It starts with a reasonable article by Harumi Ozawa, describing an iPhone version of a dating-simulation game, Love Plus. Originally released on the Nintendo DS by Konami, the Love Plus franchise has grown into a soon-to-come comic series, internet memes, and various fan goods within the otaku subculture. Atami, a once booming couples vacation destination, is using the Love Plus franchise to revitalize their tourism industry. The original article can be read here, and describes the AR-feature game and this new campaign in Atami. News of this game, which most Japanese don’t even know exists, could have come and gone like any other, but it instead tumbled into a snowball effect of fear, outrage, and moral panic in Western audiences fueled by poor wording, cumulative error, and the “news of the weird” phenomenon. (I have an excuse to write this… really… there’s augmented reality involved, I promise.)
Love Plus+ Promotional Video
Age of Virtual Consent
First and foremost, I want to fix a cumulative error. Remember that game we played as children, Telephone, where a sentence was passed from one person to another by whispering, and the final iteration ended up totally different? Every iteration of this story slightly alters minor details and cumulatively results in changes that might make a pretty big difference in regards to attitudes towards Love Plus. None of the girls in this game are 12. I think I can figure out how this one happened, but none are twelve, and none are pre-High School.
Vacation With Your 12-Year-Old Virtual Girlfriend!? Seriously!?
Allowing an older man to take his pre-High School aged girlfriend on vacation to do whatever he wants with her, even if it’s just pretend, is an outrage. It is apps and materials like these that promote this mindset that make men look for and expect a static, subservient woman who will fulfill his needs at the touch of a button. — TechLand
In North America, our typical journey through grade school is as follows: Elementary = Grades 1 through 5. (5 years); Middle School = Grades 6 through 8. (3 years); High School = Grades 9 through 12. (4 years) with some variation depending on Junior High, or Secondary. In Japan, a typical journey would be as follows: Elementary = Grades 1 through 6. (6 years); Middle School = Grades 7 through 9. (3 years); High School = Grades 10 through 12. (3 years). When the grade of a student is expressed in Japanese, it is usually written as School Level + Year (ex: High 1, Middle 3, etc). Writers of a select few guilty articles may have looked up the characters of Love Plus on sources like Wikipedia, and seeing “High 1″ might interpret it as Grade 9 rather than grade 10. (The ages of the charaters are never disclosed by Konami, however, their grade levels are. Ages are being calculated by average age at particular grade.) As such, the reported assumed ages of the characters versus their correct assumed ages are as follows:
Nene is a third year high school student or 14 or 15 years old, Manaka is a year younger and little Rinko is just 12 or 13. Even by Japanese standards, where the age of consent is 13, Rinko is a bit young to be the centre of attraction for the 20-somethings who seem to be hooked on the simulation. — TechEye
Nene => High 3 Japan => Grade 12 => ~17
Manaka => High 2 Japan => Grade 11 => ~16
Rinko => High 1 Japan => Grade 10 => ~15
I don’t want to argue about ages of consent (we aren’t even really talking about sexual relationships in this anyways) or age gaps, but I really believe that age 12 and age 15 are pretty different. While you might not agree that dating a high-schooler is appropriate for a 20-something, 15 is definitely not as outrageous as 12.
Moral Panic and News of the Weird Revisited
Something about this whole fiasco is very reminiscent of an incident where CNN “stirred up gratuitous controversy” about the game ‘Rapelay’ (a portmanteau of rape and play). This prompted erotic-comic author Takeshi Nogami to write a response, which I believe summarizes my feelings regarding both the Rapelay and Love Plus issue almost perfectly:
Men and women are equals in politics and in the law. Your society and ours are no different there. Moreover, the crime rate statistics for both general crime and sex crime in Japan are, with all due respect, several times lower than in the United States. Did you, for instance, fear for your safety while walking the streets of Akihabara, or Ikebukuro (holy ground of hentai books for women)? They’re probably many times safer than the streets of New York, let alone those of the suburban housing districts around. (And guns are illegal, too.) Furthermore, in our Akihabara and Ikebukuro, there is no persecution of men or women alike, or of sexual minorities like homosexuals. We all live together in peace, expressing ourselves freely.
It also goes without saying that human trafficking and violence against women are serious crimes in Japan too. As a Japanese citizen, I am deeply offended by the insulting implications of that so-called expert who associates Japanese people at large with heinous criminals. Is hentai detrimental to the upbringing of children? Yes, it some circumstances it may well be the case. It certainly true, for instance, of that game you reported about. I am an average citizen with a younger sister and two nephews; I can relate to your concerns. And precisely as such, I beg to differ with your argument. Those products are developed for rational adults. You surely don’t believe that a rational adult would be influenced by such a game into committing rape, do you? — Takeshi Nogami
Nogami has an excellent point, and in the case of Love Plus, there isn’t even any sexual relationship involved. Why do we fear and hate a game and group of people who are hurting no one? While these relationships being built are virtual, the fear and association people are making to pedophilia and ‘sexual perversion’ are very real. Why do we fear virtual relationships when we are fine accepting video games in which we kill each other?
DAMN. Just…damn. That is beyond disgusting.
Sickening.
These words are pretty strong for that which is just a game. There are other games take the experience beyond the living room. Some games, like Pokemon, influence waves of tourism so young children can collect stamps of their favourite Pokemon and battle in stadiums set up around the nation — extensions of the game into real life.
All hope is lost for anyone who takes this sermon seriously.
… children are building relationships with all these pokemon creatures… little reclusive power-filled monsters… Pokemon is a game that teaches children how to enter into the world of witchcraft, how to cast spells… Pokemon world is a world of the demonic — of the Satanic.
I’m pretty sure most of us find that this sermon is going a little over the edge. Pokemon are not met with the same level of fear, outrage and confusion as Love Plus. Why is it so scary when we start virtualizing other people? This example of selective neo-luddism (we embrace Facebook, computers, television, online shopping but reject virtual relationships) is, I can only guess, deeply rooted in a fear of replacement. It is entirely likely, however, that these LovePlussers might not be looking for a replacement at all. Maybe they have a certain type of person in mind, and have found that girls of this criteria simply do not exist or are not ‘accessible’. Calling this replacement (as in, replacing “real relationships” with virtual ones) wouldn’t be appropriate since there’s no potential candidate meeting this criteria in the real world.
These men will probably never procreate so eventually their creepy genes will be erased from humanity.
While I respect the opinions of others who may find that LovePlus and similar games are not for them, I have to express some concern over the proliferation of these fear mongering articles when they pin this phenomenon, similar phenomenon or along the same lines, as this, as exclusively Japanese, and examples of ‘why Japan is so f***ed up’.
See Japan, this is why we don’t apologize for dropping nukes on your sorry asses, things like this make us think we did the world a favor and should have dropped a few more.
Shortly before the Love Plus story blew up, I happened upon an article that describes why people love to find weird stories about other countries, how it stigmatizes those other countries, and how people are really good at filtering out the weird things from their home country.
… when we–or our students–hear shocking things about the cultures in which we travel or study or work–there’s a greater tendency to place some kind of importance on the strange news. (At least, in my experience.) We and they lack context and have difficulty judging the representativeness or even the veracity of such news items. Japan is particularly plagued by this, as countless American and British news outlets thrive on repeating stories about strange things that just appall my Japanese friends, who usually identify the reported incident as some kind of fringe activity (if they’ve even heard of it).
Japan is definitely quirky, but every place has its quirks–we just are a lot better at filtering out “home quirkiness.”
In all fairness, Japan does have some history and culture that makes it particularly warm to the idea of virtualization, but the continuation of this weird/wacky news from Japan trend is getting to be a bit much.
Fair commentary by Roland Kelts around 4 minutes in regarding the influence of animism, moe and kawaii culture, and the place of games like these in sub-cultures of sub-cultures in Japanese society.
Can non-animist cultures warm up to virtualization, and more importantly (hehe), augmented reality? Yes, I think so. Communities like Second Life (as ‘wacky’ as they are, too) are great indicators of this. Every day we virtualize and simulate when I plow our fields in Farmville, massacre in Mafia Wars, and connect with others we’ve only known online.
