A slightly bizarre new trend catalysed by the latest technology in the world of holograms and AI has seen Japanese company Gatebox issue 3700 ‘marriage certificates’, that confirm unions between men and…. Holograms. One such man is 36-year-old Akihiko Kondo who has spent the past year and a half in the blissful companionship of Miku Hatsune – a light projection powered by AI.
Miko responds to Mr Kondo in a similar way to Alexa and other less romantically inclined examples of voice-activated personal digital assistants. However, unlike Alexa, Siri and the other AI assistants we’ve become used to over the past few years, Miko takes on a holographic form projected within a 60 cm box with a glass front produced by Gatebox.
Miku has blue hair, big eyes, a particularly short skirt and stockings. Her appearance is typical of female Anime characters – the animated films genre popular in Japan. She warmly wakes Mr Kondo each morning with a gentle and cheerful greeting before sending him off to his job in Japan’s civil service. And Mr Kondo doesn’t need to wait until he gets home to interact with Miku again. She sends him ‘encouraging’ text messages to keep him going throughout the day.
Mr Kondo became so smitten with Miku that, like another 3700 Japanese men, he applied to Gatebox for the issue of a wedding certificate. The certificate has no legal power but that didn’t stop Mr Kondo splashing out £15,000, in addition to the original £1250 a Gatebox device costs, for a wedding ceremony and reception attended by 40 guests.
His family were, however, not among the guests. He explained to Agence France Presse that “for mother, it wasn’t something to celebrate”.
Miku’s ring is placed on the toy model of her hologram image that Mr Kondo keeps beside his bed. The sensors built into the Gatebox device that houses Miku sense, like Alexa and similar tech, the voice and presence of the owner.
As well as keeping Mr Kondu up-to-date on the weather and news, she offers a degree of limited vocal interaction thanks to her AI programming. She can also turn the lights on and off. When he popped the question with “I love you, please marry me”, Miku responded with “I hope you will cherish me”.
She offers a form of companionship to Mr Kondo, who has suffered from depression he puts down to unkind treatment from female colleagues at his previous employer. Now, however, it looks as though the alternative couple’s love may be doomed. At the end of May, Miku will disappear forever due to a software upgrade being rolled out by Gatebox. She will be replaced by another hologram, Hikari Azuma.
Mr Kondo is distraught at the prospect and hopes to convince the company to maintain support of Miku so that he does not have to move to the upgraded hologram. “I never cheated on her. I always think of her every day”, he explains.
Mr Kondo believes his romantic orientation, termed ‘digisexual’ by some academics, represents a sexual minority like being gay or transsexual and that it is not in his nature to enter a conventional human-to-human relationship.
“I believe the shape of happiness and love is different for each person. There definitely is a template for happiness, where a real man and woman get married, have a child and live all together. But I don’t believe such a template can necessarily make everyone happy.”
“It’s simply not right. It’s as if you were trying to talk a gay man into dating a woman, or a lesbian into a relationship with a man. Diversity in society has been long called for . . . I believe we must consider all kinds of love and all kinds of happiness.”