Zer0 contributes an article about Otaku culture in Singapore, chronicling how the Japanese cartoon and anime scene and culture entered Singapore’s cultural consciousness during the post-independence years.

During the Cold War era, the only non-Communist Chinese entertainment came from Taiwan and Hong Kong. The entertainment programmes from Hong Kong were all in Cantonese. These couldn’t be broadcast on national TV as all Chinese dialect was banned on the airwaves under the ‘Speak Mandarin Campaign’. So Channel 8 had to go Taiwan to source for children’s entertainment programmes. That’s how Japanese animation began transmission on our airwaves. Later, kids could also watch anime dubbed in English by the way of USA. The ethnic Chinese Singaporean pre-Otakus had the benefits of bilingual conditioning at a young age. (This the foundation for learning Japanese, given the mastery of a phonetic language that uses alphabets and another iconographic written language that uses kanji. That would explain why there’s a strong presence of Singaporean ‘anime-bloggers’ on the Net, since we make good emulators to bridge the East-West divide.)

Read more about Singapore’s Otaku Culture.

Tags: Singapore Otaku culture, Anime