Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
I am, at the moment of writing, at Heathrow awaiting my flight to Tokyo. This week be my second trip there, although this one is more of a lucky happenstance than a long-worked-on masterplan like last time. But "going to Japan" is not an uncommon holiday destination these days. In fact it's by far the most commonly cited location for a "dream holiday", at least for people of my generation. Japan now, moreso than ever before, is trendy, accessible and capable of hosting a true horde of foreign visitors. Last week, while actually buying some supplies for this trip, I saw a guy wearing a t-shirt reading "ask me about my trip to Japan". I did not ask the annoyingly well-groomed man about his holiday, rather every contrarian bone in my body shuddered with a disgust usually saved for hen-parties and star wars fans as my conscious mind collided with the zeitgeist and made the realisation that "the Japan Trip" is cringe.
Now this conclusion is a major issue for me. We Japanophiles have long been ourselves regarding with the "c word" of course; weeaboos have always been naturally outcasts in the cruel darwinism of the social rat-race. But somehow the success of such subcultures have now perforated so deep into the fabric of the millenial/zoomer mindset that they have become mainstream. At some point there was a tipping point: first the anoraks persuaded the geeks, the geeks persuaded the nerds, the nerds persuaded the casuals, and finally the normies latched their parasitic suckers onto what they saw as "next big thing" to impress their friends. And of course at this point it was only a matter of time before the "eye of sauron" of the global marketing cartels spotted this shift and switched out their livestock's feed from avocado tacos to umami wagyu matcha teppanyaki to fill their piggybank for the next ticket on the lolita-express. I've watched this process play out for the last 15 years with ever increasing disgust, although I'm sure I have contributed to it myself in my own small part. At its core is a monkey's paw tale of bitter success. The massive success of '90s Japanese videogames for the millennial generation left such powerful nostalgia that once those children grew up (although I cannot say "matured"), the promise of a real connection with Japan became too enticing to pass up.
This encroachment of the mob onto the sacred turf (I mean this both in the physical and online worlds) has naturally pushed the outcasts to further and further recesses. It is virtually impossible to find someone who was "into Japan" in say, 2010 who equally embraces the plastic Japanomania of 2026: it is a market built for a mutually exclusive spiritual crowd. Just as "I watch anime" can no longer be used as a safe indicator of true weebdom, neither can "I'm going to Japan". It's a sad state of affairs in the quest of nostalgia fulfilment, the paradise I imagined visiting in my youth no longer exists: places like Akiba and Shibuya so drastically altered by time to be totally different cities these days. But this is of course of a strange loop, with shining new examples emerging in their stead.
This is all to say my mind now required further justification fit my desire to visit the holy land. I'm sure you will understand and agree with me, dear reader, that my (and by extension our) desire to go to Japan is unlike the masses', and has something worthwhile at its core when compared to their vapid excuses of "horizon broadening" or "finding oneself". Rather than some passive (and expensive) form of education, I instead think of it more as a "fulfilment of a dream". Something which completes a personal philosophy in the same manner visiting Jerusalem or Rome does for your faith. The goal isn't consumption or sightseeing per se (although they have their places), but merely existing within the ambience of a manifestation of fantasy. That's why, for the "true Japanophile", the simple things excite us the most: walking down random suburban streets, browsing Familymart, catching seasonal anime on satellite TV. The sort of thing I hope would make many people say "you're wasting your time!"
