A Blurring Of Intimacy & Solitude
How Japan Is Using The Virtual To Battle The Loneliness Epidemic
Fun fact: Japan actually sells more adult diapers than child diapers…I think that says it all.
The question is, why is this happening?
The low levels of reproduction as a result of the rise of career-oriented women wasn’t the only factor to which we can attribute this population problem, it was also discovered that an alarmingly high number of Japanese men are in virtual relationships. I don’t mean long-distance, zoom-calling relationships, but relationships with virtual girls programmed within video games like LovePlus and new technologies by companies like GateBox.
This case study came back to me as I was reading Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other (2011). Because at its very core, its very essence, the Japanese men (and women too) in question really do expect more from technology than actual people when it comes to love relationships. Watch this clip below and you’ll see what I mean:
According to Bloomberg, 70% of unmarried men and 65% of unmarried women aged 18–34 are not in any form of relationship. Japan’s loneliness epidemic has led to the emergence of a multi-million-dollar virtual romance industry.
Whenever they’re feeling blue, they can be comforted by the presence of their virtual “wives” or “husbands”. Hikari, created by GateBox, can send text messages while you’re at work, turn the lights on and off, wake you up in the morning, and much more.
One lady in Turkle’s book, speaking about her virtual dog, said that “it won’t do dangerous things, and it won’t betray you…Also, it won’t die suddenly and abandon you and make you very sad,” (pg.10).This supports the point that Turkle (2011) raises that people (and clearly dogs) disappoint; robots will not.
We don’t naturally associate love or relationships with technology because we understand what they can’t. We can’t touch them, feel them, relate to them. And yet, in a report by Time magazine, Loulou d’Aki found that for these men and women, it was never about the physical, but rather the companionship. “There is no friction between these relationships,” says d’Aki.
It doesn’t matter if they’re not real, for them, they’re real enough–not even a Turing test will convince them of otherwise. It may seem strange, but it’s clear that this stems from other issues like insecurity in the real world, and potentially fear of our own human vulnerability. It is in that way that technology is seductive, because it speaks to these vulnerabilities (Turkle, 2011). And just like the case with the virtual dog, if we project the same human emotions on robots that we do with pets, humans won’t need more to become attracted to the virtual (Maines, 2008).
Soon we may stop asking all the big questions like why am I talking to robot? And instead learn to simply accept and appreciate its company.
References
Lowry, R. (2015). Meet the Japanese Men in Love With Virtual Girlfriends. Retrieved 10 January 2021, from https://time.com/3998563/virtual-love-japan/#:~:text=Some%20Japanese%20men%20are,the%20tap%20of%20a%20stylus.
Maines, R. (2008). Love + Sex With Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships (Levy, D.; 2007) [Book Review]. IEEE Technology And Society Magazine, 27(4), 10–12. doi: 10.1109/mts.2008.930875
Oppy, G., & Dowe, D. (2020). The Turing Test (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Retrieved 13 January 2021, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/
Sze-Yunn, P., & Arivalagan, Y. (2020). These countries are most ready to deal with ageing populations. Retrieved 10 January 2021, from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/what-are-japan-and-singapore-doing-about-ageing-population/#:~:text=Japan%20is%20another%20rapidly%20ageing,slow%20down%20the%20Japanese%20economy.
Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other (1st ed.). New York: Basic Books.
