On Oct. 23, publisher Sanseido did what it would usually do for an upcoming title: It uploaded the basic details of the book, along with sample pages, to its website. It then issued a press release for it, the Otaku Yogo Jiten Daigenkai, or Otaku Dictionary Daigenkai, compiled by students of Nagoya College and headed by Japanese literature researcher Yoshiko Koide.
By that afternoon, netizens were up in arms.
“There is not even a bare-minimum level of correctness that a publicly published book should have,” said one X user in a post that has been viewed 10,000 times. Another posted, “Publishing such subjective, dōjinshi (self-published magazine)-quality work and calling it a ‘dictionary’ is just going to decrease the credibility of Sanseido so they should really stop.”