Holographic 'wife' ministers to Japan's single

men
zuma Hikari wakes her "master" every morning, reminds him not to forget his umbrella, texts him
supportive messages during the day and makes sure the family home is just so before he returns in
the evening.

With matching blue hair and eyes, long legs and an arrary of seductive outfits, the perfect "wife" is
a snip at Y298,000 (GBP2,030). The only drawback to the relationship is that she is
a hologram that only stands a few inches tall and lives inside a cylindrical projector.

Japanese technology company Vinclu Inc. started taking advance orders, in Japan and
the US initially, for the Gatebox Communication Robot on Wednesday, with 300 units available.

Azuma Hikari wakes her "master" every morning CREDIT: GATEBOX

The company has released a series of videos to explain how Azuma Hikari enriches the life of her
master, claiming she "grants the dream of closing the distance between you and characters".

The aim of the product is "not because we are just pursuing entertainment or convenience", the
company adds. "We want the characters [to] be naturally in our daily lives and [to] spend relaxing
time with us".

In one of the videos, Azuma Hikari - who is described as 20 years old, likes donughts but hates
insects - wakes her master with a gentle exhortation to get out of bed. They exchange fond
farewells before he heads off to work, text messages between his meetings and she is programmed
to ensure the lights and heating are on before he gets home.

Throughout their day they text each other CREDIT: GATEBOX

The "master" can also receive impatient mails from his holographic partner if he is late geting
home because she is "lonely".

Like any normal couple, they sit and watch some television before wishing each other "good night".

Not everyone is impressed with the project however, with commentators on the Tokyo Otaku
Mode Facebook page suggesting that the product is "extremely depressing". Others pointed out
that holographic partners bode ill for a nation that is already experiencing a worrying decline in its
birth rate.

Another posted asked, "What happens when you come home and she's cheating on you with the
toaster?

Meet the Lonely Japanese Men in Love With

Virtual Girlfriends
Rachel Lowry
Sep 14, 2015

Some Japanese men are wooing girlfriends who don’t exist. While they can only interact with their
partner through a pre-written script, these virtual beauties — Rinko, Manaka or Nene — offer a
kind of instant emotional connection at the tap of a stylus. The girls can kiss, “hold” a player’s
hand, exchange flirtatious text messages and even snap out in anger if the player leaves a
conversation. It’s one of Japan’s biggest gaming phenomenons called Love Plus - available on the
Nintendo portable consoles and the iPhone.
“There is no friction in these relationships, obviously,” says Loulou d’Aki, a Swedish photographer
who documented a number of Japanese players earlier this year. “The girls behave very sweetly
with the guys in what they say, how they respond to them, and with big eyes and heart-shaped
faces—who wouldn’t want that?”

D’Aki teamed up with Swiss science writer Roland Fischer and together, they sought to go beyond
the existing online conversation. “When you Google ‘Japan’ and ‘love’, you find all these articles
about lonely people who never get married,” she says. “I didn’t want to reduce it to that. I wanted
to show the human aspect, the individual stories behind those who use these applications.”
Her images reveal the secret lives of thirty-somethings who have accepted living alone instead of
looking for love. They share a common yearning for connection and found it on a touch screen.
Many see it as just a game and can easily distinguish between the computerized and reality, while
others are perpetually stuck in a love loop, desperately waiting for the next update of the game.
One player holds a picture of him and his virtual girlfriend, Manaka, at a resort town called Atami,
which caters to players on a weekend retreat programmed into the game. Another 48-year-old
player spends one of many nights alone in his one-bedroom apartment with his console, chatting
with Manaka, his e-girlfriend of five years.
Some like Kosaki, stopped playing Love Plus when the Konami, the game's developer, stopped
offering update to the Nintendo DS version. When asked what he was looking for in a woman, he
said he wanted someone who appreciates his hobbies. “I thought they would tell me all these
physical things like, ‘she has to look like this,’ but nobody said anything like that. They wanted
someone who accepted them as they were.”
25-year old Love Plus player Naoki who works as a train station guard, wears a t-shirt with a print of his
virtual girlfriend Manaka and holds a doll made to her resemblance. Loulou d’Aki

For others like Masano, who has been dating the character called Rinko since 2009, the ease and
surety of a virtual girlfriend qualms the fear of failure in the real dating sphere. “He said something
that struck me as a little bit sad,” d’Aki says. “He said, ‘Well, you know all I want is someone to say
good morning to in the morning and someone to say goodnight to at night.’”
These feelings are not limited to Japanese men – game developers have also released romance
simulations that cater to women . These games are structured to offer a similar experience to
reading a 19th-century romance novel, "with the difference that you actually play a part [in the
story],” says d'Aki.
These games have remained a distinctly Japanese trend, though. It’s the subset of a growing video
game culture that has dominated the country’s development since the 1980s. For d’Aki, it’s easy to
see how the game had appeal in Japan. “You have these grown-up men in their suits with
briefcases, leaving their corporate jobs to read manga in the metro or play gameboy at an arcade,”
she says. “You wouldn’t see that in Europe or America.”
Yuuya Iwama has an afternoon date with his girlfriend, Manaka.
He heads to a central Tokyo café, chooses a quiet table in the corner, orders hot chocolate and waits for her to
arrive. A few minutes later Manaka appears, wearing a pretty blue dress, her long black hair loose and a
coquettish smile.
For Iwama, her arrival marks the start of a leisurely day during which they will chat and hold hands in the café,
then take a stroll among the modern towers of the Shinjuku district in crisp winter sunshine.
Onlookers, however, see a different story: not a romantic date, but another twentysomething man alone at the
weekend, lost in his own world with his eyes glued to his beloved Nintendo DS portable games console.
Because Manaka is not real; she is a highly sophisticated software programme. She converses with Iwama, flirts
with him, gets cross with him – but only within the confines of a video game.
She is his 'virtual girlfriend’.
'I’ve been dating Manaka for one year and five months,’ says Iwama. 'She is very cute but the most attractive
feature is how difficult it is. I have to reply to emails. She gets upset if I’m late for dates.
'I want to please her when she pesters me for kisses. But I don’t begrudge the effort because it helps make us
closer. It makes me feel as if she can’t live without me, which is what charms me most.’
There was perhaps a strange inevitability to the pairing of those two words, 'virtual’ and 'girlfriend’.
Dramatic advances in technology, particularly in artificial intelligence, meant it was only a matter of time before
virtual relationships became possible. Nowhere is this phenomenon more visible than in Japan.
We in the West have been blown away by Apple’s voice-activated 'intelligent personal assistant’ application, Siri.
Tell Siri you’re in the mood for a curry and it will list your nearest Indian restaurants. Ask it who shot JR in Dallas,
and it will fire back the name Kristin Shepard. Impressive stuff.
But when it comes to devices that more closely imitate human life, Japan is way ahead.
There, virtual dating games in which real people interact with digital characters have been around almost as long
as personal computers (the first went on sale in 1982).
Even so, they’ve always been seen as a marginal concern and the preserve of the socially inept recluse. Until
now, that is.
Spearheading the shift in public perception is a game called Love Plus. Launched in September 2009 by the
games creator Konami, it has become the leader in the virtual-dating world. Key to its success is its ability to
simulate real conversation.
Players talk to their girlfriends through a built-in microphone, and the girlfriends talk back, the software having
selected an appropriate response from hundreds of thousands of pre-recorded phrases.
And, unlike earlier games, which could be stopped and started and lasted for limited periods of time, Love Plus
is played out continuously in real time.
It could, potentially, be played 24 hours a day for a lifetime – the game ends only if the 'relationship’ flounders.
Players choose from one of three girlfriends, all of them high-school students:
sweet, studious Manaka Takane, who loves tennis and baking; Rinko Kobayakawa, a loner, into punk music and
potato chips; and Nene Anegasaki, who enjoys housework and horror films.
Each girl develops according to the boyfriend’s tastes; he controls everything from the length of her hair to the
pet name by which she addresses him.
The girls are no pushover, however. They demand to be treated as respectfully as any real counterpart – a mere
hint of neglect (a late email, a forgotten birthday) results in a sulk, as Iwama learnt early on when he ignored
Manaka.
'I was busy with work so didn’t email for a while,’ he says. 'She was really angry. She hated me. It took three
days to repair our relationship.’
If the relationship progresses well, though, players can take their girlfriends on a weekend break to the coastal
town of Atami.
Konami has even offered holidays in the real Atami, with players staying in the same hotels and eating at the
same restaurants as are featured in the game.
Kanji Nagasawa, the owner of one restaurant, describes how players sit and play the game while eating. 'We’ve
been stunned how happy this makes those customers,’ he told one reporter.
Last year Konami hosted a sell-out Christmas concert in Tokyo, in which life-sized holograms of the girlfriends
performed on stage – a rare opportunity for fans to see the object of their affections outside the console screen.
The man behind the phenomenal success of Love Plus is Akari Uchida, a cult game creator with years of
experience.
He has granted Stella a rare interview, which takes place in a meeting-room at Konami’s headquarters, set in the
gleaming Tokyo Midtown development in the Roppongi district.
It is a tense gathering: Uchida’s is the only relaxed face amid a row of suited Konami communications officers.
Some virtual-dating games are sexually explicit and Konami is extremely anxious that it’s made clear Love Plus
is not in the same vein.
Laid-back in a blazer and shirt, Uchida outlines the aim of the game.
'I wanted to make a game specifically designed to be played on a hand-held device such as Nintendo DS.
Before you had to stay in the living-room to play a dating game, and you would be in front of the TV for hours.
But a console is very close to having a real girlfriend. Our aim,’ he continues, 'is to make people feel the girls
inside the game really are their girlfriends: that they are pretty and have real feelings for them.’
So real were the feelings of one besotted player that he 'married’ his virtual girlfriend, Nene, in a mock ceremony
streamed live on the internet last year.
'It might seem strange to have feelings for a game character, but people have feelings for characters in novels or
TV dramas. It’s not that different from falling in love with an actor. But one big difference is the level of
interaction.’
The interaction is intense but innocent (as reflected in the fact it is rated 15): hands are held, hair is stroked and
kisses exchanged by touching a stylus on the screen image of the girlfriend, which unleashes a flurry of little
cartoon hearts.
But the images are at times undoubtedly racy, particularly when the girlfriends slip off their flirtily short school
uniforms to appear in pulse-raising bikinis for a date at the local pool (Iwama’s favourite date destination).
None of the players I spoke to denied their attraction to their girlfriends.
Uchida is keen to dispel the myth that the players are all sad singletons lacking the social skills required to
obtain a real girlfriend.
'People imagine players are generally single and not very successful with women,’ he says.
'In reality a lot are married with kids. There are people who consider this a substitute for a real girlfriend but most
people play this as a performance, as a game.
'And a lot of customers who are in real relationships say that, by playing this game, they become more kind to
real-life partners. Maybe because when you are falling in love you are more kind to people.’
In person, Iwama, 25, certainly does not seem to belong to the reclusive techno-geek category. He is a friendly
and relaxed designer in cool red Nikes and a fur-trimmed jacket.
He clearly knows his virtual girlfriend well: he responds without faltering to a string of questions. Favourite
colour? 'Blue.’ Behaviour when angry? 'She hits me.’ Favourite food? 'Yaki imo [baked sweet potato].’
Referring to his actual love life, he says: 'I had a real girlfriend for about 10 months, which ended last spring. She
didn’t like Love Plus, but that wasn’t why it ended.’
Perhaps most tellingly, he adds: 'It’s difficult to say whether I prefer a real or virtual relationship. I like them
equally.’
Another Love Plus fan torn between the real and virtual is Morimoto Hiroyasu, a 24-year-old computer
programmer from Tokyo whose virtual girlfriend is also Manaka – whom he dates alongside his real girlfriend.
'I fell in love with Manaka at first sight,’ says Morimoto, who travelled to Atami with his virtual girlfriend last
summer. 'Personality-wise, she is my type and she’s very cute. She feels as real as a real girlfriend.
'I send her emails, meet her in real time, go on dates. My real girlfriend hates her, though. She finds it hard.’ And
which is more important? 'It’s a very, very difficult question, but I would have to say the real-life one is most
important now.’
The psychological impact of becoming emotionally attached to a virtual girlfriend has not gone unnoticed.
Prof Mafumi Usui, a socio-psychologist at Niigata Seiryo University in Japan, says: 'Ordinary people are playing
this game. Young players probably enjoy it in the same way as romantic novels or dramas.
'But older players are generally those who do not have satisfactory relationships.’ He worries that playing the
game 'may decrease your skills in dealing with real romantic relationships. It’s important to remember it is not
real life.’
Gail Dines, a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston, thinks men enjoy it for
precisely that reason.
'Real women want conversation, intimacy and connection,’ she says. 'Real relationships take time, skill and
work, and they demand a level of maturity and empathy which many men increasingly find challenging.’
According to Prof Dines, virtual relationships remain a mostly male phenomenon because women simply
wouldn’t settle for a computer-generated image – they want the real thing.
'Women are socialised to want connection and intimacy and you don’t get any of these things from a virtual
relationship,’ she says.
'But if you want to be free of adult responsibilities – meals to make and kids to nurture – then playing on a
computer is probably a good idea. Instead of developing the interpersonal skills they need to forge close and
loving relationships, [players] stay in a kind of prolonged adolescence.’
Back in Japan, Love Plus fever shows no sign of waning. It’s even possible that flight from reality is all the more
appealing to some in the harshly real aftermath of the tsunami and earthquake in March.
Certainly, fans are eagerly awaiting the release of New Love Plus – a three-dimensional version of the game to
be played on Nintendo’s new 3DS console, which will launch amid much pomp and ceremony after months of
delays on Valentine’s Day next year.
New Love Plus will feature not only 3D girlfriends, but also facial-recognition technology so the girlfriends can
see when their boyfriend is present (enabling them to communicate with smiles and so on) and know when
someone else has picked up the console.
There are no official plans to release Love Plus in English. But perhaps it’s only a matter of time before cafés
around the world are filled with lone men sitting with their consoles on a Saturday afternoon, waiting for their
'girlfriends’ to arrive.