Video dating games and cosplay mean that the Japanese have learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

Our point is thus a very elementary one: true, the computer-generated “virtual reality” is a semblance, it does foreclose the Real; but what we experience as the “true, hard, external reality” is based upon exactly the same exclusion. The ultimate lesson of “virtual reality” is the virtualization of the very “true” reality: by the mirage of “virtual reality,” the “true” reality itself is posited as a semblance of itself, as a pure symbolic edifice. — Slavoj Žižek

According to CNET news, a young Japanese man who goes by name “Sal9000″ married his sweetheart Nene Anegasaki this past week. What’s remarkable about this, apart from the groom’s futuristic handle? Well, Sal9000′s betrothed exists only in the Nintendo DS game, Love Plus. The popular video game requires its players successfully to woo one of three school girls within a 100-day period. Take a lady to the wrong restaurant, and risk losing her favor, as well as the game. Wine and dine her successfully and she’ll be ready to accept any overtures.

Once the young lady does, the player gains entry to a whole new level in the game: He can email his new girlfriend, or speak to her via a DS microphone (sadly, she only understands Japanese). A player can also select how he wants his girl to address him — formally, informally, or something in between. Over time, the girls of Love Plus change their behavior to suit their suitors. And since the game uses an innovative new technology that places the game in real time, it could literally take years to win and then mold an ideal mate. A player can always cheat, of course, by speeding up the clock when she’s not looking, but he risks a pre-date tongue lashing if he does so.

Seems quite trivial, the marriage of Mr. and Mrs Sal9000. Such stunts have been pulled before: In 2006, a British woman married a dolphin, and, more recently, a woman married the Eiffel Tower. But these have something of the goof about them — tongues firmly in cheek as vows are repeated. But for Sal9000, the experience of marrying his beloved Nene proved life changing. The wedding was a gala affair complete with an ordained priest and a buttercream-frosted ivory tower of cake. Sal9000 and his bride repaired after the ceremony at the Tokyo Institute of Technology to an undisclosed honeymoon location. Though there was a strong whiff of the media spectacle about Sal9000 and Nene’s marriage, it  reveals something about post World War II Japanese culture.

In his 1956 essay “Reflections on the H bomb” (gated) German philosopher Günther Anders discusses the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s effect on the agents and co-agents of that mass genocide. He writes:

The action of unleashing the bomb is not merely irresponsible in the ordinary sense of the term: irresponsibility still falls within the realm of the morally discussable, while here we are confronted with something for which no one can even be held accountable. The consequences of this ‘action’ are so great that the agent cannot possibly grasp them before, during, or after his action. Moreover, in this case there can be no goal, no positive value that can even approximately equal the magnitude of the means used to achieve it.

The dropping of “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” on Nagasaki and Hiroshima did not simply incinerate tens of thousands of people; it challenged, and vanquished, the limits of one’s ability to understand that action. The agent of destruction cannot possibly understand the consequences of his actions. In a certain sense an action like the dropping of an atomic bomb on a city returns the agent of that destruction to a state of childlike naivety. Anders continues:

The Biblical “They know not what they do” here assumes a new, unexpectedly terrifying meaning: the very monstrousness of the deed makes possible a new, truly infernal innocence.

[...]

Consequently, modern unmorality does not primarily consist in man’s failure to conform to a specific more-than-human image of man; perhaps not even in his failure to meet the requirements of a just society; but rather in his half-guilty and half-innocent failure to conform to himself, that is to say, in the fact that his capacity for action has outgrown his emotional, imaginative, and moral capacities.

On that clear Monday in August, as the school children of Hiroshima were having their lunches packed for them by anxious parents or performing their early morning drills upon freshly-mown lawns, the crew of the Enola Gay momentarily fell into a state of innocence much like that of their victims as they opened the hatch to release their deadly cargo. For how could they have gone through with it unless their capacity for action, as Anders supposes, outgrew certain emotional, imaginative, and moral capacities? And what of the survivors of the bombing? Could it be possible they too had to embrace a certain childlike naivety because it was, and still is, too damn hard to comprehend what really happened?

Nuclear reaction: continued cultural fallout from the atom bomb.

The marriage between Sal9000 and Nene Anegasaki seems to imply just that, as does the Japanese obsession with all things cartoonish and cartoon-like. On November 21, 2009 the AFA 09 Regional Cosplay Championships took place. To qualify, one had to dress in costumes adapted from various Japanese anime serials and manga. Since 1998 Tokyo’s Akihabara district has featured a large number of cosplay cafes; the waitresses at these cafes dress as various anime characters, with maid costumes being the most popular getup. The aim of cosplay is to portray one’s character much like one would inhabit a role on the stage. Indeed, some participants are loath ever to don non-cosplay attire.

It’s hard not to imagine that the United States had something to do with all the young adults wandering the streets of Tokyo dressed like purple-haired action figures.

Given that other great trend in Japan — internet suicide clubs — cosplay and civil unions between gamers and their video vixens seem quite tame. But it’s hard not to imagine that such strange pastimes are in part due to the horrors that were perpetuated sixty years ago in the name of ending the Second Great War. It’s hard not to imagine that the United States, a nation that also suffers from a strain of postmodern malaise all its own, had something to do with all the young adults wandering the streets of Tokyo dressed likepurple-haired action figures. Sixty years ago people failed to conform to themselves, to recognize the limits of their moral and intellectual capabilities and to work toward extending those limits so that they might master the consequences of their technologies. Now, as a consequence, these technologies have mastered people.

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