One thing I like about being involved with Japan and anime is the “second childhood” it allows us all to enjoy. In a very real sense, a new part of your brain is “born” when you start to learn a new language, and just a children are less sophisticated than adults, that new part of yourself is closer to the intellect of a child, and just as precocious, creative and impressionable, too. Last night I was geeking out while re-re-re-watching the Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie, one of the watershed films in the development of otaku culture as a worldwide movement. My wife guffawed at me: “Why don’t you at least watch something new?” She didn’t understand, of course, that we all love what we’re exposed to in childhood, be it X-Men comics or Scooby Doo or Star Wars, and we take it with us forever. Just as Japanese in their twenties and thirties now will always have a place in their hearts for the original Mobile Suit Gundam or Fist of the North Star because they saw it when they were young, the first shows we otaku were exposed to will always be special to us, even if we were 18 years old at the time. In the context of this exciting new language and culture, we were seishun shitemasu, or “living the springtime of our lives,” a phrase I’ve used from time to time. What Japanese anime show is especially important to you?
