2013. Yasufumi Ono made comments about the state of Japanese gaming at the Infinity Ventures Summit in Kyoto. Currently, Japan controls a mere 30% of the market share in North America and only 13% worldwide. The horn of plenty has become a trombone of self-doubt. Why isn’t the world buying Japanese games anymore? Has Japan lost its touch?

There are several factors at play here. When Japan swooped in to grasp the field mouse that was U.S. gaming, that mouse was dead. Thankfully Japan brought the mouse back to life and became the sole devourer of its innards. Today there is more than one falcon-country eyeing those rodent intestines, namely the U.S., South Korea, and Finland.

Also, Japan doesn’t make the games that western countries presently want to play, games in the “Call of Battlefield: Ghost Ops II” category. Japan makes games more along the lines of Dungeon Monster DX: The Fire! Time was, you could take your Dungeon Monster games and package them so your average Todds and Brandons would buy them. That’s been a challenge Japan has yet to surmount in this modern era. But why is this such a challenge if it wasn’t before?

Instant Connection

When we hear a story, our mind does its best to connect us to the story’s main character. We want to get to know that character so we can become the hero and experience the tale explicitly. In traditional storytelling, this is no easy task. It takes a witch’s brew of situation, exposition, and time to make a character connection with an audience. And few writers ever know what’s going to work in a given story.

Video games don’t have this problem. It’s a unique storytelling medium. The connection a game character has to the player is almost immediate. My go-to storytelling guru, Scott McCloud, best explains why, by summarizing philosophy first put forth by Marshall McLuhan:

When driving, for example, we experience much more than our five senses report. The whole car—not just the parts we can see, feel and hear—is very much on our minds at all times. The vehicle becomes an extension of our body. It absorbs our sense of identity. We become the car. If one car hits another, the driver of the vehicle being struck is much more likely to say: “Hey! He hit me!!” than “he hit my car!” or “his car hit my car,” for that matter.

So, in touching and controlling the car, your mind makes the car an extension of yourself. The same happens when playing a game. That touch of the controller and your control over the avatar gives your mind the same connection. The hero is a virtual extension of you. You become the hero as soon as you start the game.

This explains why games with subpar stories can still be great games. Your connection to the experience is immediate and doesn’t require a fantastic story to draw you in. If the game is enjoyable, you keep playing because you like your role as the hero. But what happens when you don’t like the hero you become?

Different Heroes For Different Hemispheres

Back to the Inifinity Ventures Summit (we were talking about that, right?). Some interesting statements were made by Sega/Sammy president, Hajime Satomi. Read below his hypothesis on why Japanese games fail to make an impact in the U.S. And Europe:

Europeans and North Americans like strong people, so the main character has to be a fully-grown, middle-aged man. On the other hand, in Asia, people like stories about middle or high school students growing up or becoming stronger. As you make games for more dedicated players, I think you have to be aware of those differences.

This makes sense when you consider characters from best-selling games in the U.S. from the past ten years: Kratos, Nathan Drake, Master Chief, Niko Bellic, Marcus Fenix, and that hooded guy from Assassin’s Creed. All severely grizzled, middle-aged combat types.

Compare that with some of Japan’s top character picks, plucked from a Famitsu poll of readers’ favorite characters: Link, Sora, Yuri Lowell, Sakura Shinguji, and Cloud Strife. All very ungrizzled and full of youthful optimism for the adventures of life (until they enter the job market).

There is some crossover, of course. Both east and west love Chris Redfield, Solid Snake, Link and Cloud. But there is something to Satomi’s ideas. There is clearly a difference in hero preference between hemispheres.

So if Japan once ruled the western gaming market, they must have created games with middle-aged heroes. Not necessarily.

Let’s Compare Some Box Art!

This is a simple exercise. I will present three games released both in Japan and the U.S. We will observe the in-game pixelated sprites that represent the main character(s) and the art on the boxes for the Japanese and U.S. releases of the game. Let’s begin.

DOWNTOWN NEKKETSU MONOGATARI vs. RIVER CITY RANSOM

The in-game character looks pretty cartoony. Could be any age.

Japanese Box Art:

The Japanese release of the game suggests the characters are young high school students.

US Box Art:

But the U.S. release suggests they are weird 36-year-old dudes! Despite that “River City High School” sign behind them, these two are clearly just there to pick up their kids from baseball practice.

ROCKMAN 2 vs. MEGA MAN 2

The age-neutral Mega Man sprite we know and love.

Japanese Box Art:

Japan gets some great art that actually looks a good deal like our robot friend on the screen.

U.S. Box Art:

America gets a welder with a broken foot and ray gun. He’s a weirdo, but he’s a grown-up combat weirdo!

DRAGON QUEST II vs. DRAGON WARRIOR II

Here’s the in-Game Characters – Japan & U.S.

These in-game characters could be impetuous teens or seasoned adventurers.

Japanese Box Art:

The art for Dragon Quest II features Akira Toriyama’s youthful depictions of the heroes, which have become a staple of the series.

U.S. Box Art:

The American release of Dragon Warrior II is, again, a band of fully-grown adults. These heroes promised each other in college that when they turned 40, they would reunite for a quest to Las Vegas.

Finding Ourselves

So what does this box art comparison mean, exactly? I’ll get to that in a second.

The heroes on our TV screens during the 8-bit and 16-bit eras were less defined and more iconic, and thus more easily interpreted. I touched on this in my article about Hello Kitty, so for a more detailed and Tom Hanks-oriented explanation of icons.

But there was another force at play, helping us interpret our pixel friends. That force is confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is the psychological effect of your mind to favor information that coincides with your preconceptions. Traditionally, confirmation bias is used to describe how we gather information to make rational (or irrational) decisions. Recently, however, a young philosophy blogger named Sam McNerney introduced this idea:

If we are defining confirmation bias as a tendency to favor information that confirms our previously held beliefs, it strikes me as ironic to think that it is almost exclusively discussed as a hindrance to knowledge and better decision-making…With such a broad definition, I think it also explains our aesthetic judgments… Put differently, confirmation bias influences our aesthetic judgments just as it does any other judgment.

Since the pixelated hero images transmit so little information as to what they are, players needed the box art to confirm their bias of what they wanted to see, in this case, their bias of what they think, aesthetically, a hero should look like. Japanese gamers’ biases said, “this pixelated image is a youngling,” and the box art confirmed their bias. Western gamers’ biases said, “this pixelated image is muscular manbeast,” and their different box art confirmed their different bias.

Since video games, as we said earlier, offer an instant connection for the player, it is imperative that the player like that connection. Giving players the chance to connect to the heroes they wanted to be helped to ensure they would not put down the controller and, furthermore, keep buying games.

The Beginning Of The End

So that’s it. Everyone was happy, and all it took was paying two artists to do the same job. It’s easier to sell people what they expect than to challenge their perceptions. Unfortunately, this box art trick got harder to pull off as console gaming entered the world of polygons in 1995. Keeping the hero’s in-game appearance ambiguous got a little trickier.

Such was the case with The Legend of Zelda‘s transition from 2D to 3D. For the most part, early polygonal models could still be interpreted by both cultures as the heroes they wanted to be. And so it was with 1998’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on Nintendo 64. EVERYONE loved this game. The main character, Link, started out as a kid but later grew into an adult. But what kind of adult? A grizzled one, probably.

How old is this adult Link? Fifteen or thirty-five?

When the first Zelda game for the 128-bit Gamecube was announced, Americans eagerly anticipated their powerful adult Link to appear in new, beautifully rendered 12 million polygons per second! It was at this point Nintendo thought it would be a good idea to have Link represented as a very cartoony boy child in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Americans went nuts. Angry nuts! Link had always been an elfin lad since the very beginning, according to the series’ story, but in pixel world and the American mind, he was nice and grizzled. For the first time, gamers were faced with a Link they could not interpret to their liking. Despite The Wind Waker being a gaming triumph, it sold a mere 3.07 million copies worldwide, compared to Ocarina of Time’s 7.6 million.

It was around this time, Japan’s control over the gaming industry began to wane. Of course, it was not solely due to the unambiguous heroes. The Xbox launched with incredible success in 2001, eating away at a large part of the North American market share previously held by Nintendo, Sega, and Sony. American video game companies, having learned from two decades of great Japanese games, started making games just as good or better. The spike in popularity that Japanese pop culture saw in 1999 was diminishing by the mid 2000’s, banishing anime from general acceptance back to the cavern of the nerds, which also meant the unmistakably Japanese video game heroes were banished as well (unless they were grizzled).

In our modern era, we have our two camps making games for themselves. American game companies churning out gritty power lunks and Japanese companies churning out sleek action teens. And we like it that way, apparently. Only a small fraction from each side is interested in games from the other.

The Sun Also Rises

2014. In a few months, the next Infinity Ventures Summit will be held in Sapporo and the Japanese gaming industry will gather once again to discuss the future, the past being a non-issue. The truth is, Japan will likely never again rule the video game world as it once did. The special circumstances of an evacuated market and technology that was easily localized is gone forever. Global competition and the advent of mobile/social gaming has changed the industry so nobody knows what to expect anymore. (BIRDS being angry at PIGS?! Nobody saw that one coming.)

But that’s okay. Industries change. When Georges Méliès and the Edison Trust dominated the film industry, it was only a matter of time before other artists from around the world said, “I want to do that, too!” Film expanded until people loved it so much that certain individuals began making films simply as artistic expression.

The Infinity Ventures Summit is a gathering of companies, so their primary concern should be how to sucker people out of money (using video games, hopefully). But games are made by artists, so I hope when these artists gather in May, they will talk, at least individually, about how to move video games forward as medium, how to push boundaries and make something people have never seen before. There will always be success in giving people what they expect. But there is a truer reward in creating something that changes peoples’ minds.

Bonus Wallpapers!

[1280x800] ∙ [2560x1600]

Sources:

• Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud
• Why doesn’t Japan like first-person shooters? Old characters and World War II, says Sega exec, by Casey Baseel
• Confirmation Bias and Art, by Samuel McNerney
• LVLs. Cultural Anxiety Features
• Famitsu’s Top 50 Video Game Characters

Nintendo is one such magical company of magical products, so we’ll be looking today at their founder, Hiroshi Yamauchi, pictured below.

Before you start thinking that this is a tale of another Walt Disney-esque creator, I should stop your expectations right there. Sure, his results with Nintendo prove his genius, but you’ll have to leave the ウィリー・ウォンカ fantasies aside… that is, unless you want to imagine Shigeru Miyamoto as an Oompa Loompa, and nobody wants that.

Harsh Hiroshi

Look at that whimsical, magical place. You know they’ve gotta have an underground ice cream roller coaster in there!

Hiroshi Yamauchi was the president of Nintendo from 1949 to 2002. He led the company not only to financial success in the video game era, but was the reason the company made video games at all. It would be easy enough to say that Yamauchi saw the future and transformed his family’s playing card company into one of video games through sheer vision. But it was more of an accidental process than that, and it certainly had nothing to do with whimsy.

Unlike Wonka, who brought prosperity to his company with trippy boat rides and musical numbers, Hiroshi Yamauchi did it with harsh criticism and mass firings. When he was asked to become president in 1949 by his dying grandfather, Hiroshi agreed on one condition: the firing of all other family members at Nintendo. This resulted in only one person, his older cousin, being let go and is also a really roundabout way of telling this cousin, “I hate you.” Immediately after becoming president, Yamauchi faced a strike of factory workers who thought he would fold on account of he was only twenty-one years old. Instead, he fired them all on account of he was the president. This led to a clean sweep of the company during which the young prez fired many long-time employees who had dedicated their lives to Nintendo.

During the video game years of the early eighties, Hiroshi Yamauchi hired his son-in-law, Minoru Arakawa, to run Nintendo operations in America and he was smart to do so. Arakawa wasn’t hired because of family ties. He was a solid businessman with an MIT education and a reputation for successfully managing a Japanese construction firm in Canada. But when Arakawa had a hard time gaining a foothold in the American market with the Nintendo Famicom (Japanese NES), Yamauchi was not hesitant to remark “a more competent person would have no trouble marketing the Famicom in the United States.” Straight to the point, that one is.

Risky Business

Young Yamauchi with Roy O. Disney during a meeting that actually made Nintendo a lot of money, which Yamauchi would later lose on three bad business deals.

The image most projected of Yamauchi was his severity. But as a businessman, he was also shrewd, very forward-thinking and not all that conservative. Certainly by our modern standards for a “forward-thinking” boss, Hiroshi Yamauchi looks conservative, though. There was no ping-pong table in the break room or “bring your shorts to work day.” But when it came to taking a chance on young talent or uncertain ideas, he was certainly not playing it safe.

Yamauchi realized early on that the world of playing cards was only so big. After a recon visit to the world’s largest playing card company (in beautiful Cincinnati!) he was disappointed to find it was a fairly small-scale operation. Upon returning to Kyoto, he took his company public and started a series of risky ventures to bring Nintendo greater success than it had ever seen with stupid ol’ playing cards. He started with instant rice packets, which immediately flopped. Apparently people like waiting for their rice. The anticipation is what makes it taste good. Then he started a taxi company called Daiya, but he quickly grew tired of negotiating with the unions over ridiculous demands like getting paid. Finally, he started a love hotel (which is exactly what you think it is), but ended up being his own best customer and this venture was also a failure.

Though these examples do not display Yamauchi’s business acumen, it certainly shows his bold and non-conservative nature. A conservative businessman would have stuck with playing cards. Actually, at the time he took over, Nintendo was doing so well with its playing card business that there was no reason make a change. But Yamauchi was ambitious and willing to try something different even if it made no sense. Really, if you think about it, it’s the same as if I became president of a greeting card company and said, “Hey guys! I know we’re really successful making greeting cards, but I’d like to take our money resources and start producing cat sweaters.” I would immediately be thrown out the window. But no one dared to throw Yamauchi out the window because he would’ve fired them before hitting the ground.

Whispers of the Art

Gunpei Yokoi and Shigeru Miyamoto, two of Yamauchi’s best decisions.

Yamauchi had brought Nintendo to the brink of bankruptcy with his ideas and it was only the 1960s. He was going to have keep the company going until at least 1982 when they could start making the big money. Thankfully, almost every decision Yamauchi made from 1966 onward was successful. As Nintendo transformed into a toy company, he began to display what was arguably his most visionary aspect: his ability to take chances on young talent.

Contrary to the Mr. Burns stereotype we are wont to place him in, Hiroshi Yamauchi recognized brilliant people who had talents he did not, and gave them opportunities to create. He handpicked Gunpei Yokoi, creator of the Game Boy, from his factory floor and gave a job to Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario and Zelda, despite Miyamoto’s dreamy and incredibly non-businesslike persona. A real stuffy businessman would have turned these two daydreaming ne’er-do-wells away, along with the countless other Nintendo innovators over the years. The book Game Over by David Sheff has the best insight on this:

“Nintendo would, Yamauchi decided, become a haven for video-game artists, for it was artists, not technicians,who made great games.”

Growing Up

So Hiroshi Yamauchi was smart at business and a little harsh. Actually, most sources I’ve read describe him as “notoriously harsh” or “imperialistic.” He was quick to dish out criticism and made his employees compete for his approval. In my research on Nintendo over the years, I have mostly focused on the creators and innovators at Nintendo and only read about Yamauchi as it related to them. This had cemented a picture in my mind of Yamauchi as the uncreative business-oni that sucked money from his hard working, jovial video game creators. Certainly there is a lot of truth to this oni image, but it wasn’t until after his recent death that I discovered a different side of him.

Hiroshi Yamauchi’s father, Shikanojo, abandoned his family when Hiroshi was five years old. Hiroshi’s mother then threw him into the care of his grandparents, who raised him with the same strictness that they used on their employees. During the War, Hiroshi was still too young to fight, so his studies were put on hold for an assignment in a military factory. When he finally returned to his studies, he gained entrance to the prestigious Waseda University to study law, but was forced to drop out yet again, this time to take over the family business.

Shortly after Hiroshi became Nintendo’s president, his father, Shikanojo, returned to see his son. Whether by anger or pride, Hiroshi refused to see his father and turned him away. When Hiroshi was close to thirty, he got word that his father had passed away and immediately regretted missing the chance for reconciliation. He grieved openly for days and regularly visited his father’s grave for the rest of his life. This made Shikanojo the second father figure with whom Hiroshi lost his chance for acceptance. Hiroshi’s grandfather had died regarding his grandson as impudent and foolish, never seeing his years of success. Though Hiroshi’s mother was around, she became more like an aunt than a mother and his grandmother was no different. In essence, between four parental figures, Hiroshi Yamauchi received plenty of material care and support, but little else. His history really helps to explain his style of business.

Retirement And Beyond

Upon his retirement, Yamauchi refused his pension of close to $14 million, stating that he felt Nintendo could put it to better use. It’s not that he was without avarice. You don’t become the 12th richest man in Japan without liking money just a little. But unlike the bloated CEOs who get fired and take a hefty severance at the expense of the company, Hiroshi Yamauchi looked out for his company’s and employees’ well-being, albeit firing them / squashing their pride from time to time.

So was he Wonka, Mr. Burns or Scrooge? Really, none of the above. We like it when people in high positions are easy to define. This guy’s bad, this guy’s good, this guy was bad but is now good because some ghosts scared him, etc. I read some comments about Yamauchi shortly before he died and they were all about how he was a vampire and evil and crazy (he did say some nutty stuff over the years). But after his death, articles all over the web were touting him as a visionary genius. The truth is that Hiroshi Yamauchi was a human man. He treated a lot of people badly, got hurt a lot in his early life, made good and bad decisions, donated a lot of money to charity, and gave opportunities to artists that made a lot of us really happy. He was complex and the story of his life is incredibly interesting. And that is perhaps the best and truest way to remember his personal legacy.

Sources Referenced:

• Game Over by David Sheff
• The First Quarter by Steven L. Kent
• http://thepunkeffect.com/?p=11804
• http://www.usgamer.net/articles/hiroshi-yamauchi-the-iron-fist-in-the-velvet-glove
• http://www.n-sider.com/contentview.php?contentid=224
• http://www.nindb.net/feature/history-of-nintendo.html

Ha! You wish. Some people really truly love their two-dimensional partners. And this article is for those aspiring to become one of them.

When Love Is Not Enough: Love Plus

Whether it’s a two-dimensional girl or a two-dimensional 01100111 01110101 01111001 you’re looking for, you’re in luck. They come in all shapes and sizes, though mostly flat ones. But say you do get into a committed 2-D relationship. You’re serious about him/her. Would it be possible to actually marry my 2-D partner? Seal the deal? The answer is … probably not. I think this question on Yahoo知恵袋 (Japanese Yahoo Answers) sums it up quite well:

Q. 二次元の女性との婚姻届は出せますか？
Can I legally marry (do the marriage registration of) a 2-dimensional girl?

A. 戸籍（外国人なら婚姻要件具備証明書等の書類）が無いので無理でしょう。
Since they don’t have a koseki/family register it’s probably impossible.

It’s nice that the answerer actually came up with a real reason.

The person asking the question isn’t alone, though. There are, of course, many people who have fallen in love with a 2-D guy or girl (though mostly it’s a 2-D girl). One game that kept coming up in my research was Love Plus, a dating sim for the Nintendo DS.

I remember how back in the day when I played Hatoful Kareshi I became madly in love with one particular pigeon, only to have my hato broken. So, I can only imagine what Love Plus would do to me. Apparently this dating sim is convincing enough that people have actually married their Love Plus partner in real life, though I imagine the legality of said marriage is pretty nonexistent at best.

I do!

There are many stories of this out there about Love Plus destroying / creating marriages.

One man (known as SAL9000, pictured above) fell so in love with Nene Anegasaki (a character in Love Plus) that he married her and took her on a honeymoon to Guam. So, he and his Nintendo DS (I hope he has save file backups!) livecasted their trip on NicoNico and then held a public reception when they got back to Tokyo. [Source]

In another Love Plus story, instead creating a beautiful 2-D union the guy just ended up hurting his real life 3-D one. Koh (the guy), bought Love Plus for his DS just to see what the hype was about and found himself hooked. After committing himself to Rinko in the game, their relationship got deeper and deeper. She started calling him by his first name and began to demand more attention. BoingBoing wrote about this and did an interview about it, some of which is pasted below:

Koh, what do you and Rinko do together?
OK, this is pretty embarrassing. The DS has a mic and a touchscreen, so… one time, she asked me to say “I love you” a hundred times into the mic. I was on the airplane when she asked me that, so I was like, no way. There was also this part where you have to hold her hand on the touchscreen. If you touch her hand with the stylus, you get to hold her hand. And then there’s the part where you have to kiss her.

Did you do it?
No, no! The girl’s face shows up on the screen, and you have to touch her lips to give her a kiss. That’s pretty weird…. this is embarrassing. I’m sweating right now just talking about it. Yurie: Ew. Do people really do that? Koh: I guess some people do.

[...]

But Koh, you have a real woman in your life.
That’s why I was able to come back. Thank god! I was only stuck in that world for about a week. Also, I got hooked when I was in Japan on a business trip, so when I came back to San Francisco, I didn’t play it that much. Maybe just for a day. In the bathtub

[...]

Yeah, if I was playing too many games and that was compromising the time I spent in my real life, that would be a problem. It’s the same with Second Life or World of Warcraft. If I got too into something and couldn’t come back, that would be a problem. At the same time, though, the danger I felt when I almost got sucked into Love Plus was very human. If I was single and had gotten too into this… I don’t know, I recognized that there was a me in there that could have a real attachment to this artificial character on the other side of the DS screen. It made me think that humans could probably pretty easily develop feelings for AI robots. It’s the same with animals, right? Animals don’t speak words but you can really love them. But I do think it has something to do with the simplicity of men. I’d be really curious to see how women would react to a boy version of Love Plus.

[...]

So what is your Love Plus girlfriend doing now?
I’m too scared to find out. I’m probably going to get in big trouble if I open it after leaving her alone for several weeks. Maybe she’s dead now. That would be scary.

That’s a pretty edited version of the interview (read the full interview here), but you get the idea. The original interview included his wife as well, and she was surprisingly okay with it. She essentially said that as long as her husband knew that this was a game and that’s all, it’s okay with her. She was more concerned with the amount of time he played on it, more than anything. So, there’s hope for some of you guys yet!

Of course, there are other dating sims out there that dudes get addicted to, but this game is pretty high up there in terms of getting dudes in trouble. After coming out, wives and girlfriends got onto the internet to complain to Konami for stealing their men away. I can’t imagine the release of the 3DS helping out their cause any.

When You Love Sleeping

Personally, I’m a huge fan of sleeping. I do it every night, most nights. If only the person pillow I loved could be by my side during all those special unconscious moments! Wait! That’s a thing already!

If you head on over to Akihabara’s possibly X-rated and not X-rated shops, you’ll see all kinds of body pillows adorned with scantily clad anime ladies (and men). While this isn’t solely a Japanese thing anymore, I think it’s pretty safe to say that this whole idea either originated or got popularized in Japan.

One man, Nisan, was written about in the New York Times Magazine. The “how they met” story brings a tear to my eye.

Their first encounter — at a comic-book convention that Nisan’s gaming friends dragged him to in Tokyo — was serendipitous. Nisan was wandering aimlessly around the crowded exhibition hall when he suddenly found himself staring into Nemutan’s bright blue eyes. In the beginning, they were just friends. Then, when Nisan got his driver’s license a few months later, he invited Nemutan for a ride around town in his beat-up Toyota. They went to a beach, not far from the home he shares with his parents in a suburb of Tokyo. It was the first of many road trips they would take together. As they got to know each other, they traveled hundreds of miles west — to Kyoto, Osaka and Nara, sleeping in his car or crashing on friends’ couches to save money. They took touristy pictures under cherry trees, frolicked like children on merry-go-rounds and slurped noodles on street corners. Now, after three years together, they are virtually inseparable. “I’ve experienced so many amazing things because of her,” Nisan told me, rubbing Nemutan’s leg warmly. “She has really changed my life.”

Nisan of course knows she’s not real, but the love is, he says.

“Of course she’s my girlfriend,” he said, widening his eyes as if shocked by the question. “I have real feelings for her.”

It’s not just Nisan, either, though Nisan is much more public with his love for Nemutan because he takes her around everywhere. There are thousands of other people just like him who feel an emotional attachment to their dakimakura, and it’s turned into a kind of subculture where people make custom designs, sell them, buy them, and gather together to talk about them. One very important factor I learned about was the type of fabric. Smooth knit is good. I guess that’s the kind of thing you go on since the personality of the pillow is whatever you want it to be.

This culture is getting larger and larger too, it seems to me, and I don’t think it will slow down. We’ll talk about this more in the next section, but before we do that I just wanted to mention that if you’re looking for your very own special pillow someone, Tofugu actually runs the number one body pillow dating site in the world, so find Your One True Threadcount™ today!

When 2(D) Is More Real Than 3(D)

You may be wondering… why in the world would someone love a two-dimensional person??? While I don’t know from my own experience (except with my beautiful birdfriend Nageki Fujishiro. WHERE ARE YOU COME BACK TO ME!), similar themes came up again and again when I read through articles and research. Surprisingly, after reading so much I’ve come to realize it’s not actually all that weird and makes sense in a way. I’m not saying it’s for me, but I can see why people would feel and think this way.

First lets start with some general numbers about 2-D characters. How wide-spread is this phenomenon?L et’s take a look at a study done by 瞬刊！リサーチNEWS in May of 2013.

Q. Do you have an ideal man/woman from a 2-D world?

MEN (Answers：17,387)
- Yes: 33.6％
- No: 48.5％
- I don’t read manga and don’t watch anime: 17.8％

WOMEN (Answers：18,767)
- Yes: 40.9％
- Now: 42.9％
- I don’t read manga and don’t watch anime: 16.2％

Surprisingly, that’s 33.6% of men and 40.9% of women who said yes, they do have an ideal man/woman from a 2-D world. Of course, this doesn’t mean that all of these people are in love with an two dimensional character. Far from it. It does however show how anime/manga characters are personifications of “ideal” people you’d want to know or be with. With so many of them, of course you run into one or two that match the kind of girl or guy you’d want to date. But, that’s the same as with TV dramas or movies too, and these have real people in them. So, it’s not all that different from that. Children idolize cartoon superhero characters all the time. They want to be them, which isn’t all that different from wanting to be with a cartoon character, I’d say. The line that’s drawn has to do with knowing or thinking that you can be with them. I think Japan’s line is a lot harder to see.

The difference with Japan I think is the saturation of 2-D characters. If all you see is 2-D, and if this many people are able to idealize a 2-D character, then of course some of them are going to fall in love with them too. It’s still a very small subset of people that do this, but if you throw enough cats at the wall, one or two are going to stick, you know?

So what happens if you ask a similar question, but only with otakus. Someone took a group of 500 otaku dudes and polled them already, and here are the results:

Q. What Kind Of Females Do You Like?

2D Women: 23%
2.5D Women: 9.6%
Real Women: 65.8%
*2.5d = three dimensional animated girls

So, out of the otaku subset, you have around 30% of them who reportedly prefer not-real women. Of course, preference doesn’t mean you’re dating a body pillow, but you are leaning in that direction, at least.

There are a few generalized reasons why otaku dudes are more likely to fall for a 2D girl rather than a real one as well, from what I’ve read of individual experiences:

1. There are way more otaku guys than girls. So, since otakus are more likely to date other otakus (rather than outside this otaku circle), there are fewer possible girls to date.
2. It’s harder for otakus to find dates with real people. This is partly due to shyness and partly due to confidence and partly due to lifestyle choices, supposedly.
3. Otaku tend to have very good imaginations from all the anime, manga, and storytelling that they are surrounded by. The better your imagination, the easier it is to imagine the ideal personality onto a figure, body pillow, etc. The inanimate object “comes to life” in their head because of their vivid imagination.

There are also other reasons as well. Things like bad previous relationships often play a part. Not-real people won’t hurt you or leave you or cheat on you, after all. But, if you’re not 100% committed to this lifestyle you could be hurting somebody else, too! A real person! There are so many stories of desperate girlfriends trying to make their guys love them when a 2-D girl is creating competition. Here are some summaries of people having trouble with this from various blogs, forums, and websites:

One girl complained that she has a boyfriend who can only date 2-D girls… but he loves her, though he’s sick of 3-D girls. [source]

Another girl (who also likes anime) has feelings for a guy who loves 2-D. They enjoy talking about anime together too. When she asked him if he has someone on his mind, he replied by saying he only loves 2-D girls. She wants to kokuhaku but is afraid he’ll reject him. [Source]

Another post had a list of replies on why they can only love 2-D characters. One said that it’s not that they can only love 2-D, but that they’ve never been loved by 3-D. Someone replied saying that they are the same, and only 2-D girls would accept them. Another guy talked about how the more he learned about 3-D girls, the more he loved 2-D ones. Then there’s others who said that they don’t get tired of 2-D women (like they do with 3-D ones) and yet another that said they don’t want to be hurt by a real woman, so they choose 3-D. [Source]

There was also a girl I read about who loved 2-D characters. She says she’ll never be hurt this way. She pretends she’s looking for a boyfriend so people don’t think she’s weird, but she knows that if she had a boyfriend it would take time away from being able to think about her manga characters, so she doesn’t actually want a boyfriend that much. [Source]

And lastly, there’s one person who thinks that loving 2-D women is a form of evolution. I think this was the plot of one X-Men comic I read. He says that a normal guy’s brain wave reacts when they watch porn because they live in the 3-D world. However, a 2-D lover doesn’t have the same reaction when watching 3-D porn. It does react when they watch 2-D anime, though. He further goes on to state that this is proof of some kind of evolution that allows men to survive using less energy. Around 10% of otaku guys have this evolved brain pattern. Look out, lesser-humans! [Source]

So there you have it. Maybe more people than you thought are into the 2-D. Maybe you knew it all along because you’re on the front lines. Hopefully you understand better why it goes on. I think one issue out there is that most people just automatically assume all these people are serial killers. To be honest, they’re all probably nice people. Many of them lead very normal lives (besides all this). While I’m not one to be a part of this lifestyle, I’m not going to judge it as well… poke fun? Maybe a little. But, I hope you’re nice in the comments as well. Read some of the linked articles and stories, it’s quite fascinating and interesting.

Main thing is you don’t let your 2-D or 3-D loves get in the way with each other, I think. The 3-D one will win every time. Question I have, though: is it real murder if you come home to your Nintendo DS broken in half and then drowned in water?

ANGRY KOICHI SAYS BE NICE IN THE COMMENTS, OK?

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Bonus Wallpapers!

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[1280x800] ∙ [2560x1600] ∙ [1280x800 Animated] ∙ [700x438 Animated]

When you’re not saving the Mushroom Kingdom from blood-thirsty turtles, you can use your uneducational Nintendo DS to study, improve, and practice your Japanese. There are several “games” out there to help you. Of course, there are several electronic dictionaries out there that do similar things, and it seems like everyone has them. I’m here to tell you that you should hold off and buy a DS instead. That’s right, buy a piece of gaming hardware for your education. You might even be able to convince your parents to do it for you, if you’re lucky. But why buy a Nintendo DS instead of an electric dictionary? First off, there is a good selection software you can choose from, and all of them do different things.

Nintendo DS Kanji Dictionary:
そのまま楽引く辞典／漢字そのまま (sono mama raku hiku jiten / Kanji Sonomama). How many times have you looked at a kanji and had no idea what it was? More than you can count, most likely. Once you stop reading children’s books, you’ll probably start to notice that there is less and less furigana going on (that’s the hiragana next to the kanji telling you how to pronounce it). Furigana will only stick around for very difficult kanji, and that’s why you need this software. All you need to do is write your kanji into the box (as ugly and as poorly as you want to) and it will decipher it and give you its meaning. What makes this “game” so invaluable, however, is that it will translate it for you into English. You can also translate the other way around (English -> Japanese). Here is what happens when you look up a word:

Learn Kanji on your DS:
正しい漢字かきとりくん（Tadashii kanji kakitori-kun) is a game (for Japanese kids) that can teach you how to write elementary level kanji up to the sixth grade level. Using your stylus, you can learn proper stroke order, how to write more beautifully, and have a tiny bit of fun doing it.

[yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2B5GmBGY2c']

Hiragana/Katakana Homebrew DS Game:
Zoelen has come up with (so I hear) a pretty good app for the DS that allows you to practice reading and writing hiragana/katakana. This could potentially be perfect for a beginning student, because we all know where I think Japanese self-learners should start. I’m not exactly sure how it’s uploaded to your DS, but there’s go to be a way. I’m sure someone will comment on it down below somewhere.

Kanji Chikara (kanji strength):
This game was made for native Japanese folks, and it isn’t for the faint of heart. This “game” is tough. Native Japanese have trouble with this one. You have to figure out which kanji is written incorrectly in a sentence, choose the correct pronunciation of obscure words, and do all sorts of other things that test your kanji skill against a tricky computer. This might be a good game for people studying for ikkyu, but any lower than that and……I’m afraid this one’ll be a little past your level.

There you have it. The Nintendo DS is a great tool for learning Japanese. Not only can you play any and all Japanese DS games on your American Nintendo DS, but you can study on it as well. When you’re bored of “studying,” you can pop in the Japanese version of Osu, Tatakai, Ouendan and sit back, knowing that you might be able to read something now. Good luck!