Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal 203 Cervelli. Exchanges 2022 9(3), pp. 203-225 Saved by the Nerd: Otaku and the space of family in Summer Wars Filippo Cervelli Dept. of East Asian Languages and Culture, SOAS, University of London, UK Correspondence: fc15@soas.ac.uk Twitter: @musashi023 ORCID: 0000-0002-5978-5602 Abstract This article analyses Hosoda Mamoru’s anime film Summer Wars (2009) through its rearticulation of the lonely male otaku. A highly debated issue in and outside of Japan, the otaku community of fans shares with nerds associations with obsessive interests, technology, and lack of social skills. Summer Wars provides a counternarrative to such discourses by setting up a story of interpersonal ties with an otaku at its centre. Furthermore, the film displaces this story to rural Japan, thus recontextualising the otaku’s typical highly technological urban environment by relocating one of them amidst a large family and historical continuity. Through this emblematic shift in space, in opposition to the city at multiple levels, Summer Wars takes a novel approach in representing the otaku’s potential for sociability, while still retaining the very features that may categorise him as an otaku; at the same time, the film uses otaku themes to create an imaginative reflection on the importance of interpersonal familial bonds, recuperated through the space of the native place. Keywords: nerd; otaku; anime; Summer Wars; Mamoru Hosoda; family Peer review: This article has been subject to a double-blind peer review process Copyright notice: This article is issued under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use and redistribution of the work provided that the original author and source are credited. You must give appropriate credit (author attribution), provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. https://creativecommons .org/licenses/by/4.0/