Otaku Redefined: Engaging Youth through Anime culture in casework

Abstract

Adolescents at a developmental stage face the challenge of searching for identity through social learning and interpersonal feedback from peers. In the recent decades, Anime (動漫) has become a worldwide popular youth culture. Most of the anime productions come from Japan, targeting teenagers and above. The contents of anime have a large variety, like friendship, family, romance. Some of them are about real life, while some are about fantasy world. A form 6 girl, Susan is an anime lover who appeared to have high anxiety level, poor peer relationship, as well as difficulties in study in school. The worker adopted narrative approach in helping Susan to build up supporting network, boost self-esteem, as well as increase her learning motivation. Experience sharing will be focused on how to get into anime world to engage the service user and co-create the story in the anime world. Throughout the helping process, anime was found to serve for a number of purposes. For instance, it is a good engagement and value discussion topic. Insights will be shared on youth work. Anime culture can be a good tool for workers to engage youths and understand their values on different issues. For example, they may easily have black and white thinking as there are always clear-cut evil and justice in anime; they might believe themselves to have unexplored potentials, as main characters in anime are usually like this. To conclude, anime culture can be either a facilitating force or barrier for youth’s growth, depending on how the contents are embraced.