Marrying a Digital Creature in Japan: Fake Weddings and True Love in 2.5 Dimensions
Résumé
In 2009, a Japanese man narrowly avoided divorce after his wife discovered his adultery relationships with Nene, a character of a video game called LovePlus. One month later, another Japanese man married Nene. Since then – and in spite of the stigma associated to artificial relationships –, digital lovers are commonly offered to marry with, through the use of fake marriage certificate, sham ceremonies and pair rings. Such weddings can happen inside the game but also outside, in what is commonly referred to as “2,5D space” (nitengo jigen kūkan), a liminal space between fiction and reality. Focusing on these 2,5D weddings, and on some specific cases of Japanese women who introduce themselves as the “wife” or even as the “husband” of a character, I would like to analyze this phenomenon as a revealing mirror of the “sentimental mechanisms” underlying the Japanese societal developments.