Patrick Galbraith examines Japanese "otaku," their relationships with fictional girl characters, the Japanese public's interpretations of them as excessive and perverse, and the Japanese government's attempts to co-opt them into depictions of "Cool Japan" to an international audience.

This edited volume expands on what Aoyagi Hiroshi intended in the first decade of the new millennium to establish as a subfield of symbolic anthropology called “idology.” It brings together case studies of popular idolatry in Japan, but goes further to provide a transcultural perspective to guide anthropological investigations in different places and times. In proposing an integrated paradigm for the growing body of literature on idols, the volume redirects recurrent questions to more fundamental points of sociocultural inquiry. Contributions from scholars conducting ethnographic...