sorry, more fandom stuff

I'm sort of going to travel back to last week and the week on fandom and write down some things I forgot to because I think there are some similarities between fandom in anime/manga and consuming places. Specifically when Jenkins outlines some criticisms people have made of anime fans ie: Asiaphilia where people fetishize Asian products. And as this relates to tourism:
If you go to the Akihabara district of Tokyo (essentially, the center of otaku) you can get taken on a tour by a "guidol," Japanese girls in cosplay. Or if you want, by:
a guy from Alaska dressed up as Goku. Patrick Galbraith (the guy in the picture) serves as a spectacle to both Tokyo inhabitants and tourists.

Akihabara is a major shopping center for electronics, computers, video games and anime/otaku goods that sort of boomed in the 1990's when the anime craze took off. It's a haven for otaku's who are generally frowned upon in Japan. This in part has led to Japan's tourist campaign (which is government affiliated) that has been trying to change the image of Akihabara away from the otkau image but has largely failed.

The popularity of the aforementioned tours and Akihabara itself depends on the fetishization of Japanese pop culture. Depending on your point of view, this could be a good or bad thing. Are Akihabara and people like Patrick Galbraith detrimental to Japanese culture? Tourists will go from experiencing a Japanese tea ceremony to the weirdness that is Akihabara. In my mind, going to a tea ceremony is about as culturally significant to a tourist as the International Day at an elementary school is to a third grader. But the impression I get from criticism of Akihabara is that it is sort of a patronizing practice, for a tourist to go visit Akihabara and look at the cosplay cafes and the hypersexualized images of cartoon girls or as a tour guide (ie: Galbraith) take advantage of the perception of this culture being "weird." Although not as extreme as the sort of exploitation that was talked about in the Jamaica excerpts, but there are definitely Japanese who are embarrassed/annoyed with tourists coming to visit this place and in a sense suffer because of how their culture is then perceived (but that may be too much...)

Anyways, I think this is sort of interesting because there are definitely Japanese people who participate in otaku culture and Americans who love manga/anime and the weirdness of Japanese pop culture, but would not see this interest as patronizing.