INTERVIEW With Independent VTubers: Chiaki Mitama

Award winning journalist, editor at Anime Feminist, diversity consultant, and biblically accurate Cat Goddess, Chiaki Mitama wears as many hats as they have heads. A great Bluesky follow if you want niche media hot takes, social commentary, and just a pinch of furry and/or queer spicy content; Chiaki’s streams feature chill games and loads of direct engagement with chat. Also, mahjong!

Chiaki was also instrumental in connecting Yatta-Tachi with many of the VTubers profiled in this series, and for that we’re extremely grateful to them. 

What’s the elevator pitch for you and your channel?

Hi we’re Chiaki Mitama, the purrberus catgoddess VTuber, the patron deity of all cat-based VTubers and notorious girlfriend of various pink-haired VTubers. Although we’re the world’s most sporadic streamers, we try to deliver a cozy and chill time.

Why do you like mahjong so much? What are the best mahjong games available to play right now?

Sunk cost fallacy. We’ve been playing this game since we were 5 years old. At this point, backing out would shatter our brand so much we would need to develop a whole new identity in life. Maybe even change names.

There’s a number of good mahjong clients available today, but they all come with pros and cons. Mahjong Soul is probably the most popular and casual client out there today. The game has some beginner friendly resources, and the characters are all cute. It’s a gatcha game, however, and its pity system is abysmal. If you just want to play mahjong, this isn’t a bad choice. If you have a gatcha addiction, don’t play this.

Riichi City is a direct rival to Mahjong Soul, and flashier. My problem with it is that you get two default characters and they’re both literal children. The bond outfit for the elementary schooler is a wedding dress. Yeah, no.

Critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV has a mahjong minigame that’s unlocked after completing the main quests up to Level 15 and gaining access to the Gold Saucer. You can access it for free on the game’s free trial (which includes the award winning expansion Heavensward as well as the not as acclaimed expansion Stormblood with no restrictions to playtime). It’s said the client was so good, one of the best mahjong players in Japan made a trial account just to play there. Unfortunately, the non-Japanese servers do not have the same player population that plays mahjong, and queue times in the American servers are hours long sometimes. I also just don’t like their tile designs.

Finally, there’s a paid Japanese mahjong service called Tenhou, which is a no-frills mahjong client with skilled players. It’s great, but you have to pay for it, and also it’s all in Japanese, so good luck with that.

Why’d you get into VTubing? What makes VTubing preferable to traditional streaming or “fleshtubing” for you?

We started VTubing to hang out with my girlfriends who are also VTubers. They are all mostly on hiatus now, so we’re just VTubing by ourself to maintain the community we’ve somehow built through American Truck Simulator streams. We have nothing against fleshtubing, but also we don’t care about streaming all that much anyway, we just want to be a three headed cat online.

How does VTubing fit into your life and broader career? Is it something you are trying to do full-time or is it closer to a side-hustle that bolsters your other pursuits?

It’s a hobby. Trying to pursue it as anything more than a hobby would require a level of investment we have no interest in doing. We know what it takes to be a full-time entertainer and it’s honestly not something that appeals to us. Professionally, we prefer working in the back more than as the talent anyway.

That said, we do work around the entertainment industry and we’ve long been critical of it. How we structure our brand, our presentation online is kind of a direct response to our criticism of the corporate and professional entertainment industry. We’re running a hobby channel because we specifically know that how we run it isn’t compatible with financial success.

What are the biggest issues in the VTubing space right now and, subsequently, how can the VTubing space improve?

I think there’s an elephant in the room with VTubing spaces, namely queer representation. Much like queerbaiting in mainstream media, VTubers often interact in seemingly-queer environments owed to Japanese idol-culture influences that emphasize a parasocial connection with fans. The assumed heteronormativity of male fans with female idols requires talents to not indicate heterosexual relationships in their lives to keep alive a dream that perhaps, one day, a presumed male fan would have a chance with the female talent. That, of course, then means much of the closest and most affectionate relationships VTubers are allowed to show online are their relationships to other same-gender VTubers, leading to shipping between them. Though these depictions are popular, it’s important to note that corporate rules and guidelines often require suppression of actual and genuine queer relationships.

This environment creates the appearance of a queer space, but in reality often denies opportunities for true inclusion. Corporate spaces cash in on that perception but would never allow true inclusion, because doing so would likely invite backlash and a financial burden. Hence, you can probably understand why there are so few openly trans corporate VTubers, and those who are, often operate under the radar.

And this is all not even mentioning the issue with racial diversity either, as corporate outfits now expand into the English sphere trying to emulate East Asian idol culture, where melanin is often a missing element in character designs by default.

Improving these issues would require a radical moment of self-reflection from corporations that will likely never happen. So the second best way to address this would be the recognition of the broader queer and BIPOC streaming community that is out there and recognizing that their work is just as entertaining and important than one with backing from a major talent agency.

Do you have any advice for people looking to start VTubing?

Just start streaming. You don’t need to spend hundreds and thousands to get started. All you need is a character you can put up as a reactive image and stream with that. See if that works out for you. Vroid Studio is also free now, there’s a lot of different avenues to start streaming these days. As long as you can yap for an hour and feel like you’re having fun, you can probably keep doing this until you find a niche. 

Also, if you’re trying to advertise what you’re doing, you need to be just a bit more annoying than you’d like to be when promoting your work.

Above all, make sure you’re enjoying what you’re doing. It’s not like this is your job or anything. If you want to make it your job, start applying to agencies and treat it like a job.