Japan, he also runs a weekly tour of Akihabara, the otaku capital of Japan. Prior to moving to Japan, he earned degrees in print journalism and Japanese at the University of Montana.

Patrick Galbraith will be discussing otaku culture and signing copies of The Otaku Encyclopedia at Elliot Bay Books in Seattle on Wednesday, September 2, 2009 at 7:30 PM.

Patrick was kind enough to answer some questions for Seattle Metblogs about otaku culture, his studies, and Japanese pop media.

When and why did you become involved in Japanese pop culture fandom? Do you recall how your interest originated?

I was maybe five or six years old when I first saw anime, Japanese anime. I was sitting waiting for my parents in this barbershop, and the owner was playing anime in Japanese. I have no idea why, but guess it might have been a kind of background noise or ambience. The work was Miyazaki Hayao’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, this immersive story that takes place in a world ravaged by war and ecological disaster. (more…)

Slightly belated news: Local ad agency Publicis in the West has won the 2008 ADDY Awards Best in Show for “Birds,” a commercial produced for the Washington State Lottery. Normally, I don’t care who wins what, unless it’s a book prize, but I admit to a deep, abiding, possibly unhealthy, love for “Birds.” Totes awesome.

Watch it HERE.

Publicis also won Silver ADDY awards for ads created for T-Mobile and UNICEF. The awards were presented at the 2009 AAF National Conference in Washington, DC.

I recently mentioned that local comedian Dartanion London was chosen by Ford to represent the Ford Fiesta in a social media campaign designed to draw interest in their new fuel-efficient car. Though the Fiesta won’t be released in the US until next year, Ford’s giving London a European model of the car to use for six months as an “agent” performing “missions” involving the car which will then be put on display in a variety of social media platforms.

Even though Ford only selected 100 people nationwide to take part in this campaign, it turns out that he’s not the only Washingtonian involved: two other Seattle residents and a guy from Bellingham have also been named “Fiesta agents”. Considering how heavily involved in social media most Seattleites are, it makes sense that we’re so well-represented.

Derek Johnson is the 23 year old CEO of a Bellingham-based company called Tatango which allows easy group text-messaging. His planed series of missions to explore Bellingham can be followed on his website.

Kristina Horner from the U District is a musican (she’s in a Harry Potter band called the Parselmouths), a student at the Dub, and a vlogger whose first planned mission is to visit Washington’s biggest waterfall.

Bridget O’Neill is a Seattle resident who has been an actor and a teacher and now runs a Seattle based art and media development and production company called Confluence Creative Media; follow her vlog for her debut mission, a trip from Seattle to San Diego.

Tomorrow, do not be surprised if you run into a walking, talking lemon that will be wandering Downtown. This lemon will be promoting Worktank’s “Embrace the Lemon” campaign, whose goal is to promote pragmatic optimism.

This innovative campaign seeks to leverage the abundance of lemons in the public psyche to “make lemonade” on an unprecedented scale, creating a community of optimism to turn things around and drive positive change.

Pragmatic optimism (link not related to Worktank) promotes the idea that most of the time in life, the good outweighs the bad. A good summary of how this concept came about comes from a comment in that link: “Because many people do not deal with truly bad events on a regular basis, it is easy for them to adopt a false sense that ordinary circumstances or events are somehow bad.”

You can find the Lemon wandering around the metro bus tunnels starting at King Street Station from 7:00 a.m. to10:00 a.m., at Westlake Center and Pike Place Market from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., and outside Safeco Field prior to the Mariner’s game from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Stop by and say hi, share some lemons-to-lemonade stories, maybe take photos and drop them in our Flickr pool.

The Ford Motor Company plans to start selling the fuel-efficient Ford Fiesta in the US next year but wants to start building up anticipation for it this one so they created a “social media campaign” called the Fiesta Movement, an advertising experiment in which “agents” across the US get to test drive a European version of the Fiesta for six months taking their vehicle out for “missions” which they share with the public through a variety of social media platforms.

More than four thousand people applied to be part of the Fiesta Movement, but only 100 were chosen. One of them is Seattle comedian Dartanion London, producer of improv/stand-up hybrid “Dartmondo”, the “Week of Comedy” and “The Super Mega Art Show” as well as a cast member of the highly-regarded Jet City Improv troupe. His plans for his time as a Fiesta agent include stopping at clubs and theaters for improv performances while out on his missions. His first mission is a visit to Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. Follow this adventure and more to come at his website.

Garth Stein writes about why in the May issue. Read it online!

The capital of the Pacific Northwest is blessed with divine geography, frontier spirit, and an abundance of both artists and geeks. Plus, it’s not even that rainy.

illustration by the pew research center

Some interesting interactive charts and maps from December turned up today via Kottke.org [#] about patterns of regional migration in the US. Aside from the general “out of the northeast” movement, they report also characterized states as being “sticky” or “magnetic”. Washington ends up high on both of these measures, with 54.3 percent of the population born in another state and 64.3 percent of those born in the state staying around. [pewsocialtrends]

m.seattlepi.com, the p-i’s mobile website

Once you’ve completed your hunt to scavenge a copy or three of today’s final print edition of the Seattle P-I for your archives or eBay, you might take a moment to add the paper’s new (to me, at least) mobile website to your iPhone’s (or other portable web-compatible personal communication device’s) bookmarks.
SeattlePI.com is a bustling bazaar of links; so when you’re on the go add an “m.” to the front of that URL and find yourself facing a clean list of news stories to read. They’re not breaking any new ground with the interface, but it seems nice, usable, and ripe for being turned into an App that could maybe take advantages of some of the revenue-enhancing bells and whistles announced today for the iPhone 3.0’s new operating system. [engadget]

In order to gather and provide a better representation of Metro’s routes during adverse weather, Metro has teamed up with KCNews to use Twitter and blogging in an attempt to let passengers know if/when their bus is running, and to find out from passengers what is really going on out there. All I have to say is: it’s about freaking time.

Twitter KCNews
KCNews blog

And, now an answer to speculation about the future of the Post-Intelligencer: “Hearst makes offers to staff for online-only P-I” [seattlepi]

(via dylan [twitter], who will probably write much more about this later).