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.”
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
FOREST SITE: A rescue helicopter spotted the burning fuselage of the plane in a forested area, with rescue personnel saying they saw no evidence of survivors A passenger plane carrying nearly 50 people crashed yesterday in a remote spot in Russia’s far eastern region of Amur, with no immediate signs of survivors, authorities said. The aircraft, a twin-propeller Antonov-24 operated by Angara Airlines, was headed to the town of Tynda from the city of Blagoveshchensk when it disappeared from radar at about 1pm. A rescue helicopter later spotted the burning fuselage of the plane on a forested mountain slope about 16km from Tynda. Videos published by Russian investigators showed what appeared to be columns of smoke billowing from the wreckage of the plane in a dense, forested area. Rescuers in
‘ARBITRARY’ CASE: Former DR Congo president Joseph Kabila has maintained his innocence and called the country’s courts an instrument of oppression Former Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) president Joseph Kabila went on trial in absentia on Friday on charges including treason over alleged support for Rwanda-backed militants, an AFP reporter at the court said. Kabila, who has lived outside the DR Congo for two years, stands accused at a military court of plotting to overthrow the government of Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi — a charge that could yield a death sentence. He also faces charges including homicide, torture and rape linked to the anti-government force M23, the charge sheet said. Other charges include “taking part in an insurrection movement,” “crime against the
RSS