Into The Arms of Dolls: Japan's Declining Fertility Rates, The 1990s Financial Crisis and The (Maternal) Comforts of The Posthuman

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.
net/publication/309413181
Into the arms of dolls: Japan’s declining fertility rates, the 1990s ﬁnancial crisis
and the (maternal) comforts of the posthuman
Article in Social & Cultural Geography · September 2016

DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2016.1228112
CITATIONS READS
12 3,617
1 author:
Heidi J. Nast
DePaul University
51 PUBLICATIONS 1,385 CITATIONS
SEE PROFILE
Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:
Pet-i-filia; the geographical contradictions of human reproduction (fembots, sex dolls, commercial surrogacy, organ mining of the poor) View project
Critical race, queer, Marxian and psychoanalytic theories View project
All content following this page was uploaded by Heidi J. Nast on 19 November 2017.
The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Social & Cultural Geography
ISSN: 1464-9365 (Print) 1470-1197 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rscg20
Into the arms of dolls: Japan’s declining fertility

rates, the 1990s financial crisis and the (maternal)
comforts of the posthuman
Heidi J. Nast
To cite this article: Heidi J. Nast (2016): Into the arms of dolls: Japan’s declining fertility rates,
the 1990s financial crisis and the (maternal) comforts of the posthuman, Social & Cultural
Geography, DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2016.1228112
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1228112
Published online: 26 Sep 2016.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 77
View related articles
View Crossmark data
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rscg20
Download by: [DePaul University], [Professor Heidi J Nast] Date: 13 January 2017, At: 17:54
SOCIAL & CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1228112
Into the arms of dolls: Japan’s declining fertility rates, the

1990s financial crisis and the (maternal) comforts of the
posthuman
Heidi J. Nast
International Studies Department, DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA
ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Japan’s 1990s financial crisis proved psychically traumatic for many Received 13 June 2015
men, their trauma exacerbated by decades of falling fertility rates Accepted 21 July 2016
and related sociospatial attenuation. The crisis disrupted a range of
KEYWORDS
heteronormative practices that had stabilized post-war gendered Japan; sex dolls; political
identities, especially marriage and stay-at-home motherhood. economy; psychoanalysis
Some men consequently began seeking comfort in the company
of youthful-looking, large-format, hyper-feminized commodity- MOTS CLÉS
dolls of which there are two psychical kinds: ‘infantile’ dolls used Japon; poupées sexuelles;
largely by precariously positioned young men for comfort and play; économie politique;
and expensive ‘Oedipal’ silicone sex dolls associated with Japanese psychoanalyse
salarymen whose jobs had become less secure. Both have worked PALABRAS CLAVE
emotionally for two reasons: dolls are evocative of the maternal – the Japón; muñecas sexuales;
basis of intersubjective (be) longing/Eros; and the dolls are owned, economía política;
ownership allowing pleasure and control more securely to intertwine. psicoanálisis
Following the oil crisis and the de-industrialization that followed,
men in racially and economically privileged terrain across the US
and Europe turned to similar kinds of commodity dolls for comfort,
if for differently sexed and racialized reasons. Japanese men’s doll
markets therefore speak to certain particular and general conditions
of masculinity and geopolitical economic trauma.
Dans les bras de poupées: baisse du taux de fertilité du

Japon, crise financière des années 1990 et réconforts
(maternels) des post-humains
RÉSUMÉ
La crise financière du Japon dans les années 90 s’est avérée
traumatique psychiquement pour de nombreux hommes, leur
traumatisme étant exacerbé par des décennies de baisse du taux de
fertilité et l’atténuation socio spatiale qui y est associée. La crise a
bousculé un ensemble de pratiques hétéronormatives qui avaient
stabilisé les identités des genres, surtout le mariage et la maternité
au foyer. C’est ainsi que les hommes ont commencé à chercher le
réconfort en compagnie de poupées de consommation grand-format,
d’apparence jeune et hyper féminines, dont il existe deux catégories
psychiques : les poupées « infantiles » utilisées principalement par
des jeunes hommes en situation précaire pour le réconfort et le jeu et
les poupées sexuelles «oedipiennes », chères et en silicone associées
CONTACT Heidi J. Nast hnast@depaul.edu

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 H. J. NAST
aux Japonais salariés. Les deux ont fonctionné émotionnellement

pour deux raisons : les poupées sont évocatrices du maternel –
fondement de l’Eros / désir (ou appartenance) intersubjectif et les
poupées sont possédées, la possession permettant de mêler le
plaisir et le contrôle plus solidement. Après la crise du pétrole et la
désindustrialisation qui ont suivi, les hommes de conditions raciales
et économiques privilégiées à travers les Etats-Unis et l’Europe se
sont tournés vers des poupées sexuelles d’un genre similaire pour
y trouver le réconfort, même si c’était pour des raisons sexuées et
raciales différentes. Les marchés de poupées pour les Japonais parlent
donc à certaines conditions particulières et générales de masculinité
et à un traumatisme géopolitique économique.
En los brazos de las muñecas: la disminución de la tasa

de fertilidad en Japón, la crisis financiera de 1990, y el
consuelo (maternal) de lo post-humano
RESUMEN
La crisis financiera de 1990 en Japón demostró ser psíquicamente
traumática para muchos hombres, cuyo trauma ha sido exacerbado
durante décadas por la caída de la tasa de fecundidad y la atenuación
socio-espacial relacionada. La crisis interrumpió una serie de prácticas
hetero-normativas que había estabilizado las identidades de género
de la posguerra, especialmente el matrimonio y la maternidad en
el hogar. Como consecuencia, algunos hombres comenzaron a
buscar consuelo en la compañía de muñecas con aspecto juvenil,
de gran formato e híper-feminizadas, de las cuales hay dos tipos
psíquicos: muñecas ‘infantiles’, que son utilizadas en gran medida por
hombres jóvenes precariamente posicionados para jugar y encontrar
consuelo; y costosas muñecas sexuales de silicona ‘edípicas’, asociadas
con los hombres japoneses asalariados. Ambas han funcionado
emocionalmente por dos razones: las muñecas evocan el sentido
maternal — la base del (pertenecer) anhelo/eros intersubjetivo; y las
muñecas les pertenecen a estos hombres, lo cual permite entrelazar
el placer y el control de una forma más segura. Luego de la crisis
del petróleo y la des-industrialización subsiguiente, los hombres en
lugares racial y económicamente privilegiados en los EE.UU. y Europa
recurrieron a tipos de muñecas similares en busca de consuelo, acaso
por diferentes razones sexuales y raciales. Por lo tanto, los mercados
japoneses masculinos de muñecas denotan ciertas condiciones
particulares y generales de la masculinidad y del trauma económico
geopolítico.
Airdoll Nozomi: It seems the world is the summation of others and yet we neither know nor
are told that we will fulfill each other. (Monologue from Airdoll, Dir. Hirokazu Koreeda, 2009)
Introduction
During the early-1990s financial crisis in Japan, when the structure of regular employment
for men weakened for the second time since the 1973 oil crisis, a number of Japanese man-
ufacturers began producing what I argue were two distinct kinds of female dolls for adult
men. The first kind included life-sized hugging pillows imprinted with pornographic anime/
manga figures (dakimakura) as well as large-format ball jointed dolls (BJDs). While BJDs were
typically an order of magnitude more expensive than dakimakura, both were considerably
less expensive than the second kind, life-sized sex dolls made of silicone, its US precursor
SOCIAL & CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY 3
launched a year earlier in California (Nast, in press). Whereas young men known as otaku
were the ones most heavily invested in dakimakura and BJDs, sex dolls were associated with
salarymen. Both kinds of dolls, I contend, held important unconscious connections to the
maternal, whether in terms of nonsexualized forms of comfort and play (the infantile) or in
terms of heteronormatively directed desires for sex (the Oedipal), respectively.
Over the ensuing decades, adult male markets for infantile and Oedipal dolls expanded.
Japanese BJDs could now be found in retailing sites across the US, Asia and Europe. (In the
US, one could arguably include Bronies (My Little Pony ‘bro’s’) and the retailing of large-scale
cribs and diapers for grown men.) Likewise, demand for silicone sex dolls in both the US and
Japan intensified. By 2015, sex dolls were being made in 22 plants across seven nations, the
vast majority of these located in the US, Japan and China – the world’s three largest econo-
mies (Nast, in press). Within each country, however, the demography of consumption has
differed. In the US and Japan, it has been primarily racially and economically advantaged
men who have invested in both kinds of doll markets, that is, those who had the most to
lose after the oil crisis and the concomitant rise of finance capitalism. The attendant upheav-
als produced not only conscious dilemmas about livelihoods and survival, but unconscious
dilemmas about egoic identity and Eros, both of which are in psychoanalytic terms rooted
in sexual difference and maternal attachment (Marcuse, 1964; Nast, in press).
It was the unconscious unsettling of certain men’s privileged positions, I contend, that
produced desires for maternally oriented distraction, comfort, and play and/or desires for
heteronormative (oedipalized) feminine ideals, despite the latter’s increasing obsolescence.
Adult men’s dolls, in other words, supported psychical stability during times of bodily egoic
vulnerability, a provisioning of care that speaks to the central importance of the maternal
in navigating uncertainty.
My argument depends on a particular psychoanalytic-geopolitical economic way of think-
ing about the commodity doll, one that gives primacy to sexual difference, affect and the
unconscious.1 I locate men’s desires for doll comfort in Japan and elsewhere in the accumu-
lating instabilities effected through the abstractions of private property, industrialization
and what I refer to as the machine (Nast, 2015). The material and psychical force of these
latter have simultaneously made for unstable hierarchical formations of masculinity and
uniformly falling, if geographically uneven patterns of, total fertility rates (TFRs). In Japan,
fertility declines since the 1990s have been propelled by a growing refusal, largely by women,
of normative marriage-related expectations (Matsui, Suzuki, Eoyang, Akiba, & Tatebe, 2010;
Rosenbluth, 2007).
The comfort that the commodity dolls bring to men is therefore complex, drawn from
two distinct streams of affective belonging. The first has to do with the fact that the infantile
doll, as in most western contexts, has served transitional functions, that is, as an object that
psychically stands in for, but allows some distance from, the maternal (c.f. Napier, 2010). The
second draw of the commodity doll has to do with its propertied status, which makes for a
competing and ontologically distinct kind of (market-mediated) belonging. The doll-com-
modity therefore harnesses two powerful if incommensurable affective streams of belonging:
the maternal, as related to Eros and a particular kind of intersubjectivity, historically tied to
biological reproduction; and the commodity form, tied to self-pleasuring ownership and
consumption – whether such consumption takes place individually or collectively in groups
(Marcuse, 1964). Given the doll’s direct formal lineage to the maternal, the comforts sought
from its purchase assume affective proportions different from those to be had in other
commodity kinds.
4 H. J. NAST
While there are many interesting comparisons to be made between doll markets in the
US and Japan, I focus on Japan because of the range and intensity of commodity doll culture
in Japan, one tied to a particularly rich and varied doll-related past (Pate, 2008).2 I also focus
on Japan because the intensity of its population decline and the post-war importance of
the mother have made issues surrounding reproduction and the maternal more politically
and economically salient than in the US and China (‘Ministry to push,’ 2013; Mori & Scearce,
2010).
The material and affective circumstances of doll use in contemporary Japan, then, not
only sheds light on the maternal nature of desires-for (be)longing, play and comfort –
whether infantile or Oedipal; but on why certain adult men in privileged arenas across east
Asia, the US and Europe have similarly come to rely on dolls for access to regressive if not
archaic ideals of maternal love.
My analysis is inspired by and contributes to several subdisciplinary strands of geograph-
ical thought. Perhaps most importantly, this paper builds on psychoanalytically informed
scholarship in geography that examines how spatiality and subjectivity make one in relation
to the unconscious. While such inquiry started several decades ago, it has since come into
its subdisciplinary own (e.g. Kingsbury & Pile, 2014). At a finer grained level, my work on love
dolls (infantile or Oedipal) points to what I hope will become a greater analytical concern
within psychoanalytic geographies: how Unconscious traumas and investments surrounding
sexual difference and the maternal have been inflected and navigated racially and territorially
(e.g. Healy, 2010; Nast, 2000, 2015; Sioh, 2010).
This work has additionally benefited from efforts made by queer theorists in geography
to bring sex and sexuality more broadly and explicitly into geographical question, whether
normative or not. In so doing, ‘queer geographers’ have shown how sex operates across
scales.3 My interests build on queer interventions not only by making the Unconscious a part
of the sex and sexuality picture, but in showing how race has been central to how sexual
difference operates in western and nonwestern contexts. In arguing that capitalist prof-
it-seeking is fundamentally about the geographically uneven and masculinist alienation of
the maternal, moreover, this paper brings sexual difference and the Unconscious to bear on
mainstream political and economic geography, domains where sex is often fetishized and/
or addressed obliquely in terms of ‘gender’ and/or ‘reproduction’.4
I begin my arguments about commodity doll love by placing Japan’s population losses
since the Second World War front and centre, subsequently examining how Japan’s fiscal
crisis of the 1990s changed the impetus behind the nation’s falling TFRs and inspired
doll-making for men. The fall of TFRs after the financial crisis was linked to the demise of
Japan’s salaryman – a male worker guaranteed life-long firm-based employment (Dasgupta,
2012; ‘Sayonara, salaryman,’ 2008). The weakening of his position saw social dislocation and
strain, expressed partly in declining marriage and fertility rates. I then review two of the most
dramatic manifestations of masculine trauma that followed the crisis, adult male suicide and
the hermitic withdrawal of many young men into parental homes and private bedrooms.
By comparison, the crisis improved many women’s economic lives. More women began
entering the formal workforce and opting-out of marriage and having children (Kumagai,
2012; Rosenbluth, 2007).
The last half of the paper examines how the Japanese economy came to be partly sus-
tained by men’s growing social and commercial investments in female dolls and the new
spaces that followed. These investments have shored up rather than dissolve
intersubjectivity’s alienation by providing new spaces for (and of ) communal consumption.

At best, the dolls provide anthropomorphized sites that can be regularly treated to various
goods and services ‘as if’ they are human, even as they fail to reproduce the new mouths
that capitalist markets want to feed. I round out the paper by talking about the fembotici-
zation of sex dolls, in particular. This has involved technologizing the (Oedipalized) doll body
to make its care functions more exacting and ‘real’.
The contradictions of rising industrial efficiency, geopolitical economic instability and
falling fertility rates point partly to the absurdity of a schema that relies on machines to
increase productivity whilst simultaneously supplanting the (maternal) means by which
labouring bodies are made and the (waged) bodies needed to consume what is produced.
The doll-commodity thus points both to the multiscalar nature of the processes involved in
attenuating intersubjectivity and how certain masculinities have weathered neoliberally
induced economic trauma.
In manufacturing heteronormative ideals in cloth, resin, silicone and plastic, the repro-
ductive contradictions of machinic efficiency and instability are made more evident and
deepen (Nast, 2015). It is these reproductive contradictions that film director Koreeda (2009)
explores in Airdoll, a manga story-based film set in contemporary love-torn Tokyo about the
life and times of an inflatable sex doll, Nozomi, and her owner, Hideo. Koreeda uses Nozomi
as a device for pointing not only to how intersubjectivity has been depleted by machinic
life and the commodity form, but how the doll – as the embodiment of a lost maternal – has
come to assume poignancy in telling alienation’s story.
Global declines in TFRs

TFRs have declined worldwide for decades and, in early industrial countries, for well over
100 years (Figure 1).5 The earliest declines in TFRs had largely to do with labour’s mechani-
zation – and, consequently, the lessening need for children (as future labour) – along with
the rise of a middle class that has had growing interests in consumption, education and
leisure. In agrarian nations, the decline has been less dramatic due largely to the enormous
labour needs required in nonmechanized farming. In the 1980s and 1990s, the large-scale
structural reasons for decreasing TFRs world-wide broadened to include, amongst other
variables, intensified regional poverty (former Soviet countries), restrictive state mandates
(China) and/or gendered and forced migration. By 2013, 89 out of 196 countries were esti-
mated to have TFRs below the replacement level of 2.1, roughly 45% of all nation-states.6
The steepest declines have mostly taken place in the wealthiest industrial and post-industrial
nations as well as in former communist countries that adopted industrial capitalist accumu-
lation strategies in the 1980s and 1990s, including China and nations of the former USSR.
As a result, global population numbers are expected to peak around 2100 and fall thereafter,
the numbers buoyed by population growth in nine of the world’s poorest nations (UN, 2015).
In the wealthiest neoindustrial and post-industrial contexts, today, children (as future labour)
are for the most part no longer as essential to productive economic life as they once were:
they are not used in farming, nor are large numbers needed for industry; in many cases,
children have become optional (c.f. D’Emilio, 1993, 2006; Nast, 2014; Senior, 2014; Zelizer,
1985).
In Japan, the decline in TFRs has been comparatively extreme. In contrast to other wealthy
industrial and post-industrial nation-states in Western Europe and the US, TFRs began falling
6 H. J. NAST
Figure 1. Decline in total fertility rates globally (children per woman) from 1950–1955 to 2050–2055.
just a few years after the Second World War rather than in the 1960s. Consequently, Japan’s
TFR is lower than those of its economic counterparts. In 2001, its population peaked at 127.7
million, a number forecasted to fall to 89.33 million by 2050 at which time nearly 41% of the
population will be aged 65 or older (NIPSSR [National Institute of Population and Social
Security Research], 2011; Smil, 2007). The advanced nature of Japan’s population decline
points to two of the most profound reproductive contradictions of capitalism currently unfold-
ing in the wealthiest of nations. The first is the search for ever-higher profits through greater
machinic efficiencies and labour’s devaluation and replacement leading to the question of
who capitalism can count on in future to consume. While the rising number of elderly persons
provides considerable opportunities for future investment, this demographic fix is unsus-
tainable in the long term (Mason & Lee, 2006). The second contradiction has to do with the
accelerated flow of capital that has accompanied falling TFRs, a result of foreign direct invest-
ment’s quickening and expansion, the heightening of worker migration (at all income-levels),
and a proliferation and intensification of virtual transactions. Such acceleration, along with
the first contradiction, has led to the attenuation and falling spatial density and fixity of familial
and community relationships and place-bound social attachments. The sociospatial losses
and alienation that have followed have raised real questions about who there is to love. While
many scholars have examined the conundrum of ageing global populations, few scholars
have looked at the affective implications of falling relational densities amongst bodily
(vs. virtual) humans or the radically geographically uneven nature of the declines – both of
which have enormous implications for future and present formations of subjectivity and
love, world-wide (e.g. Bagchi, 2006; Fishman, 2012; Imam, 2013; Schermer & Pinxten, 2013;
Srivastava, 2009; Vettori, 2010).7
Male trauma and the 1990s: suicide, seclusion, withdrawal

The economic uncertainty, rising unemployment and changing nature of work that began
in the 1990s proved devastating to Japanese men (Kumagai, 2012). From 1990 to 2000 to
2009, male suicide rates climbed from 20.4 (out of 100,000/year) to 35.2 to 36.2, respectively,
most of the men middle-aged and unemployed (Bremner, 2015; Kuroki, 2010; WHO, 2010).
Suicide rates for women, meanwhile, remained low and relatively constant. The suicide rate
for young men (between the ages of 20 and 39) likewise began climbing, a reflection of the
fact that university graduates were finding it increasingly difficult to secure regular
(salaryman) employment (Chen, Cheong Choi, Mor, Sawada, & Sugano, 2012; Kosugi, 2008).
By 1998, suicide had become the leading cause of death amongst those younger than
30 years old (Ozawa-de Silva, 2010) and, by 2000, it was the second leading cause of male
death overall (WHO, 2010). Japan’s NPA [National Police Agency] (2009) took up the problem,
conducting an in-depth demographic study of suicide in 2008. It found that the 1990s eco-
nomic downturn appeared largely responsible.
By the late 1990s, a new pattern of suicide emerged – group suicides, mostly involving
young men in their 20s and 30s who used the virtual spaces of Internet chat rooms to discuss
and plan suicides together. For Ozawa-de Silva (2010) and others, such rooms have ironically
cultivated the kinds of intersubjective engagements that many Japanese men crave but
which seem otherwise unattainable. Those visiting suicide chat rooms speak of feeling unno-
ticed, disconnected, bullied or unrecognized. The refrain of a poem written by a member of
one such room is emblematic of these sentiments and reads in part:
Someone please look at me and acknowledge me
Please acknowledge the fact that I am here
Though I shouted and shouted
It did not reach anyone’s ears (in Ozawa-de Silva, 2010, p. 398)
While sociospatial withdrawal through suicide has been a particularly dramatic manifes-
tation of the psychical trauma effected by the crisis, withdrawal has also become a way of
living for many, allowing those traumatized to distance themselves from what seems over-
whelming. This is most cogently presented in the sociospatial practices of the hikikomori (‘to
be confined to the inside’), a social category that emerged in the 1990s. The term refers
mostly to privileged young men and male youth from urban areas that refuse to leave their
homes, staying in their bedrooms for extended periods of time. If they do leave, it is occa-
sionally and typically at night to secure food and supplies. In 2001, the Japanese Ministry of
Health, Labour and Welfare launched the first national study of the phenomenon, publishing
its findings on more than 14,000 cases in 2003. The report showed that most hikikomori are
male (76.4%), between the ages of 19–24 (30%) or over 31 years old (40%). One-fifth of the
cases secluded themselves for 10 years or longer, with an average seclusion period of
4.3 years. The Ministry estimated that as many as 1 million Japanese persons were hikikomori,
roughly 1% of the population. They also found that a not-insignificant number of hikikomori
(40.4%) engaged in domestic (physical and verbal) violence towards their mothers (50.2%)
8 H. J. NAST
or both parents (26%) (Jones, 2006; Ohashi, 2008). Most hikikomori come from middle to
upper-income families whose wealth derived from the 1980s economic boom, helping to
explain how these young men can be socially afforded (Borovoy, 2008).
The reasons for physical withdrawal are not unlike those that led many to suicide, namely,
the deeply competitive and punitive nature of a post-war economy mediated by a state-
sanctioned parental regime of obedience and shame that was now in crisis. The original aim
and desire of such disciplining had been to re-make a defeated Japan into a culturally and
ethnically coherent and economically successful nation. Given the salaryman-father’s excep-
tionally long hours, the mother acted as the household’s main disciplinary force, which for
boys meant pressuring them to excel in their studies so as to be taken up into the corporate
quota system. If successful, they could be counted on to provide for their parents as well as
their own wives and children, expectations amplified given falling TFRs. Most scholastic and
corporate accomplishments were therefore reckoned through the mother. The system
worked for decades, even as it literally drove many salarymen to an early and sudden death,
which the state came to classify officially as karoshi (death by overwork; Nishiyama & Johnson,
1997).
With the financial crisis, however, young men seeking entry into universities or poised
for regular post-university (salaryman) employment began experiencing unprecedented
levels of competition and failure. The inability of boys and young men to access the benefits
of this at-once individual and national ideal, despite considerable sacrifice and educational
success, was overwhelming. Within the now familiar context of one-child households, the
pressures of isolation and alienation were heightened. Still, the desire to become a salaryman
remained, many young men and students working harder to access fading ideals of heter-
omasculinity. Many men unable to secure regular employment internalized the results as
evidence of personal failure, while others who took on more precarious employment (freeters)
were commonly construed as selfish or undisciplined (Borovoy, 2008). The chronic headaches
and insomnia that accompanied anxiety went largely unacknowledged, reduced in Confucian
terms to signs of a weak character (Ohashi, 2008).
In 1999, the Japanese government for the first time allowed international pharmaceutical
companies to market anti-depressants, allowing (as in all international contexts) for collective
anxieties to be medicalized and contained. The more than 10-year lag time in relation to the
introduction of similar drugs into the US and western Europe suggests difficulties that state
actors had in admitting to what might have been seen as a national indignity. By contrast,
more culturally discreet means emerged to deal with the crisis, including the making of the
‘rental sister’, a (young) woman hired by a hikikomori’s parents to visit their son as if she is
his sister. The hope was that through her ministrations, the young man would feel confident
enough to leave the house and, perhaps even enter a treatment and/or rehabilitation facility
(Jones, 2006).
That hikikomori have chosen to retreat to the parental home is psychically significant. As
a primary site of the maternal and a place of national discipline, it is an ambivalent space,
helping to explain why up to 76% of hikikomori have struck out verbally and/or physically
against their mothers. More important is that fact that hikikomori retreat to their bedrooms,
an infantile space where they not uncommonly enjoy the company of human-sized female
pillow dolls (dakimakura) and play with BJDs. Relying on their mothers for reproductive care,
while simultaneously striking out against their former disciplinary pressures, hikikomori
entertain themselves by reading manga, watching anime, playing computer games, playing
with dolls and in some cases developing extensive virtual networks.8
The hermitic life of hikikomori would be impossible if Japan had not pioneered an impres-
sive array of information, telecommunications and computer-related technologies during
the 1980s, things that would eventually help propel Japan’s economy away from manufac-
turing and towards knowledge-intensive and service-related endeavours. The technologies
not only made virtual lives possible, they allowed for the force of manga (Japanese comics)
to be re-channelled into masculinist networks of computer animation (anime), especially
that centred on the hyper-feminized and juvenile pornographic characters of the so-called
lolicon. The lolicon provided entertainment for secluded hikikomori and other disaffected
youth and young men in the 1990s, as well as imaginative ground for creating 3D and, later,
4D girl-doll cultures, to which I now turn.
Into the arms of dolls, Part 1: otaku, dakimakura and BJDs

Lolicon is old school!Doll Love is going to be in from now on! (Excerpt from (Machiyama 2004a,
p. 48))
In 1982, on the heels of a recession that would cut Japan’s economic growth in half, Studio
Nue launched the television anime series Super Dimensional Fortress Macross. The first epi-
sode was about a futuristic alien spacecraft that crashes on earth and a protagonist fight-
er-pilot who addressed others using the unusually formal designation, ‘otaku’ (you). The
name otaku had by this time become somewhat commonplace amongst young ani-
me-manga enthusiasts, a means of emphasizing the formalities (rather than intimacies)
generated through shared interests (Eng, 2006). Historically, it had been mostly middle-class
housewives who used the word. Machiyama (2004b, p. 13) provides the example of an after-
noon tea party where a hostess might address her guests as otaku to emphasize each of
their respective collective identifications with a lineage or family. Anime/mange fans seized
on the term to communicate a similar kind of tribal belonging, uncoupled from the
personal.
In 1983, Akio Nakamori wrote disparagingly of anime manga enthusiasts in an essay series
penned for a soft-porn manga magazine (lolicon hentai; below), Manga Burikko, referring
to them as otaku. He called the series, ‘Otaku no Kenkyu’ (Studies of Otaku). His first article
identified otaku as the more than 10,000 youth, ‘mostly junior and senior high school stu-
dents’, who attended the semi-annual Comiket or manga festival in Tokyo, which he – ‘at the
ripe old age of 23’ – was attending for the first time.9 Nakamori averred that otaku included
not only those obsessively interested in all things anime/manga, but those having similarly
obsessive and eccentric interests in anything from railway trains to movie stars – an idea
akin to that of nerds (US English) or geeks.10
While 1980s Comiket conventions and fan-based manga production were (and continue
to be) overwhelmingly dominated by girls and young women, young men dominated the
1990s electronics-based, computer-generated scene of anime. Accordingly, the latter became
the most prominent and lucrative face of Japanese otaku culture, propelling two related
pubescent female figures historically forward into the computerized limelight – the hyper-
feminine pubescent bishojo and the hypersexualized pubescent lolicon. The bishojo’s origins
lie partly in the pervasive cultural practice of kawaii (cuteness) that Japanese schoolgirls
10 H. J. NAST
Figure 2. Examples of infantile (dakimakura and BJD) and Oedipal (silicone sex doll torso) love dolls. Source:
This image is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License and is attributed to Danny
Choo. The original image can be seen at http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5166/5342458958_b8c0247b6a_o.
jpg; photo still from Mechanical Bride (2012) courtesy of Dir. Allison de Fren.
elaborated in the 1970s using calligraphic flourishes and comics. Hello Kitty, incarnated in
1973, is perhaps the most well-known expression of kawaii in the West.
The term lolicon, by contrast, comes from Lolita, the main character of Nabokov’s mid-
1950s eponymous novel, wherein an adult man yearns after a pubescent girl whom he
abducts after becoming her stepfather. Lolicon originally referred to manga pornography
for men (lolicon hentai) that featured wide-eyed and hypersexualized pubescent and, even,
prepubescent female characters, known as Lolitas. With the masculinist development of
computer technologies in the 1980s, the Lolita was taken up into anime, becoming the
singlemost iconic female character in anime manga productions as well as the centrepiece
of a separate pornographic animation subgenre known as H-anime (from hentai).
With the 1990s fiscal crisis, the cartoonish lolicon took on new spatial and material propor-
tions in the form of large cloth-covered doll-pillows, called dakimakura. The pillow dolls allowed
the hyperfeminized lolicon to assume more fully a range of idealized maternal characteristics
related to tactility, care giving, affection and play. Yet this was not the only doll to emerge from
childhood precedents. The other was the so-called ball-jointed doll or BJD (Figure 2).
New incubational enclaves for both doll-related otaku interests opened up in western
Tokyo’s renowned discount electronics district of Akihabara or ‘electric town’. Whereas in the
1980s Akihabara had been the marketing hub of the lolicon-oriented videogame and anime/
manga industry, it now became dotted with new sorts of retail outlets well stocked with
pillow doll covers and BJD parts and products (Kumagai, 2012; Morikawa, 2012; Napier, 2010).
On the outskirts of Akihabara, meanwhile, a different kind of female doll industry was
taking shape, one catering to the sexual desires of young and middle-aged salarymen. Unlike
the relatively inexpensive dakimakura and BJDs, these dolls were much more expensive,
reflecting the costs of sophisticated material technologies and an emphasis on realism. I
discuss the material and psychical differences of these dolls in relation to infantile and
Oedipal attachments to the maternal, below.
Otaku comforts and play

Otaku began collecting and/or using dakimakura and BJDs in the mid-1990s to engage
largely in child-like play and/or for physical comfort (Galbraith, 2009, 2015; Macias and
Machiyama, 2004). Unlike BJDs, dakimakura had a cultural precedent, namely, the small
overstuffed ‘hugging pillows’ given to children. The pillows assume their identity through
imprinted cloth covers that can be changed. TBy contrast, the dakimakura covers created
for men are much larger dakimakura, roughly 5′ in length, and imprinted with graphic (most
often pornographic) images of popular lolicon characters taken from manga, anime and
video games.
Cospa, a cosplay retail clothing company launched the first dakimakura line in 1995 in its
Akihabara retail outlet. The added dimensionality of the slip-covered pillows provided otaku
(and hikikomori) with intimate experiences that 2D anime/manga characters could not: the
pillows need no electrical outlets and can be slept with, hugged, propped up in chairs, or
otherwise imagined and treated as (heterosexual) companionate objects of affection and
love. While some men have developed extended relationships with a single character, others
have collected and engaged with a variety of characters (Katayama, 2009).
Over the next two decades, other companies in Japan and China began manufacturing
the covers in response to growing consumer demand. Despite some diversification in con-
tent, the vast majority of images still cater to male heterosexual fantasies. Most product
diversification has focused on increasing the range of characters on offer, packaging the
dolls with ancillary products, and expanding marketing channels. The company Movic, for
instance, packages one of its pillows with a spray bottle containing, ‘the scent of Ayase [the
character’s name]’ ‘right after taking a bath’. Another dakimakura (‘sexy hug pillow cover’)
comes with a ‘gorgeous illustrated pinup poster’ intended to promote an art book featuring
the works of Hiromitsu, inventor of the Japanese manga series, Maken-ki! (http://www.jbox.
com/home). One of the biggest draws of dakimakura is their affordability, most ranging in
price from $50.00 to $200.00. BJDs, by comparison, are expensive.
The articulated ball joints of the BJDs make for a modularly constructed doll body that
has somewhat realistic body movements. Their modularity has allowed for considerable
customization and variety: a doll’s face, eye and hair colour, and hand and foot shapes, for
instance, can be customized and/or modularly switched out. Similarly, the unique resin ‘flesh’
of BJDs can be sanded to give a doll a new look (Macias and Machiyama, 2004).
The most famous Japanese manufacturer of BJDs is the doll company Volks, which
released its first large-format BJDs in 1997. The dolls were scaled at 1/6 human size and were
named Dollfies (a kawaii contraction of doll + figure). Volks expanded its offering in 1998
when it launched an even larger BJD product line that was 1/3 human size, the Super Dollfie.
Super Dollfie figures cost more than $600.00, with limited editions from earlier years fetching
thousands of dollars. By 2003, Volks had improved joint mobility and created a more realistic
‘Pure Skin’, improvements valued by those who pose and photograph their dolls in real and
contrived landscapes.
Unlike the intimate, private and mass-produced nature of dakimakura, Volks marketed
its dolls from the outset as artisanal objects intended for public appreciation and consump-
tion. Japanese artisans who paint Super Dollfie faces are often known by name.11 To further
heighten brand value, Volks set up a select purchasing system in which new limited editions
dolls are only made available at annual company-sponsored Dolpas (doll + parties) held in
large convention-like spaces and restricted to Volks aficionados. Inside the conventions, fans
examine and buy new dolls and paraphernalia or sell their own dolls, clothing and accesso-
ries. The exclusivity of the model has given Volks dolls significant caché. The limited edition
model has likewise proven beneficial to doll owners, who have built lucrative secondary
12 H. J. NAST
markets and networks amongst themselves through Dolpa ‘After Event’ parties and Dollfie-
centred community activities.
By the early 2000s, men in Korea and women in the US had begun demanding greater
access to the Volks doll market, and so Volks opened its first international retail outlet in
Seoul, followed by Los Angeles (2005) and New York (2006). The openings allowed the com-
pany to stage its ‘first-ever’ international Dollfie World Cup 2013 the highlight of which was
the Dollfie Make-up Championship.12 To compete for the $1000 cash prize, Dolfie owners
were asked to apply face make-up on a special edition Super Dollfie head that Volks released
expressly for the event, the Dollfie World Cup head (DWC). Akihabara’s new and varied doll
investments helped launch many doll-centred sociospatial networks and activities, such as
photographed excursions, or doll tea parties in maid cafés in Akihabara (Galbraith, 2008).
While the bishojo nature of Dollfies was inspired by 2D anime manga, new 2D characters
have since been spun off of 3D Dollfie characters, the new 2D figures in turn inspiring new
3D Dollfie editions, and so on. The iterative nature of these differently dimensioned products
can be seen in the case of the popular manga series Rozen Maiden (2002–2007). In 2004,
Rosen Maiden was adapted into a popular anime series, which Volks subsequently capitalized
on when it released five of the characters as Super Dollfies between 2005 and 2007. Thus,
five 2D manga (and, later, anime) characters, originally imagined as (3D) dolls, were made
into actual 3D Volks dolls. In 2007, Volks sold one of the dolls, Suigintou, on its lottery system
at its Los Angeles ‘Dolls Party 18’ for $1078. Seven years later, the same model entered the
secondary market of Amazon.com with an asking price of $5999.13
The dimensional and material fluidity of otaku-oriented doll life expanded further in the
new millennium, marked by two related events. The first came in 2001 when young women
were for the first time employed to dress up as bishojo ‘maids’ on Akihabara’s streets and
hand out flyers advertising the opening of a new kind of otaku-oriented doll endeavour, the
‘maid cafe’. While the cafes serve food, the interiors are designed to appeal to the infantile.
Meanwhile, all of the waitresses are young female ‘maids’ who wear Cospa outfits inspired
by 2D bishojo anime manga characters of the 1980s and 3D dolls of the 1990s. Their role
(other than serving food) is to ‘play’ and interact whimsically with their mostly male charges.
The maids’ doll-related performances do not simply render the Lolita incarnate; they render
her maternal (see Kumagai, 2012, 16).
A second event marking the expanding dimensionality of the otaku doll came in 2007
when Vogue Nippon published a fashion spread using Super Dollfies rather than human
models. Indeed, the event clarifies the interchangeability of doll and human figures within
the world of women’s fashion, one arguably carried along by specifically infantile male desires
to immobilize, spectacularize, and make present (stage) an idealized feminine figure whose
fetishistic perfection and ability to play-with speaks of maternal nostalgia. Yet, the photo
shoot also tells us something about the maternal qualities of the commodity form itself. Like
the maternalized provisioning of the market, the commodity is purchased so that it can
‘belong’ only to you – or to whomever you choose to give it. There are consequently femi-
nizing qualities embedded in the spatial and ontological arrest that characterizes commodity
purchase and becomes potentiated when mapped onto maternal figures, in this case, BJDs,
dakimakura and Cosplay maids.
The infantile allure of otaku-related dolls lies in some contrast with the Oedipal allure of
the salaryman’s sex doll, even if the aesthetic impulses of the infantile and Oedipal have
recently begun to bleed into one another.
Into the arms of dolls 2: sex dolls and salarymen

Nowadays, women are sometimes more dominant than men in the real world, and they don’t
always pay attention to men … More and more men are finding themselves miserable so we’re
making these dolls partly in support of men. (Hideo Tsuchiya quoted in Maeda, 2007)
Hideo Tsuchiya, founder and CEO of Japan’s most successful sex doll manufacturer, began
his career as owner of an adult sex-aid store in the mid-1960s. It was around this time that
Japanese scientists purchased two female inflatable limbless sex dolls from Tsuchiya – named
Antarctica I and II – to take to Japan’s Showa Base in Antarctica for their months of isolated
stay. Media coverage of the dolls brought Tsuchiya public recognition and some additional
demand. According to Tsuchiya, his clients during the first decade or so of his being in busi-
ness were chiefly handicapped men, men over 40, or elderly married men.
In 1977, four years after the oil crisis, which saw the collapse of real GDP growth rates in
Japan and a doubling of unemployment, Tsuchiya launched the female blow-up sex doll
production company, Orient Industries, simultaneously releasing its first model, which
Tsuchiya named Hohoemi (Smile).14 Like Antarctica 1 and 2, Hohoemi was limbless and had
an inflatable body made from urethane and PVC. The tensile strength of blow-ups was prob-
lematic, as were the structural weaknesses of the seams. Tsuchiya thus continued to innovate,
releasing a new model every five years. Hohoemi was retired in 1982 and replaced by
Omokage (Face), a more realistic full-body latex doll built modularly for easy disassembly
and storage. Kagemi15 replaced Omokage in 1987, and so on, until 1997, several years after
the financial crisis when for the first time single men in their 20s and 30s began visiting
Tsuchiya’s showroom. As the showroom manager of the time recalled, some of the men were
unemployed and having a hard time meeting the financial expectations involved in dating
(‘Silicone valley of the dolls,’ 2008).
Using the newly developed Internet as a marketing tool, Orient established a website to
attract new customers, an important part of this involving the elaboration of an entirely new
kind of sex doll, one made of steel and silicone. The use of such highly capitalized technology
was undoubtedly inspired by the US company, Abyss Creation, which designed and released
an all-silicone female sex doll line, Real Dolls, in 1996. The impetus behind Abyss’ creations
came, in turn, from Hollywood where new silicone technologies were being adopted to
effect realistic looking silicone-based corpses (de Fren, Mitchell, & de Fren, 2012; Nast, in
press). In 1998, then, Orient launched its first all-silicone sex doll Series, Candy Girl, which
was its most expensive and realistic to-date. The revolutionary technology allowed Candy
Girls to be bodily tailored to suit individual tastes, using menus not unlike those used in
tailoring Volks’ BJDs. Hence, for the first time, men could choose from amongst a list of
options the doll’s head (face), hairstyle, body firmness (airy or hard grip), pubic hair colour
and geometry, and diameter of the anus-vagina ‘body hole’ (Boing or Tight).
The sale of the dolls dramatically changed the company’s fortunes. Indeed, demand must
have been considerable for in 2000 Orient launched its second all-silicone line intended to
expand its market’s demographic bandwidth: the Fantastic anime line geared towards the
otaku community (http://www.orientlovedoll.com/orient-industry-love-doll-history). Tina,
Tisse and Siina came dressed as maids, while Satsu arrived wearing a schoolgirl uniform.
Unlike the dakimakura or BJDs, the Fantastic dolls allowed for penetrative sex. The latent
sexual desires of otaku for innocence (the bishojo), holding (the dakimakura) and play (BJDs)
could thereby assume explicitly oedipalized proportions. By the end of 2003, ‘Tsuchiya’s dolls
14 H. J. NAST
were selling so well that he was able to boast how it took only ten minutes for fifty new dolls
to disappear from the shelves’ (Levy, 2007, p. 138).
In 2005, the Oedipal and infantile again coalesced when the company launched a line of
large-breasted, pubescent and pre-pubescent sex dolls, Petite Jewel and Petite Soft Nano. The
dolls were not rendered as otaku caricature (as with the cartoonish prepubescent Fantastic
line) but as ‘real’ under-aged (albeit buxom) girls. Hence, just as otaku desires to hold and be held
began assuming Oedipal sex (doll) proportions, the Oedipal desires of salarymen for adult women
began edging towards the infantile, the special physical and economic vulnerability associated
with little girls positioning male subjects as even stronger, by comparison. Since 2005, Orient
has continued to expand its product offering in an effort to keep up with changing demand,
aesthetics and technologies (http://www.orientlovedoll.com/ange-bihaku).
By 2012, only 14 years after Orient launched its Candy Girls Series, the company felt con-
fident enough to issue a call for its first ‘love doll’ photo contest in honour of its first 35 years
in the sex doll business. Like Volks’ BJD World Cup, Orient’s contest was brand and product
specific: it included only Orient’s all-silicone dolls. The call encouraged competitors to submit
photos ‘of their precious love doll companions in all sorts of unusual poses and places’. Like
the Volks’ Dollfie World Cup, Orient offered a $1000 cash prize. Over 106 photographic entries
were submitted by men in their 20s through 50s. Most dolls were photographed in lolicon-like
seductive poses – in bed and out of bed; dressed, semi-dressed or undressed. The winning
entry featured a large-breasted, light brown-haired doll named Sakitan in perhaps the most
conventional of poses and settings: she stands in front of a kitchen sink wearing a full-length
red-striped apron. Turned partway to face the camera, she holds a cherry out to the viewer
(http://www.orient-doll.com/photocon2012/detail.php?pid=116).
Today, Orient offers a range of competitively priced dolls, from the less expensive,
vinyl-limbed models, such as the Candy Girl Light f-line, to the higher priced and more
customized all-silicone dolls, like the AngeBihaku (‘Silicone valley of the dolls,’ 2008).
Regardless of model, all doll heads are made of silicone and attached to the torso by a ball
and socket system, allowing owners to change a doll’s identity by changing its head, not
unlike how otaku change a dakimakura pillow cover or resurface a BJD face. One of the only
drawbacks of Orient dolls is that the mouths cannot be penetrated. Users are cautioned to
use the dolls’ mouths for kissing, only.
Tsuchiya predicts that sex doll markets in Japan will expand, not only because economic
precarity has continued but because older men are turning to sex dolls for comfort, a practice
that will grow as the country’s population rapidly ages (Shimanaka, 2013). Moreover,
Japanese reproductive-oriented fembot development is on the rise, an important part of
which involves creating a realistically skeletized body with flesh-like skin. It is because sex
doll manufacturers already have advanced design and material know-how that new collab-
orations with the robotics industry have begun, including a large gamut of players lodged
in Japanese universities (NIAIST [National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and
Technology], 2009; Mori & Scearce, 2010; Nast, in press; Robertson, 2010).
Orient began working with robotics in 2010 after Showa University’s Department of
Orthodontistry asked Tsuchiya to be part of a consortium of interests that were developing
a fembotic doll for dental school instruction. Part of the consortium included the premier
Japanese robotics firm, Tmsuk Co., Ltd, and Yoshida Dental, a manufacturing company. The
idea was to patent a teaching-oriented robotic doll. The collaboration was successful and in
2011 the group launched Showa Hanako 2, an all-silicone fembotic patient that could utter
a limited range of phrases, turn its head, gag and carry out other useful head-oriented
movements.16 Orient presumably benefited from the collaboration in many ways. For one
thing, the collaboration expanded Orient’s access to Showa University’s scientific and pro-
fessional communities and tied the company’s fortunes commercially to Japan’s dental
school markets. It also insinuated the company into a range of technical and scientific net-
works and subsidies, which bodes well for Orient, especially given state interests in assuming
global leadership in reproductive robotics, the bodies of which are most often rendered
young and female (Bremner, 2015; Robertson, 2010).
By 2014, Orient had launched its own rather clumsy fembotic initiative, Party Doll, a sta-
tionary fembot designed to serve guests at parties. Priced at about $18,000, Party Doll, comes
in two forms, neither of which can be used for (Oedipal) sex. The first is Geisha, a young
looking woman dressed in a long sashed kimono, and the second is called Bunny Girl and
comes dressed up as a Playboy Bunny.17 Both Party Dolls stands upright, with a semi-circular
serving table strapped onto their waists onto which snacks and utensils can be plied. Behind
the left leg is a special compartment within which a large liquor bottle can be placed. From
here, tubing leads through the lower back to a duct behind the left breast. In the company’s
promotional video, Tsuchiya uses Geisha to demonstrate how the duct system operates:
massaging and squeezing the nipple of the right breast, the nipple duct in the left breast
opens up, wine flowing into his waiting cup. The overtly maternal nature of the doll is striking,
not only in terms of the infantile character of breastfeeding, but in terms of the figure’s
physical disposition. Immobilized, it is meant for tactility and sustenance, not sex.
Orient’s market preeminence in Japan is undisputed. It has been in the sex doll business
for the longest period of time, with net sales in 2014 estimated at $4.2 million (Dun &
Bradstreet, Inc., 2014). 18 Between 2002 and 2008, however, several new start-ups emerged,
three of them in or near the Greater Tokyo Area and one in Kyoto (Table 1). At least two of
the new companies brought important product and marketing innovations to bear, including
fembotic maternal features. Unlike Orient, moreover, both companies have sought export
markets.
In 2006, for instance, 4woods (founded in 2002), gave the French silicone sex doll com-
pany, Doll Story, exclusive rights to distribute its dolls in the EU, later establishing a subsidiary
production company outside Lyon – 4woods Europe Co. Ltd, in partnership with Doll Story.19
In 2009, it gave the short-lived US company, Lovable Dolls, exclusive US rights.20 Then, in
2014, 4woods opened its first overseas showroom in San Diego, California, giving US cus-
tomers access to Japanese-made dolls and allowing the company to compete directly with
California-based firm Abyss Creations, the most successful sex doll company in the world.
While 4woods does not yet offer fembotic options, Axis’ (founded in 2006) line of HoneyDolls
did, at least until 2014 when the company went out of business. HoneyDolls were best known
for their mouths, which were made from a special silicone polymer that allowed for vigorous
oral penetration without tearing. Their main fembotic option included breast sensors that,
when squeezed, activated a voice box that would emit affirming sounds of female pleasure.
Abyss Creations and a German sex doll maker (First Androids) tried similar fembotic inno-
vations around the same time. Such options require greater capital outlay and risks, however,
which may explain why the latter two companies abandoned their first fembotic attempts
and why Axis folded in 2014 (Nast, in press).
While companies in six other countries now make their own versions of silicone dolls, the
doll market in Japan is comparatively unique. Most importantly, the Yakuza – a male-run
16
H. J. NAST
Table 1. Japanese sex doll companies, locations, base and high-end model purchase price. All prices in US dollars.
Year founded Company name Location Price range (2015) Materials Options Onahole insert name
1977 (firm opens) Orient Industry Tokyo $3791–$8444 Silicone; aluminium alloy ‘Party Doll’ – dispenses Octopus Grip, Whirlpool,
1998- (silicone doll www.orient-doll.com $17989 (Party Doll) and alloy steel skeleton liquid from left breast Styler, Boing, Webbed
production while right breast is
commences) massaged
2002 4woods Niiza, Greater Tokyo Area $5990–$6590 Silicone; stainless steel None Twine, Spiral, Snugly, Tiny
www.aidoll.4woods.jp alloy skeleton Bubble
b
2004 Unison Maebashi, Greater Tokyo $3831–$5053 Silicone; resin and metal None
www.unison-direct.jp Area skeleton
2006–2014 HoneyDoll Chiba, Greater Tokyo Area $6460–$6980 Silicone; aluminium • Breast implant-sensors styrene insert, unnamed
www.honeydolls.jp/en/ skeleton; medical grade activate a programma-
feature/honeyflavor.htmla styrene for oral ble voicebox
sex-capable head • Oral sex-capable heads
• Detachable breasts
b
2008 Lifedoll Kyoto $3945–$4536 Silicone • Oral sex-capable heads
www.lifedoll.net
2012 Doll Sweet Dalian, China $3170–$3730 Silicone • Oral sex-capable heads A, B, C
www.dsdoll.us/?
a
The link stopped functioning after HoneyDolls went out of business. The site can nonetheless be accessed through the digital archive ‘The Internet Library’ (archive.org), by entering the term, ‘ww.
honeydolls.jp’ into its search engine, WayBack Machine.
b
Some companies do not provide onahole inserts, in the past many users having to go to blackmarket sources since the explicit making of genitalia was forbidden. Some companies today continue
to rely on alternative sourcing.
criminal business syndicate constituted largely by ethnic minorities – has long been involved
in the industry, early on providing the dolls’ female genitalia (the onahole insert).21 The sexed
nature of Yakuza interests are in keeping with its broader investments in female sex-related
commodity markets, including pornography, international sex trafficking and prostitution.
Its participation helps to explain why, unlike in the US, Japanese manufacturers do not make
male sex dolls that might appeal to women or gay men. More importantly, its large mem-
bership (over 100,000) and ties to the sex industry have allowed the dolls to be taken up
into related escort services and brothels.
In 2004, for instance, a group of (presumably Yakuza) businessmen started a cash-only
sex doll delivery (escort) service, Doll No Mori (Forest of Dolls) (http://www.dollnomori.net;
Ferguson, 2010, p. 51). Between August 2004 and April 2005, demand grew from 20 to 150
customers per month, prompting the company to open up 40 franchises. Most clientele
were ‘ordinary salarymen in their 30s and 40s’ – those most affected by the financial crisis
(in Levy, 2007, p. 140). The company protects its assets and reduces its risks through two
main prohibitions. Gang-banging is not allowed, and all men must use condoms. Soon after
Doll No Mori’s was launched other delivery companies started up, including Pretty doll (in
2005) and Creamdollshiga (in 2007). Pretty doll additionally created a doll brothel. Exclusivity
is cultivated through minimal annual membership fees.22
Japanese pornography has likewise circulated through the figure of the sex doll, not
unlike anime-mange deployments of pornographic slipcovers for dakimakura. Human
Vending Machine (2008), for instance, is a film about a row of sex dolls (played by ‘real’
actresses) lined up in a glass-fronted vending machine, not unlike how some female sex
workers – from eastern Europe to Amsterdam to southeast Asia are positioned in glass
encased viewing rooms. One by one, a differently disposed man puts in a 100 Yen coin into
the machine, choosing his preferred ‘Drink Gals’ flavour. The sex doll slides down into a drawer
at the bottom of the machine. Once opened, the man heaves the doll over his shoulder to
‘drink’ her. This involves turning the doll up-side down and unwrapping her aluminium foil-
sheathed genitalia, as one would an aluminium tab on a vended beverage. In another film,
Yakuza Weapon (2011), a man vigorously has sex with a back-bending sex doll (again, played
by a real woman) her mouth opening with each thrust to spew bullets.
In 2013, a group of Japanese investors – probably Yakuza – established Doll Sweet, the
first sex doll company overseas, in Dalian, China (Nast, in press).23 The positioning allows the
company access to cheap labour resources and frees the company from Japanese state
restrictions regarding the production of genitalia and sex doll export. This may explain why
Doll Sweet is the only Japanese company that offers a doll with an anus, all other Japanese
dolls made with a single modular ‘body hole’ (onahole), a feature in keeping with the dolls’
blow-up precedents. Even so, the company discourages these requests, noting on its website
that anal penetration might tear the silicone.
The Japanese sex doll market is unique in other ways, too, particularly in relation to
Japanese cultural aesthetics. Japanese manufacturers make only Japanese-looking dolls
and emphasize skin whiteness and softness along with the suppleness of certain body parts.
These characteristics are favourably tied, in turn, to the dolls’ youthful if not childish appear-
ance. Advertising their new Naughty Girls line in 2013, for instance, 4woods emphasizes that
the dolls are so:
[c]ute and lovely … [that] you want to hold them. … [T]he whole body is made of marshmal-
low-like soft skin which makes you want to keep touching.24
18 H. J. NAST
Breasts are similarly discussed in terms of tactility and softness, rather than crudely in terms
of size. The 4woods website invites the potential doll owner to view the online promotional
video to see first-hand, ‘how sexy these breasts look when “touched”“pushed”“grabbed” and
“picked”’, the final video segment showing a hand lingering on a nipple.
The faces of Japanese dolls are distinct. Tender and vulnerable in appearance, their eyes
gaze softly at the user, not unlike the gaze presented on Volks’ BJDs. Promotional images
heighten this vulnerability by depicting the dolls as waif-like, with mid-length unadorned
brown long hair, wearing little if any make-up.25 Lastly, the names given to the dolls (such
as CandyGirls and Naughty Dolls), their modular vaginas (e.g. Boing, Tight, Octopus,
Whirlpool, TinyBubble) and various hair and makeup styles (e.g. Smokey, Dolly, Little Devil)
are playful compared to those associated with nonJapanese dolls (Nast, in press).
The political economy of child-bearing and women’s procreational strike

Japanese guys like the cute, innocent look … The passive-looking, non-aggressive woman is what
they want. They don’t want someone who is … going to give them a hard time. Hoshio Nakamura,
manager of Orient Industry sex doll showroom in Toyko (‘Silicone valley of the dolls,’ 2008)
Dolls don’t have an ugly thing called a heart [ego] so a doll is beautiful and perfect (anime director
Oshii Mamoru quoted in (Machiyama 2004a, p. 48)
In The Political Economy of Japan’s Falling Fertility Rates, Frances Rosenbluth (2007) provides
evidence that many Japanese women would like to have children but are unwilling to do
so without dramatic changes in traditional gender relations and child support (c.f. Yamada,
2009). As of 2010, Japanese men contributed the least amount of childcare weekly of any
OECD nation – 15 min/day (Matsui et al., 2010). While this lack of support, on the surface,
has much to do with the long hours that salarymen work, it also has to do with the economic
pact that the post-war state made with industrial interests. In particular, the conservative
Liberal Democratic Party, which has more or less governed Japan since 1955 (with a break
between 2009 and 2012), agreed not to push companies to provide childcare through private
firm subsidies or to pay higher corporate taxes. Hence, Japan’s population decline must be
seen at least partly as the result of a patriarchal corporate-state agreement that compelled
women to provide enormous maternal-labour subsidies to both private interests and the
state (Rosenbluth, 2007, pp. 11–12).26
With the 1990s financial crisis, rising unemployment rates and an upsurge in employment
precarity, a dramatic shift in gender relations began unfolding. While men’s employment
levels fell in the 1990s, women’s levels remained constant and in 2003 began to climb, reach-
ing nearly 64% by 2015 (Cauterucci, 2015; Matsui, Suzuki, Akiba, & Tatebe, 2014). A team of
Japanese female economists at Goldman Sachs, led by Kathy Matsui, was amongst the first
to take notice of what this gendered fact meant financially, enjoining investors to capitalize
on women’s gains by providing them with greater access to, and larger lines of, credit. Such
measures, Matsui’s team argued, would help offset the risks coming from Japan’s declining
population numbers. Moreover, her team noted that the disposable income of single
Japanese women had begun to outstrip that of single men, a phenomenon largely to do
with single women continuing to reside with their parents after securing employment
(parasaitoshinguru, lit. parasite singles), something less acceptable for single working men
(Matsui et al., 2005). Unencumbered from having to pay rent, women received an economic
boost not unlike that traditionally awarded to married men through free maternal-labour.
Commodity doll culture has therefore had as much to do with heterosexual women’s refusal
to take on the economic risks of marriage as it has had to do with men’s economic losses
and distress (see Yamada, 2009).
As such, falling TFRs and commodity doll love in Japan (as elsewhere) cannot be consid-
ered outside sexual difference, one organically rooted in a biological maternal that has
anchored life, longing and desire, even if its importance has materially and spatially varied.
It was the oil crisis of 1973 and the financial meltdown that began in the early 1990s, for
instance, that eroded the biological foundations of the maternal in Japan, an erosion long
set in motion by the workings of the industrial machine.
Not addressing the historicity of the maternal and its structuring of desire has led some
scholars to celebrate adult men’s doll attachments as evidence of a critical reworking of
normative sex and masculinity and the making of new kinds of posthuman love. Galbraith
(2015) in an extensive survey of otaku culture and scholarship, for instance, concludes that
otaku desires for the 2D bishojo (the ‘2D complex’) have worked to erode heteronormativity.
For him, otaku who marry 2D figures and who prefer a life of 2D love make up highly social
communities that find meaning through shared refusals of normative ideals. Through invest-
ing in 2D love, otaku are forging new kinds of sociality unburdened from the reproductive
and familial. To bolster his case, he quotes Halberstam (2011, p. 2) in The queer art of failure:
that ‘success in a heteronormative, capitalist society equates too easily to specific forms of
reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation’. Otaku sexuality is, if anything
then, revolutionary.
In remaining in the 2D, however, Galbraith (and others) leaves aside the material, bodily
and spatial differences involved in the making and staging of 2D, 3D (dakimakura and BDJs)
and 4D (cosplay maids) doll play, not to mention the growing affinities of some male otaku
for silicone sex, the affinities of salarymen for the bishojo, and the integration of bishojo
aesthetics into the commodity-female sex industry overall. The hierarchically sexed and
spatial particularities of the commodity doll players are also left to one side, including men’s
privileged access to Japan’s largest and most expensive urban conurbation (Tokyo) and its
lucrative retail sector, Akihabara.
The presumption that any commodity or cultural investment that erodes heteronorma-
tively is inherently liberatory reifies sex, providing little insight how sexual difference has
worked materially, spatially and psychically. Indeed, today, sexual difference is being trans-
acted transnationally, with certain colorized peoples providing the majority of maternal
labour used to create the neoindustrial workforce.
If looked at in demographic and geographical terms, then, commodity doll investments
are decidedly conservative – emotionally and financially. There is nothing radical about
investing in a doll business, or in purchasing and playing with commodity dolls for either
infantile or sexual purposes (e.g. NRI [Nomura Research Institute], 2005). While commodity
dolls may allow for new kinds of community there is nothing far-reaching about this fact.
Doll play seems mostly to conserve the economic status quo – even if new kinds of (a) sex-
uality are formed, a fact in keeping with Kumagai’s (2012) assertions that otaku tend to be
politically conservative and nationalistic, not unlike the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and,
by extension, the salaryman (Charlebois, 2013; Otake, 2014).
Such conservatism runs across the commodity doll spectrum, presenting itself in the
heterofeminized characteristics of dakimakura images and the bodily schema of the BJDs
20 H. J. NAST
and silicone sex dolls. The Yakuza’s choice to enfold the latter into its female commodity-sex
portfolio additionally speaks to the conservatism involved, as does scientific interest in using
the silicone dolls in the reproductive robotics industry (Bremner, 2015; Robertson, 2010).
Sexed conservatism is, of course, not limited to Japan! Rather, it abides in the proliferating
array of adult men’s doll cultures that largely span formerly privileged racial and economic
domains. The demographically specific internationality of this upsurge suggests that infantile
and Oedipal doll kinds are helping certain men to mitigate the geographically varied ‘crises
of masculinity’ that followed the 1973 oil crisis and its aftermath and that the field of Men’s
Studies emerged to attend.
Capitalism and maternal obsolescence

Man suffocates himself in the prison-house of disembodied cognition, disavowing his love-sick-
ness for the (m)Other and the tediousness of the stories he tells himself. (Saldanha, 2013, p. 3).
Largely freed by the machine from the necessity to procreate, men and women in privi-
leged social formations are progressively liberating themselves from the constraints of sexual
difference. Such liberation has taken place regardless of sexuality: it is not only nonhetero-
sexuals choosing not to have children; many normative heterosexuals are. What has followed
is a privileging proliferation of new gendered and sexed categories. The growing obsoles-
cence of the (organic) maternal nonetheless has a scalar catch: Those very persons freed
from the biological are also those who depend on the existence of racialized other-mothers
to produce the labouring bodies needed to manufacture the cheap goods (and carry out
the informalized services) that subsidize privileged lives.
The market-driven recreational pleasures of which adult men’s dolls are part have in fact
been integral to the transnationally uneven shift in the geopolitical economic nature of sex:
from procreational (especially in agrarian contexts) to recreational (in wealthy nations shifting
to economies that service financial capital). With the turn to the market (as maternal), the
sexually differentiated body has become progressively redundant, divided up and/or repli-
cated into a multiplying number of commodity-oriented parts (Marcuse, 1964). The mater-
nalized market opens up as that which commodity-care-gives, a move that infantilizes
consuming subjects.
The commodity dolls for adult men, discussed here, embody this reductive and redirective
process in especially poignant ways, for it is the maternal body that is physically prefigured
in the doll, an overlay of the market as source of nourishment onto a femininized commodity
form. The dolls discussed, here, are consequently revelatory, showing how the market (like
the infantile or Oedipal maternal) has become a place of desire and plenty (Crary, 2013;
Marcuse, 1964).
While similar transferences of the maternal onto the market are taking place in adult
men’s doll cultures worldwide, the racial uniformity of dolls in Japan is somewhat unique.
The lack of commodity doll races is in keeping with widespread Japanese preferences that
Japan be only for the Japanese (see the special UN report by Diène (2006) as well as the work
of Mori and Scearce (2010) and Robertson (2010)).
By contrast, in white settler contexts and Europe, border zones have long been used for
strategic supremacist ends, namely, to allow the entry and expelling of labouring surplus
populations. Most recently, such populations have included agrarian and native persons
displaced by neoliberal economic policies that have, amongst other things, allowed for the
foreign ownership of native lands. Racially privileged men in these contexts have often used
the sexual services of the racially disadvantaged, especially after the oil crisis when white
women were forced onto the job market and assumed greater economic independence,
however precarious. The racial variety of dolls in these same places is hence in keeping with
a different racialist history of border control and conquest, allowing maternal anxieties to
be assuaged in the racialized commodity-flesh of either doll or human (e.g. Davydova, 2013;
Jeffreys, 2009; Twine, 2011). Despite these differences, Eros and the intersubjective are con-
sistently displaced by maternalized commodity forms that promise to hold, comfort and play
(Marcuse, 1964).
It is Eros’ end that concerns Director Koreeda Air Doll (2009). Early on, Hideo’s love for his
blow up sex doll, Nozomi, seems moving and real, as if posthuman doll love really works.
One day Nozomi comes alive and begins daily sojourns into the world around her, re-assum-
ing her rigid doll form before Hideo returns from work. Later on in the film, after Hideo is
fired from his low-paying job as a restaurant cook, he buys himself a new air doll and names
her Nozomi. Hurt by her easy replacement, Nozomi runs away, eventually deciding to end
her life amidst stacked bags of ‘unburnable’ garbage outside Hideo’s apartment building.
Leaning disconsolately sideways, slightly deflated, Nozomi starts to die and as she does so,
a little girl she had seen earlier in a restaurant holding onto her own little baby doll hurries
past, still holding the doll in her arms. Curious, the girl retraces her steps and spying Nozomi’s
oversized rhinestone ring, slides it off and puts it on her finger. Placing her doll gently in
Nozomi’s arms, she shakes Nozomi’s hand in a silent trade, the (Oedipal) blowup and
(infantile) plastic making the ring of maternal alienation complete.
Epilogue
Many persons familiar with the doll cultures discussed here might ask why I have not
addressed young Japanese women’s attachments to doll culture, especially those who in
the 1990s began dressing up as Lolita-like dolls in a-sexualizing ways. Indeed, today, such
Lolita girls parade regularly in front of one another in a section of Tokyo (Harajuku) to show
off their performative abilities and dress (e.g. Kawamura, 2012; Mackie, 2011; Okazaki &
Johnson, 2013; Yoshinaga & Ishikawa, 2007). While dressing up in ways codified as cute
(kawaii) started at the end of the 1970s, the asexual Lolitas of the 1990s have proliferated
into a number of different Lolita kinds, each one characterized by sumptuary and period
preferences. By the new millennium, Lolita fandom had spread across European and white
settler contexts, facilitated by the Internet (Kang & Cassidy, 2015; Lunning, 2011; Monden,
2013).
Yet, while the Lolita phenomenon is ostensibly linked to the lolicon and the making of
adult men’s doll cultures (whether dakimakura, BJD or sex doll), in psychoanalytic terms
being a doll (women) rather than having a doll (men) reflects a very different relationship to
the commodity-phallus and, hence, the doll and maternal. Documenting and analysing such
gendered distinctions go well beyond the scope of this study. Suffice it to say that the dif-
ferences correspond with how modern female subjects have normatively identified with
the commodity-phallus (I am it), assuming seductive postures in commodified heteronor-
mative relationships, whereas male subjects have typically identified as owning the com-
modity phallus (I have it), which has more complicated spatial and material implications
(Lacan, 1958/2002).
22 H. J. NAST
The distinctions between men’s and women’s commodity doll cultures could likewise be
read through Freud’s theory of the fetish: the commodity-doll marks a male lack that mate-
rially and paradoxically emphasizes the vulnerability and lack that that very fetish is trying
to hide, in this case, maternal intersubjectivity (support) and Eros (Freud, 1931/1961). In
either case, the gendered phallic economies of commodity-doll love do not lead to sub-
ject-subject engagement or desire, but to desires for, or identifications which, commodity
markets.
The elderly in Japan, whose suicide rates also began to climb with the crisis, perhaps
understand the pathos of intersubjectivity’s decline the most, something Ayano Tsukimi, an
elderly village woman has made plain through her own uniquely maternal doll-related enter-
prise. Tsukimi sews and places throughout her village of Nagoro hundreds of life-sized, straw-
stuffed dolls made in the image of those who have died or left the village since she was a
young girl. Located in farm fields, at the bus stop, or in the empty halls and classrooms of
the primary school, her dolls re-member rather than replace or substitute for those lost, a
sensibility specific to her location, gender and generation. In effect, Tsukumi gives birth to
the dead or, as she states, ‘When I make dolls of dead people, I think about them, when they
were alive and healthy. The dolls are like my children’. (Schumann, 2014; https://player.vimeo.
com/video/92453765?autoplay=1).
Notes
1. See Cowen and Elden’s (2013) edited theme issue on ‘geopolitical economy’. I expand on their
ideas by insisting that the maternal is central to the spatial making of any geopolitical economy.
2. This paper does not deal with the long history of dolls (ningyō) in Japan (see Pate, 2008 for a
rich and provocative study of doll life across millennia in Japan). My interests stem, instead,
from ontological differences between noncommodity and commodity doll forms in relation
to the maternal.
3. Sexuality and space literature covers normative and non-normative sexualities in modern
contexts, demonstrating that the categories cannot be neatly mapped onto a heterosexuality/
nonheterosexuality divide (e.g. Bell & Valentine, 1995; Blidon, 2008; Brown, 2012; Browne, Lim,
& Brown, 2007; Browne & Nash, 2010; Elder, Knopp, & Nast, 2003; Hubbard, 2011; Johnston &
Longhurst, 2009; Oswin, 2008; Pitoňák, 2014; Puar, 2007).
4. I speak here of mainstream (masculinist) political and economic geography, not the critical
interventions made by queer and feminist geographers whose works are often marginalized.
5. For a partial overview of recent work, see Lutz, Sanderson, & Scherbov, 2013; McDonald, 2001).
6. CIA World Factbook (2013), https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
fields/2127.html.
7. Falling relational densities refer to how falling TFRs in privileged contexts have led to smaller
household sizes and sociospatially attenuated community. Commodity relations, meanwhile,
displace intersubjectivity with market intimacies, something that Marcuse (1964) theorizes in
terms of ‘repressive desublimation’ and the ‘one dimensional’ man.
8. Note that while hikikomori may have many sumptuary interests in common with otaku,
they are recluses and not interested in engaging in the same kinds of public activities. My
psychoanalytic understanding of withdrawal is in keeping with Kumagai’s (2012) insights into
the changing masculinity of three kinds of disaffected youth in Japan – herbivores, otaku and
petit-nationalists. He argues that all of the men involved are driven by a desire to be comforted
by a domesticity now largely out of financial reach. Also similar is his analysis of how domesticity
operates across scale, from the household to the nation and beyond.
9. Matt Alt translated Akio’s article in its entirety with permission in 2008. See: http://neojaponisme.
com/2008/04/02/what-kind-of-otaku-are-you/. Schodt (2011, p. 44) translates part of Akio’s
essay.
10. The word otaku did not assume popular proportions until 1989 when a young man (Tsutomu
Miyazaki) kidnapped, raped and murdered three very young girls. His bedroom was found to
contain lolicon manga, for which reason he was deemed an otaku. Also in 1989, Machiyama
released his bestselling book, Otaku no Hon (The book of otaku), followed by Toshio Okada’s
launching of the anime production, Otaku no video (The video of otaku; Machiyama, 2004b, p.
14).
11. Artisans paint Super Dollfie faces, whereas customers are expected to paint those of Dollfies.
12. The first (mis-named) Dollfie World Cup was a 2011 costume competition open only to those
in Japan. By contrast, Volks opened up the 2013 Dollfie Make-up Championship to patrons in
the US, Korea, and Japan.
13. http://yhst-70052297082953.stores.yahoo.net/dolls-party-18.html; link.
14. Blow-up sex dolls simultaneously became popular in the US and Western Europe, an outgrowth
of blow-up toy technologies that emerged after the Second World War.
15. According to Kawai (1995), ‘kage-mi’ means ‘to see’ (mi) a reflection or shadow (kage), the
contraction (Kagami) meaning ‘mirror’. Eika (Eternal Flower) replaced Kagemi in 1992 to be
supplanted in 1997 by the Hana (Flower) Sisters. See http://www.orientlovedoll.com/orient-
industry-love-doll-history
16. See http://www.tmsuk.co.jp/english/pdf/hanako.pdf and https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=WhzbFaNueKU for details of the development of Hanako 1 and Hanako 2.
17. See http://www.kanojotoys.com/party-doll-geisha-tomoko-p-2613.html and http://www.
kanojotoys.com/party-doll-bunny-girl-saori-p-2617.html. The dolls have an earlier gynoid
counterpart: US Art Professor Clayton Baily of California State University created a breasty
metallic gynoid coffee dispenser – ‘Sweetheart’ in 1983, one year after the global economic
downturn (Toledo Blade, 1983).
18. The publicly traded business database Dun and Bradstreet collates information on millions
of companies worldwide. Access was obtained on 1 July 2015 through the academic news
database, LexisNexis, under a business-related informational link titled, Company. D&B’s online
dossier for Orient was obtained by entering Orient’s founder’s name: Tsuchiya Shokai, Y.K. in
the company search box.
19. 4woods Europe began production in 2012. To ensure product uniformity, 4woods sent its
long-standing Tokyo-based foreman, Mr Koji Yamada, to train and work alongside Doll Story
employees. See: http://www.dollstory.eu/dollstory.aspx?code=french-manufacture&lang=EN
20. Company information was obtained through a nonprofit web crawling search engine or
Internet library called The Internet Archive (archive.org) that uses spidering software to access
and permanently store digital information. Using the term http://lovabledolls.com in the library
search engine, WayBackMachine, website information was sampled and indexed over a number
of years.
21. Personal communication and email from the Japanese doll scholar and filmmaker, Allison de
Fren (18 December 2015).
22. See http://www.c-doll.jp/top.html and http://www.pretty-doll.com.
23. Japan colonized Dalian for decades following the Crimean War, making it a hub of economic
operations and using its women for comfort-related purposes – not only sex. After China
opened up Dalian to foreign direct investment in the 1990s, Dalian re-cultivated economic
ties with Japan karaoke bars (with resident sex workers) used to attract Japanese businessmen
(Zheng, 2009).
24. http://naughty.4woods.jp/en/detail/softbody.html. Naughty Girls are available only in Japan,
probably because the childish look of the dolls would be banned by obscenity laws elsewhere
(see Valverde, 2012).
25. This is in marked contrast to US and European markets where men choose from a menu of
racialized options, one of which is ‘Asian’ and where the dolls have comparatively ornate
hairstyles and heavily made-up faces that gaze somewhat vacantly onto the horizon.
24 H. J. NAST
26. Some of Prime Minster Abe’s second term reforms (2006–2007; 2012-present) aimed at
encouraging women to join the workforce. Many co-workers, however, harassed men taking
paternity leave (Otake, 2014; ‘Pay during child leave,’ 2013; Yoshida, 2013), just as they harassed
women taking extended maternity leave (Cauterucci, 2015).
Acknowledgements
This paper is part of a project that received support from a number of quarters. I am grateful to the
Humanities Center (HC) of DePaul University and DePaul’s University Research Council for their financial
and logistical support and to the 2013-14 HC Fellows for comments on earlier versions of this work. I
am likewise grateful to Richard Ek and Mekonnen Tesfahuney for inviting me to present this work as
part of the 2014 Andersson Memorial Lecture in Karlstad. Thanks to Winifred Curran, Allison de Fren,
Lynda Johnston, Paul Kingsbury, Keichi Kumagi, Frenchy Lunning, Alex Papadopoulos, Rhoda Rosen,
Shailja Sharma and Eleanor Wilkinson for their invaluable input. The paper benefited much from the
generous comments of anonymous reviewers and from the research skills of Rachael Dimit, Eeman
Ouyoun and, especially, Nikki Vigneau.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
References
Associated Press. (1983, October 26). Robot found too sexy, or sexist, for campus. Toledo Blade, p 21.
Bagchi, A. (2006). The ageing world. Chennai: Pearson Education.
Bell, D., & Valentine, G. (1995). Mapping desire: Geographies of sexualities. New York, NY: Routledge.
Blidon, M. (2008). Jalons pour une géographie des homosexualités [Milestones in a geography of
homosexuality]. L’espace geographique, 37, 175–189.
Borovoy, A. (2008). Japan’s hidden youths. Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry, 32, 552–576.
Bremner, B. (2015, May 28). Japan unleashes a robot revolution. Bloomberg Businessweek. Retrieved
from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-28/japan-unleashes-a-robot-revolution
Brown, M. (2012). Gender and sexuality I: Intersectional anxieties. Progress in Human Geography, 36,
541–550.
Browne, K., Lim, J., & Brown, G. (2007). Geographies of sexualities. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Browne, K., & Nash, C. J. (2010). Queer methods and methodologies: Intersecting queer theories and social
science research. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Cauterucci, C. (2015, October 8). What the U.S. can learn from Japan’s working women. Slate. Retrieved from
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2015/10/08/japan_passes_u_s_in_women_s_employment_
rate.html
Central Intelligence Agency. (2013). Total fertility rate: The world factbook. Washington, DC: Author.
Retrieved from https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2127.html
Charlebois, J. (2013). Herbivore Masculinity as an Oppositional Form of Masculinity. Culture, Society &
Masculinities, 5, 89–104.
Chen, J., Cheong Choi, Y., Mor, K., Sawada, Y., & Sugano, S. (2012). Recession, unemployment, and suicide
in Japan. Japan Labor Review, 9, 75–92.
Cowen, D., & Elden, S. (Eds.). (2013). Geo-political economy. Virtual Issue: Society & Space. Retrieved from
http://societyandspace.com/2013/11/18/geo-political-economy-virtual-theme-issue/
Crary, J. (2013). 24/7: Late capitalism and the ends of sleep. London: Verso Books.
Dasgupta, R. (2012). Re-reading the salaryman in Japan. New York, NY: Routledge.
Davydova, D. (2013). Criminal networks, unfortunate circumstances, or migratory projects? Researching
sex trafficking from Eastern Europe. Cultural Dynamics, 25, 229–243.
de Fren, A., Mitchell, C. G. (Producer), & de Fren, A. (Director). (2012). The mechanical bride [Motion
picture]. Retrieved from http://www.mechanicalbridemovie.com/
D’Emilio, J. (1993). Capitalism and gay identity. In H. Abelove, M. A. Barale, & D. M. Halperin (Eds.), The
lesbian and gay studies reader (pp. 467–478). New York, NY: Routledge.
D’Emilio, J. (2006, November–December). The marriage fight is setting us back. The Gay & Lesbian
Review, 13, 10–11.
Diène, D. (2006). Report of the special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination,
xenophobia and related intolerance. United Nations Economic and Social Council. Retrieved from:
http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/ G06/103/96/PDF/G0610396.pdf?OpenElement
Dun and Bradstreet, Inc. (2014) Tsuchiya Shokai, Y.K. Company dossier from publicly traded D&B
commercial database. Retrieved July 7, 2015, from LexisNexis Academic database using ‘company’
search function (no stable link).
Elder, G. S., Knopp, L., & Nast, H. J. (2003). Sexuality in geography. In G. Gaile & C. Willmott (Eds.),
Geography in America at the dawn of the 21st century (pp. 200–209). New York, NY: Oxford University
Press.
Eng, L. (2006). Otaku engagements: Subcultural appropriations of science and technology (PhD
dissertation). Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York, NY.
Ferguson, A. (2010). The sex doll: A history. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press.
Fishman, T. (2012). Shock of gray. New York, NY: Scribner.
Freud, S. (1931/1961). Female sexuality. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The standard edition of the works of Sigmund
Freud (vol. XXI, 225–243). London: Hogarth.
Galbraith, P. (2008, May 15). All dolled up. Metropolis. Retrieved from http://metropolis.co.jp/features/
feature/all-dolled-up/.
Galbraith, P. (2009, November 13). Best Tokyo maid cafes. CNN Travel- International Edition. Retrieved
from http://travel.cnn.com/tokyo/drink/tokyos-best-maid-cafes-798315
Galbraith, P. W. (2015). Otaku sexuality in Japan. In M. McLelland & V. Mackie (Eds.), Routledge handbook
of sexuality studies in East Asia (pp. 205–216). Oxon: Routledge.
Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Healy, S. (2010). Traversing fantasies, activating desires: Economic geography, activist research and
psychoanalytic methodology. The Professional Geographer, 62, 496–506.
Hubbard, P. (2011). Cities and sexualities. New York, NY: Routledge.
Imam, P. (2013). Shock from graying (Working Paper No. 13-191). Retrieved from https://www.imf.org/
external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=40916.0
Jeffreys, S. (2009). The industrial vagina. Oxon: Routledge.
Johnston, L., & Longhurst, R. (2009). Space, place, and sex: Geographies of sexualities. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield.
Jones, M. (2006, January 15). Shutting themselves in. New York Times Magazine. Retrieved from http://
www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15japanese.html?pagewanted=all
Kang, Z. Y., & Cassidy, T. (2015). Lolita fashion: A trans-global subculture. Fashion, Style & Popular Culture,
2, 371–384.
Katayama, L. (2009, July 29). Love in 2-D. The New York Times, p. MM19.
Kawai, H. (1995). Dreams, myths, and fairy tales in Japan. Einsiedeln: Daimon.
Kawamura, Y. (2012). Fashioning Japanese subcultures. London: Berg.
Kingsbury, P., & Pile, S. (2014). Psychoanalytic geographies. Surrey: Ashgate.
Koreeda, K., Uratani, T. (Producer), & Koreeda, K. (Director). (2009). Airdoll [Motion picture]. Japan:
Asmik Ace Entertainment.
Kosugi, R. (2008). Escape from work: Freelancing youth and the challenge to corporate Japan. Melbourne:
Trans Pacific Press.
Kumagai, K. (2012). Floating young men: Globalization and the crisis of masculinity in Japan. HAGAR
Studies in Culture, Policy and Identities, 10, 3–15.
Kuroki, M. (2010). Suicide and unemployment in Japan: Evidence from municipal level suicide rates
and age-specific suicide rates. The Journal of Socio-Economics, 39, 683–691.
Lacan, J. (1958/2002). The signification of the phallus. In B. Fink (Trans.), Ecrits: The first complete edition
in English (pp. 575–584). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
26 H. J. NAST
Levy, D. (2007). Love and sex with robots. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.
Lunning, F. (Ed.). (2011). Mechademia 6: User enhanced. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Lutz, W., Sanderson, W., & Scherbov, S. (2013). The end of world population growth in the 21st century.
New York, NY: Routledge.
Machiyama, T. (2004a). Dollars. In P. Macias & T. Machiyama (Eds.), Cruising the anime city (pp. 48–53).
Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press.
Machiyama, T. (2004b). Mondo Tokyo: Otaku. In Macias & T. Machiyama (Eds.), Cruising the anime city
(pp. 13–15). Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press.
Macias, P., & Machiyama, T. (2004). Cruising the anime city: An otaku guide to neo Tokyo. Berkeley, CA:
Stone Bridge Press.
Mackie, V. (2011). Reading Lolita in Japan. In T. Aoyama & B. Hartley (Eds.), Girl reading girl in Japan
(Asia’s transformations) (pp. 187–201). New York, NY: Routledge.
Maeda, T. (2007, July 8). Japan’s lonely hearts turn to dolls for sex, company. Reuters Life! Retrieved from
http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/07/18/us-japan-sex-dolls-idUSSP10422420070718
Marcuse, H. (1964). One dimensional man. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Mason, A., & Lee, R. (2006). Reform and support systems for the elderly in developing countries:
Capturing the second demographic dividend. Genus, 2, 11–35.
Matsui, K., Suzuki, H., Akiba, T., & Tatebe K. (2014). Japan: Portfolio strategy: Womenomics 4.0: Time to
walk the walk. Japan: The Goldman Sachs Group. Retrieved from http://www.goldmansachs.com/
our-thinking/pages/macroeconomic-insights-folder/womenomics4-folder/womenomics4-time-
to-walk-the-talk.pdf
Matsui, K., Suzuki, H., Eoyang, C., Akiba, T., & Tatebe K. (2010). Japan: Portfolio strategy: Womenomics 3.0:
The time is now. Japan: The Goldman Sachs Group. Retrieved from http://www.goldmansachs.com/
our-thinking/investing-in-women/bios-pdfs/womenomics3_the_time_is_now_pdf.pdf
Matsui, K., Suzuki, H., Suwabe, T., Ushio, Y., Nakata, M., & Iwao, Y. (2005). Japan: Portfolio strategy:
Womenomics: Japan’s hidden asset. Japan: The Goldman Sachs Group. Retrieved from http://www.
goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/investing-in-women/bios-pdfs/womenomics-pdf.pdf
McDonald, P. (2001). Low fertility not sustainable. Population Reference Bureau. Retrieved from http://
www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2001/LowFertilityNotPoliticallySustainable.aspx
Ministry to push nursing robots to aid caregivers. (2013, November 26). The Japan Times. Retrieved
from http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/11/26/national/ministry-to-push-nursing-robots-
to-aid-caregivers/#.VAuDHGRdUjx
Monden, M. (2013). The ‘nationality’ of Lolita fashion. In F. Nakamura, M. Perkin, & O. Krischer (Eds.), Asia
through art and anthropology: Cultural translation across borders (pp. 165–178). London: Bloomsbury.
Mori, K., & Scearce, C. (2010). Robot nation: Robots and the declining Japanese Population. Discovery
Guides, 1–17. Retrieved from: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/242739186_Robot_Nation_
Robots_and_the_Declining_J apanese_Population.
Morikawa, K. (2012). Otaku and the city: The rebirth of Akihabara. In M. Ito, D. Okabe, & I. Tsjui (Eds.),
Fandom unbound: Otaku culture in a connected world (pp. 133–157). Danbury, CT: Yale University Press.
Napier, S. (2010). Lost in transition: Train men and dolls in millennial Japan. Mechademia, 3, 259–261.
Nast, H. J. (2000). Mapping the ‘unconscious’: Racism and the Oedipal family. Annals of the Association
of American Geographers, 90, 215–255.
Nast, H. J. (2014). ‘Race’, imperializing geographies of the machine, and psychoanalysis. In P. Kingsbury
& S. Pile (Eds.), Psychoanalytic geographies (pp. 281–301). Farnham: Ashgate.
Nast, H. J. (2015). The machine-phallus: Psychoanalyzing the geopolitical economy of masculinity and
race. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 35, 766–785.
Nast, H. J. (in press). Silicone sex dolls, capitalism, and the death drive: Mapping traumas of masculinity
and sexual difference. Dialogues in Human Geography.
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. (2009). Successful development of
a robot with appearance and performance similar to humans. Retrieved from http://www.aist.go.jp/
aist_e/latest_research/2009/20090513/20090513.html
National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. (2011). Social security in Japan. Retrieved
from http://www.ipss.go.jp/s-info/e/Jasos2011/SS2011.pdf
National Police Agency. (2009). Overview of suicide in 2008. Japan: National Public Safety Commission,
National Police Agency.
Nishiyama, K., & Johnson, J. V. (1997). Karoshi – Death from overwork. International Journal of Health
Services, 27, 625–641.
Nomura Research Institute. (2005). New market scale estimation for otaku. Japan: Nomura Research
Institute. Retrieved from https://www.nri.com/global/news/2005/051006.html
Ohashi, N. (2008). Exploring the psychic roots of hikikomori in Japan (PhD dissertation). Pacifica Graduate
Institute, Santa Barbara, CA.
Okazaki, M., & Johnson, G. (2013). Kawaii!: Japan’s culture of cute. Munich: Prestel.
Oswin, N. (2008). Critical geographies and the uses of sexuality: Deconstructing queer space. Progress
in Human Geography, 32, 89–103.
Otake, T. (2014, January 24). Over 1 in 10 men have experienced ‘paternity harassment’: Survey. The
Japan Times. Retrieved from http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/01/24/national/social-issues/
paternity-leave-harassment-revealed-in-union-survey/#.VqZbGzaCzdl
Ozawa-de Silva, C. (2010). Shared death: Self, sociality and internet group suicide in Japan. Transcultural
Psychiatry, 47, 392–418.
Pate, A. S. (2008). Japanese dolls: The fascinating world of ningyō. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing.
Pay during child leave to get big increase. (2013, October 30). The Japan Times. Retrieved from http://
www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/10/30/national/pay-during-child-leave-to-get-big-increase/#.
VA5GXmRdUjx
Pitoňák, M. (2014). Urban spatiality in the context of (homo/hetero)sexuality: Introduction to a
theoretical debate in geographies of sexualities. Geografie, 119, 179–198.
Puar, J. (2007). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Robertson, J. (2010). Gendering humanoid robots: Robo-sexism in Japan. Body & Society, 16, 1–36.
Rosenbluth, F. M. (2007). The political economy of low fertility. In F. M. Rosenbluth (Ed.), The political
economy of Japan’s low fertility (pp. 3–26). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Saldanha, A. (2013). One, two, many: What is sexual difference now? In A. Saldahna & H. Song (Eds.),
Sexual difference between psychoanalysis and vitalism (pp. 1–29). New York, NY: Routledge.
Sayonara, salaryman. (2008, January 3). The Economist. Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/
node/10424391
Schermer, M., & Pinxten, W. (Eds.). (2013). Ethics, health policy and (anti-) aging (vol. 1). New York, NY:
Springer.
Schodt, F. L. (2011). Dreamland Japan: Writings on modern manga. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press.
Schumann, F. (Director). (2014). Valley of the dolls (Documentary). Retrieved from https://player.vimeo.
com/video/92453765?autoplay=1
Senior, J. (2014). All joy and no fun. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.
Shimanaka, K. (2013, January 21). Market for love dolls in aging Japan has nowhere to go but up, up,
up. The Tokyo Reporter. Retrieved from http://www.tokyoreporter.com/2013/01/21/market-for-love-
dolls-in-aging-japan-has-nowhere-to-go-but-up-up-up/
The silicone valley of the dolls. (2008, March 30). The Tokyo Reporter. Retrieved from http://www.
tokyoreporter.com/2008/03/30/the-silicone-valley-of-the-dolls/
Sioh, M. (2010). Anxious enactments: Postcolonial anxieties and the performance of territorialization.
Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, 28, 467–486.
Smil, V. (2007). The unprecedented shift in Japan’s population. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus,
5(4). Retrieved from http://www.japanfocus.org/-Vaclav-Smil/2411
Srivastava, L. (2009). Wireless independent living for a greying population. Aalborg: Rivers Publishers.
Twine, F. W. (2011). Outsourcing the womb. New York, NY: Routledge.
UN 2015. Global population projections. Retrieved from http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Graphs/
Probabilistic/POP/TOT/
Valverde, S. (2012). The modern sex doll-owner: A descriptive analysis (MS thesis). California State
Polytechnic University. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.
cgi?article=1893&context=theses
Vettori, S. (Ed.). (2010). Ageing populations and changing labour markets. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
28 H. J. NAST
WHO. (2010) World health organization fact sheet. Retrieved from http://www.who.int/mental_health/
media/japa.pdf
Yamada, M. (2009). After parasite singles – The real story behind Japan’s marriage crisis. In J. R. Navarro
& E. R. Vázquez (Eds.), Envejecimiento de la población en España y Japón: Estudio comparativo y posibles
implicaciones para Europa y Asia Pacífico [The a ging population in Spain and Japan: Comparative
study and possible implications for Europe and Asia Pacific] (pp. 96−120). Spain: Ediciones
Universidad de Salamanca.
Yoshida, R. (2013, April 20). Abe vows to help women in the workforce. The Japan Times. Retrieved from
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/04/20/national/politics-diplomacy/abe-vows-to-help-
women-in-workforce/#.VqZbPzaCzdl
Yoshinaga, M., & Ishikawa, K. (2007). Gothic & Lolita. London: Phaidon Press.
Zelizer, V. A. R. (1985). Pricing the priceless child. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Zheng, T. (2009). Red lights: The lives of sex workers in postsocialist China. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
View publication stats

Into The Arms of Dolls: Japan's Declining Fertility Rates, The 1990s Financial Crisis and The (Maternal) Comforts of The Posthuman

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Into The Arms of Dolls: Japan's Declining Fertility Rates, The 1990s Financial Crisis and The (Maternal) Comforts of The Posthuman

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

Article in Social & Cultural Geography · September 2016

Critical race, queer, Marxian and psychoanalytic theories View project

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

ISSN: 1464-9365 (Print) 1470-1197 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rscg20

Into the arms of dolls: Japan’s declining fertility

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1228112

Published online: 26 Sep 2016.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

Into the arms of dolls: Japan’s declining fertility rates, the

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Dans les bras de poupées: baisse du taux de fertilité du

CONTACT Heidi J. Nast hnast@depaul.edu

aux Japonais salariés. Les deux ont fonctionné émotionnellement

En los brazos de las muñecas: la disminución de la tasa

intersubjectivity’s alienation by providing new spaces for (and of ) communal consumption.

Global declines in TFRs

Male trauma and the 1990s: suicide, seclusion, withdrawal

Into the arms of dolls, Part 1: otaku, dakimakura and BJDs

Otaku comforts and play

Into the arms of dolls 2: sex dolls and salarymen

The political economy of child-bearing and women’s procreational strike

Capitalism and maternal obsolescence

View publication stats

You might also like