The march of progress, Tokyo-style: Vacuum cleaners alert you when it's time to clean. Grandmothers in kimonos bow in gratitude to their automated banking machines. Workers on a Toyota assembly line in Toyoda City vote robot co-workers into the auto workers' union. Elevators stop where you tell them to.

A woman calls the Matsushita Denko kitchen design showroom to complain because her kitchen doesn't look like the model she saw in a virtual reality walk-through demonstration. "I was expecting more vivid oranges and pinks," she says. "Something more cartoony."

This blurring of man and machine, of reality and what comes in over the video display terminal, is spawning a generation of Japanese kids who are opting out of the conformity of Japan Inc. in favor of logging onto computer networks. They have been dubbed the Otaku by the Japanese media, from the most formal way of saying \o7 you \f7 in Japanese, the implication being that there is always some kind of technological barrier between people.

The Otaku came of age way back in the '80s with "prehistoric" 186 computers and Neanderthalic Atari Pac-Men as playmates. They were brought up on junk food and educated to memorize reams of context-less information in preparation for multiple-choice high school and college entrance exams. They unwound with ultra-violent slasher comic books or equally violent computer games. And then they discovered that by interacting with computers instead of people, they could avoid Japanese society's dauntingly complex Confucian web of social obligations and loyalties. The result: a generation of Japanese youth too uptight to talk to a bank teller, but who can go hell-for-leather on the deck of a personal computer or workstation.

First identified by the Japanese lifestyle magazine SPA!, about 200,000 hard-core Otaku are Japan's newest Information Age product. "These are kids unlike any who preceded them in Japan," Lap Top magazine editor Abiko Seigo says of the subculture of 16- to 25-year-olds. "Where they are coming from is a world where all the usual perspectives--like whether something is good or bad, smart or stupid, etc.--are irrelevant, because all of those things are judgments based on social relations. If you don't socialize, you don't have much sense of morality. The only thing that matters to them is data. How much do you have, and how much can you memorize."