Occidental Otaku

"Did someone just say weeaboo?"

— The Trope Namer, The Perry Bible Fellowship

The Phenotype Stereotype-afflicted Westerner with stereotypical Otaku interests usually centering around anime. Usually—but not always—made fun of in both Western and Japanese media, but in different ways. Western portrayals tend to be more straightforward parodies, but Eastern ones, more dualistic: In Japanese media, their obsession is the reason for their Anime Accent Absence (they learned the language from anime) and why they came to Japan and are interacting with natives in the first place. So, they'll at least be portrayed as more knowledgeable than the average American, just cringeworthy, though they usually mean well.

When male, often a... hentai enjoyer. When female, frequently a Yaoi Fangirl.

In the West, the term refers almost exclusively to some obsessive Japanophiles, but some otaku are into other aspects of Japanese culture instead, and early examples of this trope were obsessed with traditional Japanese dress and food, especially if the work took place right after Japan opened itself to the world.

Often derisively called a "weeaboo" online, or "weeb" for short, which originated on 4chan when "Wapanese" was telephone-gamed into a nonsense word originally from The Perry Bible Fellowship. This has become an Appropriated Appellation to the point where calling oneself an otaku is falling out of fashion, and some anime fans now jokingly (or at least self-depricatingly) refer to themselves as weebs more often than not.

Sub-trope of Foreign Culture Fetish.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Inverted in The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You - Nadeshiko (or "Naddy", as she prefers) is a Japanese woman obsessed with America, due to her hatred of the Yamato Nadeshiko life she was forced to live as a child.
• FBI Special Agent Katie Lindberg in Alyosha!. She's very excited when she's sent to Japan undercover as a high school student, because she's really into Japanese culture — at least, her understanding of it. She cosplays when on an outing to Akihabara with a friend (and rode the train there wearing the costume), and she can't get over the fact that Alyosha is a real maid. Alyosha, who comes from the fictional Ruritania nation of Estolakia, has some elements of this as well, but her fascination with Magical Girl anime is largely due to her never having a real childhood.
• Dino in Blend-S is an Italian affected by Phenotype Stereotype that owns a Cosplay Café in Japan, watches Otaku O'Clock anime on a regular basis, and is said to be "changing waifus every three months."
• And speaking of dorky Western otaku scientists, Alec from Ceres, Celestial Legend.
• Alice in Croisée in a Foreign Labyrinth is a 19th-century French version. Obviously, given the time period, ukiyo-e prints and kimonos take the place of anime and video games as focal points of interest; this is Truth in Television, as it refers to the Japonisme movement in 19th century France. Like more modern examples of this trope, however, she's just as clueless as to the difference between her understanding of Japan and actual Japanese culture.
• Darker than Black has an Israeli one who came to Japan to study animation, as he believes it’s the world’s finest. He speaks with a varying degree of a foreign accent... which doesn’t sound remotely Israeli.
• Dear Shitamachi Princess is about a princess from a fictional Scandinavian country that is so much this trope that not only is she fluent in the language when she's interviewed by a Japanese TV host, but also impulsively visits the country for a surprise visit to the host, who not only didn't seriously invite her to visit, but said visit was so abrupt that her home country thought she was exiled. Besides that, she otherwise takes to Japan like a duck to water and the locals are sad to see her eventually go.
• Elena Peoples in Eureka Seven AO, who, as revealed in a Newtype issue, is actually an American — she's too much of an Ambiguously Brown Mukokuseki to notice it outright.
• Sandora from Excel♡Saga: in episode 17 he draws Puni Puni☆Poemi. That said, in episode 17 everyone Excel and Hyatt meet in America seems to have some familiarity with anime — the hood rats who accost them when they first arrive flip out when animation cels from Puni Puni Poemi start falling from the sky, and the mafioso they face at the end recognizes Sailor Moon and thinks it's old hat. This is, oddly, probably more accurate than most depictions in anime; while a lot of more obscure stuff (such as Excel Saga itself, ironically enough) would probably get you strange looks, nearly everybody in America is familiar with Pokémon: The Series, Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon.
• Jeremy Watt from the NASA Aliens in Eyeshield 21. Despite being pretty familiar with the Japanese language, he's laughably (and absurdly) uninformed. For example, he somehow thinks that everyone who plays go is named Hikaru... which means that he would have to be familiar with Hikaru no Go in the first place, which would mean he would never come to a conclusion like that. Nobody who had gotten as far as he has in studying Japanese would think samurai would commit ritual suicide with chopsticks... though you could blame this on Rule of Funny. This all started when he saw a skilled linebacker from Japan, which somehow led to him thinking "Man, samurai are so cool..."
• The Geek Ex-Hitman: This trope is basically the entire plot in a nutshell. Title character T.O., an assassin for The Mafia, quits his job and moves to Japan in the first chapter after finding a figurine from a Show Within a Show Magical Girl anime on the desk of one of his targets and falling in love with it. He falls in with two carabinieri who pursue him to Japan (one a Yaoi Fangirl, the other a male sketch artist) and opens a doujinshi studio with them.
• Angela and Sue, Ohno's American friends from Genshiken, are heavily into yaoi, though unlike the others on this list they do not really speak Japanese.
  • Sue does. 90% of her spoken lines are anime quotes (she has a very broad list to draw from). It's implied that she's pretty bilingual, but hides behind the quotes.
• Tom of High School Ninja Girl, Otonashi-san is an Eaglelander who is a big fan of ninjas. As a result, he eagerly makes himself the apprentice of Fuka Otonashi, but he has a very fantastical idea of what ninjas actually are capable of.
• How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift?: Gina Boyd traveled from Russia and eventually stayed in Japan full-time because of her obsession with its pop culture, learning the language from anime, and having dreams of becoming an idol with the rest of the gym girls plus Satomi. Not that her ideas of what is or is not Japanese are particularly accurate; she names both kung fu movies and yoga as Japanese things she likes, and believes that both Hong Kong and Macao are in Japan.
• In the comedic Infinite Stratos spin-off manga, one of Laura's German subordinates has enthusiastically studied Japanese culture by way of games, anime, and manga, and regularly gives her advice on fitting in in Japan and pursuing Ichika.
• Miria from Jewelpet Twinkle☆ is American. She likes manga and cosplay, and whenever she goes to Japan she takes the opportunity to buy loads of merchandise.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency: Joseph Joestar collects plenty of comics and manga since his youth.
• The ecchi series Kandagawa Jet Girls has Jennifer Peach and Emily Orange, two Californian girls obsessed with Jidaigeki.
• Patricia Martin from Lucky Star is an American exchange student who's introduced working alongside Konata at the Cosplay Café while dressed as Mikuru. Her whole purpose comes down to being a way for the creators to (gently) parody Western fans. Heck, her knowledge of the Japanese language and culture is derived solely from fansubbed anime and manga. Not to mention she's also a requisite Yaoi Fangirl. In universe, Konata and Hiyori hit it off with her pretty quickly, and her more Occidental Otaku moments mostly get written off to her being a Funny Foreigner.
• Lindy Harlaown from Lyrical Nanoha, although she's more foreign than most examples. She drinks green tea (incorrectly), has a room on her ship set up to look like a Japanese garden (complete with shishi-odoshi), and is aware of Magical Girl Anime. The second movie ramps it up when she's shown to own a paper lantern, a tengu mask, a sai, a teapot, and a log with shuriken embedded in it. She even moves to Japan full-time after the events of the second season, although that was mainly so her newly adopted daughter could stay with her friends.
• Subverted with Graham Aker from Mobile Suit Gundam 00. True, he's American and a fanatical Japanophile, but he also studied under actual Japanese people, is extremely competent in the culture and language, and treats his passion with sincere respect, even though to a casual observer he seems like the typical example of this trope. Examples of his activities include having a Mid-Season Upgrade called the Susanowo, named after Shinto deity Susanno'o, and getting nicknamed "Mr. Bushido". It seems he also took up Buddhist teachings from a master in Japan as seen in flashbacks. When he sees Setsusna face to face (and naked) in the burst of GN Particles, he even asked if he was in Nirvana.
  • Of course, in 00, America and Japan are now technically part of the same country.
  • A newer Gundam example is Black and Nerdy Teen Genius Nils Nielsen from Gundam Build Fighters who not only uses Samurai-themed Gunpla, the 侍ノ弐 Sengoku Astray Gundam (the prefix is officially written in Kanji even when the rest is in roman characters, it literally means "Samurai Unit 2) but dresses up as a Ninja to spy on Chairman Mashita and Baker. He also holds knowledge of various Asian martial-arts techniques, not just Japanese.
• Centorea Shianus, the centaur-girl from Monster Musume, can be considered this since she has all the visual traits associated with Nordic/European foreigners (flowing blonde hair, blue eyes and a big bust) and yet she's the only one in the house to live in a Japanese-styled room complete with tatami, appears to be knowledgeable about anime tropes like Crash-Into Hello, and recognizes slimes as a species from old-style JRPGs.
• One is interviewed in Otaku no Video. Interestingly, though he is dubbed over in Japanese, one who knows both languages can easily spot that the dub is intentionally written to make him sound like much more of a weeaboo.
• Otomen has Mifune Knight, a blond and (presumably) blue-eyed American who teaches Japanese history at a Japanese high school, and is obsessed with Japanese history, culture and the true Japanese Spirit. Apparently he inherited it from his equally Japan-crazy father who actually built a hilariously inaccurate Jidaigeki Theme Park.
• Ouran High School Host Club has a couple characters from overseas who develop an obsession with Japanese culture:
  • Renge is the series' archetype of an Otaku, to the point where her existence revolves around character analysis. It's a little bit scary, to say the truth. She moves to Japan from France to meet Kyoya, solely because she saw a photograph of him and he resembled a character in her favourite game.
  • When Kyoya and Tamaki first meet Kyoya wonders if he's "one of those westerners who're interested in Japanese culture". But Tamaki is actually half Japanese, although he'd never set foot there before that point and his knowledge of Japan comes from his dad's stories. Which are wildly inaccurate, either because he's wealthy and out of touch or he's just screwing with his son.
• In Psychic Squad, the Ex-Black Phantom Espers are some of the most Otaku-like characters in the series (The two guys are constantly going on about Moe and 2D, the girl is a Yaoi Fangirl), but it is heavily suggested that they are not from Japan. Also one of the Comerica agents is heavily into Traditional Japanese culture, rather than Otaku culture.
• Isaac, the Dutch diplomat in Samurai Champloo is sort of a joking reference to this trope, as he is a Westerner who tends to prefer Japanese culture to his own. Another reason he loves Japanese culture so much is because of pre-Meiji Japan's attitude towards homosexuality: He is Straight Gay and could be called a Yaoi Fanboy.
• Ivan Karelin, a Russian Ninja-themed superhero from Tiger & Bunny, wears his love of Japan on his sleeves — quite literally◊, in fact.
• Tonari no Kashiwagi-san has Tina, a German exchange student who originally got into anime and manga thanks to her long time boyfriend (who grew up with her in Germany before moving back to Japan).
• In The Way Of The House Husband, one of Tatsu's neighbors is Bob, an African American who loves Japanese culture so much that he immigrated to Japan.

Fan Works

• Alexis Lois "Lexi" Luthor of Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku! loves Japanese pop culture. She gets excited over the thought of invoking anime cliches like running out of the house with toast in her mouth once she begins attending U.A. Lexi also spends her classtime writing essays about anime and manga instead of paying attention and chastises Izuku for not introducing himself as per Japanese customs when she coerces him into her limo.
• Serena from Total Drama Legacy, whose label is even "the Weeaboo". She's a Canadian obsessed with Japanese culture, especially anime and manga, and this is made very clear from the moment she's introduced. She dresses in Lolita Fashion, peppers her speech with Gratuitous Japanese, constantly makes anime references, refers to others by Japanese Honorifics, runs like Naruto, and picked up several of her "mad skills" from watching anime.

Film — Live-Action

• Creed III: Adonis Creed is shown in a flashback to have had a bedroom full of anime and manga merch as a kid, mostly Shōnen series including Naruto—which makes him extra Black and Nerdy since, given the scene is set in 2002, he's collecting merch for a series that didn't officially debut in English until the first issue of Shonen Jump in January 2003.

Literature

• Baccano!:
  • Firo (an Italian-American teenager who has never left the States in the last seventy-two years) shocks a Japanese tourist by conversing with him in almost disturbingly fluent Japanese. When asked, he claims that he learned it from reading raw manga (well, and Yagumo taught him some 19th century Japanese, but that's besides the point).
  • Isaac and Miria also speak Japanese... in Prohibition-era America. No explanation is ever given, but it's Isaac and Miria. It should be noted that they later appeared in a Continuity Cameo in the Durarara!! anime, implying that they apparently move to/visit Japan at some point... though this doesn't explain how they learned to speak Japanese in the first place.
• In The Case Files of Jeweler Richard, Richard Ranasinghe de Vulpian is a British man with a vested interest in Japanese. He started learning the language around the age of five because he believed the difficulty would make it easier to later learn other languages (and given that he turned into an Omniglot, it seems to have worked). Along with his attachment to his Japanese tutor, this rapidly developed into even naming his childhood pet "Taro" and studying Japanese in university and graduate school. His dream has been to teach English to Japanese students, and he has a familiarity with Japanese culture and classical literature that dwarfs Seigi's, the actual Japanese protagonist of the series.
• Snake from The Cyber Dragons Trilogy by C.T. Phipps is a surprisingly serious version of it, being a Mexican gangster who has adopted all the trappings of a Japanese samurai while teaching his students martial arts as well as cybernetically augmenting them. This includes a Blue-and-Orange Morality code of ethics that it takes Kei years to shake out of her head.
• Ling Yu of the web-novel Domina, to the point of going into long rants about anime and going to college in the hopes of producing one eventually. She's also almost certainly invoking Anime Chinese Girl on purpose.
• High School D×D:
  • Rias Gremory has a strong appreciation for Japanese culture, everything from the food to the spirituality, to the point where she sets up her base of operations there. Her first interaction with her future Queen was to compliment native-born Akeno's black hair. What puts Rias in a class above is that she's Pure Devil - born in Hell - and still finds Japanese culture that fascinating.
  • There's also Susan, one of Issei's first customers. She is an avid fan of Samurai-era Japan, and always wears samurai armor.
• Pina Sformklan Estor from Ladies versus Butlers!, princess of a small Scandinavian country, is possibly among the most absurd. While she occasionally acts shy at first, she's quite willing to lecture people about how underappreciated anime is as a cultural medium, or how ridiculous she finds it that a Japanese school would place old European literature above modern manga. She's in fact in Japan partially for research, as her nation's main entertainment industry is imported anime. She's also a Cosplay Otaku Girl who spends most evenings wandering the grounds dressed as a Magical Girl Warrior with a hammer almost as big as she is.
• Anna from Mouse (2017) has filled her bedroom with anime figurines, posters for Japanese bands, light novels, anime DVDs, stuffed anime creatures, and a bedside lamp shaped like a Japanese lantern. Unlike most examples, Anna actually does have Japanese ancestry, but in her efforts to reclaim her heritage she went way overboard, at least in the opinion of her brother Kai, who thinks she should have just read a book about Japan or something.

Live-Action TV

• Claire in Dramaworld is an American who is a huge Korean drama fangirl (although her fandom is Korean rather than Japanese, the trope still fits)
• Bert Cooper on Mad Men is a japanophile, which features in one episode when SCDP meets with Honda. He also makes people take off their shoes in his office.
• The "J-Pop America Funtime Now" sketches on Saturday Night Live, featuring two college-age anime fans who've added "-San" onto their very non-Japanese names.
  Their horrified Asian Studies Professor: "If there is such a thing as a loving form of racism, you've found it."

Magazines

• 月刊OUT was a monthly Japanese magazine that ran from The '70s to The '90s that was said to be Japan's first anime magazine. The magazine was targeted at anime fans of an older demographic and featured a lot of Fanservice.
• Animage began serialization in 1978 and as of current, is one of Japan's top three bestselling anime magazines. It is dedicated to fan contributions and commentary on various anime, as well as interviews with creators and other supplementary material. While it was mainly targeted at the Japanese, the August 1985 issue had a dedicated section for fans of Leiji Matsumoto from the United States of America. Fans sent fanart, fan-letters and supportive messages, in both English and Japanese.

Podcasts

• Find Us Alive has Dr. Klein, who keeps an "extensive anime collection" with at least a few seasons of Dragon Ball Z and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, among others.
• DKDiamantes plays up this part of his personality for laughs on Adeptus Ridiculous. He watches a lot of anime, in contrast to co-host Bricky who can't stand the stuff.

Pro Wrestling

• This has been a major part of Kenny Omega's gimmick for the longest time, especially when he works in Japan as a part of Dramatic Dream Team or NJPW. He's a humongous fan of Japanese anime and video games, particularly Capcom games like Street Fighter, which he's taken ideas from for his move names, such as his "V-Trigger" knee and his "Flash Man's Time Stopper" enzuigiri. Even when he turned heel and became a member of Bullet Club (a group of Foreign Wrestling Heels), it's clear that the otaku in him is still there, even when he denounces Japan in the process.

Theatre

• W. S. Gilbert gave The Mikado a Japanese setting to capitalize on the fact that England at the time was in the midst of a popular craze for all things Japanese.

Tabletop Games

• The Draconis Combine in Battletech is noted to be this In-Universe (partially as an in-universe justification of the writers' somewhat poor handling of the faction during the game's early years). Its ruling house of Kurita can trace its lineage back to Japan on Earth, but by the time they founded the Combine they were over three centuries distanced from their Japanese roots both genetically, spiritually and culturally. They attempted to recapture the aestetics and traditions of ancient feudal-era Japan as a way to create a unified culture for their new empire, where they were a Foreign Ruling Class, and were... Somewhat less than successful. During the marriage of Hanse Davion and Melissa Steiner, which took place on Earth, the Draconian delegation was noted to have visited Japan, during which they made the native Japanese somewhat uncomfortable with their enthusiasm and their own bastardized takes on Japanese culture and history.

Video Games

• In the original .hack// series, the player behind the Ronin-inspired Sanjuro is actually a Japanese teacher from America with a love for Akira Kurosawa films who plays the Japanese version of The World to improve his Japanese.
• In Asura's Wrath Augus's reincarnation from The Stinger of Episode 22 is this, coming to Japan to collect Japanese swords, and trying to use broken Japanese to talk to some locals.
• In Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, the Save Points, which appear as floating gas pumps, require you to listen to the ramblings of a fictional and particularly obnoxious one of these before you can save. According to the developer, some of the rants are taken from actual forum arguments.
• The translator of Brave Soul ended up being included in the Developer's Room, as an obese blond, jogging in the lobby and mumbling about 'Oppai'.
• You can choose to be an Otaku in Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, which is set in New England. They start with a Cat Girl costume, a Tailor's Kit (the best sewing tool in the game), a cheeseburger, a Boston AnimeCon Magazine, and level 1 tailoring skill.
• Fatal Fury's primary villain, crime boss Geese Howard, is a variation on this. While not depicted as interested in Anime or Manga, Geese's office on the top floor of his tower is covered in Japanese artifacts, and he himself wears a traditional akido fighter's uniform in most of his appearances. And considering who he is, no-one's going to call him out on it.
• Final Fantasy XIV: One of the Samurai Job Quests involves tracking down a corrupt businessman with a Foreign Culture Fetish for the Japan-inspired land of Hingashi; he wears a kimono, decorates his pleasure boat like a Hingashi palace, slips into Gratuitous Japanese (at least in the English dub) and collects several (extremely expensive) katana. What makes him a particularly dark depiction of this trope is that by the time you hear about him, he's started killing random people just to get a chance to genuinely use his new katana blade, relying on his wealth and status to protect him from the consequences.
• Sodom, from the Final Fight and Street Fighter games. He seems fascinated by samurai in particular. He wears a samurai helmet and mask with football pads and blue jeans. His win quotes largely consist of badly pronounced Japanese, he wrote the character for "Death" incorrectly on his shirt (though his calligraphy is very good), and his weapons are katanas and jittes (weapons used by police in the Edo period). His World Warrior Encyclopedia entry notes that he believes certain Japanese "unlucky words" inflict spiritual damage on an opponent, causing him to incorporate these words into the names of his moves (such as Jigoku^note Hell Scrape and Butsumetsu Buster).
• Chipp Zanuff, American McNinja from the Guilty Gear series, who regularly spouts Gratuitous Japanese during his fights and even falsely claims to hail from Japan. He's also one of two of the only non-Japanese people to learn ki^note the other being Kliff Undersn (which, due to the setting's Japanese having a natural affinity for channeling ki, meant he had to do it the hard way through lots and lots of training.) His backstory reveals that he was a drug dealer for the Mafia before a Japanese ninja saved him from an attempted hit and convinced him to change his ways, leading to his reverence for Japanese culture.
  • Nagoriyuki isn't as gratuitous as Chipp, but definitely qualifies. He is a Nigeria-born Western Samurai who decided to become one during his extended stay in Japan, changed his name to a Japanese one, and his Trademark Favorite Food is onigiri. Amusingly enough, it's implied his master is Oda Nobunaga which would make him the Guilty Gearverse version of Yasuke.
• Tegiri Kalbur of Hiveswap is a parody of this trope, with frequent mention of alien Japanese (err, sorry, Eastern Alternian) culture. He wields a fake katana and his hive is full of anime merchandise.
• Sarah from HunieCam Studio is meant to be the kind of anime-obsessed girl that makes other people cringe and their skin crawl. Her vocabulary is filled with Gratuitous Japanese, she relates everything to her favorite shows, and insists other people call her Suki. HuniePop 2 literally describes her as a "filthy weeb".
• Ashley Taylor, a character exclusive to the English server of Magia Record, is a Californian living in the Japanese city the game is set in. She's a diehard J-fashion and anime fan that taught herself Japanese and is obsessed enough to actually became a magical girl in exchange for being able to go to Japan. Even when speaking English, she fawningly throws the word "kawaii," which she considers very Serious Business, around constantly.
• Metal Gear:
  • Otacon is a huge fan of the mecha genre is one of the main reasons he wanted to work in robotics. His nickname comes from a popular anime convention.
  • There's also Para-Medic, who loves everything about Japan, especially cinema. In the mid-1960s, no less. In Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots it's revealed she even has a Japanese assistant, whose mitochondrial DNA she used to create Snake and his brothers.
  • Played with by Revolver Ocelot, a Soviet (born technically French) agent who obsesses over American culture. He dresses like a cowboy, uses revolvers and named himself after an American wild cat. It may not surprise you to learn at the end of the third game that he's actually loyal to the US government, and his mother was American.
• Implied with Moira from Overwatch. Her third-person run animation has her holding her arms behind her a la Naruto, and her several of her sprays are references to scenes from a variety of anime.
  • But wait, there's more! Moira's ultimate, Coalescence, look similar to a Kamehameha, points like Jotaro, plots like Gendo, styles her hair like Hisoka, and seem to have regenerated her arm like Tetsuo.
• Persona:
  • The Silvermans from Persona 2 are obsessed with traditional Japanese culture, much to their daughter Lisa's chagrin.
  • The vaguely effeminate French exchange student Andre Laurent Jean Geraux (AKA, Bebe) from Persona 3.
• No More Heroes: Travis Touchdown is the very embodiment of this trope, down to his pink Magical Girl t-shirt and beam katana. That's right, he has a working Laser Blade that he won off an online auction. He uses it to kill stuff.
  • He started killing stuff, in fact, so that he would have something to do with his new working beam katana. (Turns out it's actually a bit more complicated.)
• Mr. Sunnyside from Sakura Wars: So Long My Love is obsessed with Japanese culture to the point of building a massive Japanese style mansion in the middle of Central Park in New York City!
  • Gemini Sunrise is a big fan of Japan, as well: she's particularly taken with stories of samurai, going so far as to train under a Japanese swordsman in America and wield a katana in combat.
• Inverted in Shadow Warrior (2013). Lo Wang is Japanese and obsessed with American music, comic books, films and TV.
• Valentine, from Skullgirls, is, according to Alex Ahad, a weeaboo.
• Wilson Fisk in Spider-Man (PS4) has a very large collection of Japanese art and artifacts in his office and personal museum. He started his business front by importing Japanese spices and even learned sumo techniques overseas. His collection of katanas and armor come from men who went to any lengths to protect what they cared about, which may be how Kingpin sees himself.
• Lionel Jones, a.k.a. Benjamin, from True Crime: New York City is this in spades with his zen garden, samurai armor, and katana.
  Marcus Reed: [wielding an AK-47] I ain't gonna get into no samurai shit with you, man. I want answers.
  Lionel Jones: [slices off the barrel of the AK-47] There's steel, and then there's my Shinto sword. Cuts through bone like butter.
• In Unpacking, the protagonist has a massive amount of anime posters and minifigs, manga, and books based on real Japanese novels (alongside general fantasy ones), implying that she's an otaku. In Stage 3, she even appears to be working on a costume of Sailor Venus.

Visual Novels

• Sonia Nevermind in Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is a princess from the European Micro Monarchy of Novoselic and a big fan of Japanese TV dramas and anime.
• Go! Go! Nippon! is a visual novel made in Japan specifically for the foreign market, and its main character (unnamed and featureless, since it's a stand-in for the player himself) is an otaku coming from an unnamed, but definitely Western, country.
• According to the supplemental material for Hatoful Boyfriend, Sakuya Le Bel has a fascination with ninja and samurai. Since he usually identifies more with the French side of his family, it comes off as this.
• Various Western characters in the Nasuverse have become preoccupied with anime.
  • Despite not actually being very fond of Japan itself, Lord El-Melloi II from Lord El-Melloi II Case Files has a well known preoccupation with Japanese video games, a quirk he adopted from his former Servant of the fourth Grail War, Alexander the Great. He was quite excited to learn that one of the students he was sponsoring was actually Japanese... until he discovered that she knew absolutely nothing about Akihabara or otaku culture. Rin Tohsaka was never that good with tech anyway, let alone otaku culture.
  El-Melloi II: Fuck! You're the worst Japanese person in the world!
  • In Fate/Grand Order, Blackbeard is portrayed as a sterotypical weeaboo with a fondness for cute girls, who talks in imageboard slang and is obsessed with doujinshi and anime.
  • Dr. Roman from the same game is an ardent fanboy of a Virtual Idol named Magi☆Mari and has an obsession with Japanese sweets. It's revealed that he is King Solomon as in the one from The Bible and he picked it up as a hobby when he was summoned to Japan in 2004.
  • Hilariously inverted and then further inverted again by Osakabehime in the same game. By default, she's a Japanese youkai who is a shut-in that likes to spout Engrish phrases. When she debuted in the global version, her quirk is translated into speaking in a bizarre weebspeak, mangling Japanese and English phrases at the same time, resulting in cringy phrases like "Gomenasorry", "Chotto a minute", "Yametekudastop", etc.
• Panzer IV of Panzermadels is German (and a Nazi), but she constantly peppers her dialogue with random Japanese phrases, and is the only one in the game to use honorifics. She also gets excited when she sees Japanese food in the supermarket.
  Erwin: She gets... a bit odd when she's around Japanese stuff.
• In the localization of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies, Simon Blackquill comes across as this, as the series is changed to take place in America, but he still styles himself like a Samurai, and frequently uses Japanese Honorifics in his speech.

Web Animation

• Slushi from Chikn Nuggit has great interest in anime, to the point of blowing money on anime merch the first chance she gets. She is also willing to give lengthy thesis statements about her favorite anime when asked, which Chee learned the hard way.
• The Teen Girl Squad short "4 Gregs" introduces us to "Japanese Culture Greg", who blurts out completely random japanese words in the middle of his sentences AKIHABARA!

Webcomics

• Dear Children gives us Gabe Hernandez, an Hispanic Shrinking Violet high school student and major anime fan from the Central Valley of California who moves to Hearthbrook in Essex County, Massachussetts, and promptly finds himself living a Cosmic Horror story.
• Bob Floy in Flying Suit Reiko. It's mentioned in the author's notes that him being an otaku was specifically so it'd make sense for him to know Japanese.
• Rufioh Nitram from Homestuck once lived in the forest with a group of "Lost Weaboos" that he led. Note, that as a space alien, the anime they watched and manga they read was actually from "East Beforus", and the tribe actually counted East Beforan Damara Megido as a member and Rufioh's girlfriend. Poor Rufioh.
• Look at the quote for Keigo:
  Gaijin talk like that so they don't get the shit kicked out of them for being disrespectful.
• Piro from Megatokyo, who learned Japanese from anime and video games (and therefore, given what he watches, sounds like a teenage girl).
• Muh Phoenix: Iron Man and Captain America are portrayed as two obsessive anime fanboys. Though they seem to be more into hentai rather than normal anime.
• Otaku Dad focuses on the titular Otaku Dad, a weeaboo from a rich family who builds a typical Japanese High School in the middle of the United States so his daughter can have the archetypical Japanese High School student experience.
• Despite providing the popular Alternate Name for this trope, "weeaboo" as shown in The Perry Bible Fellowship seems to be some kind of humiliating ritual hazing. The name comes from 4chan wordfiltering "wapanese"^note "White + Japanese" as in white people who try to act Japanese to "weeaboo", and it spread from there.
• Rain (2010): The titular character is fond of manga (and has been explicitly described as an Occidental Otaku by the author), and Gavin is into anime.
• Yume Hime's Laurie, who creates the titular alter-ego after becoming obsessed with Magical Girl anime as a little girl.

Web Original

• One common copy-and-paste thread on imageboards, which was later rediscovered by Tumblr, was written from the perspective of a fictional Occidental Otaku who had named himself "Ken-Sama". Much of the humor came from the fact that Ken-Sama absolutely butchered the Japanese language (introducing his post with the word "gomenasai") and held a poor understanding of genuine Japanese culture.
• One common label for people of this ilk that is employed on imageboards is weeaboo, a term derived from one of the strips from the Perry Bible Fellowship as a result of a word filter. The term has persisted since then.
• As Regular Car Reviews Mr. Regular explains, anyone who would willingly try to acquire a Toyota AE86 Sprinter Trueno has to be one of these, especially importing a right-hand drive one from Japan rather than a US-model Corolla GT-S; it's not very powerful, most of them are rusty and beaten-on after 30 years, and it features technology no newer than 1987. But it was the car from Initial D, so to that limited group of fans, it's worth it.
  "Weeaboo! Weeaboo weeaboo weeaboo weeaboo! ... You don't like this car, you like a cartoon!"
• In Shadowrun Storytime, 2D needs a private spot during the Neo-Tokyo job so he can start hacking and settles on a maid cafe. To ensure nobody bothers him, he enters as the absolute worst incarnation of this trope: Wearing a kimono (with nothing underneath), with a waifu bodypillow in one arm, a bag of nasty hentai in the other, while speak-screaming in the most broken, weeabo Japanese he can manage. The employees stay as far away from him as possible while the rest of the team mourns the damage 2D has done to America's reputation.
• Discussed in Filthy Frank's video "WEEABOOS", where he gives a satirical explanation of weeaboos, essentially, non-Japanese people who think that they are Japanese, even though they aren't and are obsessed with anime. His video goes so far as to show lots of rather... cringey images of weeaboos. He also jokingly mentions about a reverse weeaboo, in which an Asian person starts acting as if they are Westerners and do things like dress up as Cowboys. The video is hilarious and will give viewers a good laugh.

Western Animation

• Sarah G. Lato from The Amazing World of Gumball who not only reads manga in the original Japanese, but actually refers to herself as an otaku.
  Sarah: I'm an otaku, light could kill me.
• Dr. Krieger from Archer often shows signs of this, including having a collection of hentai envolving tentacles and a sentient holographic anime girl (who he created himself) as his girlfriend.
• Craig of the Creek:
  • The Elders of the Creek have several anime posters in their cave (though they're interested in plenty of other things as well). Mark's favorite anime is Sadboy Pilotgeddon.
  • The Ninja Kids consume exclusively Japanese media, or at least claim to. At one point, the other kids discover that one of their ilk enjoys reading Western superhero comics as well, and are disgusted.
• TQ Shrader from Fillmore! is one given the way he eats, dresses, and acts, but is a rare non-anime and manga fan example, as his interest in Japanese culture is more towards its traditions akin to the Western Otakus of the 19th and early 20th century as opposed to modern ones.
• Peter Potamus is depicted as one of these in Jellystone!; he obsessively collects figures, has a body pillow of a catgirl, and imitates Naruto during a wrestling event. He's desperate for friends and when Top Cat and his gang end up crashing at his house, he annoys them by wanting to watch OVAs and other such activities with them.
• Birch Small, who is an aspiring mangaka and the main character of the heavily Animesque series My Life Me. To a lesser extent, the rest of the cast.
• Rosie's Rules: Crystal might be an anime fan if this◊ Freeze-Frame Bonus in "Rosie's Seashell Museum" is anything to go by. In her notebook, she drew what appears to be a purple-haired Sailor Moon.
• Ronaldo from Steven Universe, especially on his blog, Keep Beach City Weird. He sometimes brings up weird anime he likes, calls his girlfriend his ohime-sama, and owns a $300 replica of the sword from Beautiful Girlfriend Satan (about an Otaku who sells his soul for a girlfriend), as well as a green plastic sword based on I Can't Believe My Stepdad's My Sword that he bought at a convention and which he tries to use as if it were a real weapon in the episode "Rocknaldo". He also owns a set of samurai-styled armor that he occasionally wears, even wearing it under his regular clothes at times and outright wearing it to a wedding (albeit a somewhat casual one).
• Teen Titans has Beast Boy, a non-Japanese manga addict, and Control Freak, an offbeat villain who's more of a Trekkie, but still tried to convert himself into a TV signal so he could become a character in his favorite anime one time... and briefly succeeded, until Beast Boy defeated him with his superior knowledge of TV trivia. Incidentally, in the Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo movie, it was shown that Beast Boy can't read Japanese, and doesn't even know what Otaku means.
• Panda in We Bare Bears. Loves anime, has a huge manga collection and has a body pillow called "Miki-chan" which sometimes is treated as a Companion Cube. He's also a fairly good artist, but draws everything in manga style.

Real Life

• This goes back a lot further than you might expect. In the late 19th century, following the Opening of Japan, western artists - particularly those from France and Britain - loved to emulate Japanese woodblock styles. In many ways, the Japonism of the 19th century helped inspire the modernism of the 20th century, which in turn gradually evolved into the present-day fascination with Japan in the 21st century.
  • In a similar vein, many 19th-century anthropologists were fascinated with the Ainu because they don't look quite like the Japanese. This was revived because of the discovery of haplogroup D and Kennewick man^note Friendly reminder to always treat every claim with a healthy dose of skepticism.
  • Vincent van Gogh had a self portrait called "Me as a Japanese Man" where he tries to emulate the hairstyle of the samurai.
  • Hilariously, Oscar Wilde himself wrote on this phenomenon just 30 years after Japan first opened its borders to the world, calling its fans obsessive without really knowing about this culture they love. As he put it, "The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them."
• In a way (though not nearly as pronounced as Weaboo-ism), this happened in reverse in Japan with regards to the Portuguese. After two traders landed by accident on the island of Tanegashima in the mid-1540s, a minor fascination with Portugal (and later, other European nations such as the Netherlands and England, prior to the closure of Japan by the Shogunate) developed. While a lot of modern loanwords in Japanese are derived from English, plenty of the more ingrained terms in the language are derived from Portuguese, and a good handful of traditionally Japanese foods (ironically the ones that are so praised by modern Weeaboos!) are decidedly Western in origin, having hailed from the Iberian peninsula, albeit with almost 500 years of adaptations and variations made from them.
• When hired by the emperor of Japan to design the Imperial Hotel, Frank Lloyd Wright felt somewhat bittersweet. He loved Japanese architecture but part of the requirement for the job was that it had to reflect western design as well. Ultimately, the emperor and several leading Japanese architects described his design as utterly brilliant.
• Rolf Anschütz, the man who opened the first Japanese restaurant in the German Democratic Republic. He even adopted a typical Japanese lifestyle in his private life. His restaurant became one of the most successful restaurants of East Germany.
• Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, an Irish author who moved to Japan and changed his name to Yakumo Koizumi. He is best known for his writings on Japanese legends and ghost stories.
• The English-language imageboard 4chan was originally designed for the posting of pictures and discussion of manga and anime, as the site was modelled on Japanese imageboards. Despite its later increase in popularity and infamy, much of its content still features otaku, anime and other Japanese cultural influences.
• Katagami — a style of printing using intricate, finely detailed paper stencils and used in clothing, graphic design, and architecture — was a major influence on Western art and design in the early 20th century and one of the primary inspirations for art deco.
• David Byrne's staging for Talking Heads' 1983 tour, as captured in Stop Making Sense, was inspired by Kabuki and Noh theater, including the famous big suit and the stagehands dressed in black visible to the audience.
• Frederik L. Schodt, anime and manga historian, personal friend of Osamu Tezuka, and translator of Japanese comics.
• Richard Sapper's design for the IBM (and later Lenovo) ThinkPad series of laptops was inspired by traditional black lacquered bento boxes.
• The "third wave" coffee movement in the West has drawn a lot of inspiration from Japanese kissaten culture, with the use of pour-over brewers, vacuum brewers and sourcing the highest-quality beans available.

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