Man marries hologram!

Akihiko Kondo’s mother refused an invitation to her only son’s wedding in Tokyo this month, but perhaps that isn’t such a surprise: he was marrying a hologram.

A hologram, according to Wikipedia is a photographic recording of a light field, rather than of an image formed by a lens, and it is used to display a fully three-dimensional image of the holographed subject,

“For mother, it wasn’t something to celebrate,” said the soft-spoken 35-year-old, whose “bride” is a virtual reality singer named Hatsune Miku.

Around 40 guests watched as he tied the knot with Miku, present in the form of a cat-sized stuffed doll.

“I never cheated on her, I’ve always been in love with Miku-san,” he said, using an honorific that is commonly employed in Japan, even by friends.

“I’ve been thinking about her every day,” he told AFP a week after the wedding.

Since March, Kondo has been living with a moving, talking hologram of Miku that floats in a US$2,800 desktop device.

“I’m in love with the whole concept of Hatsune Miku but I got married to the Miku of my house,” he said, looking at the blue image glowing in a capsule.

“DROP DEAD, CREEPY OTAKU!”

He considers himself an ordinary married man – his holographic wife wakes him up each morning and sends him off to his job as an administrator at a school.

In the evening, when he tells her by cellphone that he’s coming home, she turns on the lights. Later, she tells him when it’s time to go to bed.

He sleeps alongside the doll version of her that attended the wedding, complete with a wedding ring that fits around her left wrist.

Kondo’s path to Miku came after difficult encounters with women as an anime-mad teenager.

“Girls would say ‘Drop dead, creepy otaku!’,” he recalled, using a Japanese term for geeks that can carry a negative connotation.

As he got older, he says a woman at a previous workplace bullied him into a nervous breakdown and he became determined never to marry.

In Japan, that wouldn’t be entirely unusual nowadays. While in 1980, only one in 50 men had never married by the age of 50, that figure is now one in four.

But eventually Kondo realised he had been in love with Miku for more than a decade and decided to marry her.

A “SEXUAL MINORITY”

“Miku-san is the woman I love a lot and also the one who saved me,” he said.

And while Kondo says he is happy to be friends with a “3D woman”, he has no interest in romance with one, no matter how much his mother pushes for it.

AFP