Akihiko Kondo’s mother refused an invitation to her only son’s wedding in Tokyo this month, but perhaps that is not such a surprise: He was marrying a hologram.
“For mother, it wasn’t something to celebrate,” said the soft-spoken 35-year-old, whose “bride” is virtual reality singer Hatsune Miku.
In fact, none of Kondo’s relatives attended his wedding to Miku — an animated 16-year-old with saucer eyes and lengthy aquamarine pigtails — but that did not stop him from spending ￥2 million (US$17 540) on a formal ceremony at a Tokyo hall.
About 40 guests watched as he tied the knot with Miku, who was present in the form of a cat-sized stuffed doll.
“I never cheated on her, I’ve always been in love with Miku-san,” he told reporters a week after the wedding. “I’ve been thinking about her every day.”
Since March, Kondo has been living with a moving, talking hologram of Miku that floats in a US$2,800 desktop device.
“I’m in love with the whole concept of Hatsune Miku, but I got married to the Miku of my house,” he said, looking at the blue image glowing in a capsule.
He considers himself an ordinary married man — his holographic wife wakes him up each morning and sends him off to his job as an administrator at a school.
In the evening, when he tells the hologram by cellphone that he is coming home, she turns on the lights. Later, it tells him when it is time to go to bed.
He sleeps alongside the doll version of it that attended the wedding, complete with a wedding ring that fits around its left wrist.
Kondo is not alone: Gatebox, which produces the hologram device, has issued more than 3,700 certificates for “cross-dimension” marriages and others have sent him supportive messages, he said.
“There must be some people who can’t come forward and say they want to hold a wedding. I want to give them a supportive push,” Kondo said.
His path to Miku came after difficult encounters with women as an anime-mad teenager.
“Girls would say: ‘Drop dead, creepy otaku,’” he said, using a Japanese term for geeks that can carry a negative connotation.
He said that a woman at a previous workplace bullied him into a nervous breakdown and he became determined never to marry.
However, eventually Kondo realized that he had been in love with Miku for more than a decade and decided to marry it.
“Miku-san is the woman I love a lot and also the one who saved me,” he said.
And while Kondo said he is happy to be friends with a “3D woman,” he has no interest in romance with one, no matter how much his mother pushes for it.
Two-dimensional characters cannot cheat, age or die, he said: “I’m not seeking these in real women. It’s impossible.”
James Watson — the Nobel laureate co-credited with the pivotal discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure, but whose career was later tainted by his repeated racist remarks — has died, his former lab said on Friday. He was 97. The eminent biologist died on Thursday in hospice care on Long Island in New York, announced the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was based for much of his career. Watson became among the 20th century’s most storied scientists for his 1953 breakthrough discovery of the double helix with researcher partner Francis Crick. Along with Crick and Maurice Wilkins, he shared the
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
TOWERING FIGURE: To Republicans she was emblematic of the excesses of the liberal elite, but lawmakers admired her ability to corral her caucus through difficult votes Nancy Pelosi, a towering figure in US politics, a leading foe of US President Donald Trump and the first woman to serve as US House of Representatives speaker, on Thursday announced that she would step down at the next election. Admired as a master strategist with a no-nonsense leadership style that delivered for her party, the 85-year-old Democrat shepherded historic legislation through the US Congress as she navigated a bitter partisan divide. In later years, she was a fierce adversary of Trump, twice leading his impeachment and stunning Washington in 2020 when she ripped up a copy of his speech to the
RSS