The Rise of Virtual YouTubers in Japan

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The 'Virtual YouTuber' Phenomenon in Japan
Article · April 2019
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The ‘virtual YouTuber’ phenomenon in Japan
Candidate number: 1006986
Word count: 14518
FHS Oriental Studies (Japanese)
Dissertation: Hilary Term 2019
1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction ........................................................................................... 3
1.1 What is a ‘VTuber’? ........................................................................ 7
1.2 Demographics................................................................................ 11
1.3 Methodology ................................................................................. 12
1.4 Context and History ...................................................................... 13
2. Aesthetics ............................................................................................ 16
2.1 The Figure of the High-School Girl in Post-War Japan ................ 16
2.2 Moe and Kawaii ............................................................................ 20
2.3 The Kawaii Body .......................................................................... 29
3. Gender ................................................................................................. 32
3.1 Babiniku Ojisan ............................................................................. 32
3.2 ‘Digital Onnagata’ ........................................................................ 37
3.3 The Ethics of Female Impersonation............................................. 45
4. Technology and Simulating Bodies .................................................... 50
4.1 Simulating Femininity ................................................................... 50
4.2 Idols: between the real and the virtual........................................... 55
4.3 Why simulations? .......................................................................... 62
5. Conclusion........................................................................................... 65
6. Appendix ............................................................................................. 67
7. Reference List ..................................................................................... 67
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1. INTRODUCTION
‘Um… [ēto…]’
Against a background of pure white, a figure slowly rises
into shot, pastel-pink hair-ribbon first. Now fully in shot from the
waist up, she bashfully gazes around the white void she finds
herself in, waving to her imagined viewers.
‘Can you see me? [mieteimasu ka]’
After politely introducing herself, she jokingly narrows her
eyes and acknowledges that some of her sharper viewers may have
noticed she’s a little different to an ordinary YouTuber. Here there
is no mistake. In place of the typical bedroom backdrop seen in
many vlogs (video blogs), there is a white void, and inhabiting it
there is no well-lit vlogger but a computer-generated animated 3D
model depicting a large-eyed girl in the style typical of manga and
anime. She has long brown hair rendered so that it appears to catch
the light with a large heart-shaped pastel pink ribbon sitting on top.
The ribbon has been programmed to bob about realistically when
she moves her head. She wears a mainly white costume with pink
accents and black lace trim, and a black and white striped ribbon on
her chest.
This is the introductory video of self-proclaimed ‘virtual
YouTuber’ Kizuna Ai, uploaded on the 1st of December 2016. This
video marks the very beginning of the Japanese virtual YouTuber
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(later contracted to VTuber) craze, which would explode in
popularity at the end of 2017. The content of her other videos is
generally not dissimilar to that of a typical vlogger, and viewers are
able to watch Ai as she talks entertainingly about various topics,
draws, dances, plays video games, takes online quizzes or tests her
kanji skills, makes announcements and advertises sponsored apps
or games.
As her self-introduction continues, Kizuna Ai goes on to
explain her reasons for beginning her virtual YouTuber career. As
she exists in the virtual realm, she explains, she is a little different
to us viewers, and so would like to form connections with as many
humans as possible in order to get to know us better. She goes on to
explain that she would like to try new things, such as livestreaming
and ‘futuristic’ virtual reality (hereafter VR), and that she would
someday like to appear in a commercial, like ‘real’ popular
YouTubers do.
Hearing her list these goals over two years later in 2019, it
is striking the extent to which she has surpassed them. With over
2.4 million subscribers, rivalling many of the most popular
Japanese YouTubers, she has certainly succeeded at connecting
with people, and not only has she appeared in several commercials
since then, but she has performed as a hologram in her own music
concerts, listened to peoples’ troubles while working behind the
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counter of a virtual bar in a virtual-reality chatroom, collaborated
with brands such as the huge convenience store Lawson, and
interviewed Nobel-prize winning scientists, to list but a few of her
varied achievements. This success is not limited only to Kizuna Ai,
and other VTubers have also had segments on terrestrial TV shows,
held their own virtual reality live concerts and released licensed
figures, comics and various other merchandise.
Despite the trend’s current success, however, it may be
tempting to dismiss the VTuber phenomenon as merely another
superficial internet fad that will fade from popularity as soon as the
novelty wears thin. I do not know for how much longer VTubers
will remain popular, or if, indeed, they will refuse to disappear and
instead become a fixture of the Japanese pop-culture landscape
going forward (the Google Trends data for searches for ‘vtuber’
suggest a slow rise in interest from the trend’s inception up to
2019, suggesting they are at least not yet in imminent threat of
disappearance – see Appendix 1).
Regardless of what the future might hold, however, I
believe that there are things we can learn from the VTuber
phenomenon. Its emergence and popularity can also be traced back
to earlier trends that also emerged from Japan in recent times, as
well as broader movements in Japanese pop-culture. In this
dissertation I will explore issues such as why VTubers are popular
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and among what kinds of people, how the trend fits into wider
movements in Japanese pop-culture, how virtual avatars interact
with gender, the nature of simulated bodies and the way in which
they are gendered, and why simulated or fictional characters are
desired by certain groups in Japanese society.
I will begin my analysis of this phenomenon with an
overview of VTubers and their rise to popularity, followed by a
description of audience demographics, a discussion of
methodology, and a brief description of the context of the
phenomenon, including other trends that VTubers seem to have
built on.
After this introduction, I will discuss aesthetics concepts
relevant to VTubers in the context of a wider shift away from
meaningful narratives and towards affective attributes such as
kawaii and moe in Japanese popular culture.
Following this, I will discuss issues of gender relating to
VTubers, focusing on male performers creating VTube content
mediated through female avatars, and the issues implicated by this.
In the final chapter I will discuss the significance of
‘simulacra’ and constructed or fictional figures in Japanese society,
analysing the ways in which simulations have come to be desired in
and of themselves with little concern for what they are simulating,
if they are in fact simulating something that exists at all. As a
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recent example of ‘simulacra’, how can this help to explain the
popularity of VTubers?
1.1 What is a ‘VTuber’?
The term ‘VTuber’ refers to content creators who use
motion-capture technology to record and map their own
movements to an expressive 2D or 3D illustration or computer-
generated model in order to create the illusion of a lifelike virtual
character that moves like a real person. The movements of these
avatars along with the voice of the person manipulating the avatar
are typically used in videos uploaded to video-sharing services
such as YouTube or Nico Nico Douga, or used in live-streams and
various other live performances. The word ‘VTuber’ itself is a
contraction of the phrase ‘bācharu yūchūbā’ [‘virtual youtuber’]
which was coined by Kizuna Ai in her first video uploaded to
YouTube. Minoru Hirota, the president and chief executive officer
of virtual reality news site Panora (Panora, 2018), has defined the
two main characteristics of VTubers to be that they ‘move a 2D or
3D character using motion capture technology’ and that they
‘broadcast videos, livestreams and the like on the internet’ (Minoru
2018a, p.45, my translation).
In his article ‘The existence of virtualised people: the past
and future of VTubers’ (my translation), Minoru Hirota also gives a
useful timeline of the rise of the VTuber ‘movement’.
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Minoru recognises Kizuna Ai, who started uploading videos
in December of 2016, as the origin of the movement, and probably
owing to her influence other VTuber-like creators started to appear
in the following year, with Dennō shōjo Shiro [lit. ‘Cyber-girl
Shiro’] appearing in August and Mirai Akari in October of 2017.
Later that year recognition of VTubers was further advanced by the
bācharu noja rori kitsune musume yūchūbā ojisan, [lit. ‘virtual old
man little fox-girl who uses the sentence ender “no ja”’] otherwise
known as Nekomasu, who in November of 2017 began uploading
videos created by manipulating a CG (computer graphic) model he
had created as a hobby. Due to the large gap between the cute
appearance of the fox-girl avatar and the obviously-male voice it
produced, the content of the videos which often consisted of
complaining about his real-life convenience-store part-time job,
and surreal gags such as the avatar pulling an onigiri (rice ball] out
of its armpit, the writer ‘Nyalra’ introduced Nekomasu on his
personal blog at the start of December and it immediately began
attracting attention. On the 9th of December 2017 Kaguya Luna
debuted to immediate popularity, with three of her six videos
uploaded before 2018 already having a million views each by that
point. Minoru attributes the appearance of Nekomasu and Kaguya
Luna as sparking renewed interest in the three VTubers who had
come before, leading to the birth of the ‘Big Five’ [‘五人で四天
王’, lit. ‘The (Five) Four Heavenly Kings’, a playful adaptation of a
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phrase usually meaning ‘big four’] consisting of Kizuna Ai, Shiro,
Mirai Akari, Nekomasu and Kaguya Luna. With other smaller
VTubers also having debuted in 2017, the phrase VTuber was now
no longer solely associated with Kizuna Ai and had come to refer
to a genre with a selection of personalities for viewers to choose
from (Ibid, p.46).
In January 2018, the corporation Ichikara began recruiting
official live-streamers, and started the first class of official
‘bācharu raibā’ [virtual live-streamers] on the 8th of February
2018. Rather than uploading videos, they instead hold live-streams
typically lasting one to two hours using services such as YouTube
Live and Mirrative (Ibid, p.46-7). Ichikara’s official streamers are
often referred to as the Nijisanji group because of the software used
to manipulate the avatars they use – a mobile phone app titled
Nijisanji that uses the facial recognition technology in the iPhone X
to capture motion from the face and upper body to manipulate a 2D
illustration in the program Live2D. In Minoru’s view, Nijisanji
proved that even a 2D avatar – unlike the 3D ones used by previous
VTubers – could become popular as long as what they talked about
was interesting enough, which further lowered the hurdles for
entry.
At the same time, the ‘Big Five’ started appearing on
platforms outside of the internet. In March, Shiro and Mirai Akari
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appeared on stage at the anime event AnimeJapan 2018, and in
April, Kizuna Ai starred in her own TV show on Nippon TV,
‘kizuna ai no BEAT sukuranburu’ [Kizuna Ai’s BEAT Scramble]
and Shiro has become the presenter of a night-time variety show on
TV Asahi, ‘saikidō’ (Ibid, p.47).
On the larger-scale side, from early 2018, VTuber
management companies and agencies have been springing up, with
Nijisanji debuting 10 VTubers in March as part of their ‘second
class’ and 2 in May as part of ‘Nijisanji Gamers’, focused on
VTubers specialising in gaming-related content. DUO, the
company producing Mirai Akari, founded the management office
ENTUM in April, and Appurando, which Shiro belongs to,
established ‘.LIVE’ which started broadcasting 12 VTubers as part
of their ‘aidorubu’ [idol club.] The company producing Kizuna Ai,
Activ8, also established a production company ‘upd8’ to support
individuals and teams aiming to become VTubers on the 31st of
May.
At an individual level, too, there are those who have
become VTubers on their own as a hobby, perhaps influenced by
Nekomasu’s self-produced efforts. The social VR service ‘VRChat’
has helped these creators, as users can create their own virtual
studios and produce videos using the camera function of the
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application, using motion capture technology used in conventional
VR to manipulate their avatars on camera (Ibid, 47-8).
1.2 Demographics
The best data available on the audience demographics for
VTubers seems to be an online survey conducted by the CyberV
Corporation which runs virtual YouTuber and streaming
enterprises. The survey asked 1500 Japanese men and women from
the ages of 15-39 whether they knew what VTubers are, and the
results are analysed according to age and gender. The group with
the highest rate of awareness was males between 15 and 19, with
70% saying they know about VTubers. The rate of awareness was
negatively correlated with age for both men and women, and the
rate of awareness among women was always lower than that among
men in the same age-group. The average rate of awareness for men
across all age groups from 15-39 was 53.2%, and 30.4% for
women.
The survey also asked respondents about their image of
VTubers. Males between 20-24 were the most likely to say they
‘liked’ (suki) VTubers, at 35.3%, followed closely by males
between 15-19 at 35.2%. The age group among men least likely to
say they like VTubers was 30-34 at 12.7%, followed by 35-39 at
14.1%. Women from 15-19 liked VTubers the most at 27.1%,
followed by women from 25-29 at 25.7%, followed closely by
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women from 20-24 at 23.0%. Again, the age group least likely to
say they like VTubers was 30-34 at 10.8% followed by 35-39 at
12.0%. The average for men of all age ranges was 26.6% compared
to women at 21.5%. From this it is clear that VTubers enjoy the
most popularity among younger age ranges, and among men
(CyberV Corporation 2018).
1.3 Methodology
There were some challenges in writing this dissertation. As
virtual YouTubers are such a new, niche phenomenon, it appears
that there is still no academia surrounding the subject, with the
virtual YouTuber special issue of the poetry and criticism journal
Eureka serving as the most academic source directly relating to the
subject. Additionally, due to time and logistics constraints I was
unable to conduct primary research such as interviews or surveys
with VTubers themselves, their fans, or management. Such primary
research would improve a future study, however in the current
study I have gathered data from a wide variety of sources so as to
get the widest picture of the phenomenon within these limitations.
As virtual YouTubers are an internet-based phenomenon, there
were many articles, blog posts and social media discussions
available online discussing the subject, and I have read and
analysed a wide range of this kind of indigenous commentary
including blog posts, social media discussions and websites
providing news about the phenomenon. In addition, while there is
12
no directly relevant academia, there exist many developed
discourses and frameworks that I believe to be highly relevant and
applicable to the subject at hand, and I have taken pertinent ideas
from these and applied them to the case of virtual YouTubers.
These discourses include writings on aesthetic concepts such as
moe and kawaii, on otaku and their relationships with fictional
characters, on the dominance of the figure of the high-school girl in
Japanese media and her significance, on gender in Japan, as well as
postmodern theory such as Jean Baudrillard.
1.4 Context and History
Looking around the recent Japanese pop-culture landscape
one can sense resonances with the VTuber phenomenon in many
places, from idols, anime and mascot characters to virtual singers
and the cutting-edge Japanese robotics industry.
However, the trend sharing most in common with VTubers
must be the ‘virtual idol’ trend, detailed in Black (2008). The trend
began in 1996 when an idol talent agency, HoriPro, attempted to
overcome the problems inherent to human idols, who age or
become embroiled in scandals, by commissioning a computer
graphics company called Visual Science Laboratory to create the
world’s first virtual idol, Kyoko Date. Kyoko managed to release a
music CD, appear in a soap opera and appear on a radio talk show
before her career fizzled out, but not before inspiring the creation
13
of a string of other virtual idols, beginning in Japan and spreading
to other countries such as Korea, Hong Kong, Germany, France
and the UK, although only one, Yuki Terai, apparently had much
long-lasting success. Black draws a comparison with traditional
idol ‘creation’, noting that while human idols must be trained at
considerable cost in order to move them closer to an ideal they can
only ever approximate, the ‘key to the desirability of virtual idols’
is their freedom from the constraints of biology which bind human
idols, meaning they can be constructed and reconstructed to
perfectly match consumer tastes without the problem of ageing.
The only element that remained tied to human biology was the
voice used to sing their tracks or take part in interviews (Black
2008, p.38). For most VTubers, too, the human voice remains the
most direct remnant of human biology, yet now this has become a
choice, as certain VTubers such as Norakyatto hide their real voice
using artificial speech-recognition software to generate a synthetic
voice. Looking at software such as Yamaha’s Vocaloid, Black
predicted that synthetic speech would soon become possible and
that when it did virtual idols would ‘cut the last cord of biological
dependency’ (Ibid), but the fact that most VTubers still choose to
rely on the human voice perhaps shows that, for now, there remains
an appeal in the human voice that is still out of the reach of
technological imitation.
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Hatsune Miku and the ‘Vocaloid’ phenomenon also share
much in common with VTubers. ‘Vocaloid’ is a piece of voice-
synthesis software, created in 2004, designed to create a digital
approximation of a real singer using voice banks created from a
real singer’s voice. However, now the term also refers to the now
hugely popular mascot characters created to represent and promote
the purchasable voice banks for the program. These have now
essentially become another form of virtual idol, appearing on stage
in hologram form, dancing elaborately programmed choreography
and ‘singing’ their most popular songs accompanied by live
backing bands, to huge crowds of fans waving glow sticks (Lam
2016, p.1107).
What is most remarkable about the Vocaloid phenomenon,
however, is the huge role fans play in both the production of
meaning for these characters, as well as their role in producing the
very songs and dances they perform. Users of the software are
encouraged to compose their own original songs to be ‘sung’ by the
mascot characters, and to share these online. As the characters
assigned to each voice bank each started off more-or-less as a blank
slate, with only a character design illustration to inform fans of
their personality, users who ‘compose their original Vocaloid
music sung by Miku’ ‘continuously impose their own values and
perceptions on the virtual character’ (Ibid, p.1111), gradually
building up a more defined image of each character through fan-art,
15
original songs, and music videos either animated by hand or else
created using software called Miku Miku Dance (MMD) to animate
3D models of the idols.
Vocaloids share with VTubers a similar willing suspension
of disbelief on the part of the audience. I had the opportunity to see
Hatsune Miku perform as a hologram at the Miku Expo in London
in December 2018, and regardless of the fact that there would be no
real ‘presence’ on stage singing the set-list aside from a projected
hologram, my fellow attendees were just as excited to see this
hologram perform in person as they would be to see any huge
singer perform. So much so that a fellow audience member told
me, with only a small trace of irony, that she was ‘so excited to see
the REAL Miku.’ Fans tend to be willing to indulge in the fantasy
and take these virtual characters on their own terms.
2. AESTHETICS
2.1 The Figure of the High-School Girl in Post-War Japan
Despite the nature of virtual avatars, which in theory allow
near-unlimited range of expression in the kind of virtual body one
could ‘inhabit’, the overwhelming majority of VTuber avatars seem
to cluster around a central theme – the young girl, often around
high-school age. This is by no means limited to the case of
VTubers. The figure of the high-school girl is ubiquitous in
Japanese media, from manga and anime such as Sailor Moon to
16
chat-shows, documentaries, educational programs and swimsuit
modelling (Kinsella 2002, p.225-8).
An explanation of the rise of the figure of the high-school
girl in post-war Japan can be gleaned from Sharon Kinsella’s essay
on their school uniforms, ‘What’s behind the fetishism of Japanese
School Uniforms?’ For Kinsella, the uniformed figure is
symbolically potent, tied up with Japanese subjectivity and Meiji-
period modernisation, as well as forming a ‘key symbol, and anti-
symbol, of the political system and the education system’ (Kinsella
2002, p.219).
The Meiji government recognised the necessity of ‘citizen-
making’, or the creation of the Japanese subject, for modernisation,
and it accomplished this primarily through the two arms of
elementary schools and the conscript army, producing the Rescript
of Soldiers and Sailors and the Imperial Rescript of Education in
1885 and 1891 respectively. Schoolchildren were ‘seen largely as
soldiers, sailors and airmen’, particularly during the Pacific War,
and their uniforms reflected this: boys’ uniforms were based on the
late nineteenth-century Japanese army uniform, while girls’
uniforms, which became known as ‘sailor suits’ (sērāfuku), were
based on nineteenth-century English navy uniforms (Ibid, p.217-8).
The government lost one of its arms of citizen-making with
the dismantling of the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy following
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the end of the Pacific War, but as a result the school system came
to be viewed with increased political importance, and while those
who fought in the army were demobbed, schoolchildren continued
to be closely managed by governmental institutions. Reflecting
this, society, which had been viewed as a kokutai (Imperial ‘family
state’) came to be viewed as a gakureki shakai (‘educationalist
society’). For Kinsella, official school uniforms, which continued
to resemble the pre-war military-style school uniform even after the
war, turned schoolchildren into ‘living symbols of the pre-war
Japanese political system’, and ‘schoolchildren in uniform’
sometimes appeared to be the ‘only real national subjects
(kokumin) or full citizens of Japan (Ibid, p.218).
Perhaps influenced in part by the potency of the uniform as
a symbol of Japanese subjectivity, figures in military uniform in
contemporary Japanese culture are apparently ‘linked to stories
with extremely strong characters’. These characters are often
‘heroic, tragic, passionate’ or ‘uncontainable’, and experience ‘the
most extreme neuroses and anxieties’ as well as ‘dysfunctionality,
disconnection, despair, or desire, which symbolize the political
tensions and complications of modernity in Japan’, as well as
‘[appearing] to represent the very core and complex of
contemporary subjectivity’ (Ibid, p.219). On the other hand, the
wholesome image of uniformed schoolchildren in post-war
advertising may also have led to their heavy presence in erotic and
18
pornographic media that inverts their ‘officially chaste’ or
‘innocent’ character (Ibid).
Indeed, the sexual fetishism surrounding schoolgirls
appears to have intensified from the 1980s onward. The 1980s saw
the emergence of ‘Lolita complex’ pornography and Science
Fiction, which held the figure of the little girl in school uniform as
its ‘central object of desire’. Consuming this Lolita complex media
was an audience of adult male otaku, obsessive fans immersed in
various hobby subcultures including manga and anime, who also
formed a ‘large secondary audience for manga, animation, and
pop-idols ostensibly produced for children’, such as Sailor Moon,
which was first published in 1992 (Ibid, p.224-5).
Additionally, scandals surrounding the deviant behaviour of
schoolgirls in the mass media, beginning with shocking news in
1993 that ‘bloomer sailor’ (burusērā) shops were buying school
uniforms, ‘used knickers, and gobs of […] saliva’ from schoolgirls
and selling them to men with a fetish for schoolgirls. In 1994 an
even more shocking scandal of amateur prostitution by schoolgirls,
euphemistically referred to as ‘assisted dating’ (enjo kōsai) broke
in the national media, sparking an ‘intense interest’ in high-school
girls by the culture business sector, starting a ‘high-school girl
boom’ in the mid-1990s, and schoolgirls appeared in ‘serious news
reports, documentary programs, educational programs, wide shows,
19
and chat shows’, featuring heavily in all kinds of media (Ibid,
p.227).
It is the symbolic potency of the uniformed figure and the
intense sexual interest surrounding it, as well as moral outrage, that
have led to its domination of many spheres of Japanese media, both
mainstream and underground. This figure continues to be
prominent in media today, as can be seen with the abundance of
VTuber avatars modelled on high-school girls.
2.2 Moe and Kawaii
The domination of this aesthetic theme of young girl
characters is of course hardly limited to VTuber avatars in Japan,
and there is also a huge market for anime, manga and goods
featuring these characters designed to appeal to an otaku audience.
These characters have come to be referred to as moe kyara. The
term moe is a central aesthetic theme of current media targeted at
otaku, but is somewhat problematic to define, so I will here give a
more detailed discussion of the term.
The term moe is ‘a neologism used to describe a euphoric
response to fantasy characters or representations of them’
(Galbraith 2009), and the word itself derives from the verb moeru
(萌える) meaning ‘to bud or sprout’, and it is also homophonous
with the verb ‘to burn’. The word in its current meaning first
20
appeared in the 1990s in an online discussion about ‘young, cute
and innocent anime girls’ and ‘a burning passion for them’ on the
online bulletin board 2chan (Macias and Machiyama, cited in
Galbraith 2009). The word is also used by fujoshi, female fans of a
genre of manga centred on male gay romance called yaoi to
describe responses to the characters appearing in such manga, and
while most academic writing focuses on male otaku, this is not a
phenomenon limited only to men. Moe refers to a response to
fantasy characters rather than a ‘specific style, character type or
relational pattern,’ however following Japan’s high economic
growth from the 1960s through to the 80s and an accompanying
rise in consumption of anime, manga and character merchandise
among youths, characters came to be designed specifically to elicit
a moe response in the consumer. This is an example of moe kyara
(Galbraith 2009).
In the view of manga scholar Itou Gou, anime, manga and
video game characters became so appealing following the end of
the 80s that they were desired by fans even in the absence of stories
or narratives to ‘contain’ them. Ito refers to this type of character,
independent of any narrative, as kyara, as opposed to kyarakutā
which must be embedded within stories. This is reflected in the
huge popularity of dōjinshi, or derivative fanzines based on
existing manga, anime or videogames which place existing
characters in new, sometimes pornographic, situations and
21
relationships (Ibid). To philosopher Azuma Hiroki, otaku seem to
value these derivative works just as much as the original works,
‘[consuming] both original and parody with equal vigor’ (Azuma
2009, p.25-6), and Azuma is reminded of Jean Baudrillard’s
prediction that in postmodern society ‘the distinction between
original products and commodities and their copies weakens, while
an interim form called the simulacrum, which is neither original
nor copy, becomes dominant’ (Baudrillard, cited in Azuma 2009,
p.26). Even manga and anime producers have been known to take
part in creating their own pseudo-derivative works, with the creator
of Sailor Moon selling products at Comiket (a large market for
dōjinshi) and the company that produces the anime Neon Genesis
Evangelion producing spin-off software and the like (Azuma 2009,
p.26).
In Galbraith’s view, this tendency towards consuming
characters independently from any authentic narrative represents a
move away from consuming narratives in order to create meaning,
towards a fragmentary ‘database consumption’ [dētabēsu shōhi], to
use Azuma’s (2008) term, in order to create ‘affect’. This ‘database
consumption’ implies a breakdown of narratives where characters
designed to elicit a moe response become an ‘amalgamation of
codes from the moe database’ combining and recombining various
moe traits such as ‘a maid outfit, cat ears (nekomimi), giant saucer
eyes, a saccharine voice and so on’ (Azuma, cited in Galbraith
22
2009). As Azuma points out, otaku are aware that these
characteristics can be appealing within themselves, and an otaku
search engine ‘TINAMI’ launched in 1996 features an actual
searchable database that classifies illustrations from different sites
according to their ‘moe-elements’. For example, users can search
for illustrations of characters with ‘cat ears’, ‘glasses’, ‘maid
costumes’ or ‘angel’ characters (Azuma 2009, p.42-4).
Azuma sees this current state of database consumption as
the result of a slow shift. This shift started in the 1970s, when
Japanese otaku ‘lost the grand narrative’ in the shift to a
postmodern consumer society, before learning to ‘fabricate the lost
grand narrative’ by piecing together trivia about fictional worlds to
create meaning in a process called ‘narrative consumption’ (Ibid,
p.54). In the 1990s, consumers became unconcerned with the
underlying message or meaning of works as a whole, instead
becoming fixated on fragmentary elements of a work such as its
characters or settings, fostering a heightened empathy towards
these fragments in and of themselves (Ibid, p.36). Azuma argues
that otaku have become aware that even the characters of a work
‘are just simulacra, consisting only of moe-elements’ and as such
they have learned to ‘simply desire the database’ of these moe-
elements, consuming ‘the database of otaku culture as a whole’.
23
This is ‘database consumption’ (Ibid, p.54-5), and indicates a wider
shift in concern, particularly among otaku, away from the
underlying meaning of works and towards a more direct affective
and empathetic relationship towards fragmentary aspects of works.
It is clear from this description that there is a significant
overlap between moe and another well-known Japanese aesthetic
consideration, kawaii. Indeed, the comment section of any VTuber
with a cute female avatar will invariably be full of comments of
praise often consisting simply of the word kawaii, or else
expressing the same sentiment in a few more words. In her article
‘Cuties in Japan’, Sharon Kinsella traces the rise of kawaii in its
modern meaning from a trend for cute handwriting and childlike
fashion in the early 1970s to its domination of popular culture in
the 80s and 90s through ‘fancy goods’, infantile cartoon characters
and affected girlish behaviour (Kinsella 1995, p.222-228). The
word kawaii is usually translated simply as ‘cute’, but according to
Kinsella it basically means ‘childlike’, and celebrates the ‘sweet,
adorable, innocent, pure, simple, genuine, gentle, vulnerable, weak
and inexperienced’ (Ibid, p.220).
Kawaii derives from a term mainly meaning ‘shy’ or
‘embarrassed’ but also with nuances of ‘pathetic’, ‘vulnerable’,
‘loveable’ and ‘small’, and according to Kinsella these secondary
nuances of vulnerability and pitifulness remain important to kawaii
24
in its modern meaning. Indeed, ‘toddlers, baby animals, and frail
old ladies’ are the ‘natural models for cute’, and cute characters
like Sanrio’s Hello Kitty ‘have stubbly arms, no fingers, no
mouths, huge heads, massive eyes – which can hide no private
thoughts from the viewer – nothing between their legs’, giving an
impression of helplessness and vulnerability (Ibid, p.236). There
was also a fashion among young people for ‘using baby-talk, acting
childish and wearing virginal childish clothes’, and women who
acted in this way were referred to as burikko. Burikko derives from
the words furi (pretence, pretending) and ko, which in some cases
means ‘child’, and because of this Kinsella has misinterpreted the
literal meaning of the word as meaning ‘fake child’, which leans in
to her interpretation of kawaii as something childish. However, ko
can also mean a young woman or when preceded by ‘っ’ - as it is
in burikko (ぶりっ子) - as a suffix meaning something close to
‘someone who does…’, as in the case of words like urekko
(‘popular figure’ lit. someone who sells well) or parikko (Parisian),
where there is clearly no meaning of ‘child.’ I believe burikko’s
literal meaning derives from this latter sense, meaning ‘pretender’
or ‘someone who acts in an affected manner’ rather than ‘fake
child’ as Kinsella believes.
The design of most VTuber avatars draws heavily from the
style of typical manga and anime and seems to incorporate
25
elements of both moe and kawaii. They typically have the ‘massive
eyes’ and small mouth and nose as described by Kinsella, and also
tend to act like a more extreme version of the burikko, acting
embarrassed, airheaded or shy and relying on heavily exaggerated
cute gestures and extremely high-pitched or childlike voices to
endear themselves to viewers. This kind of behaviour would likely
seem unnatural and forced in the case of a real woman but seems to
perhaps be more acceptable when paired with the obviously-
fantastical anime-style appearance of the avatars, as exaggeration is
to be expected in the realms of manga and anime.
It is easy to see how the aesthetics of VTubers are
influenced by moe. This under-emphasis of narrative in favour of
almost a sole focus on character can also be seen elsewhere, with
the growing popularity of anime and manga series typified by
series such as Lucky Star and K-On!, which both centre around the
interactions of four girls in various situations with little in the way
of narrative development, however Vtubers seem to me to represent
the logical conclusion of the emphasis of character over narrative.
The content produced by many VTubers typically consists almost
entirely of fragmentary ten-or-so-minute-long segments of the
character playing and commenting over a videogame, chatting
about some topic, or some other activity presumably chosen mainly
to provide opportunities to elicit moe. The fact these characters
exist in a narrative vacuum is to me amusingly underlined by the
26
fact that Kizuna Ai’s videos literally take place within a white void.
Black argues that kawaii ‘[seeks to create]…an impression of pure
exteriority’ (Black 2008, p.46), and this can be thought of in terms
of Azuma’s theory of database consumption as part of the same
shift towards fragmentary elements of a work that inspire affect, as
well as towards a weakened concern with narrative or underlying
meaning. This cultural environment helps to explain the total lack
of narrative or meaning, and intense focus on kawaii and moe
affective elements, in VTuber content.
Kawaii and moe are far from politically neutral aesthetic
values, and have often been criticised by feminists, particularly due
to the over-abundance of such imagery in mainstream and
government-sponsored texts and media.
Laura Miller (2011) has criticised the way that Cool Japan,
a government-run soft power initiative aiming to globally market
Japanese pop-culture, has often promoted ‘cute’ imagery mainly
produced and curated by male elites in Japan. For example, in 2009
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs ‘appointed three women to serve as
“Trend Communicators of Japanese Pop Culture”’ who became
known as ‘the “Ambassadors of Cute” (kawaii taishi)’. They were
required to ‘wear the uniforms of fashion niches or subcultures that
were carefully chosen as exemplary of acceptable youth’ which
were ‘the Schoolgirl, the Lolita, and the Harajuku teen’. However,
27
Miller criticises the way that ‘the selection, media production, and
strategic deployment of the Ambassadors of Cute were primarily in
the hands of middle-aged men’, and she argues that ‘Cool Japan’s
otaku ethos rarely includes representations of the women and girls
who fail to conform to the narrow model of cute femininity’ and in
fact exclude such representations deliberately. To Miller, Cool
Japan ‘reifies and officially promotes male geek culture’ by
promoting a ‘cute femininity’ that ‘essentializes and eroticizes girls
and women, putting them into service for the state in a
contemporary version of geisha commodification […] and past
nationalistic uses of the moga or “modern girl”’ (Miller 2011, p.19-
20).
This is far from the only time Japan has officially promoted
convenient or marketable types of Japanese femininity, and in fact
virtual YouTuber Kizuna Ai seems to have become the newest
‘Ambassador of Cute’ for the Cool Japan initiative. On the 2nd of
March 2018, Kizuna Ai was appointed by the Japan National
Tourism Organization (JNTO) as the ‘ambassador for [the “Come
to Japan”] tourism campaign’ (Japan National Tourism
Organization 2018), and she has produced videos as part of the
campaign promoting tourism to Japan. Ai was also chosen by the
NHK, Japan’s national public broadcasting organisation, to ‘appear
on an NHK show about recent Japanese winners of the Nobel
prize’ (St. Michel 2018), in which she interviewed the scientists.
28
However, this sparked debate on social media criticising such
official use of moe kyara and kawaii imagery, which some believe
serves to sexualise and infantilise women. In an article for Bunshun
Online, Yasuda Minetoshi provides a quote from a tweet from
lawyer Keiko Oota criticising the NHK’s use of an illustration of
Kizuna Ai in a banner advertising the segment, saying ‘women’s
bodies are frequently depicted in an exaggeratedly sexual manner
and used in “eyecatches”, but of all places I want the NHK to stop
doing this’ (Keiko Ota, cited in Yasuda 2018, my translation).
2.3 The Kawaii Body
As will be seen in a later discussion of kawaii mūbu (kawaii
move) among male VTubers using female avatars, similarly to
other performances of gender in Kabuki or the Takarazuka Revue
(an all-female theatre that began in 1914 in which women play both
male and female parts (Robertson 1998, p.26)), kawaii can be
produced by reproducing set movements and signs coded as such.
However, the bodies that perform these set movements can also
serve to heighten the kawaii effect. This is especially clear when it
is not the human body but a constructed or simulated body
performing these set movements, or kata, (as discussed before with
moe kyara) and these constructed bodies can be seen to be more
desirable than the human body in some cases.
29
To Black (2008), the kawaii body is ‘also clearly a re-
imagining of the human body’, distorting and stylising the human
form to ‘[distil] the essence of its appeal’. Kawaii characters based
on animals or inanimate objects, such as Hello Kitty, are typically
anthropomorphised so as to elicit the ‘emotional engagement due to
humans’, and more recently moe kyara designed as
anthropomorphic cute-girl versions of various inanimate objects
from World War II tanks (Girls Und Panzer) and Microsoft’s
Windows 7 operating system (Nanami Madobe) to the cells of the
human body (Cells at Work!) have been created in order to elicit a
moe response from their otaku audience. Cute bodies, then, do not
simply ‘take on the qualities of a human body’, but must be
constructed so as to ‘[exhibit] qualities which are considered to be
cute’ (Black 2008, p.39).
It has been argued that these cute bodies find such
popularity in Japan because they represent ‘passivity, vulnerability,
and a lack of threat’, perhaps reflecting Japan’s view of gender
ideals or its power relations, or else a Japanese sensitivity to
‘confrontation and aggressive social interactions’ (Ibid, p.39).
However, Black also sees the aspects of the human body that are
removed or left out in the construction of cute bodies as telling of
wider anxieties in Japan about the human anatomy itself (Ibid,
p.39-40). Kinsella’s description of the anatomy of kawaii
characters points out their lack of ‘bodily orifices (e.g. mouths)’,
30
‘[muteness]’ and ‘[non-sexuality]’ (Kinsella 1995, p.226), which
Black interprets as an attempt to ‘exorcize’ all ‘evidence of certain
biological processes’. Lacking any orifices, nothing can enter or
leave these kawaii bodies, and ‘the organs of the distant contact
senses’ such as the eyes and ears ‘are magnified and distended’
while those associated with the ‘close contact senses’ such as the
nose, mouth and fingers, are ‘reduced or removed’.
Anthropological work conducted in Japan (Ohnuki-Tierney, cited
in Black 2008, p.40) has suggested evidence of a ‘belief that germs
and uncleanliness are generated by bodies and are concentrated
where bodies have been’ and so in Black’s interpretation these
kawaii bodies allay such bodily anxieties through their hygienic
bodies which are pure exterior, devoid of any messy interior
biological elements such as blood or guts (Black 2008, p.40).
However, Kinsella sees undertones of violence in the way
these kawaii bodies must be distorted. In her view, kawaii
characters are often ‘designed to be physically frail’ or ‘physically
handicapped’ (Kinsella 1995, p.236) in their attempt to inspire the
sense of vulnerability and pity so essential to kawaii, and the
‘maternal and solicitous’ gaze with which we view the cute thing is
actually ‘a transformative gaze that will stop at nothing to appease
its hunger for expressing pity and big heartedness, even at the
expense of mutilating the object of its affections’ (Harris, cited in
Kinsella 1995, p.236).
31
In this way, it is possible that the simulated bodies such as
those seen with virtual idols, VTubers, characters in anime and
manga, as well as with humanoid robots, draw some of their appeal
from the supposedly more ‘hygienic’ nature of their constructed,
surface-level, and kawaii bodies. This is one way in which
simulated bodies are sometimes desired for their own qualities
independently to their referents.
3. GENDER
3.1 Babiniku Ojisan
Although most of the larger and more professionally-
produced VTubers are voiced and controlled by professional
female seiyū [voice actors], among hobbyists it is not uncommon
for men to control and voice female avatars, with the most well-
known example being Nekomasu, who is widely credited with
inspiring individuals to pursue VTubing as a hobby.
Cute female avatars dominate the VTube scene to such an
extent that the word bācharu bishōjo juniku (バーチャル美少女受
肉), abbreviated to babiniku (バ美肉), has appeared to describe the
act of being ‘incarnated’ [zyuniku] as a cute female avatar within
the realm of VTubing or VRChat. Further, when it is a man who is
32
operating one of these female avatars, he is referred to as a
babiniku ojisan (バ美肉おじさん) (NicoNicoPedia 2018).
While Nekomasu juxtaposes his obviously-male voice with
his female avatar in order to create a novel contrast, many of these
hobbyists use voice-changing or synthetic voice-generation
software, sometimes in conjunction with voice-training books or
courses (Ibid), in order to provide their avatar with a more fitting
voice.
Given these seeming attempts to make their avatars more
authentically feminine, one might assume that these creators are
trying to disguise the fact that they are male. However, by using
words like babiniku ojisan in the titles or descriptions of their
videos or by discussing aspects of the babiniku process within their
videos such as their successes or failures with different voice-
changing techniques, many of these creators are either open about
this point or actively draw attention to it almost as a selling point.
Indeed, a blog post discussing the appeal of babiniku ojisan
gives a list of what the author, who is an active babiniku ojisan
whose female avatar is called Sōna Baramiya, considers to be their
main qualities. Most interesting of the list’s five points are: 1) the
quality of the 3D model is usually high because it is often
professional illustrators who have the skills to become babiniku
33
ojisan, and furthermore they have the skills to supply their own
erotic dōjinshi of their characters. 2) They possess a ‘calculated
cuteness’ [azatokawaisa] that is possible precisely because they are
men, and so know what their (straight) male audience will find
appealing. 3) It is entertaining to watch them becoming more
feminine as they continue creating content – a tweet quoted in the
blog post mentions finding it cute when they noticed one babiniku
ojisan, ‘Magurona-chan’, changing their laugh from hahahaha to
the more feminine-sounding ehehehe (Sōna no VTuber Mokuroku
2018).
In interviews and tweets, Nekomasu occasionally touches
on the appeal or his reasons for wanting to become his little fox-girl
avatar. When asked why he created and came to ‘become’ his
avatar in an interview with Panora, his response suggests that he
considers wanting to ‘become’ his avatar as nothing more than a
natural extension of finding it cute, saying that ‘firstly, girls with
animal ears are extremely cute. […] I made [the avatar] because I
find them cute, but if you were to dig down and ask why I find
them cute I couldn’t answer. I feel like it’s probably because my
DNA is arranged to recognise them as something cute. So I’m
drawn to girls with animal ears, and I want to create them, and I
want to become one’ (Minoru 2018b).
34
Nekomasu is also a frequent user of the VR-based chatroom
‘VRChat’, and when asked why men want to ‘become’ their young
girl avatars he has often said that compared to when using a tall
male avatar, it is much easier to communicate with others on the
service when using a cute, short girl avatar. In another interview
with Panora (Minoru 2018c), however, the interviewer mentions
that there are some people who want to look like cute girls even in
real life (onna no ko ni naritai ‘otoko no musume’ teki-na hito mo
imasu). Nekomasu does not consider himself as one of these, but
when asked what the appeal is in becoming a girl with animal ears
(kemomimi) is, he replies that ‘conversely, if my real appearance is
in the minus numbers, then my animal ear [kemomimi] appearance
brings it back to zero. It feels like bringing it back from the minus
numbers to what it should have been in the first place’. To this the
interviewer replies, ‘so it’s like “your virtual appearance is the real
you”’, to which Nekomasu agrees, saying that when he is in
VRChat he feels more ‘comfortable’ (Ibid).
Perhaps surprisingly, coverage of this kind of usage of
virtual avatars in mainstream news media is very positive and
descriptions of it can sound almost utopian. For example, an NHK
web feature is entitled ‘Become who you want to be. VTubers open
up new possibilities!’ [naritai jibun ni naru. VTuber ga hiraku]
(Kano 2018, my translation). In the article, one subheading is titled
‘another you that transcends gender and the body’ [seisa ya shintai
35
o koeta mō hitori no jibun] and touches on the benefits of avatars,
including their cross-gender usages. The article states that while
interviewing people involved with virtual YouTubers the reporter
often heard phrases like ‘you can become who you want to be’
[naritai jibun ni nareru] and ‘you can overcome all kinds of
restrictions’ [samazama na seiyaku o norikoeru koto ga dekiru],
and it notes that there are many men who use female avatars and
vice-versa, which allows them to act without being swayed by
gender [dansei ga josei no kyarakutā o tsukai, josei ga dansei no
kyarakutā o tsukau koto de, seibetsu ni torawarezu ni katsudō o
shiteiru hito mo kazuōku imasu] (Ibid). Under another subheading
titled ‘the doorway to a society in which everyone can take part’
[dare mo ga katsuyaku suru shakai e no tobira], the article quotes
Masahiko Inami, a professor at the University of Tokyo Virtual
Reality Educational Research Centre, who says that ‘VTubers exist
within our information society, constituting a new type of body that
we can call “digital cyborgs”. Using these, we can overcome
handicaps such as gender and physical disability, and we may
arrive at an age in which everyone can take part. I think that it will
go on to be used casually by many people and take root culturally’
(Ibid). From this kind of coverage, it appears that virtual avatars are
often viewed as representing an escape from the gendered
restrictions of society, as well as the inconveniences of the human
36
body itself, a sentiment which echoes, perhaps, Black’s argument
that kawaii bodies serve to ease anxieties about the human body.
3.2 ‘Digital Onnagata’
The performance of female roles by men of course has a
long history in Japan, with Kabuki theatre being the most famous
example. Although the earliest Kabuki featured female actresses
performing men’s roles in addition to male actors often performing
female roles, women were banned from the stage in 1629 due to the
shogunate’s disapproval of the ‘general disorder, including
unlicensed prostitution’ associated with women in Kabuki. Boys
were brought in to replace them, but as audiences were no less
attracted to them, the onnagata, ‘adult males who specialised in
performing femininity’ emerged to replace them (Robertson 1998,
p. 51).
The theory and method for onnagata was developed in the
early Edo period by the onnagata Yoshizawa Ayame, and he partly
based his theory on the Buddhist idea of henshin (a bodily
transformation or metamorphosis, which in the Buddhist sense
described deities assuming human form in order to better spread
their teachings), believing that the male actor of a female role
should not be ‘a male acting in a role in which he becomes a
“woman”’ but a ‘male who is a “woman” acting a role’, with the
‘transformation [preceding] his assumption of the woman’s role’
37
(Ibid, p.54). According to Robertson, ‘the actor was unequivocally
Woman, a model for females offstage to emulate and a sex object
for males offstage to proposition’ and onnagata could bathe at
women-only public baths (Ibid, p.55).
The female roles that these male actors performed were ‘an
amalgram of signifiers of ideal femininity’ (Ibid, p.54), with roles
based on ‘categories of the ideal Woman, each with predetermined
characteristics’, with one role, for instance, being based upon the
Onna Daigaku ‘Greater Learning for Females’, an influential 1672
primer instructing women how to behave properly, which was
written by a male Confucian scholar (Ibid). Femininity was
‘defined by dominant males’ and there was even the idea that
‘female anatomy precluded womanliness and femininity’ (Ibid,
p.58) and women were seen to be less suited for performing
femininity than men. This is somewhat reminiscent of the idea seen
in the previous chapter that babiniku ojisan are able to give more
appealing performances of femininity because, as men, they
understand what appeals to men (Sōna no VTuber Mokuroku 2018).
Daniel Black (2008) also saw a resemblance between
virtual idols and onnagata, likening the former to ‘digital
onnagata’ due to the way both appropriate ‘external features
marked as feminine’. Roland Barthes also notes that in Kabuki
theatre, ‘…woman is an idea, not a nature’ and so can be reduced
38
to and reconstructed from a collection of signs coded feminine
(Barthes, cited in Black 2008, p.47). These signs take the form of
various ‘set movements and affectations’ called kata which
performers must practice (Black 2008, p.47). Black mistakenly
interprets the word onnagata as deriving from the combination of
onna [woman] and this kata (型), with the pronunciation changing
to gata due to sequential voicing, which Black argues would mean
‘kata woman’, an etymology that would emphasise the constructed
nature of the ‘woman’ that is performed (Ibid). However, according
to the Kokushi Daijiten, while onnagata is usually written with the
characters ‘woman’ and ‘shape/form’ (女形) it is thought that a
different kata (方) meaning ‘person responsible for something’
(Kokushi Daijiten 1997, 方 entry) which is used for other theatre
role titles such as wakigata or shitegata is closer to the word’s
etymology, and so the original meaning of the word is probably
closer to ‘woman role’ than ‘kata woman’ (Tobe 1997). Black’s
minor etymological mistake, however, does not undermine his
main point that the performance of an onnagata can be interpreted
as an attempt to assemble these kata in order to ‘combine the signs
of woman’ (Black 2008, p.47). As such, as Robertson argues, ‘in
Japan historically, as attested in part by Kabuki and Takarazuka,
39
neither femininity nor masculinity has been deemed the exclusive
province of either female or male bodies’ (Robertson 1998, p.51).
Interestingly, it seems that this idea of kata is limited
neither to the theatre nor to male performers, and it appears that in
fact all behaviour traditionally considered ‘womanly’, including the
behaviour of women in their every-day lives, is thought to be
constructed from these kata. Discussing the carefully-constructed
femininity of Japanese idols, Aoyagi explains that ‘womanliness in
the traditional sense is achieved through enacting a feminine kata
(form). It is to stylize oneself in a womanly fashion, which involves
a distinct speech style, body posture, and attitude’ (Aoyagi 2005,
p.91). From this it appears that Barthes’ understanding of women
as ‘an idea, not a nature’ (Barthes, cited in Black 2008, p.47) is
perhaps not limited only to Kabuki theatre, suggesting that this
view of ‘woman’ as something constructed rather than something
based in nature perhaps also holds within broader Japanese society.
It is of course nothing new to suggest that femininity is a construct,
but what is interesting here is that this seems to be acknowledged
by the language itself through the characterisation of the
performances of femininity of both real women and male
performers as kata which must be learned and reproduced.
This discussion of the word kata struck me as reminiscent
of language used by hobbyist VTubers and those manipulating
40
virtual avatars in the virtual social spaces of VRChat. The word
‘kawaii mūbu’ (kawaii [cute] moves) has come into use especially
among men controlling female avatars and was first used on
Twitter around 2013/2014 to describe the cute gestures and
behaviours of female anime characters (Murakami 2018). Recently,
however, it has begun to be used for ‘gestures that make one’s
(especially a man’s) female avatar look cute in a VR space’ [‘(toku
ni dansei ga) VR kuūkan de josei abatā ga jibun o kawaiku miseru
shigusa’] (Ibid, p.2). For example, Norakyatto, a popular male
VTuber/live-streamer who uses a female avatar, receives many
comments of praise calling the avatar cute for reasons such as her
‘innocence as she jumps into shot from off-screen at the start of her
videos’ and the way she acts as she ‘smiles at her viewers while
making big hand and body gestures and putting her all into talking’
(Ibid, p.2, my translation). If one searches for posts containing
‘kawaii mūbu’ on Twitter, the phrase is mostly used by hobbyist
VTubers praising the skilful kawaii mūbu of other VTubers they
admire, or stating a need to practice their own moves. For instance
one tweet reads ‘ūn hoka no kata no kawaii mūbu o mite // jibun
zenzen dame dame desu ne’ [hmm, looking at other people’s kawaii
mūbu I realise I’m no good, no good.](@Ricco_G6vrc 2019), and
another reads, ‘Kawaii mūbu ni wa jisin ga arimasu, kedo
madamada shōjin ga tarinai to kanjiteiru // kawaii mūbu to ieba
ano hito! Tte iwareru kurai ni kiwametai’ [I’m confident in my
41
kawaii mūbu but I still feel like I’m lacking diligence // I want to
master it to the level that people will say ‘when you think of kawaii
mūbu, you think of that person!’](@Kotokawahinata 2019). Indeed,
as early as 1997, Sherry Turkle also realised that while ‘virtual
gender-swapping is easier than doing it in real life’, virtual cross-
dressing can be ‘technically complicated’, as it requires an
understanding of ‘how gender inflects speech, manner [and] the
interpretation of experience’, even when mediated through text
rather than a moveable avatar (Turkle, 1997, p.212-3).
Language like this, focused on skill and improvement, is
typical, and the focus on practice, diligence and mastery in these
online discussions of kawaii mūbu does bear a strong resemblance
to the attitude an onnagata might have towards mastering his kata.
However, it is equally clear that the vision of ideal femininity held
by Kabuki and by these ‘digital onnagata’ is quite different. While
Kabuki performers attempt to construct a vision of an ‘ideal’
woman from an assortment of kata which imitate to some extent
the kata that might have been used by real women when they
perform femininity, the ‘kata’ they practice in the form of kawaii
mūbu are one step further removed from kata used by real women
to perform femininity in that kawaii mūbu are rather based on the
already highly-stylised behaviour of female anime characters
(Murakami 2018).
42
If, as mentioned before, both women and male performers
playing them must equally learn kata to successfully perform a
‘woman’, then perhaps both performances could be considered to
lay similar claim to ‘authenticity’. Conversely, both could be seen
as similarly illusory, like the simulacra Jean Baudrillard describes
in his essay ‘Simulacra and Simulations’. If the idea of ‘woman’ in
Japan can be successfully assembled from a collection of signs
coded as such, then performances of femininity in general could
perhaps be viewed as simulations lacking an original, or
‘simulacra’, where ‘signs of the real’ are substituted ‘for the real
itself’ (Baudrillard 1994, p.2). Perhaps this general
acknowledgement of femininity as constructed can also help to
explain how, for instance, the performances of babiniku ojisan can
inspire the same authentic moe or kawaii response regardless of the
gender or appearance of the person behind the avatar. For instance,
in the case of one VTuber Norakyatto, a technical fault during a
livestream momentarily caused the motion capture footage to be
displayed instead of the avatar, showing the male operator’s face,
but in discussions of this on Twitter many of Norakyatto’s fans
continued to defend her, with one person saying that ‘people who
are shocked seeing this are as stupid as people who would be
shocked to see the mangaka [manga artist] drawing their favourite
character. Isn’t it fine for people to just like the character? The
mangaka and character are different’ (Loveridge 2018).
43
In this view of kabuki and onnagata, the construction of
these ideal women from an assortment of female-coded signs
seems to be driven primarily by aesthetic concerns, however it
appears that there are also those who identify with the avatar they
construct and view it as a means to get closer to their idea of their
‘true self’, which may not match their biological body. In her essay
in Eureka, ‘Independent Virtual YouTuber “ideas of the self”: the
rebirth of the self and spiritual fraternisation’ (my translation), a
hobbyist Virtual YouTuber whose avatar is called Uka Todoki
further touches on the idea that hobbyist VTubers may be trying to
get closer to an ‘ideal self’ or another facet of their identity through
their use of a virtual avatar.
Uka is female in real life, and in her essay she recounts how
since she was young, she has used the prescribed feminine first-
person pronoun watasi to others, but a more masculine pronoun
also sometimes used by little girls, boku, in her inner dialogues,
with these two selves having a coexistent relationship with each
other ‘like twins’, with ‘the same core but different file extensions’
(Todoki 2018, p.60). She writes that while this other self was
initially little more than a difference in first-person pronoun use
when she was young, this identity eventually became more
concrete, incorporating fantastic elements and becoming an
‘immortal magic-using bishōnen [pretty young boy]’. The
emergence of Virtual YouTubers roughly coincided with this other
44
self, boku, assuming such a form, as well as with her encounter
with a fantasy novel called ‘When The Gulls Cried’ about young
girls escaping the oppression of society by viewing the ‘real self
that usually doesn’t surface’ as a witch and engaging in a collective
game of make-believe in order to express their repressed selves.
Uka identified with the story, which formed part of the impetus for
her putting this boku identity, which she describes as ‘closer to
[her] true self than [her] body’, onto the stage as a Virtual
YouTuber, naming it ‘Uka’ (Ibid, p.61).
3.3 The Ethics of Female Impersonation
Issues of identity aside, while the kind of male
impersonation of women carried out by these ‘digital onnagata’
may seem like nothing more than an innocuous hobby or avenue
for personal expression, the personal can often be the political and
these performances are far from politically neutral. Indeed, in her
article ‘Minstrelized girls: male performers of Japan’s Lolita
complex’ Sharon Kinsella (2006) explored the potentially troubling
issues that arise when representations of girls and women are
almost exclusively controlled by male writers, curators and artists,
drawing parallels between the ‘cult of girlhood’ in the Japanese
mass media particularly in the 80s and 90s with racist ‘blackface’
performances in 19th century America which she argues shared a
similarly fetishistic interest in the subject of its othering gaze.
Kinsella argues that although female impersonation in Japan can be
45
traced back to onnagata (men playing female roles) in Kabuki,
from the twentieth century onwards female impersonation persists
indirectly through the representations of girls and women created
by male ‘writers, directors and artists’, stating that ‘rather than
being enacted literally and theatrically on stage, most girl
impersonation has been drawn or written, and has been mediated
and reproduced through the press and lens.’ (Kinsella 2006, p.66-
8). While I believe Kinsella’s direct comparison of blackface and
male-authored depictions of women in Japanese fictional media is
misguided at best due to the enormity of the differences in power
structures between both situations, as well as differences in the
nature of both phenomena, she raises some salient points about the
relationship between the consumers of these fictional girl
characters and the consumed subjects that I will cover here.
Kinsella notes that as well as a clear sexual dimension in
the subjects of both the ‘cult of girlhood’ in Japan and in blackface,
there has been a tendency for the creators and audiences of these
warped representations to begin identifying with the subject as
well. ‘Pastoral, feeling, Southern black folk were widely believed
to bear within them the necessary antidote to an over-mechanized,
industrial America’ and ‘blackface performers who sometimes
articulated a positive identification with black Americans,
constituted the earliest practitioners of American bohemianism’
(Ibid, p.75-6). Kinsella points out that ‘bohemian cultural
46
practitioners’ in contemporary Japan have found young women to
be a similar ‘source of identity and cultural cachet’, with writers
and artists who depicted girl characters finding importance in
meeting teenage girls and ‘aligning with the notion of assertive girl
power or “girl feminism”’ and avant-garde figures in contemporary
art such as Aida Makoto, Nara Yoshimoto and Murakami Takashi
visiting their own exhibitions accompanied by a schoolgirl muse,
drawing ‘autobiographical pictures of unhappy little girls’, or
taking young women under their wing as ‘girl art prodigies’,
respectively. ‘Schoolgirl sociologist-cum media personality’
Miyadai Shinji locates the source of his own identification with
girls in the ‘girlish currents within popular culture’ which impacted
the development of his identity as a child, and he chose to illustrate
this cross-identification by dressing as a ‘kogyaru’ schoolgirl in a
series of portraits of ‘eminent figures […] in the literary
establishment […] and world of cultural criticism’ printed in a low-
brow magazine (Ibid, p.76).
It may be that this kind of identification and cultural capital
derived from these girl subjects could stem from the ‘anti-
authoritarian impulse’ contained within the ‘depictions of sexual
deviance and uncontained energy projected onto girls in stories in
boy’s comics, the male press and Lolita-complex culture’, in a
similar way to how disaffected white audiences or performers
might have seen something romantic in the pastoralized racist
47
depictions of black people in blackface performances (Ibid, p.76).
However, in the same way that these seeming identifications with
the othered subject seem able to coexist with fantasies of violence
and sexual objectification in blackface, Kinsella casts doubt on the
extent of this empathy discussing Lolita-complex material in
particular, stating that while some critics have attempted to argue
that male viewers of Lolita-complex pornography or other material
might empathise more with the female victim/heroine than the
‘phallic aggressor’ inflicting rape or violence against her, other
critics such as Shigematsu cast doubt on this suggesting that while
‘a male reader may identify with a girl insofar as he momentarily
“sees” from her perspective’, this ‘may not necessarily lead to a
consistent desire to be sympathetic toward her’ (Shigematsu, cited
in Kinsella 2006, p. 77).
The relationship between consumers and the subjects they
consume appears to be a complex one, where feelings of
identification seem to paradoxically coexist with an othering view
of the subject characterised by objectification, sexualisation and
violence. In Azuma’s view, this is because for otaku their
relationships with these characters can be ‘both pure and perverse’
as they have learnt to live ‘without connecting the deeply emotional
experience of a work (a small narrative) to a worldview (a grand
narrative)’, instead shifting their focus towards the constituent parts
of a character that inspire moe, or ‘moe elements’ while emptying
48
narratives and characters of depth (Azuma, cited in Galbraith
2009).
Kinsella’s descriptions of these issues surrounding
‘indirect’ female impersonation through media such as manga,
anime, novels and the press have obvious implications for male
performers using female avatars to create ‘VTube’ content. These
avatars, when controlled by men, fit exactly the mould of young
‘charming’ girl characters laid out by Kinsella, and seem indeed to
represent the logical progression of the ‘cult of girlhood’ she
describes, particularly surrounding the ambivalent sense of
identification with these girl subjects. With this transition from
‘indirect’ female impersonation to direct impersonation, heightened
by technologies enabling what Kinsella might consider a kind of
‘digital blackface’ such as voice-changers and complete freedom to
alter one’s appearance through the creation of different avatars,
what new issues will be raised surrounding depictions of girls and
women? In Kinsella’s view, ‘audiences for contemporary Japanese
culture have tended to confuse visual and written material about
girls with the behaviour of female children and teenagers
themselves’ (Kinsella 2006, p.69), although this does not seem
likely in the case of babiniku ojisan who do not attempt to disguise
their real-life gender. On the other hand, too, as Turkle explored in
Life on the Screen, for the individual behind the avatar, virtual
gender-swapping may be an ‘opportunity to explore conflicts raised
49
by one’s biological gender’ and ‘by enabling people to experience
what it “feels” like to be the opposite gender or have no gender at
all, the practice encourages reflection on the way ideas about
gender shape our expectations’ (Turkle 1997, p.213). These
questions will likely continue to grow in relevance as virtual reality
technology becomes commonplace and our interactions
increasingly become mediated through virtual avatars.
4. TECHNOLOGY AND SIMULATING BODIES
4.1 Simulating Femininity
The history of technology has always been closely
intertwined with that of sexuality, with the erotic either ‘driving
technological innovation’ or else ‘virtually always […] [being] one
of the first uses for a new medium’ from ‘Stone Age sculpture to
computer bulletin boards’. Indeed, representations of the human
form in fired clay predate utilitarian uses of ceramics such as pots
by fifteen thousand years (Tierney, cited in Springer 1996, p.8). It
appears that throughout history there has been an especial
fascination in depicting the female form, and with the advancement
of technology the nature of these depictions has changed, with
recent technology making possible not only representations but also
what could be called ‘simulations’ of women.
Outside of the tale of Pygmalion, the figure of the robot is
perhaps the most widely-known example of this kind of simulation
50
of the human form. Daniel Black traces the fascination with these
figures which he sees as representing the ‘combination – or
interchangeability – of body and machine’ (Black 2009, p.43) back
to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when mechanical
automata created in Europe and Japan reflected contemporary
‘materialist accounts of the human body which saw it as, itself,
nothing more than a biological machine’ (De Panafieu, cited in
Black 2009, p.43). These objects existed only to ‘mimic the human
body’, possessing aesthetic value but no practical use, and as with
both VTubers and virtual idols, the majority of European automata
‘simulated the female body’ (Black 2009, p.43). In other words,
attempts to simulate the female body appear to have existed since
technology first made this possible, and continue today.
Panafieu suggests that the source of the popularity and
appeal of these objects was the ability of these automata to perform
a femininity ‘more carefully engineered and executed than those of
biological women’ (De Panafieu, cited in Black 2009, p.43). This
view echoes the thinking behind HoriPro’s creation of their first
virtual idol Kyoko Date, who, being ‘built to order’ according to
consumer tastes, could better embody an ideal which real idols
could only ever ‘approximate’ (Black 2009, p.38). In ‘Nihon no
Robotto to Dochaku Bunka’ [Robots and Indigenous Culture in
Japan, my translation], Miyanaga (1987) also backs up this view,
arguing that Japan’s greater acceptance of and affinity for robots
51
compared to Western countries stems from Japan’s traditional view
of aesthetics, which is fundamentally different to that of Western
countries. The teaching and learning of Japanese traditional arts,
from the tea ceremony to ikebana, Kabuki and Noh, is based not on
‘mental conditioning’ [kokoro no jōkenzuke] as in the West but on
‘physical conditioning’ [shintai no jōkenzuke], where novices are
made to learn kata, or set movements, by imitating their seniors.
The ‘quintessence of Japanese tradition is working through the
stage of “imitation” and arriving at the level of “command”’ (my
translation) [nihon no dentō no okugi wa, ‘mane’ no dankai o
nukedashite, ‘jizai’ no iki ni itaru koto da], and by beginning with
the form, the education of the mind will naturally follow. Robots
are also ‘programmed to emulate humans, who are their seniors’
(Miyanaga 1987, p.8) and so are perfectly equipped to flawlessly
learn these kata. The appearance of the word kata here in relation
to robots is interesting, for as I have discussed previously women
and male performers alike must also learn kata in order to perform
femininity. Given this, it seems only natural that in Japan robots
and virtual idols would be considered able to surpass humans in
performances of femininity through their flawless reproduction of
kata, backing up Panafieu’s view.
Jennifer Robertson also points out the ‘highly formulized
and formulaic, even robotic’ behaviour expected from women in
‘typical “women’s” jobs’ in Japan such as ‘elevator girls’
52
(Robertson 2018, p.99-100). The figure of the ‘elevator girl’ was
employed by the photo, video and performance artist Miwa Yanagi
to critique these gendered expectations on women in a photo series
called ‘Elevator Girls’ (Ibid, p.101) in which she hired models to
stand with a fake elevator she set up in a Kyoto art gallery for two
weeks, using ‘digital manipulation to augment the sense of
homogeneity’ (Davis 2007). Elevator girls must ‘repeat the same
rehearsed gestures over and over again, in order to please the
customers and facilitate their shopping experience’, and their job is
‘marked very much by routine and involves strict rules with regard
to dressing and appearance’, containing ‘aspects that are also
characteristic of dolls or even robots’ (Skirl, cited in Robertson
2018, p.101).
As discussed before, the signs and set movements that are
associated with femininity and coded as female are not derived
from the real behaviour of women, as shown by how it is also
necessary for women to learn and practice these feminine kata in
order to perform femininity. However, the creators of robots and
other simulated bodies often mistakenly view gendered differences
as ‘natural and universal’ (Robertson 2018, p.100), failing to see
their ‘edifice and artifice’ (Ibid, p.85), and so tend ‘uncritically to
reproduce and reinforce dominant stereotypes (or archetypes)
attached to human female and male bodies’ (Ibid, p.100).
53
This is made uncomfortably clear in the case of the gynoid
(feminine humanoid robot) Actroid Repliee Q2, which was debuted
at the 2005 World Expo in Aichi prefecture. As Robertson
describes, Actroid Repliee Q2 is ‘overdeterminedly feminine’, with
a ‘high-pitched’, ‘breathy, girlish voice’, ‘shaggy brown hair’,
‘manicured nails’ and feminine clothing including a ‘black
miniskirt hemmed with white lace’, pumps ‘festooned with bows’
and a ‘white sweatshirt emblazoned with “I ♥ Hello Kitty”’. She
also ‘protectively covers her chest with her right arm’ and, ‘in a
teasingly cute high-pitched voice, warns (presumably male) visitors
to the robot expo that touching her bosom constitutes “sexual
harassment”’ (Ibid, p.111-3). This gynoid was created by the male
roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro in collaboration with the company
Kokoro, ‘whose mission is to “build robots which can live and
coexist with us, human beings, entertaining and communicating
with us”’ (Kokoro Company, cited in Robertson 2018, p.111).
Actroid Repliee Q2 is, needless to say, a highly unrealistic,
exaggerated simulation of a woman, created to cater to the male
gaze. However, the fact that her face was not based on a single
female model but ‘a composite of the average Japanese female
visage’ (Robertson 2018, p.113) seems to suggest that the designers
were in fact attempting to create their vision of the average
Japanese woman. The ‘scientific’ nature of the compositing process
lends the gynoid’s representation of an ‘average’ Japanese woman
54
a kind of spurious authority, as despite its exaggerated nature it can
be claimed to have been ‘scientifically’ created, and therefore
supposedly objective and accurate. This can be thought to
strengthen its reinforcement of normative values. This is exactly
the kind of issue Kinsella (2006) was describing in Minstrelized
girls, and the kawaii mūbu of babiniku ojisan can also be seen as
similarly ‘over-determinedly feminine’, similarly to how
Takarazuka actresses ‘inevitably reproduce hierarchical gender
typologies’ in their performances of male characters (Robertson
1998, p.59), and these likely also serve to uncritically reinforce
gendered differences in society.
4.2 Idols: between the real and the virtual
In the media, even real women are occasionally treated
almost identically to their simulated counterparts, seeming almost
to slip into the realm of the virtual or simulated themselves. This is
best illustrated by the example of Japanese idols. In Black’s (2012)
view, both real idols and virtual idols are equally situated ‘at the
intersection of the digital and the biological’ and the ‘virtual and
the material’. This is because ‘living performers and entertainers
exist for consumers primarily as commoditized digital data, or
physical or analog products which have been created out of digital
data’ while virtual idols exist digitally but draw their appeal from
their ‘ability to reference living biology by simulating certain
attributes of the living body’ (Black 2012, p.217). In other words,
55
real idols exist in the physical world but rely on digital
representations to reach their audience, while virtual idols exist
only digitally but rely on reference to the real world for much of
their appeal.
Galbraith (2012) describes the conflation in recent times of
‘real and fictional images’ of idols, which ‘exposes how idols are
made up and how they are imagined’. For example, members of
AKB48 have become characters in a branded manga series, and
nearly a third of the content of a recent photo book of idol Itano
Tomomi featured a large number of manga-style illustrations of her
alongside actual photos (Galbraith 2012, p.185). A 2007 exhibition
on idols also displayed ‘portraits of anime, manga, and video game
characters’ alongside photos of real idols, ‘indicating continuity
between them as images’ (Amano, cited in Galbraith 2012, p.186),
and when mascot characters or idols appear in marketing
campaigns they are both referred to as ‘image character[s]’, (imēji
kyarakutā), highlighting the extent to which ‘fictional characters
and idols occupy the same conceptual space’ (Galbraith 2012,
p.186).
In this way, Galbraith argues, idols are reduced to a network
of ‘hypertextual’ images, which only refer to each other and not to
a reality beyond them (Ibid, p.186). Otaku, including idol otaku,
have been described as having an ‘affinity for fictional contexts’,
56
and not only recognise that texts, or personalities such as idols, are
constructed, but draw part of their enjoyment of a text from this,
‘straddling all the levels of these layered contexts’ comprising a
text’s relationship to other texts or contexts (Tamaki, cited in
Galbraith 2012, p.187).
In other words, otaku are ‘attracted to the fictional contexts
of images in and of themselves’ (Galbraith 2012, p.187) and there
is even a sense that glimpsing too much of the real person behind
what is represented by the images of an idol would destroy said
idol’s appeal. Idols are demanded to be an ‘absolute existence’
(zettaiteki na sonzai) that is ‘unchanging and outside the everyday’
in order to provide a stable source of comfort or support for fans.
Although some kinds of ‘authenticity’ are valued to a certain
extent, with fans exchanging untouched ‘raw photographs’ taken
by fans (nama shashin), for instance, such images must not reveal
so much that they expose the idol as an ordinary human, as this
would ‘undermine her as an idol and absolute existence’ (Ibid,
p.197).
A similar phenomenon can be seen in ‘maid cafés’, where
usually male customers pay to spend time with women dressed as
maids who act like characters from ‘anime, manga and
computer/console games’ in order to inspire moe in visitors. The
maids in these cafés ‘adopt a “character image” which she does not
57
drop in front of customers’, and it is somewhat taboo for a visitor to
ask a maid about anything more ‘real’ than their hobbies. In these
cafés, visitors neither want the maids to ‘be women’ or ‘to be real’,
and desire for the maid is ‘oriented towards the imaginary with no
equivalent in reality’. Visitors ‘desire fiction knowing that it is not
real’, where ‘intimacy with the maid is dependent on a fictional
context, but [is] nonetheless affecting and appealing’ (Galbraith
2011).
However, while too much ‘reality’ can shatter the fantasy of
a figure’s constructed or fictional public persona, it appears that a
public persona that is too constructed or too managed can also be to
the detriment of a figure’s popularity. In Black’s (2012) view, it is
for this reason that the virtual idols of the late 90s and early 2000s
ultimately failed to achieve any lasting popularity. While all
celebrity involves an ‘imaginary public face’, in the case of ‘real’
idols there is a tension between the ‘highly managed persona of the
living celebrity’ and the ‘“real” person to which this persona has
been attached, and which anchors the artificial persona in physical
reality’ (Black 2012, p.214-5), while in the case of virtual idols
‘there is no veridical self, and the public face is entirely a fictional
creation’. This limits their ‘capacity to inspire a deep fascination’
due to their ‘high level of predictability and lack of autonomy’
(Ibid, p.214-5). In Black’s view, public fascination with celebrities
is highest when this public face ‘[comes] unstuck’ from the ‘real’
58
person, ‘providing a glimpse of the latter behind the former’, as
exemplified by the interest in scandals such as ‘marital infidelities’
or ‘racist or misogynist rants’ (Ibid, p.215). Ironically, Black notes
that part of HoriPro’s motivation for creating their first virtual idol
was to avoid the dangers of scandals and other such unpredictable,
yet fascinating, behaviour in their stable of idols (Black 2008,
p.38).
It is my view, however, that if VTubers represent a kind of
second coming of the virtual idol craze, a few key differences with
said virtual idols may enable them to achieve the fascination
characteristic of idols, who are able to blend both the real and
fictitious. The most important difference between VTubers and
virtual idols is that VTubers do in fact have autonomy, as their
movements and speech is supplied by a human controlling the
digital avatar in real time. In this way, there is in fact a gap between
a VTuber’s public face and ‘real’ self, even if the identity of this
self is typically intentionally obscured. The existence of a real
person behind the avatar also provides a certain authenticity or
weight to the appearances of a character such as Kizuna Ai on chat
shows, live concerts or special events, and as live interaction is
possible between the VTuber and, for instance, a chat show host or
the audience members of a live show, they are able to capture the
unpredictability and spontaneity of ‘real’ celebrities which virtual
idols were unable to recreate. An article in Nikkei Style shares my
59
view, stating that ‘while having an appealing appearance,
[VTubers] can have flesh-and-blood [namami] communication with
fans, and on top of this their banter is of a very high standard. As
these “ideal idols” [risoo no aidoru] upload videos almost daily,
their fans have come to have an overwhelming affinity for them,
and have been raised into passionate fans’ (Usuda 2018, my
translation). The article notes also that this sense of closeness is
heightened by VR spaces such as VRChat where fans can
occasionally meet popular VTubers in a virtual reality social space
(Ibid).
I also find it worthy of note that Black (2008) points out the
‘high level of concern with realism’ regarding the physical
appearance of virtual idols, which ‘must not look like a fantasy
figure’, but must ‘give the impression of being a representation of a
physically real, embodied person’ (Black 2008, p.42). In contrast,
looking at the highly stylised appearances of VTubers, which
closely resemble the style of manga and anime, I am led to wonder
if the sense of ‘reality’ afforded VTubers by the presence of a real
person behind the avatar gives them the leeway to have a less
realistic appearance, whereas virtual idols, whose personas are
entirely constructed, must rely on their realistic appearance in order
to give an impression of any depth beyond the fiction. When
VTubers appear alongside real people in such settings, they have a
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‘presence’ which virtual idols, being scripted and non-interactive,
could not hope to achieve.
The very real ‘presence’ of VTubers can be seen in footage
from the chō bācharu YouTu‘BAR’ [Super Virtual YouTu‘BAR’]
booth of the Niko Niko Chōkaigi 2018 [Nico Nico Super-
Convention] event held by the Japanese web company Dwango
(Minoru 2018a, p.47). The booth featured a section set up to
resemble the counter of a bar, with barstools set in front of
transparent glass screens onto which holographic images of various
popular VTubers such as Shiro and Mirai Akari were projected in
real time, along with their live speech. Through a raffle system,
customers could win the chance to sit at the bar counter and have a
brief conversation with a holographic projection of one of their
favourite VTubers. Looking at footage available of the event on
YouTube (Chō bācharu YouTu”BAR” 2018), it is clear from their
body language that some of the audience members who were
chosen to speak with these VTubers were very nervous in the
presence of these idol-like characters. In summary, the presence of
a real person controlling these VTubers provides their live
appearances with authenticity, a sense of ‘presence’, and an
unpredictability and spontaneity that was out of reach for virtual
idols, and I believe they embody the combination of reality and
fiction that is key to the appeal of idols.
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4.3 Why simulations?
What drives people to form affective bonds with these
simulacra? Many commentators in Japan have associated the
pursuit of such relationships with a sense of loss, anxiety and
isolation in Japan following the collapse of the bubble economy
and amidst increasing consumerism. These simulated relationships
are seen to represent a way to ease these anxieties, providing
comfort and a sense of connection for those who feel alienated
from society.
Azuma (2008) views the emergence of otaku and their
indulgence in fantasy as a response to a breakdown of grand
narratives and the weakening of social cohesion, which was
‘accelerated in the 1970s, when both high-speed economic growth
and “the season of politics” ended and when Japan experienced the
Oil Shocks and the United Red Army Incident’ (Azuma 2008,
p.28). Galbraith (2011) also sees the ‘bursting of the economic
“bubble”’ and the subsequent ‘recession and rapid neoliberal
deregulation in the 1990s’ as having led to a destabilisation of the
family unit and the postwar model of intimacy. A new reality of
irregular and part-time employment instead of the previous system
of lifetime employment ‘destabilised income and the family unit
based on it’, and undermined the ‘postwar “Japan, Inc” model’ of
intimacy in Japan which was ‘framed by “nakama” (group)
relationships at home, school and work’. In Galbraith’s view, those
62
who ‘cannot strategise relationships’ in this new reality ‘may
instead consume and fantasise intimacy to meet individual needs’
(Galbraith 2011).
The period following the burst of the economic bubble from
the 70s through to the 90s seems to be widely viewed as a
traumatic time characterised by anxiety the breakdown of old
norms. It was amidst this ‘economic and social dislocation’ in the
mid-1990s that the concept of iyashi [‘healing’] first attracted the
attention of the public. Iyashi is ‘less about healing in a medical
sense’ and closer to ‘something that is soothing, is comfortable, or
brings one heavenly feelings’ (Koch 2016; Ozawa-de Silva, cited in
Koch 2016). This was a time when mental illnesses such as
depression were becoming more widely recognised (Koch 2016)
and there was an ‘increased concern with forms of “existential
alienation, loneliness, and loss of meaning”’ (Ozawa-de Silva, cited
in Koch 2016). Discourse on iyashi only increased going into the
2000s when the term muen shakai (‘a society without connections’)
was coined ‘to characterize the moment of insecurity and alienation
that captured the nation’ (Allison, cited in Koch 2016).
In other words, iyashi represents relief or escape from the
‘stress, anxiety and isolation’ of modern urban environments
(Galbraith 2013). It quickly became a marketable term, spawning a
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consumer market based on the discourse surrounding the concept
(Koch 2016).
The affective bonds felt by otaku with fictional manga or
anime moe characters has also been theorised in terms of escape
from social responsibility and the stress and anxiety associated with
it in the highly consumerist society Japan had become by the
1970s. In Honda Tōru’s view, in the 1970s ‘consumption had come
to play an increasingly important role in courting in Japan’,
creating a ‘love gap’ (ren’ai kakusa) ‘roughly corresponding to the
income gap’. Honda refers to this as ‘love capitalism’ (ren’ai
shihon shugi) and argues that ‘men marginalised by this system,
especially “otaku” types investing in hobbies rather than
relationships, turned to the fictional girls (the shōjo) of manga and
anime’, as they provided a ‘pure love’ (jun’ai) free from
socioeconomic concerns (Honda, cited in Galbraith 2011; Galbraith
2011). In other words, in Honda’s view there is something about ‘a
relationship with a mediated character or material representations
of it’ that is ‘preferable to an interpersonal relationship’ (Galbraith
2009).
In Galbraith’s view, these moe characters ‘allow men to
stop performing socially sanctioned masculinity and indulge
femininity’. By ‘taking care of infantile moe characters like a
mother or indulging a desire for cute things’, the ‘moe man’ is
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‘feminized (shōjoka)’, which can ‘be very soothing (iyasareru)’ for
the escape it provides from masculinity and social responsibility,
becoming a source of iyashi (Galbraith 2009). This ‘“soothing”
aspect of leisure’, or iyashi, is something otaku ‘particularly hold in
high regard’ (Galbraith, cited in Sharp 2014).
This is another way in which simulations can be seen to be
valued not for their ability to accurately mimic reality, but rather
for the ways in which they are not like reality. In other words,
simulations are valued as simulations in and of themselves, without
reference to what is being simulated, if they are indeed simulating
something that exists at all. Affective bonds and relationships with
such simulations are ‘pure’ and ‘eternal’, even if they can ‘never
[be] realised’ (Galbraith 2011).
5. CONCLUSION
In conclusion, while simulacra and constructed or fictional
representations of women are not new, the malaise of post-bubble
Japan has slowly brought about a new relationship between
consumers and these simulacra, resulting in a heightened desire for
fragmentary elements which inspire affect, such as moe and kawaii,
and a corresponding weakening of concern with narratives.
VTubers can be seen as the newest stage in this shift, stripping
away all narrative elements in order to present a ‘pure exterior’
(Black 2008, p.46) comprised of affective elements. Because of the
65
Japanese view of femininity which acknowledges femininity as
nothing more than an assemblage of signs, behaviour and
movements coded female, VTubers are able to give ‘authentic’
performances of femininity regardless of the gender of the person
operating the avatar.
These simulated bodies are sometimes thought more desirable
than ‘real’ human bodies, as shown in the case of distorted kawaii
and moe bodies that serve to maximise affect while avoiding
anxieties surrounding the real human body, and so desirable is the
fictional and constructed that even real women occasionally seem
to be pushed into the realm of the simulated, as has been seen with
idols and maid café maids, who straddle the real and simulated.
Virtual YouTubers can be viewed as the next stage in this
movement towards the consumption of simulations and fictions,
and they are presented as a kind of ‘living fiction’. These new
boundary figures have an authentic presence and can interact with
the audience that consumes them, blending the strengths of both the
real and the unreal more effectively than previous figures such as
virtual idols, maximising affective bonds with consumers.
66
6. APPENDIX
Appendix 1
Google Trends: searches for 'vtuber'

(Worldwide)
100
80
60
40
20
0
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The 'Virtual YouTuber' Phenomenon in Japan

Article · April 2019

Undergrad Dissertation View project

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Candidate number: 1006986

Word count: 14518

FHS Oriental Studies (Japanese)

Dissertation: Hilary Term 2019

Against a background of pure white, a figure slowly rises

herself in, waving to her imagined viewers.

‘Can you see me? [mieteimasu ka]’

After politely introducing herself, she jokingly narrows her

noticed she’s a little different to an ordinary YouTuber. Here there

is no mistake. In place of the typical bedroom backdrop seen in

many vlogs (video blogs), there is a white void, and inhabiting it

there is no well-lit vlogger but a computer-generated animated 3D

model depicting a large-eyed girl in the style typical of manga and

The ribbon has been programmed to bob about realistically when

This is the introductory video of self-proclaimed ‘virtual

YouTuber’ Kizuna Ai, uploaded on the 1st of December 2016. This

video marks the very beginning of the Japanese virtual YouTuber

(later contracted to VTuber) craze, which would explode in

popularity at the end of 2017. The content of her other videos is

generally not dissimilar to that of a typical vlogger, and viewers are

able to watch Ai as she talks entertainingly about various topics,

kanji skills, makes announcements and advertises sponsored apps

As her self-introduction continues, Kizuna Ai goes on to

explain her reasons for beginning her virtual YouTuber career. As

to us viewers, and so would like to form connections with as many

humans as possible in order to get to know us better. She goes on to

someday like to appear in a commercial, like ‘real’ popular

2.4 million subscribers, rivalling many of the most popular

Japanese YouTubers, she has certainly succeeded at connecting

concerts, listened to peoples’ troubles while working behind the

counter of a virtual bar in a virtual-reality chatroom, collaborated

with brands such as the huge convenience store Lawson, and

interviewed Nobel-prize winning scientists, to list but a few of her

varied achievements. This success is not limited only to Kizuna Ai,

and other VTubers have also had segments on terrestrial TV shows,

figures, comics and various other merchandise.

Despite the trend’s current success, however, it may be

tempting to dismiss the VTuber phenomenon as merely another

instead become a fixture of the Japanese pop-culture landscape

suggest a slow rise in interest from the trend’s inception up to

2019, suggesting they are at least not yet in imminent threat of

disappearance – see Appendix 1).

Regardless of what the future might hold, however, I

phenomenon. Its emergence and popularity can also be traced back

to earlier trends that also emerged from Japan in recent times, as

well as broader movements in Japanese pop-culture. In this

dissertation I will explore issues such as why VTubers are popular

movements in Japanese pop-culture, how virtual avatars interact

they are gendered, and why simulated or fictional characters are

desired by certain groups in Japanese society.

I will begin my analysis of this phenomenon with an

overview of VTubers and their rise to popularity, followed by a

description of audience demographics, a discussion of

methodology, and a brief description of the context of the

phenomenon, including other trends that VTubers seem to have

After this introduction, I will discuss aesthetics concepts

relevant to VTubers in the context of a wider shift away from