Love Plus: Japanese Men Vacation With Virtual Girlfriends

The basis of Love Plus+, a video game from Japanese company Konami that was released in Japan last September, is that male players can choose between one of three high school girls to be their virtual girlfriends, and then engage in a sort of competition against the game to keep their girlfriend happy and maintain a relationship with her. The girls are anime dolls: wide-eyed, pale-faced, with slim girlish figures and school uniforms. Their expressions suggest sweet, sad, teenage innocence. The men buy the girls flowers, kiss them via a few sweeps of the mouse, and, lately, take them on vacations.

As sometimes happens in Japan, the line between fantasy and reality, particularly when dealing with sex, has become blurry. One man has already married his virtual girlfriend. Many men are obviously willing to make real-life compromises, decisions and purchases for their pixelated adolescent lovers; last Christmas Konami, the company that puts out Love Plus+, put out a cake that men could buy for their girlfriends. The cake sold out before the bakery had even opened.

More recently, Konami has paired with the dying seaside town of Atami to offer vacations and honeymoons for the men and their "girlfriends." Atami was once a hot destination for, ahem, real life couples, but has suffered economically in the past decade. So its businesses jumped at the prospect of indulging in a little suspension of disbelief to encourage lonely Japanese men to take their fantasies one step further. Restaurants have named dishes after the game, the town has put up billboards of the three teenage girls, and a hotel has offered special "suites" with two of everything for the men and their hand-held devices. The female hotel employees dress up like the girls in specifically designed Japanes yukatas, and the hotel employees must check in the Love Plus+ vacationers as couples, actually registering both names in their records. An iPhone app lets the men take photos of themselves with the girls.

I can see why real-life wives and girlfriends of Japanese men, and Japanese women in general, might find this disturbing. A) The men get to be with teenage girls, smart and young and innocent and beautiful in a very stock comic-book way B) These girlfriends are so easy to please with a swipe of the mouse and a trip to the bakery and C) The men are in complete and total control, all the time, of a relationship. Love Plus+ is an adolescent male fantasy flirting in pretty intense ways with reality, and making it virtually impossible for real women to compete.

Photo credit: Danny Choo