http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/01/10/hunting-for-bambi-that-is-women/

There are tens of thousands of figure series in Japan. Most of them are normal depictions of the characters of manga, anime and videogames, or just plainly cute: Bleach, Rozen Maiden, Monster Hunter Pig, Dragon Quest Monsters.

Some play to otaku fetishes in a titillatingly cute way, like collections of girls in maid uniforms or anthropomorphic personifications of machinery: Costume Party Maid Cafe, Konami Mecha Musume.

And some are more definitely in the erotic genre, even more than the disincarnated torsos from the above post. Heisei Democracy is a weblog that features this last kind of fanservicey figures quite often.

While in Japan people of all ages and sexes are consumers of manga and anime (and there are quite innocent figure collections of pretty much every series you will have heard of, from Sailor Moon to Naruto — even figures of the high school Naruto alternate universe characters featured in one of the credits of the anime series), the otaku fringe, and specially the figure-obsessed otaku, are still disproportionally male and hormonally-overloaded, so a significant section of the figure market caters to this niche population. Hence the erotic themes.

http://www.huntingforbambi.com/

Not sure if that one has been posted before. You could apparently really buy the videos (not any more), but they were staged and people did raise genuine hell when it first appeared. Snopes covers the history and timeline of it.

From Wikipedia: Otaku (おたく or オタク?) is a Japanese term used to refer to people with obsessive interests, particularly anime and manga.

And

The term was popularized in the English speaking world in William Gibson’s 1996 novel Idoru, which has several references to otaku. In particular, the term was defined as ‘pathological-techno-fetishist-with-social-deficit’.

Sounds about right.

Plastic hip collectors? Now that’s odd!

Yep.