Otaku: a Japanese term used to refer to people with obsessive interests, particularly anime, manga, and video games.
In this article titled Love in 2-D, this man, “Nisan” has a “pillow girlfriend”. This is not a security blanket. He believes that he has a relationship with the girl that is printed on the cover. He talks to it, goes on dates with it, and… um… that is as far as I want to think about it. Though initially funny; as lauded on the program Good News Week, this pitiful character (the man not the anime girl) confesses…
“I’m pretty conflicted inside. People say there are some otaku who don’t want to get married, but that’s not true. Some have so little confidence that they’ve just given up, but deep inside their souls, they want it just as much as anybody else.”
This article made me sad. Our culture has been set up to cater to the needs of an individual so well that we become islands of self indulgence. Intimacy can be manufactured, bought and sold but it ends up looking like the bride of Frankenstein; a freakish imitation of life that reeks of death. I don’t want to laugh at this man because the issues he deals with are like ours; loneliness, anxiety and loss. His culture has provided him a means to escape this through the otaku societies that trade in such fetish products, and even though he knows people are laughing at him, he chooses this life because he does not know of one better. What you see is a man who has escaped reality, just as our commercials have promised.
