I’m late on this, so sue me. The pictures are priceless though.
There’s been much hullabaloo around the recent NYT Magazine piece by Lisa Katayama (AKA Tokyomango) that focused on some bizarre sub-subculture of otaku who not only love their pillows (NSFW) printed with cute anime characters, but they LOVE those pillow in a quite literal sense. Well, at least one guy does, and that was where the critics came in alleging that the example given is so extreme that he couldn’t possibly be representative of any pillow-dating trend in Akihabara (much less Japan).
Mutant Frog did a pretty nice breakdown on the piece, and I can see valid points on both sides of the debate. As InvisibleGaijin put it to me at the time (I’m paraphrasing), “YOU get something published in the New York Times, and then we can talk.”.
Just today I was sent a link to Vipper (semi-NSFW) that shows some interesting photos that, without context, mean very little but are GREAT on the web! Did you know that there are now hordes of Japanese men dating realistic love dolls (NSFW) that look like junior high school girls and riding around with them on the trains?
Love pillow orgy! Do you think they ever run the girls through the wash and then randomly pick their new partner out of the hamper in a kinky pillow-swapping swing-fest?
Not that there isn’t a shred of truth in these stories. There’s a big market for anime girl pillow cases, but that doesn’t mean that anyone is dating them or even having creepy late-night pillowtalk with them (haha).
The problem with a lot of these “weird Japan” shock pieces by foreign press is that each topic, on the surface, isn’t all that shocking anywhere. If your average American geek had an Olivia Munn pillow on his bed would he be branded as anything more than a guy who really likes Olivia Munn? Apparently it’s only weird because Japanese guys are buying the pillows, and that fits in quite nicely with all the other weird things that Japanese guys do when they aren’t making out with robots or dating their Nintendos.
The fact is, I know a handful of Japanese guys (successful ones I might add) that simply don’t like real women and claim to prefer their 2D equivalents. These people DO exist! However, they aren’t under the delusion that these characters are returning the love in any way, and they definitely aren’t dragging their love pillows around town with them.
