How close is too close? Which side of the line are you on? Such were the questions that plagued me in the field. By spending time in Akihabara with the producers and players of *bishōjo* games without immediately criticizing them for what seemed to many to be clear violations of international norms and global standards, if not also the law, I crossed a line. I became visible to *bishōjo* game producers and players in a way that reminded me of Geertz running away from authorities with informants when a cockfight was broken up during his fieldwork in Bali (Geertz 1973: 414–417). Like Geertz, being seen as on "their side" of the line opened doors and made certain interactions and relations possible. It was not as simple and complete as crossing a threshold, however. Rather, it was an unsettling process of feeling out lines. Rather than suddenly becoming visible as Geertz did in his transformation, I had a distinct urge to remain invisible, someone watching safely from the sidelines, but that is not how participant observation works. It was a struggle, and not an entirely heroic one. Anthropology employs a "kinky empiricism," as theorist Danilyn Rutherford memorably names it, which means getting close enough for long enough to feel "what one imagines the other feels" (Rutherford 2012: 472). While Rutherford is "not afraid of dangerous liaisons" (Rutherford 2012: 476), I cannot say that I was always so brave, because my fieldwork demanded sharing responses to imaginary sex, violence and crime that was often perverse and personally disturbing. Dwelling with *bishōjo* game producers and players meant dwelling with disturbing affects and being moved in disturbing ways. It meant dwelling in the darkness like Malinowski, dwelling in the darkness with Ataru in Akihabara (Chapter 2 and Conclusion). Finding oneself and others in the darkness, because, "Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others" (Chödrön 2008: 74). If there are "analytic and ethical twists and turns born of a research method that forces [… one] to get close enough to imagine how it might feel to walk in another's shoes" (Rutherford 2012: 476), then my fieldwork made these ethical twists and turns kinky indeed.

Part of what makes the methodology so perverse is the need to share imagination and movement. It was simply not adequate for fieldwork to observe players responding to games or attempt discussing them when I had not participated in or shared experiences of imaginary worlds. To imagine what the other feels, I needed to feel something myself; I needed to play the games that moved them so and try to share that movement. If they were playing games involving imaginary sex, violence and crime, then I had to do the same. As a relative newcomer to *bishōjo* games in 2014, I learned about them while playing titles recommended by informants, who agreed to meet and discuss experiences. These were at once their own and mine, as we talked about shared and divergent paths through, and responses to, games that we had played. The lines between subject and object, inside and outside, self and other began to blur. At times, I thought that I was indeed a pervert, but then a *bishōjo* game producer or player would introduce me to something involving imaginary sex, violence and crime that crossed lines I did not even know that I had drawn. Negotiating those lines while interacting with manga/ anime characters and *bishōjo* game producers and players was part of fieldwork. To put it somewhat differently, responding to *bishōjo* games with others and drawing and crossing lines was part of a perverse methodology of sharing imagination and movement. Resisting iconophobia, art historian W.J.T. Mitchell recommends we "put our relation to the work into question, to make the *relationality* of image and beholder the field of investigation" (Mitchell 2005: 49). In my attempt to do so, the field expanded from my own relation to the image to include others and their relations to the image, as well as my own evolving relations with all of them as we shared imagination and movement.

For these reasons and more, I do not want to draw a redline between *bishōjo* game producers and players and myself, which would serve to keep imagined perversion safely located in others. Fieldwork, which renders us vulnerable in interaction with one another, "requires ethical reflections and solidary engagement" (Bourgois and Schonberg 2009: 14). This means not erasing myself from the field and reflecting on my own imagination and movement, especially when it would be all too easy to hide behind *bishōjo* game producers and players as perverts and reduce the risk of personal association. Such hiding is more problematic still when those exposed might be taken as criminals. Against the backdrop of building momentum toward the conclusion that the distinction between fiction and reality should not matter before the law, there is added ethical pressure to clearly and compellingly translate other ways of seeing and being in the world learned in the field. Of course, knowledge gained through fieldwork is far more partial than Malinowski might have ideally wished, but, as Rutherford reminds us, there is an ethics to "empiricism that admits that one never gets to the bottom of things, yet also accepts and even celebrates the disavowals required of us given a world that forces us to act" (Rutherford 2012: 465). The ethics emerges from methods that place anthropologists into interactions and relations with others and create obligations, which compel researchers to "put themselves on the line by making truth claims that they know will intervene within the settings and among the people they describe" (Rutherford 2012: 465). This is increasingly important as anthropologists enter into "politically fraught arenas," which "require us to write and speak authoritatively" (Rutherford 2012: 465). Choosing to write and speak means putting oneself on the line, if not also an opening for self-recrimination.

Over the course of fieldwork, I came to understand that it is not only about encountering the other, but also confronting the self in interactions with others, the other in oneself and the self imagined in others. This seems very much to be the "split and contradictory self," which can "interrogate positionings and be accountable" and "construct and join rationale conversations and fantastic imaginings" (Haraway 1988: 586). Is there a better figure of the split and contradictory self than the anthropologist in the field as a "participant observer," who remains self-reflexive even while trying to see and experience the world as another? In my case, the approach was encouraged by *bishōjo* games, as the player sees the world from a first-person perspective, is involved in active imagining to move the image in line with the textual and sound cues and makes choices in interactions with others that impact the story and world. The player thinks and speaks as the player character, but also sees the player character as a separate entity on screen, which leads to oscillation between immersion and distance. To put it simply, the player character is both self and other, even as the player is both participant and observer. As "a person involved" (Sasakibara 2003: 104), and involved with others who are known, if not cared about, the player is oriented toward ethical encounters and ethical reflection on actions and their consequences. For me, this extended from game play into interactions with *bishōjo* game producers and players, who shared imagination and movement as we discussed routes and choices and saw ourselves in one another and others in ourselves.

This becomes decidedly more challenging when the other self on screen or in conversation crosses a line into perverse imaginary sex, violence and crime. The dodge is to say it has nothing to do with me, but that is ultimately dishonest. As Sasakibara Gō taught me, we have an obligation to engage in ethical reflection and account for our own affective responses (see Chapter 3). We have an obligation to recognize and deal with our own desires and capacity for violence and harm. For his part, Sasakibara experiences moments in games as being in "criminal accomplice," but this goes even further in disturbing interactions such as the one with a man I thought I knew defending child pornography and prostitution or being identified as dangerous at an event where a cute girl character designer suggested he photographs children. This brings to mind how Ōtsuka Eiji, in the fallout after the arrest of Miyazaki Tsutomu in 1989, refused to entirely distance himself from the child molester and murderer (see Chapter 1). Instead, Ōtsuka reported feeling a disturbing sense of "synchronicity" (Ōtsuka and Nakamori 1989a: 17). He saw himself in the other and the other in himself. When called for comment by journalists and critics, Ōtsuka asked himself questions and debated them in conversation with others (Ōtsuka and Nakamori 1989a: 17). Is this not what I also did in the field? An experience left me upset and unsettled, and I worked it out in interactions with others, which were also with myself. Like Ōtsuka, I found that small stories coming together led to the emergence of an "ethics of the abandoned" (Ōtsuka and Nakamori 1989b: 216). While I cannot state as Ōtsuka does that "I am a *lolicon*" (Ōtsuka and Nakamori 1989a: 73), which given the timing of his statement and his sense of responsibility to others is no doubt a way of putting himself on the line in Japan in 1989, I can say that I crossed over to that side in fieldwork where I imagined and moved as a *lolicon*. There I learned the ethics of drawing lines and negotiating them with others and myself. All of this leads to appreciating participant observation as perverse methodology, or a methodology of self-perversion and othering in pursuit of learning outside of oneself.

### **8.4 Conclusion**

There are, then, two primary points about this perverse methodology of sharing imagination and movement and its ethics. The first is openness to exposing oneself in the struggle to imagine and follow the lines of movement of others. This movement can and does impact ways of seeing and being, positions and perspectives, one's own sense of self. This potential to shift perceptions of reality and one's place in the world is precisely why the method is as powerful and political as it can be disturbing and dangerous. It is the perverse methodology of imagining and moving as another. In my particular case, this included the action and everyday practice of drawing lines in response to fiction and reality, as well as crossing and negotiating lines. The second primary point is commitment to write clearly and compellingly about other ways of seeing and being in the world, which can push back on preconceived notions, draw readers in and encourage them to imagine the lives of others and themselves as others.

For what it is worth, I see glimmers of both points about perverse methodology in Bronisław Malinowski. Acknowledging that he did not make it part of his final ethnography, Malinowski's diary does speak to his struggle to imagine and follow the lines of movement of others. By bringing this into the writing, we can more honestly reflect on field experiences. As for imagining other ways of seeing and being in the world, Malinowski directly appeals to readers in *Argonauts of the Western Pacific* and invites them to, "Imagine" (Malinowski 2014: 4). In passages where he goes "sailing through color" (Taussig 2009: 99), Malinowski draws the reader into another world or the world otherwise. In the spirit of theorist David Graeber's return to the ethnographic record to challenge common sense, Malinowski's work might encourage readers to think about other ways of seeing and being in the world and thus contribute to "liberation in the imaginary" (Graeber 2004: 102). This casts into stark relief the imaginative and political aspects of anthropology that have been there from the very beginnings of fieldwork.

The challenge, methodological and ethical, is to try to not only observe interactions and relations between fiction and reality, humans and characters, but also to participate in them. This does not entail the naïve communion that Malinowski expressed in *Argonauts* as taking "part in the native's games," following the lines of their movement and sharing "conversations" (Malinowski 2014: 21), but rather the darkness revealed in his diary as he struggled to act and interact with others and reflect on himself and his practice. Whether "pawing" girls and indulging in "lewd excesses of the imagination" (Malinowski 1989: 132, 268) or picking a *bishōjo* game and doing the same, the reflection might not be pretty, but it is part of being open and honest in learning with others. I for one find this to be much more ethical than pretending that the perversion and danger of sexualization and abuse is located over there, with them, in "Japan," safely placing it outside of the self in the other even as it slips across lines and is imagined to infect the world like a virus. Between dismissing life on islands in the Pacific as belonging to savage beasts or engaging in participant observation, struggling to live with and as others and encouraging readers to imaginatively join in, I see Malinowski as moving along a line that I still follow and learn from.

To make this work, however, one really needs to get over and outside oneself in the field. One cannot remain the unimpeachable scientist in impeccable white garb, the eminent scholar of the future, standing tall and staring down the exposed "natives" (Taussig 2009: 80–82). We must get into the weeds and mud and expose ourselves in that painful and pleasurable affective slop of living together. In that moment perched there beneath the scorching sun with those men, phallic gourds lined up and erect, but without the pretense of being the only one clean and clothed. In my estimation, literary scholar and social theorist Michael Warner offers one of the most lucid visions of our ethics: "The rule is: Get over yourself. Put a wig on before you judge. And the corollary is that you stand to learn most from the people you think are beneath you. At its best, this ethic cuts against every form of hierarchy you could bring into the room" (Warner 2000: 35). Bring into the room, or more broadly into the field and encounter.

It is possible to take Warner's advice literally, as I did in an earlier project by donning a Son Gokū wig and costume and learning on the street in Akihabara with queer performers and "weird otaku" (Galbraith 2019: 139–140), but we can take it even further in pursuit of perverse methodology and learning outside oneself with others in the world. We can turn fieldwork inside out by exposing ourselves in the open instead of others behind closed doors.263 This is an extension of the ethics of queer life (Warner 2000: 33) and ethical encounters in the field. In this perverse methodology, we encounter ourselves in others and others in ourselves, even as lines are drawn and crossed, negotiated in shared imagination and movement. This is the anthropology of lines I pursued in the fieldwork for this book and now propose as an option for researchers going forward. If the perverse methodology encourages us to remove the "weighty plumage of […] normalcy" and strut "our more deviant […] selves" (Bering 2013: 233), then the clothes have come off and I walk naked back into Akihabara. It seems the best way to return to those rooms and continue learning by "feeling it on the skin."

# **Endnotes**

#### 1. Ellison 2013.

2. On the official company website, the game is introduced as a "real time 3D groping simulator." See: https://www.itazura.biz/01\_it-pro/pro07/index.html.

3. A survey conducted by the Gender Equality Bureau in Japan in 2004, for example, found that of 1,773 women over 20 years of age sampled, 48.7 percent reported an experience of "*chikan*," which is a category of sexual assault referring to being groped, most often on crowded public transportation. See: https://web.archive.org/web/20140215120631/, http://www.gender.go.jp /e-vaw/chousa/images/pdf/h11.pdf. The result is supported by more recent surveys as well. See: http://7085aec2289005c5.main.jp/assets/doc/20190120 \_harassment\_research.pdf.

4. One could also say that my male companion is drawn to the lines. Here my thinking is informed by art historian W.J.T. Mitchell's concept of "drawing desire," which gets at the dual meaning of drawing as inscribing lines and attracting (Mitchell 2005: 59). I find Mitchell helpful for addressing desire among those living with and loving characters in not only contemporary Japan, but also further afield. Of particular interest is "desire generating images and images generating desire" (Mitchell 2005: 58; compare to Lamarre 2006).

5. Note how comics, cartoons and computer/console games all blend together, even as keywords such as manga are retained and associated with sexual violence and Japan. See the full report at: https://digitallibrary.un.org /record/833895?ln=en.

6. In the United Kingdom, researcher Perry R. Hinton notes media portraying "Japan as a source of danger, with certain Japanese harbouring the 'Lolita complex virus' [… Japan has become] a dangerous (potentially pedophilic) 'other' to be censored and avoided" (Hinton 2014: 56, 65).

7. Patridge: "To insist that one's imagination is one's own private affair, detached from one's own actual commitments and similarly detached from the contextual moral facts on the ground, amounts minimally, in this case, to a thumbing of one's nose at a requirement of solidarity with the victims of oppression. This is an obvious vice of character" (Patridge 2011: 310).

8. For a classic and often cited analysis of the spectrum of rape culture and an argument that pornography undermines social and moral inhibitions against sexual violence, see Russell 1993.

9. Indeed, Patridge goes further: "What exactly does the virtual-pedophilia case establish? Minimally, I think that it establishes that some activities that are aimed at fictional entities and so are in some sense simulated, expose a flaw in the agent's character: a virtuous agent would not undertake such an activity for the sake of pleasure, sexual or otherwise" (Patridge 2011: 305).

10. Young continues: "All that can be said at this stage is that evidence regarding a relationship between virtual violence (which has been the most researched STA) and increased anti-social behavior is inconclusive. This being the case, why should there be a relationship between other STAs – specifically virtual murder and virtual pedophilia – and their corresponding real-world taboo or even anti-social behavior in general?" (Young 2013: 18).

11. Seddon: "What we do when gaming is certainly tricky to pin down: trickier than one might expect of a virtual counterpart to the real, with its tantalizing promise of ethical conclusions no less general than the principles which we may hope to develop to guide our lives in the real world. The trickster, however, is in every case the playful human being" (Seddon 2013: 10). Well said. This is precisely why I believe anthropology generally and the methodology of fieldwork specifically is the best approach to understanding the issues at hand.

12. On *Custer's Revenge*, Patridge writes: "In the actual world, women are the victims of a kind of systemic oppression that involves seeing them in certain kinds of ways, conceiving of them as certain kinds of creatures, and subjecting them to certain kinds of violence. Given this shared moral reality, it does not take much to see the representation of the female characters in this game as an extension of real-world moral phenomena, whatever the avowed intensions of the game designers, in the same way that the image of Obama eating watermelon is an extension of real-world racial phenomena. The game invites us to enjoy representations of women as objects of sexual violence in a way that does not undermine the morally worrisome social meaning of these images" (Patridge 2011: 309–310). Expanding to other examples: "This imagery has a meaning that is fixed by the actual practice of casting women in the role of objects of sexual pleasure and violence. I think that the same can be said of the notorious game *RapeLay*" (Patridge 2011: 311). The demand is for appropriate sensitivity to sexism. Does playing such games, even enjoying them, necessarily mean one is not sensitive to sexism in the real world? Does play with characters impact ways of seeing women? I also question whether "a virtuous gamer will refuse to enjoy the offending content because such content will bring to mind real-world, moral conditions" (Patridge 2011: 311). This seems like quite a puritanical demand on the imaginary.

13. For her part, Patridge proposes that, "the nature of actual act[s] of child sexual abuse makes it more difficult morally to see even virtual representations of it as enjoyable. I further suspect that if such an account can be sustained, it will appeal to facts about the relative helplessness of the victims of such actual wrongs […] I suspect that disagreements between gamers who see such content as a bit of harmless fun, and those who see it as morally troubling will debate these very issues" (Patridge 2013: 33; see also Kjeldgaard-Christiansen 2020). The point that we ought to account for relations between fiction and reality, as well as representational details, is well taken. My encounters in the field are an attempt to explore such issues.

14. Given its strict definition of "virtual reality" as "a three-dimensional interactive computer-generated environment that incorporates a first-person perspective," explicit exclusion of "two-dimensional graphic environments" and emphasis on "realistic simulation" (Brey 1999: 5–6, 13), the discussion arguably does not encompass *bishōjo* games. I argue later in the introduction that there are reasons to expand the scope to include other forms of "virtual reality" (Saler 2012) and "dangerous games" (Laycock 2015). For more on uses of the "virtual," and how they may not be helpful in getting to more profound issues and concerns, see Seddon 2013.

15. In her seminal essay "Thinking Sex," anthropologist Gayle S. Rubin elaborates: "A democratic morality should judge sexual acts by the way partners treat one another, the level of mutual consideration, the presence or absence of coercion, and the quality and quantity of the pleasures they provide. Whether sex acts are gay or straight, coupled or in groups, naked or in underwear, commercial or free, with or without video should not be ethical concerns" (Rubin 2011: 154). If one wonders what Rubin might say about cartoon depictions of sex, or manga/anime sex objects, this ought to clarify: "A person is not considered immoral, is not sent to prison, and is not expelled from her or his family for enjoying spicy cuisine. But an individual may go through all this and more for enjoying shoe leather. Ultimately, of what possible social significance is it if a person likes to masturbate over a shoe? It may not be consensual, but since we do not ask permission of our shoes to wear them, it hardly seems necessary to obtain dispensation to come on them" (Rubin 2011: 181). To circle back to the gamer's dilemma, "Given that the attraction and therefore the motivation is that the particular STA [symbolic taboo act] merely *symbolizes* that which is taboo, it seems that criticism over what one *desires* as the object of fun is, in the end, a matter of taste rather than morality" (Young 2013: 20).

16. "There is evidence that societies and communities in which there is sexual tolerance, in which the proliferation of sexual imaginaries are encouraged, are safer places for women. […C]ommunities which allow the proliferation of sexual imaginaries are ones in which the environment itself, by encouraging tolerance, also helps to discourage violence" (Cornell 1995: 153).

17. Bridging philosophy and game studies, Grant Tavinor similarly highlights the ability for play to become "unsettling" and tackles issues related to the "gamer's dilemma." For Tavinor, "we should not be too quick to dismiss the moral intuitions that there are about the content of videogames as *merely*  fictional" (Tavinor 2009: 152). If gamers feel that what they are doing is morally significant, perhaps it is so. Relaying his own game play through a murderous scenario, Tavinor elaborates: "In the episode, a depiction of fictional violence, toward which I contribute, and replete with striking visual images and sounds made possible by the digital props of videogames, elicits an emotional response that is the basis on which I make a cognitive judgement of moral concern. Some of the examples detailed in the previous chapter also show how such judgments can subsequently have an impact on how a player will or will not act in a fictional world" (Tavinor 2009: 151). In a by now familiar move, the experience of "virtual murder" leads to questions about "virtual pedophilia:" "would gamers be happy to play a game in which it was the player's goal to rape women or commit acts of pedophilia? I suspect that almost all gamers would be reviled at this prospect" (Tavinor 2009: 152). While acknowledging the arguments for moral criticism, Tavinor counters that, "By itself, content may be offensive, but that is not enough to establish that it is also immoral. […] It is the context in which content is presented in addition to the content itself that is of genuine moral significance […] It is not violent or offensive fictions *simpliciter* that strike most reasonable people as morally condemnable. Rather, it is fictions for which there is no redeeming or mitigating context which strike us as expressing an objectionable viewpoint on the content they depict" (Tavinor 2009: 164–165). Games can provide context to reflect on the content. While I depart from Tavinor in that I do not think that artistic or moral standing is a necessary condition for a game to unsettle us and trigger reflection, I agree that working through feelings is part of an important ethical practice when faced with objectionable content. Furthermore, if "cartoon abstractness and humor can also modify or contextualize violence" (Tavinor 2009: 168), then I see no reason why manga/anime aesthetics and realism might not do something similar, regardless of the putative immorality of the content. Tavinor concludes: "Where there is no danger to society, people should be allowed to pursue the activities they want to, even if a significant proportion of their society regards them as morally dubious. […] Perhaps, indeed, these moral issues are most pressing in the personal case, and this is what is so interesting about my moral response to the bank robbery I carried out in Liberty City: a videogame can provoke my moral assessment of what I am fictionally doing in a game world" (Tavinor 2009: 170). The fact that there are more games and gamers, more content and ways to engage, as well as to do so playfully and socially, seems to explode the gamer's dilemma once and for all. There are, ultimately, too many assumptions baked into the problem, even when those debating

it call for consideration of "how these action types are, or would be, concretely instantiated and responded to" (Kjeldgaard-Christiansen 2020: 96). As Tavinor makes plain, I do not think that we can state that, "Observers of impure acts tend to short-circuit normal processes of moral deliberation" (Kjeldgaard-Christiansen 2020: 97). Beyond the abstract nature of the dilemma, we absolutely need to bring into focus relations between the player and game, the player and player character, the player character and other characters, the player and other players and more. Be it "immoral" or "impure," an imaginary act cannot be flattened out in our critiques. In their tendency toward both storytelling and simulation, *bishōjo* games in particular present imaginary acts in complex ways. The challenge is no less than to understand "contextually sensitive responding" (Kjeldgaard-Christiansen 2020: 99). This is what it means to judge concrete cases ethically. Rather than theory and speculation, let us finally get back on the ground and to gamers and their own ethical stances and principles.

18. Examples of this evidence comes from cognitive science and developmental psychology. In play, we observe players aware that "signs are signs distinct from the objects they signify" (Laycock 2015: 15). This is learned; "by imposing the imaginary order of play onto reality – for instance, imagining that a banana is a phone – children acquire the ability to distinguish referent from object" (Laycock 2015: 15). In fact, cognitive scientists have found that "children as young as two can discern fantasy from reality quite well" (Laycock 2015: 212). Add to this that, "Studies in developmental psychology have suggested that children with a high 'fantasy orientation' – that is, who are more imaginative – are better at discerning fantasy from reality" (Laycock 2015: 289–290). Studies also suggest that children with "a natural tendency to fantasize" are "generally more aware of the implications of violence and therefore less likely to act out" (Laycock 2015: 193).

19. Drawing on the example of a man escaping a car accident unscathed attributing it to his character's "high constitution score," Laycock writes: "This sort of thinking is not a case of confusing fantasy and reality. Instead it is using a game model as the lens through which one interprets reality. Most people do not require such an interpretive lens to make sense of a physical event such as a car crash. However, role-playing games also employ models of metaphysical, philosophical, and moral realities. For some players these models have had a profound influence on how they see the world" (Laycock 2015: 197). Note, first, how players reflect on moral realities and subsequently become "moral philosophers," and, second, the literacy involved in actively relating fiction to reality. The example of the player in a car accident echoes what psychiatrist Saitō Tamaki has observed in manga/anime fans, who, "straddling […] layered contexts" (Saitō 2007: 227), find reality in fiction and fiction in reality (also Saitō 2011: 24).

20. Exploring the prehistory of "virtual reality," literary scholar Michael Saler explains: "in the late nineteenth century, adult readers seeking enchantment began to inhabit the imaginary worlds of fantastic fiction for extended periods of time without losing sight of the real world. They played with multiple identities and multiple realities, [and] in the process trained themselves to question essentialist outlooks and appreciate the contingent nature of narratives. These readers had recourse to what I call the *ironic imagination*, a form of double consciousness that became widely practiced during the nineteenth century and attained its cultural centrality in the twentieth. The ironic imagination enabled individuals to embrace alternative worlds and to experience alternative truths. […] The double-minded consciousness of the ironic imagination permits greater control over virtual fantasies. This is a skill that must be practiced, but it has been part of the cultural repertoire for well over a century now. […] The practical distinction between reality and fantasy appears to be reinforced through the ongoing habitation of virtual spaces, even as philosophical quandaries about their interrelations are heightened. […] What we can now say is that the self-reflexive practice of living in virtual worlds of the imagination has inculcated the ability to abide in real and virtual worlds without confusing the two" (Saler 2012: 14, 55). Key here are his insights about "public spheres of the imagination," or engagement with others through shared imaginary worlds that intersect with reality, and how all of this allows for "enchantment that delights but does not delude" (Saler 2012: 94, 160). Concurring with Laycock in his conclusion, Saler argues that, "the literary prehistory of virtual reality does reveal that living in the imagination is a cultural practice we have gradually honed over time and will continue to exercise as new conditions warrant. It suggests that repeated exposures to the virtual actually reinforce the distinction between the real and the imaginary, while at the same time highlighting their necessary imbrications" (Saler 2012: 198).

21. Not only does such regulation close down spaces of social play and learning, but it also introduces serious concerns about freedom of imagination, thought and expression. In the panic about *Dungeons & Dragons*, there were calls to ban books, place warnings on game products and require libraries to track patron borrowing, which raises red flags about censorship, surveillance and "a potential threat to civil liberties" (Laycock 2015: 243). Moreover, a fundamental asymmetry emerges in the process of putting fantasy and play on trial. "Moral entrepreneurs were free to imagine the most nasty and evil game possible, and players were hard pressed to prove that they had not performed this evil ritual in their imagination" (Laycock 2015: 248). A similar problem has been identified in the response to "virtual pedophilia."  (Kipnis 1996: 3, 4, 12). The answer is one like the United States, where there have since been convictions related to manga/anime sexual expression. This has also happened in a number of other countries, notably Commonwealth Nations such as Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. It would appear that Kipnis' early warning is more relevant than ever: "In the stripped-down good-guy, bad-guy psychological universe invented by U.S. prosecutors, where fantasy equals intent, and role-playing makes it real, how many thousands of new prisons – each the size of Texas – would it take to hold our new criminal class?" (Kipnis 1996: 12). For more, see Galbraith and Bauwens-Sugimoto 2020.

22. Potentially enlightening here is what Laycock glosses as the "erotics of fear," a dynamic wherein "moral entrepreneurs appear to be fascinated with, and even to take vicarious pleasure in, the very ideas and activities they condemn" (Laycock 2015: 20). This may explain the fixation on thought experiments involving "virtual pedophilia." See also Kincaid 1998; Adler 2001.

23. In another passage resonating with Saler's language, Laycock writes: "By being attentive to the frames of meta-communication we can avoid corrupted play and truly learn to walk between worlds, experiencing enchantment without delusion" (Laycock 2015: 28).

24. Following philosopher Benedict de Spinoza, affect refers to a modification or variation produced in a body (including the mind) by an interaction with another body that increases or decreases the body's power of activity (Spinoza 2005: 70). The body that affects can be an image or imaginary body (Hardt 1999: 96). As shorthand, this book translates affect as moving, as in moving image, or an image that moves the one interacting with it to bodily response.

25. This portion of the research and fieldwork was conducted with approval of the Institutional Review Board of Duke University (Protocol C0044).

26. *Otome* games, which center on interactions with male characters, specifically target women and have been estimated to be a larger market than *bishōjo* games (e.g., Yaraon 2013), deserve a separate research project. For more on adult computer games for women, see Kim 2009; Hasegawa 2013; Lamerichs 2014b; Richards 2015; Andlauer 2018; Koide and Obana 2018; Ganzon 2019. For the popular subcategory of games focusing on "boys love," see Wood 2011; Ishida 2019; Okabe and Pelletier-Gagnon 2019.

27. Games such as *Mischief Fiend* come with warnings like: "The content of this software is, to the end, a constructed work of fiction and a game. Conducting the acts depicted in the game in reality will result in punishment by law. The content of the game is a bit of theater and fiction. Absolutely do not mimic these acts or be influenced by them" (quoted in Kagami 2010: 219–220). Note the insistence on drawing and maintaining lines, which includes an explicit injunction against committing crimes. This is of course

a way for the company to deny responsibility, but, as we shall see, it is also more. As part of their commitment to the ethical practice of manga/anime fandom in Japan, *bishōjo* game producers also draw and maintain lines.

28. Among anime fans in North America, science and technology scholar Lawrence Eng notes "nuanced and alternative positions on social issues" (Eng 2012: 100). More specifically, "American anime fans have engaged in numerous debates regarding the ethical and legal implications of anime and manga depicting minors in sexual situations. Despite the sensitive nature of the topic, the viewpoints expressed […] in some of these debates have been surprisingly diverse, well stated, and cognizant of the complexities surrounding the issue" (Eng 2012: 103; for more on "finding the law," see Baudinette 2018; also Pearson, Giddens and Tranter 2018). This book explores how the "ethical and legal implications" of "depicting minors in sexual situations" are understood by a subset of manga/anime fans, namely *bishōjo* game producers and players, in contemporary Japan. While presented as something of a joke, in statements such as, "Anime is trash and so am I" (Gigguk 2017), one also detects parallel thinking about ethics. That particular declaration comes in a discussion of the anime *Eromanga Sensei* (2017) and casting off the veil of decency to accept the ugly self who enjoys a story about lusting after one's underage sister, or an incest work for "*lolicon*." I recognize the humor and positivity of the fan making this video for followers, as well as the message of liking what one likes and sharing it openly, from my fieldwork in Japan. It is also worth mentioning that *Eromanga Sensei* has been singled out as an example of "child abuse anime" and linked to calls for increased regulation by disgusted politicians in Australia (Coughlan 2020; for a full discussion, see Chapter 1). The opportunity and motivation to study the more developed case of ethics in Japan could not be any clearer. At stake are alternatives to hegemonic norms, which inform common sense about, among other things, "ethical conduct" (Halberstam 2011: 89; also Warner 2000). To expand on queer theorists such as Michael Warner and Jack Halberstam, an alternative common sense, alternative norms and alternative ethics are imagined, created and lived in contemporary Japan.

29. These men are "hyper-visible subjects" (Amar 2011: 40), or those most associated with imagined excesses and perversions, if not sexual crime and terrorism. "The ones who pay are the ones who stand out in some way," writes Michael Warner. "They become a lightning rod not only for the hatred of difference, of the abnormal, but also for the more general loathing of sex. It is their sex, especially, that seems dehumanizing" (Warner 2000: 23–24).

30. See Benedict 2006, which is discussed in the appendix of this book.

31. Anthropologist Allison Alexy succinctly summarizes the imagination of Japan in much of foreign media: "In such depictions, Japan and Japanese

people are presented as the extremes of humanity: group-oriented but unable to form real attachments, dysfunctional but entertaining, and almost certainly harmless to the point of impotence. Such a profile describes a population fascinated by sex but not actually having any, fetishistically attached to both schoolgirls and inanimate objects, and thwarted by those very same preferences in any attempt to build real loving relationships" (Alexy 2019: 1). She goes on to identify the key figure of the "hypersexual virgin," who is "unduly focused on sex but not actually able to convince anyone to sleep with them" (Alexy 2019: 2). Responses to imagined excesses and perversions can become what Alexy calls "intimacy panics," or "moral panics surrounding intimate topics" wherein "public attention has focused on intimate practices supposedly causing harm to the social order" (Alexy 2019: 15). As an example of this dynamic, on February 14, 2020, American pundit Bill Maher raised up a Japanese man married to a cute girl character to lambast the abnormal phenomenon of "finding ways to get along without each other" and an "emerging sexual orientation" (Maher 2020). His solution, of course, was to find our way back to normal and hook up on this special night. One cannot help but notice the similarities to the way Nakamori Akio responded to the imagined excesses and perversions of manga/anime fans by labeling them "otaku" (Galbraith 2019: 55–63). This is a return to the founding discursive moment in 1983. Indeed, Maher is very much stepping into Nakamori's role as the reasonable outsider who sees reality, speaks harsh truths (masquerading as jokes) and demands that people act normal – like him, an adult, a man, someone about to go get laid. The disgust is similar, but unlike Nakamori, who said himself that these failed men are "gross," it was members of Maher's panel who chimed in "this is so revolting" (Maher 2020). Note also the symbolism of Valentine's Day, when many manga/anime fans feel alienated by celebrations of "normal romance," and how Maher demonstrates exactly the discrimination they perceive. For a comparison to responses to "otaku," see Alexy 2019: 17.

32. Closet to the Gamergate backlash might be those manga/anime fans who respond viciously to any and all feminist critiques of sexualized character images in public space. These issues began to surface in debates about the announced cover change for the January 2014 issue of the *Journal of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence*, which featured a manga/ anime-style maid robot that was seen as normalizing female servitude and domesticity (Ema et al 2015). Feminist critics were noticeably and mercilessly harassed as culturally ignorant and overly sensitive, but direct threats of violence were nowhere near as prevalent as Gamergate. Toward the end of my fieldwork on *bishōjo* games, however, these debates about gender and representation heated up, as did the rhetoric. There were two big dustups at the end of 2015. After I concluded this fieldwork, I noticed another incident

in 2016 and another in 2017, two in 2018 and three in 2019. There was another in 2020, but I stopped keeping count then.

33. I am thinking here of critical resolutions of meaning. For example, in her work on media and material culture in contemporary Japan, anthropologist Christine R. Yano writes, "The real or fictive nature of the sex-child image matters less than her public circulation as symbolic dream girl," which reflects "heteronormative pedophilia" (Yano 2013: 49). The distinction between the real and the fictive matters a great deal to many manga/anime fans in Japan. This is, to my mind, an empirical question. To borrow the words of anthropologist William W. Kelly, "What is the line beyond which passion becomes pathological and participation becomes illegal? These are serious questions, but most difficult to resolve. […] But just where is the line to be drawn, beyond which the excessive becomes the obsessive? The issue is rendered even more complex because society's official agents, the mainstream population, and the fans themselves may have incommensurate standards of normalcy and morality" (Kelly 2004: 12). Like Kelly and the contributors to his edited volume, including Yano, the aim of the fieldwork presented here is "deliberate and illuminating specificity" (Kelly 2004: 3).

34. This is not bracketing out structures, relations and effects that are "all too human." "Put simply," Kohn writes, "we cannot afford to ignore this all-too-human realm as we move beyond the human. That said, learning to attend to the kinds of lives that exist beyond the human (and beyond the moral), in ways that allow the logics of life beyond the human to work their ways through us, is itself an ethical practice" (Kohn 2013: 225).

35. Here I am thinking of theorist Donna Haraway's approach to politics in a space where the boundaries between human and animal, human-animal (organism) and machine and physical and non-physical have been breached. "The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This […] is an argument for *pleasure* in the confusion of boundaries and for *responsibility* in their construction" (Haraway 1991: 150). This sounds to my ears like a clarion call for responsibility in drawing lines as we struggle with the blurring of material and immaterial, reality and fiction.

36. The Institute of Contents Culture is an activist group centered on "freedom of creation" (*tsukuru jiyū*) founded by adult computer game designers and scenario writers in 2008 (Sugino Nao, personal interview, March 16, 2015). See: http://icc-japan.blogspot.com/.

37. While there is not space here to develop a comparative analysis, it is worth noting that psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, an opinion leader in the American debate about comic books, was far ahead of his time in drawing attention to "harmful potentialities" (Wertham 2004: 118), which resonates with the contemporary discourse of potential victims and criminals and risk management. For Wertham, one of the greatest harmful potentialities of comics was undermining what he called "the ethical image," which "makes possible a stable and yet not rigid ethical equilibrium" (Wertham 2004: 92). This is something that my fieldwork among *bishōjo* game producers and players in contemporary Japan has urged me to reconsider. If, as Wertham suggests, "Many if not all sexual conflicts are fundamentally ethical difficulties" (Wertham 2004: 92), then we would do well to focus on emerging ethics – the ethics of affect, for example – rather than assuming that existing ones have been undermined.

38. Add to this that Miyazaki reportedly owned a copying machine, camera and computer, which is to say that he was technologically savvy at a time before these devices were generally popular, and the image of a man lost in virtual reality was all the more convincing (Treat 1993: 353–355).

39. Again, the accuracy of this is questionable, as the identifiable adult manga in the photograph appears to feature stories and images of "horny housewives" (Ōtsuka 2004: 74).

40. Sociologist Sharon Kinsella notes that in Japan in the 1990s, the sense that "otaku" were "multiplying and threatening to take over the whole of society was strong" (Kinsella 2000: 129), which is in line with the "domino theory of sexual peril" (Rubin 2011: 151).

41. Ōtsuka Eiji and Nakamori Akio debated for the September 1989 issue of *Spa!* magazine. Miyazaki Hayao and Murakami Ryū discussed the manga/ anime connection in the November 1989 issue of *Animage* magazine.

42. Here political scientist David Leheny complicates Hall's notion of hegemony in the case of Japan: "In fact, it is only because conservatives have *not*  been hegemonic that they have turned to the legitimacy afforded to them by international norms" (Leheny 2006: 186).

43. Incidentally, Japan did not invent the so-called "rape game." That honor goes to the United States and Mystique's *Custer's Revenge* (1982). Further back, Atari's *Gotcha!* (1973) featured as controllers pink rubber bulges, which were meant to represent women's breasts. Embroiled in controversy, the game was denounced as pornographic.

44. This is an old critique that is not unique to Japan. In the moral panic about roleplaying games in the United States in the 1970s, a discourse emerged about "the delusional gamer," who could not tell the difference between fantasy and reality (Laycock 2015: 25). While the discourse about the most iconic "delusional gamer," James Egbert, turned out to incorrectly connect *Dungeons & Dragons* to his disappearance, the story stuck and was repeated by advocates against games and criminals as a defense for their actions.

45. Phillip Zimbardo, a psychologist best known for the Stanford Prison Experiment, is particularly concerned about excessive gaming and pornography, which he argues lead to young men being socially and sexually immature and stuck in "virtual reality:" "Even if games were originally designed to inspire players and make a better reality, they are now being used to replace reality, and many young men are losing themselves in increasingly sophisticated virtual worlds that are totally enchanting" (Zimbardo and Coulombe 2015: 23; also xviii). Further: "Underdeveloped emotions combined with a lack of engagement with others can stunt future social and romantic relationships […] The problem worsens when young men's sexuality develops independently from real-life sexual relationships" (Zimbardo and Coulombe 2015: xxi, 76). In this way, adult comics, cartoons and games are worse than photographs and films, because they encourage this orientation toward the virtual, which may be out of synch with reality (Zimbardo and Coulombe 2015: 111). The problem, then, is with "gamified virtual worlds" where "young men get to have a taste of what it's like to be a sheikh with their own virtual harem" (Zimbardo and Coulombe 2015: 88). Virtual sex is said to be derailing actual sex and these games to not address human "love needs" (Zimbardo and Coulombe 2015: 95).   Predictably, Japan comes to represent a dystopian future of social and sexual problems brought on by excessive gaming and pornography, which have undermined what it means to be a man and perhaps even a human being (Zimbardo and Coulombe 2015: 252; also Turkle 2011).

46. So central are computers to the discourse that some speculate that the so-called "my computer tribe" (*maikon zoku*) are the ancestors of the "otaku tribe" (*otaku zoku*). What connects them both is *bishōjo*, or cute girl characters. Soon after the arrest of Miyazaki Tsutomu, the mock documentary *Otaku no Video* (1991) introduced viewers to a man who appears to be masturbating as he tells the camera crew he is a virgin but is satisfied with the "two-dimensional" (*nijigen*) and another who is addicted to *bishōjo* games, in love with a character named Hiroko and never goes outside. The gamer is playing *Cybernetic Hi-School* (Den'nō gakuen, 1989), a *bishōjo* game produced by Gainax, and appearing in *Otaku no Video*, an anime produced by Gainax. According to rumor, many of these "otaku" are Gainax staff playing up stereotypes. This gamer, for example, is asked if he has any desire to have sex with "a real girl" (*honmono no onna no ko*), to which the answer is, of course, no, because he is fixated on the two-dimensional girl.

47. Religious studies scholar Richard Gardner remains skeptical about these claims: "Though the term 'virtual reality' was vaguely if at all defined, it became the key to explaining how manga, anime, and computer games could harm people's abilities to distinguish reality and fantasy or reality and representations thereof. […T]here seems to be little evidence that manga and anime can cause people to be unable to distinguish between reality and what they read and view. […] Such perceptions of the other, it might be noted, parallel nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century theories of primitive mentality that viewed 'primitives' as unable to make distinctions between things such as word and object or symbol and reality" (Gardner 2008: 216–217).

48. Concern about *bishōjo* games continued apace with the harmful manga movement in the 1990s and led to regulation. For example, in 1992, Miyazaki Prefecture revised its Youth Protection and Nurturing Ordinance (*seishōnen hogo ikusei jōrei)* to allow for computer games to also be named as "harmful publications" (*yūgai tosho*). Among the games labeled as such was *Cybernetic Hi-School* – the same game being played in the mock documentary *Otaku no Video*. The response to this pressure has been what adult computer game scenario writer Kagami Hiroyuki calls "excessive self-regulation" (*kajō na jishu kisei*), by which he means reactionary stances that are often overeactions (Kagami 2010: 18; see also Fujimoto 2011: 30).

49. See: https://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/kyouiku/1bunkakai/dai4/1–4siryou1.html.

50. Among the many ways that Ōtsuka states his sense of responsibility, one is to say that as a (*lolicon*) media producer he is one of Miyazaki's "parents" (Ōtsuka and Nakamori 1989a: 63).

51. In fact, Ōtsuka agrees with his dialogue partner, Nakamori Akio, who reasons, "We cannot adopt the perspective of the parent with child, or the perspective of victimhood. I think that at this point we can only be thoroughly aware of our own character as aggressors (*mizukara no kagaisha sei*). In doing so, we can keep the harm to the minimum" (Ōtsuka and Nakamori 1989a: 65).

52. This approaches queer theorist Jack Halberstam's read of artists reckoning with "the neighbor, the neighboring other, the proximate self that is nonetheless not you" (Halberstam 2011: 168). Indeed, Halberstam may well have been speaking as Ōtsuka when he wrote that, "The killer in you is the killer in me" (Halberstam 2011: 171). In his relation to Miyazaki as neighbor and proximate self, Ōtsuka stridently refuses to deny or gloss over politically problematic connections and so "lets no one off the hook" (Halberstam 2011: 171). Given the pressure to do so at this time and shut down panicked attacks on "otaku," Ōtsuka's words might sound to some like a betrayal, but his determination to speak them is part of an ethics. Following Halberstam, there appears here an "ethics of betrayal" (Halberstam 2011: 162).

53. For example, Ōtsuka writes, "[T]here are over 100,000 people with the same pastimes as Mr. M[iyazaki]" (quoted in Kinsella 2000: 129).

54. Further, "I get the feeling that I wanted to be a girl" (Ōtsuka and Nakamori 1989a: 82).

55. This turn of phrase actually comes first from Nakamori, who advocates "a new ethics" (Ōtsuka and Nakamori 1989a: 93). For further discussion, see Chapter 5.

56. On sex and violence in pornography, feminist legal philosopher Drucilla Cornell argues that "an individual viewer can potentially learn a great deal about his/her sexuality, and society's construction of sex and gender, precisely by having to confront it so directly" (Cornell 1995: 155). One might see this as the founding move in porn studies (Williams 1989; Kipnis 1996).

57. Personal interview (February 9, 2015).

58. There is reason to believe that Ōtsuka's statement is prescriptive, because he writes about the possibility of "otaku" not stopping at fiction and seeking "reality" (Ōtsuka 2004: 224).

59. Unless otherwise indicated, all Sasakibara quotes are from a personal interview (August 31, 2014).

60. It should be noted that Ōtsuka does seem to hope that people will come to no longer need the media and material objects and get out of the metaphorical room (Ōtsuka and Nakamori 1989a: 60–61, 92). A more radical position might draw on theorist Eve Sedgwick, who sees queer youth investing in media and material objects as "a prime resource for survival" (Sedgwick 1993: 3). That is, this is not a phase or something to tide one over until things return to "normal," but rather part of a queer way of life or life with and as the "other" or "abnormal."

61. Indeed, at one point, Japanese politicians debated whether or not *Winnie the Pooh* might be harmful (Nagaoka 2010: 222–223). Ishihara found allies in people such as Matsuzawa Shigefumi, governor of Kanagawa Prefecture, who designated Rockstar's *Grand Theft Auto III* (2001) a harmful publication. Responding to his critics, Matsuzawa appealed to the "silent majority" (*sairento majoritii*), who understood, supported and indeed demanded action in the face of social perversion. For more on the "silent majority," see Hall et al 1978: 163–164, 221, 241–242.

62. The transcript has been removed from the Metropolitan Government's website, but is still available at: http://blog.goo.ne.jp/harumi-s\_2005/e /fd37cd702fd9ab084a215dc38e1ed280. See also: https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=2edE4kd0O1w. For more on Ishihara, see Nagaoka 2010: 13, 21–23.

63. In Japan, as elsewhere, so-called "cognitive disorders" are thought to lead to sexual crimes (Kagami 2010: 13; McLelland 2012: 479). This position is

increasingly common sense, and those who argue against it are perverts and the enemy of children.

64. Feminist thinker and educator Fujimoto Yukari draws attention to how problematic healthy youth ordinances and strategies for passing them can be for free speech, thinking and the democratic process (Fujimoto 2011: 30–31). Journalist Nagaoka Yoshiyuki also highlights the problems of policing thought and paternalist creation of "youth" as a category to be protected and nurtured (Nagaoka 2010: 261; also McLelland 2011: 359–361). At a conference I attended called "Regulation and Freedom of Expression: The Arrest of Rokudenashiko and the Politics of Bodily Expression" (*Hyōgen no kisei to jiyū: Rokudenashiko taihō jiken, soshite, shintai hyōgen no poritikusu*) on September 15, 2014, there was a general sense from the lawyers, educators, artists and critics in attendance that Japan is in the grip of ongoing and heightened concern about sexual expression, which is leading to state intervention.

65. While a distinction used to be made between "actual" and "virtual" child pornography based on whether or not the image was of a real person and thus a record of a crime where a child was harmed (McLelland 2005: 63–64), the tendency now is to collapse together actual and virtual forms in child pornography laws. Indeed, in 2019, the United Nations recommended that countries treat drawings and other art as equivalent to real images of child abuse (Prostasia 2020). Even when acknowledging lack of scientific proof of the imagined connection between drawings of abuse and actual abuse, a judge in Canada concluded that, "for a perverse or depraved mind, any child pornography material, written or visual, will pose an undue risk for minors since it will serve to fuel a certain behavioral deviance. Human nature teaches us that everything, the best and the worst, is possible, even probable" (Prostasia 2020). This is a direct statement of the logic of sexual risk management and policing potential crimes and criminals.

66. This also occurs in extra-legal activities such as "pedohunting," where online activists "locate and target people who could *potentially* do something illegal" (Stroud 2016: 271). As with the discussion of protecting children more generally, these online activists tend to see in "polarized terms" of "innocent victim" and "evil perpetrators," which justifies their intervention. (Recall the "gothic narrative" [Kincaid 1998: 10–12].) As social media scholar Scott R. Stroud argues, however, such activism raises serious ethical issues (Stroud 2016: 278).

67. Leheny argues that this law was pushed through with international pressure, and used to police problematic youth populations rather than protect children (Leheny 2006: 51).

68. Gaiman was commenting on the fact that cartoon characters from the television series *The Simpsons* were deemed abuse victims in an Australian court: "I think it's nonsensical in every way that it could possibly be nonsensical. *The Simpsons* characters aren't real people. They definitely aren't real children. (Given that they first appeared in the late eighties, they're also all over eighteen now...)" (Gaiman 2008). While intentionally provocative, one does come away wondering how to legally discern the age of a cartoon character. Consider, for example, the cartoon character Lupin III as discussed by producer Suzuki Toshio: "[H]ow old do you think Lupin is? The interesting thing is that the answer depends entirely on the viewer. For small children he is about the age of an uncle; for preteens he is 20; for 21-year-olds he is in his thirties.  Don't you think this is amazing, that Lupin's age should change according to the viewer?" (Suzuki 2018: 93–94). Precisely because Lupin is a drawing, lines on paper or celluloid, he has no physical age to settle the matter. This is why Gaiman later stated even more strongly, "Child porn is a crime and an evil. Manga are lines on paper" (Gaiman 2012).

69. Historically, a de facto legal ban in Japan on depictions of pubic hair might have encouraged the use of young models, in combination with cultural understandings of artistic value and child models as asexual, which thereby allowed pornographers to avoid scrutiny under obscenity laws.

70. The quote about *Eromanga Sensei* comes from Stirling Griff, a senator in Australia. His name appeared in the news again in October 2020, when it was reported that Australian authorities were cracking down on the importation of sexually explicit comics from Japan (Butler 2020). The "hentai ban," as many called it, was a symbolic shutting out of the imagined threat and contagion from Japan (see Hinton 2014). Importantly, Griff was not alone in condemning content and demanding stricter regulations, which will not stop at the importation of physical media. In addition to legislative and legal actions against such content, private companies and distributors have also taken matters into their own hands. For example, in July 2020, it was reported that the manga version of *Eromanga Sensei* was among many works delisted from Amazon Kindle (Pineda 2020). This occurred only on the English-language site, with the original releases still available for purchase in Japanese on the Japanese-language site, and the reasons for many of the delistings remain unclear. This is not the first time that works have disappeared from Amazon without warning, and it has happened in Japan, as well. In July 2013, for example, 46 adult comics – *eromanga* – suddenly disappeared from Amazon Japan's e-book marketplace for causes unknown (Nagayama 2014: 339–340). Certain publishers, series and keywords appear to have been targeted for violation of some sort of standard, be it Japanese or global, but the vague process of deliberation and denial of an opportunity to appeal troubles many activists.

71. This is something that Urobuchi himself recognizes. In a flurry of social media and internet activity around the time of the announcement of his win as the scenario writer for *Puella Magi Madoka Magica*, Urobuchi specifically underscored his connections to the *bishōjo* game industry, history of producing content that many find wildly offensive (if not obscene) and the fact that then-recent moves by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government had curtailed the creative freedom of others to produce work as he did (Kuro-Mac 2012). While there are numerous reasons to doubt that the Japanese government would knowingly praise or promote the output of the *bishōjo* game industry, the case of Urobuchi demonstrates how core talent can get caught up in campaigns surrounding "Cool Japan" (for more, see Galbraith 2019: 227–260). Interestingly, in 2020, when a global pandemic shut down face-to-face events and cut off revenue streams, Wakakusa Masaya, who independently produces and distributes sexually explicit computer games for players over the age of 18, applied and was approved for financial support from the Agency for Cultural Affairs (Furusato 2021). Perhaps the government had by then recognized the value of such bottom-up production for the creative industries as a whole. Nevertheless, very few politicians and bureaucrats are willing to publicly announce such a position, and many, many more go along with pushes for increased regulation spurred by international outrage.

72. It is not surprising that this trial brought together concern for the perceived abnormality of "otaku," the healthy development of youth and the future of Japan. As Cather summarizes, "the fact that manga (and otaku) were symbols of national importance only fueled that state's desire to police them" (Cather 2012: 246).

73. For a brief introduction, see: http://www.kk1up.jp/archives/n40776.html.

74. Personal interview (January 26, 2015). For more on the event, see: http:// www.akihabara-sixteen.com/.

75. For example, Messe Sanoh on Chūō Street began to stock *bishōjo* games from around 1987.

76. Personal interview (July 2, 2013).

77. When I requested an interview with Nitroplus, they responded by email but declined to speak about their past in *bishōjo* games (mail received on August 6, 2013).

78. For more on this struggle, see Galbraith 2019. For comparative cases of how revaluation of land and minority identities can lead to policing and punishing sexual and social outsiders in urban settings in the name of "safe spaces," see Hanhardt 2013. Particularly helpful is the idea of a "simultaneously flexible and fixed language of threat, in which violence is imagined as the central risk" (Hanhardt 2013: 9). This is tied to issues of visibility, borders and inclusion and exclusion. While obviously very different from Hanhardt's cases, from 2007 into the 2010s, the discourse that Akihabara's streets had become "unsafe," imaginatively associated with queer performers and a mass murderer, allowed politicians and police to introduce and enforce strict rules and regulations to manage the "threat." It is telling that the protectionism of this neighborhood coincided with public and private investment in redevelopment that inflated property value, as well as its revaluation as a symbol of "Cool Japan."

79. In a personal interview (January 9, 2015), one activist from the organization Light House explained, "It [Akihabara] is such a great example of the problems that we just take people there and let them see for themselves." Indeed, this activist admitted to being somewhat upset to see the stores dealing with the most objectionable content disappearing from the street amid growing criticism, because this made the task of pointing them out more difficult.

80. See: http://www.excaddy.jp/charara/top.html.

81. The mail was received on October 17, 2014.

82. The CNN survey, which was titled "Should Japan ban sexually explicit video games?" was posted on the news outlet's webpage in April 2010. At one point, it was at the top of the page.

83. Writing on the boundary-policing practices of a website for distributing male-male erotica, legal scholar Scott Beattie explains, "Censorship is a divisive issue for all communities but it is also constitutive, a practice through which they define themselves, establish their barriers and the relationship with broader publics" (Beattie 2018: 172). He goes on to highlight "the constitutive and world-building role of regulatory communities and the importance of self-regulation in shaping counterpublics" (Beattie 2018: 172). If, as Beattie suggests, "Online art communities constitute themselves through aesthetic practice and internal regulatory activity" (Beattie 2018: 178), then this also happens offline in areas such as Akihabara and events such as Charara!!

87. See for example MangaGamer (https://www.mangagamer.com/), Sekai Project (https://sekaiproject.com/) and JAST USA (https://www.jastusa.com/). Importantly, the global distribution of *bishōjo* games was not planned from the start, but rather was an after-the-fact attempt to make already existing content available in new markets through collaboration with fans. Behind the spread of adult computer games from Japan beyond its borders is what has been called "progress against the law" (Leonard 2005: 281), whereby fans desiring content draw it into new circulations despite a lack of official releases or even official channels for release. This is very much how the market for

anime was established in North America, for example, with early adopters spreading the material through clubs and mailing lists, starting localization companies and generally translating for others. As in the case of anime, this new content being drawn across borders can challenge dominant norms and values and lead to debates and emergent alternatives (Eng 2012: 100–103; see also McLelland 2005). Rejection of *bishōjo* games as perverse or criminal confront divergent understandings in groups, communities and (sub)cultures connecting and communicating online. And there are signs of changing minds, from *bishōjo* games (minus explicit content, but with links to easily add it after purchase) making the list of best-selling titles on mainstream digital distribution site Steam (Grayson 2019) to indie games such as *Doki Doki Literature Club!* (Team Salvato, 2017) not only garnering critical acclaim but also demonstrating a mastery of the genre by North American developers. Indeed, from its title to its character aesthetics, *Doki Doki Literature Club!* is a *bishōjo* game produced in the style of Japan but outside that country and in dialogue with producers and fans within and beyond its borders.

88. See: http://www49.atwiki.jp/aniwotawiki/sp/pages/2538.html.

89. Unless otherwise indicated, all direct quotes from Ataru below come from a personal interview (January 12, 2015).

90. The shared appreciation for Leaf generally and *To Heart* specifically should not be underestimated. In a personal interview (September 16, 2014), Nakamura Jin recalled that his enthusiasm for Leaf's games inspired him to organize perhaps the first fan event for *bishōjo* games in 1996. The event was attended by Leaf staff, 96 creative groups and 1,500 visitors.

91. I am certainly not the first to highlight the enunciator's exception in the context of virtual regulation. Writing on the historic concern about women reading novels, religious studies scholar Joseph P. Laycock points out that, "It is significant that these opponents of fiction were not afraid that *they* might confuse fantasy and reality. This was always framed as a danger for some other class of people" (Laycock 2015: 227).

92. For parallels with Mazzarella, see Williams 1989: 12; Kipnis 1996: viii. Part of the regulatory response to pornography comes from the discourse of obscenity, which begins for Williams not with the axiomatic statement, "I know it when I see it," but rather with the realization that, "It moves me" (Williams 1989: 5).

93. Thinkers in Japan are taking this even further. For example, at a symposium held at Tokyo University of the Arts on October 5, 2014, one speaker, Ogura Toshimaru, argued that the government was regulating sexual expression with the baseline assumption that what stimulates or overly stimulates is "obscene." At the same event, Yamada Kumiko, who organizes a feminist

reading group that I regularly attended, questioned whether or not it made sense to regulate this way, because we do not know what stimulates people or how to qualify the intensity of response.

94. In a personal interview (February 16, 2015), feminist critic Fujimoto Yukari gestured in a similar direction. From her perspective as an editor, critic and educator with experience in the industry in various roles, Fujimoto argued that many people in Japan perceive manga fans as a class of people who are simple minded, undereducated, easily aroused and so on. As with the "pissing man" in India (Mazzarella 2013: 14–15), the dangerous class of manga readers in Japan tend to be imagined as an underemployed, unmarried underclass. These readers, especially men, are the ones treated as potential criminals. While Fujimoto focused her comments on manga, they are certainly suggestive of how *bishōjo* gamers might be perceived as a dangerous class.

95. All quotes come from a personal interview (October 11, 2014).

96. This chapter follows literary critic and social theorist Michael Warner's approach to publics, which come into being in relation to texts and their circulation, are self-organizing and include unknown others (Warner 2002: 50), but is not concerned with larger theoretical debates about publics. It is in Warner's earlier work with literary critic and social theorist Lauren Berlant (Berlant and Warner 1998), and in his book *The Trouble with Normal*  (Warner 2000), where the political importance of publics, counterpublics and sex in public is clearest.

97. Warner states this outright: "Publics […] are virtual entities, not voluntary associations" (Warner 2002: 61).

98. While some may bristle at the application of concepts from queer theory to the case of *bishōjo* gamers, who appear to be heterosexual men oriented toward women, I follow philosopher Judith Butler in seeing queerness as not an identity, but rather an alliance, which is "uneasy and unpredictable" (Butler 2015: 70).

99. As Warner writes, "people of very unremarkable gender identity, object choice, *and* sexual practice might still passionately identify with and associate with queer people. Subjectively, they feel nothing of the normalcy that might be attributed to them" (Warner 2000: 37).

100. "Failure is not an extinction of the possible, not a dead end. Instead, failure frames the possible in negative terms without actually erasing all possibilities. […]  As an example of this, McGlotten draws attention to criticism of gamers, or "otaku," for their supposed social and sexual failures, which are deemed pathological (McGlotten 2013: 54). McGlotten argues that screen interaction "summons us to imagine a more expansive array of potential modes of relating. These virtual intimacies, the constellation of latent capacities and routes that might be actualized, or not, serve as reminders that the generativity of queer socialities has not been exhausted, and that we cannot know in advance or for certain what forms our intimacies with ourselves or others might take" (McGlotten 2013: 136). Where McGlotten discusses sex between players as characters in games, and meetups between players offline (McGlotten 2013: 56–60), I would draw attention to virtual intimacies with game characters.

101. Unless otherwise indicated, all direct quotes from Honda comes from a personal interview (September 26, 2009).

102. Warner explicitly states that he is trying to imagine the conditions under which an alternative ethical culture exists (Warner 2000: vii–viii), which is to say that he is involved in the struggle for imagination. Indeed, drawing on Rubin's work, Warner points to the politics of sex and "victimless crimes," "imaginary threats" and "the imaginary rules of sex" (Warner 2000: 25–27). Further, critiques of public sex cultures such as pornography tend to come in a language of disgust that "make a rival point of view seem unimaginable" (Warner 2000: 181).

103. Personal conversation (July 12, 2014).

104. Recall Yamada Tarō's address at the Comic Market in August 2015 (Chapter 1). The comment on the Olympics was made by Yamaguchi Takashi at the conference "Manga Futures: Institutional and Fan Approaches in Japan and Beyond" (November 1, 2014).

105. While I am not in complete agreement with her approach to pornography, particularly that images can assault, I stand with Cornell in her fight to expand spaces of imagination rather than close them down, which is part of "liberating the imagination" (Cornell 1995: 158; also 98–99, 138, 144–152). We differ in our approach to "the protection of the imaginary domain" (Cornell 1995: 4), which for Cornell means protection of women from being forced to see images that make them into sex objects and limit their potential to transform themselves into individuated beings (Cornell 1995: 10, 103–104, 121). I more broadly see protection of the imaginary domain as a project against juridification of the imagination. So while we are in agreement that, "as feminists, we have nothing to gain, and a lot to lose, by any attempts to sexually purify public space" (Cornell 1995: 10; also 27), Cornell would still like to see sexual images kept out of sight (Cornell 1995: 104, 147–148, 150–151), which might suggest that Akihabara needs to be better zoned. (Then again, "communities which allow the proliferation of sexual imaginaries are ones in which the environment itself, by encouraging

tolerance, also helps to discourage violence" [Cornell 1995: 153].) This follows from her position that images can assault and harm women in the imaginary domain, which I find problematic, especially when the images in question are cartoons and are made distinct from "real girls and women." The bottom line, for Cornell and myself, is that one "cannot control the sexuality of others" (Cornell 1995: 11; also 163, 233).

106. It should be noted that the production company, Milk Factory, was entirely aware that it was pushing boundaries and expected backlash. The goal might well have been shock marketing. See: https://twitter .com/milkfactory\_/status/1190189530449473536?ref\_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7 Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1190189530449473536 &ref\_url=https%3A%2F%2Fotapol.com%2F2019%2F11%2Fpost-85731 .html.

107. As Rubin puts it, "The processes by which erotic minorities form communities and the forces that seek to inhibit them lead to struggles over the nature and boundaries of sexual zones" (Rubin 2011: 166). What we see in Akihabara is the struggle over norms of reading, or sorting members of the public on their affective sense of *moe*. "Strangers," Warner explains, "are less strange if you can trust them to read as you read" (Warner 2002: 83).

108. Indeed, *bishōjo* game producers increasingly speak of circulation and its "ethical considerations" (Kagami 2010: 220).

109. This reference to safe sex comes from the experience of homosexual men and HIV/AIDS in North America, but proves useful in thinking public sex and ethics more generally. As psychologist Miodrag Popovic suggests, watching pornography is "the ultimate safe sex method," which also "facilitates learning" (Popovic 2007: 264). He highlights the existence of "fantasists," or people who are satisfied with fantasy. In this group would certainly be "otaku," or those who historically rejected even "real" pornography and oriented themselves toward fiction.

110. Personal interview (November 12, 2009).

111. All direct quotes in this paragraph are from a personal interview (December 3, 2014). The direct quotes in the remainder of the paragraphs in this section come from personal conversation with Miyamoto as we walked around the area together.

112. Miyamoto, like many others, associates *bishōjo* games with the "abnormal," for example desire for nonhuman characters both in the stories (robots, animals, aliens) and games (fictional characters, drawings). He is personally attracted to the genre because "the object of affection is relatively free." He gave the example of loving a robot shaped like a "drum can." This he takes as a life lesson that teaches us that love comes in many shapes and expands the horizons of who, and what, can be an object of desire and affection.

113. Miyamoto also worries about the possibility of filtering and blocking information online making certain content invisible, or at least increasingly marginal. He claims that many *bishōjo* games no longer appear in Amazon. co.jp searches.

114. Miyamoto estimates that the industry as a whole is selling perhaps half as much as it was at its height. He attributes this to the outdated sales techniques of selling games in material packages at physical stores and charging a high price for long and involved stories, which is out of synch with the general trend toward cheap downloadable games that are played casually.

115. In both the United States and Japan, concerns have been raised about limiting access to public places, materials and information to learn about sex (Nagaoka 2010: 253; boyd 2014: 102–105).

116. Conversely, if violence, sex and sexual violence are taboo even in the context of fantasy and play, then players will be unable to make sense of them and develop a "code of ethics" (Laycock 2015: 171, 190–195, 218–219; also Brey 2008).

117. All quotes from Matsumura Kazutoshi come from a personal interview (July 23, 2013).

118. Circus' offices are located in Saitama Prefecture. How the place we met in Akihabara is related I do not know, and the person who set the meeting up told me not to ask Matsumura questions about his business or finances.

119. Izumi, who trained to be a voice actress, got her first job in the industry at Circus, where she was paid to dress in character costumes and interact with fans. After about five years of this, she was hired as full-time staff in the company (personal interview, July 2, 2013).

120. This speaks to queer theorist Bonnie Ruberg's take on infamously offensive games such as *Custer's Revenge*. For Ruberg, "knowing that the game is offensive does not suffice to make sense of the uncomfortable feelings it inspires. It is equally, if not more, important to experience the alarm that comes with playing – that worrying sense that we are complicit when we maneuver the cowboy toward his goal [i.e., rape]" (Ruberg 2015: 120). This seems in line with this chapter's approach to *bishōjo* games, but Ruberg warns that players can "overcome the initial ethical hurdle of *Custer's Revenge*" and "quickly lose sight of the game's problematic content" (Ruberg 2015: 120). For Ruberg, there is real danger that games can "convince us to accept ourselves as unquestioning agents of violence" (Ruberg 2015: 120), but *bishōjo*  games suggest the possibility of players lingering with feelings of complicity in sexual abuse.

121. Personal interview (February 16, 2015).

122. Personal interview (February 26, 2010).

123. Itō Gō, personal interview (March 19, 2010). In his discussion of Walt Disney's early animation, Nagayama Kaoru refers to the eroticism of "overly smooth movement" and "an excessive sense of vitality" (Nagayama 2014: 30). Tracing how this informed Tezuka Osamu's "anime-like manga," or moving images in still form, Nagayama refers to "the eroticism of lines in and of themselves" (*sen sono mono no motsu erotishizumu*) (Nagayama 2014: 38).

124. Personal interview (September 1, 2014).

125. Personal interview (October 16, 2009).

126. Azuma draws attention to the example of Konami's *Tokimeki Memorial 3* (2001), which made use of three-dimensional, computer-generated graphics and, despite being a beloved franchise and technical advance, failed commercially. As Azuma sees it, this was a result of players rejecting the character images, which did not conform to the preferred two-dimensional style. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokimeki\_Memorial\_3:\_Yakusoku\_no\_Ano \_Basho\_deMo. There have, however, been various attempts to design a three-dimensional body that would be responded to as "*moe*." For an explicit example of this in robotics, see Katō et al 2014.

127. Indeed, Lamarre touched on affective attunement in a personal interview (April 19, 2010).

128. Personal interview (September 12, 2014).

129. Personal interview (July 24, 2015).

130. Personal interview (February 9, 2015).

131. In other words, role language is "fictionalized orality" (Teshigawara and Kinsui 2011: 38).

132. Personal interview (September 19, 2014).

133. Personal interview (December 18, 2009).

134. As a form of melodramatic imagination, *bishōjo* games are in many ways similar to soap operas, where the goal is to "elicit as many and as complex emotions from viewers as possible" (Blumenthal 1997: 53). This is done by focusing on still images – the body in arrest, reacting to other bodies – dense with potential meaning. In soap operas, "the close-ups on faces, of important objects, the deliberate movement of characters across a room, the lingering of the camera on a face at the end of the scene, the exchange of meaningful glances – work to make every gesture and action seem highly coded and significant" (Geraghty 1991: 30). This overcoding adds far more signifying possibilities than are necessary to move the narrative forward. As pioneering researcher Tania Modleski points out, characters "get together and have prolonged, involved, intensely emotional discussions with each other"

(Modleski 1983: 68). What is happening is less important than what might be happening, or might happen. In this way, "the narrative, by placing ever more complex obstacles between desire and fulfillment, makes anticipation of an end an end in itself" (Modleski 1982: 88). This is an apt description of *bishōjo* games, where fulfillment of desire is made complex and anticipation becomes key. As researchers of soap operas and the melodramatic imagination underscore, there is something masochistic about this pleasure.

135. All quotes come from a personal interview (December 18, 2009).

136. In a personal interview (February 26, 2010), Saitō Tamaki singled out the characters of *Air* as examples of "extremely strange figures, or strange compositions."

137. Similarly, if "entertainment is purging the affects" (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 115), this is not what we are seeing in *bishōjo* games.

138. It is worth noting that McCloud's longer definition of comics includes that they are "intended to […] produce an aesthetic response in the viewer" (McCloud 1994: 9). That "aesthetic response" might refer to comics as images intended to move.

139. See: http://www.moetionworks.com/pink/.

140. The interaction occurred on August 13, 2015.

141. One is reminded here of theorist Tim Ingold, who describes ancient religious practices of "walking through" paintings into other worlds (Ingold 2011: 199).

142. Their slogan, in English, is as follows: "Moemotion Works Pink: It's Soulful, and We're the Specialists who Creates MOE and EMOTION."

143. Indeed, so common is this technique of having viewers fill in the blanks in Japanese comics and cartoons that there is even a term for it: "mind completion" (*nōnai hokan*). I have also heard a version of this referring to comics and cartoon fans who develop "the faculty of converting in the mind" (*nōnai de henkan suru kinō*).

144. "Most of the time, the player-character is only peripherally visible on screen and has no voice of its own; even though non-player characters have voices, the player-character only communicates through written dialogue options in which there are very many options" (Waern 2015: 54). With the exception of the last part about the wealth of choices, Waern may well be describing the protagonists of *bishōjo* games.

145. It is typically only in rare instances that one reflects on action, for example in *Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2* (Activision, 2009), where the player is forced to walk slowly and deliberately through an airport and take part in a terrorist attack against unarmed civilians.

146. Personal interview (August 31, 2014).

147. Indeed, film scholar Laura Mulvey, who popularized critique of the male gaze with her original essay in 1975, seems to anticipate this when she writes of films where "the powerful look of the male protagonist (characteristic of traditional narrative film) is broken in favour of the image in direct erotic rapport with the spectator" (Mulvey 2009: 22).

148. As media scholar Forrest Greenwood puts it, "In directing the *shōjo*'s gaze out toward the viewer […] many modern *bishōjo* games disrupt this hierarchy, forcing the viewer to regard the *shōjo* as being something more than a mute, passive object" (Greenwood 2014: 250).

149. Sasakibara's interaction with fictional characters as "human" is all the more plausible when we consider social science demonstrating that humans tend to treat as human and seek social interaction with what is "cute," including fictional characters (Sherman and Haidt 2011: 5), and human minds mimic the states of those they interact with, "even if those other minds are imagined" (Zimbardo and Coulombe 2015: 132).

150. Sasakibara is not alone in this experience. At an event (February 11, 2015), one female *bishōjo* gamer said that the most effective marketing for *bishōjo* games is when the image of the cute girl meets her gaze: "When there is a cute girl on the floor of the station and our eyes meet, I don't want to step on her."

151. In her discussion of photography and the politics of the gaze, theorist Ariella Azoulay argues that recognition of the demands of the one being gazed at and gazing back leads to relational and ethical engagement (Azoulay 2008: 18–23, 147–150).

152. The dynamic of the character facing the player and looking out at him recalls philosopher Emmanuel Levinas' approach to the face of the other, which says, "You shall not commit murder" (Levinas 1969: 199). The face, in its nudity and defenselessness, offers "ethical resistance that paralyzes my powers" (Levinas 1969: 199).  The face offers "passive resistance to the desire that is my freedom" (Bergo 2011). It is startling how resonant Levinas is with Sasakibara, who advances that the character, in her nudity and defenselessness, says, "Do not hurt me," which limits the player's freedom to act (Sasakibara 2003: 126; also Kulick and Rydström 2015: 274–276). For Sasakibara, as for Levinas, ethics point us toward nonviolence. For both, it begins with an "interruption," or affective moment.

153. To be clear, this is not the only and inevitable experience or response to play. Queer theorist Andrea Wood, for example, highlights how some players "make choices that will take them on the quickest path to unlocking the

myriad sexual vignettes" (Wood 2011: 356), which seems to deemphasize story and reflection on one's involvement in a scene and responsibility for actions.

#### 154. Personal interview (August 31, 2014).

155. On November 2, 2019, visiting Gatebox' offices in Akihabara for follow-up fieldwork and to participate in a promotional "premium experience," I was reminded of the importance of designing relationships. In a personal conversation, Marketing Team Manager Nishizaki Shūji zeroed in on the uniqueness of the Gatebox device, namely that it houses a character named Azuma Hikari who is "cute" (*kawaii*) and "responds" (*han'nō suru*). Without any prompting, Nishizaki recommended I look into an art experiment titled "Rhythm 0" (1974), in which Marina Abramović stood still and allowed visitors at an exhibition to view and act on her (Yuen 2017). The actions became increasingly violent, which Nishizaki believes reveals a valuable lesson for designers. When one does not respond, or is reduced to a state of "non-resistance" (*muteikō*), they are easy to victimize. In short, in becoming an object, Abramović was abused as less than human. For his part, Nishizaki reasons that designed responses are key to users treating Azuma Hikari better than an object, or as something more than a "thing." I could not help but think about Sasakibara's theory of the cute girl character looking at the player and demanding to be treated with care, which impinges on his ability to act on this "someone" who is "human." While it is not a *bishōjo* game, I nevertheless find it fascinating that people in the Gatebox company, with offices in the shared space of Akihabara, have come to similar conclusions about the need to design more human interactions and relationships with cute girl characters. Like Sasakibara, Nishizaki also sees these interactions and relationships, supported by media and technology, as "fulfilling user needs." In an age of atomization, alienation and anomie, Nishizaki imagines users wanting Azuma Hikari or another character in the future to be their wife, daughter, sister, "slut" (*bicchi*) and so on. The majority of current users of Gatebox are men, but Nishizaki tells me that women are on the rise, and I did in fact observe several women participating in the premium experience in just the hour or so I spoke with staff. According to Nishizaki, the company is in the process of designing a male character to specifically target new users.

156. For a discussion of *The Song of Saya* fostering "negative emotions" and challenging how playing games "should feel," see Sousa 2020. Reading games such as this as queering norms is both provocative and productive. For a complementary analysis of queer antisociality in manga and anime, see Jones 2013.

157. The internalization of the female other as character brings to mind queer theorist Jack Halberstam's critique of the position of white men: "like the mechanics of dominant culture itself, they absorb whatever they see and make it part of themselves" (Halberstam 2011: 67). There is, however, real tension between Sasakibara and Halberstam, who goes on to advocate certain forms of forgetting, specifically forgetting the subject position to allow for unknowing and open encounters and relations. Given the many parallels with examples of *moe* media, there may be room for an approach that adopts and follows through on Halberstam's provocative reading of *Dude, Where's My Car?* (2000). The redemptive reading is of men who stupidly forget who they are and can thus "immerse themselves in perversion and fantasy without either disgust or judgment. Their tolerance is revealed to be part and parcel to their stupidity, and their stupidity is represented as a likeable absence of critical judgement which relieves them of being either politically sensitive (aware of their own biases) or politically biased (homophobic)" (Halberstam 2011: 63). In this mode, the dude "lacks self-knowledge and fails to internalize social biases appropriate to his subject position" (Halberstam 2011: 66). For Halberstam, "forgetfulness becomes a rupture with the eternally self-generating present, a break with a self-authorizing past, and an opportunity for a non-hetero-reproductive future" (Halberstam 2011: 70). This constant movement of perversion resonates with readings of *moe* media, as well as critiques of the reinscription of sexual and gendered lines (Lamarre 2006: 370–385). Writing on *moe* and "otaku movement," media theorist Thomas Lamarre underscores possible transference from "corporate culture," or "the homosocial workplace, normative heterosexuality, and the sex industry" (Lamarre 2006: 376; see also Allison 1994). For Lamarre, the danger here is that sexual stereotypes and their connections to corporate culture and received sociosexual formations go unacknowledged, which thus allows them to go unchallenged, if they are not also bolstered by unquestioned repetition. One might also consider feminist scholar Sara Ahmed's approach to happy objects and the stickiness of affect, which "sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects" (Ahmed 2010: 29).

158. For comparison, see Kulick and Rydström 2015: 274–276.

159. Personal interview (August 31, 2014).

160. One is reminded here of a vignette from philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who recalls meeting BDSM practitioners and thinking that they were the nicest people in the world (Žižek 2015). As Žižek sees it, these practitioners have faced and worked through their own obscenity and shared it with others. This "obscene contact" allows them to be "the nicest people." Given the case of Sasakibara, and what I experienced in the field, *bishōjo* gamers seem similar.

161. There is a danger, however, that games might not be disturbing or unsettling enough to impact and shift ways of seeing and being in the world, or the danger of what theorist Christopher Howard describes as "an ethics of the other [that] is also still containable within a postmodern tolerance that

simply perpetuates […] exploitation" (Howard 2014: 385). The importance of Sasakibara's critical insight is precisely in working through and resisting "insatiable destructive appetite" (Howard 2014: 385).

162. All quotes from Matsumura come from a personal interview (July 23, 2013).

163. See for example: http://www.getchu.com/soft.phtml?id=51.

164. As an example of such intimacy, literary critics and social theorists Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner present "erotic feeding," where a man force feeds his restrained partner keeping him at the edge of gagging, which involves "trust and violation" (Berlant and Warner 1998: 565). Another example comes from anthropologist of sex Don Kulick, who introduces a subculture where obese women are desired by men who cannot physically have vaginally penetrative sex with them, but take pleasure in watching them eat (Kulick 2005). Some women as performers desire to be "taken to immobility" by men as "feeders," which is to say to be fed to the point where they can no longer walk (Kulick 2005: 82). This makes the women completely dependent on the men, which both partners desire. The women are made vulnerable and dependent, but this ideally leads to intimacy and care. As with *bishōjo* games, the power dynamics of such relationships raise questions about ethics and politics. For more, see Nagayama 2014.

165. All quotes come from interactions on January 22, 2015.

166. In the 1980s, Matsuda Seiko was the top idol in Japan, and her image was so conscientiously produced and performed that people began to call her a "*burikko*," which means "fake girl/child." Fans, however, supported Matsuda, because they in fact did not want anything more "real" from her and appreciated her idol image (Kijima 2012b: 151–153). Even as women performed as idols and images, fictional women became idols in the 1980s. One can see this in manga artists producing "photo albums" of drawn "glamour shots" of their cute girl characters, and in magazines such as *Manga Burikko*, which presented drawings of cute girl characters as gravure photography. As can be gleaned from its title, *Manga Burikko* intimates that the cute girl characters in its pages are idols like Matsuda Seiko, but even more imagined and created.

167. While I do not share Kōta's position on AKB48 being a simple story of exploitation and abuse (Galbraith 2017b), I do appreciate his struggle to draw a line between the virtual and actual, fiction and reality, which I try to unpack in this chapter. When writing it, Ataru, another *bishōjo* game player I came to know in Akihabara (see Chapter 2), posted an article about a female member of the Diet condemning the United Nations' request that Japan do more to ban virtual child pornography (Nascimento-Lajoie 2016). Ataru drew attention to another article, this one by an NGO claiming that young women were being abused in the Japanese pornography industry (Japan

Times 2016). Tellingly, Ataru agreed with both articles, arguing that more should be done to protect actual girls and women and less focus should be on virtual girls and women in comics, cartoons and games. The complexity of such a position is what I try to unpack.

168. Although there is not space to fully pursue the connections, an important text here is philosopher Simone de Beauvoir's *The Ethics of Ambiguity*  (originally published in 1947). I am especially thinking about the move to identify ethics in a world without transcendental law or moral absolutes, which encourages embracing freedom and choosing how to act in relations with others. Precisely because we are free in our nothingness, both a subject of action and an object to be acted on, we can take note of ourselves and choose what to do (De Beauvoir 2015: 69–73).

169. This is not, to be clear, about embracing positivity and jettisoning identitarian baggage along with politics, which is a standing critique of "the affective turn" (Hemmings 2005: 549–551). Surely Sedgwick (2003: 124, 138–139) acknowledges all the important work that critical reading has done to draw attention to class, gender and race relations, but drawing attention to these relations does not necessarily change them. As an example of the issue, theorist Dick Hebdige (1979: 13–14) writes that "there is an ideological dimension to every signification" and "every social formation." The imperative, then, is to read for what we already know is there, and Sedgwick questions whether that is the only thing to do. Scholars see the problem everywhere and read into everything, which can amount to nothing. Worse, scholars can be satisfied with their ability to read, and read well; in reading and knowing, scholars hope for change. Meanwhile, to those not engaged in these critical reading practices, scholars appear "paranoid" – indeed, crazy. Scholars are not open to the possibility of things being different, unknown, and so hunker down; nothing changes, the divide between those who know and do not widens and things devolve into finger pointing and name calling. As highlighted by the election of Donald J. Trump in November 2016 and the entrenched and knowing positions associated with it, and as Sedgwick (2003: 144) anticipated, critical habits – thinking that revealing hidden meaning and violence will change things, and that anyone exposed to such knowledge will be changed by it – may have made scholars unable to "respond to environmental (e.g., political) change." In this spirit, I acknowledge that media, fictional or otherwise, has an impact on "reality," but resist familiar critiques, which tend to lead to predictable conclusions. I am concerned with a situation where "anything *but* a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naïve, pious, or complaisant" (Sedgwick 2003: 126), because scholars *already know* that things are "problematic" and must reveal "problems" to be "political." Like theorist Robyn Wiegman, who is also inspired by Sedgwick, I am not convinced that the right critical discourse or tools applied to the right object will lead to the political results critics so desire (Wiegman

2012: 3). Rather than try to make the object produce these results, and be disappointed when it cannot, I pursue a politics of engagement and relation with the object and openness to its affects.

170. See also the related discussion of how "paradigmatic reading," in order to maintain its authority, must ignore contingency and "the mistake" (Wiegman 2012, chapter five).

171. One of the organizers of the event presented himself to me as a failed man who only now, in his thirties, has finally begun to climb "the stairway to adulthood" (*otona no kaidan*). While I doubted from his appearance and success that this man was single or a virgin, the phrase "stairway to adulthood" is often used to refer to social and sexual immaturity. In other words, this man was presenting himself as a late bloomer. This playful assertion and undermining of masculinity was common at the Denkigai Matsuri. The official hashtag for Twitter, for example, was "denkiguy," another example of unqualified and pathetic machismo.

172. The word translated here as "trained" is typically used for animals (i.e., training or breaking animals). It is also used in adult manga, anime and games and "training" characters, or "breaking" them in, sexually. Use of the word here increases the potential insult, because men in the audience are implied to be trained animals, but this also increases the sexual undertone. The men were sexually trained and trained to behave, sexually.

173. See for example: http://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question \_detail/q12105704512.

174. See: https://www.discogs.com/%E3%81%A8%E3%82%8D%E7% BE%8E-%E3%81%A8%E3%82%8D%E3%81%BF%E4%BB%95%E7% AB%8B%E3%81%A6/release/2994753.

175. The event was Erogē Song Only DJ Event EEE Vol. 4, which was held in Osaka on September 19, 2010.

176. In a similar way, Momoi Halko, a voice actress who got her start singing music for *bishōjo* games (see Chapter 2), performs a number where she and other women simply repeat the English words "Sex…and violence!" over and over again in different cute girl character voices. In the background, one hears stock lines from adult manga, anime and games, as well as women performing exaggerated male voices responding to them. The song sounds like a celebration of sex and violence, but is also a subtle critique. It ultimately does not encourage sex and violence in reality, but rather reflection on imaginings of, and responses to, it in virtual worlds.

177.  Not only does the player interacting with the image enter into the imaginary space of action, but so too does the voice actress. For an example of the importance of imagination in *bishōjo* game sex, see the depiction of voice actresses in *Voice Work* (Koe de oshigoto, 2010–2011).

179. Hayase is not alone in this sharing with fans. Kagami Hiroyuki, a scenario writer for *bishōjo* games, vividly recalls letters from players detailing for him what works and what they want more of (Kagami 2010: 26–29). In a personal interview (February 9, 2015), Kagami described this as the most fun and rewarding part of his job. "I want people to come up to me and tell me these things," Kagami said. "That is how I can get to know the players and do my job better." Similarly, at an event (February 11, 2015), character designer Fukumimi said, "Please tweet your reactions to the game! We want to hear from you. It keeps us motivated." He also relayed the story of a fan who approached him at the Comic Market and said simply "I came," or ejaculated while playing one of his games. "That is the sort of straight and honest response we want."

180. The spoken Japanese was "Rori… Rori… Rori desu!" The pauses seemed to have been inserted for dramatic effect, but also because she could not think of a better way to portray the character and was thinking before settling definitively on "loli."

181. Before leaving, the voice actress performed a character song about a girl in love with her "big sister." The song, which touches on the types of lesbian and little sister, was still brought back around to "Lolita." When the older woman asked the voice actress again what she thinks about her character, the voice actress responded, "Lolis are so cute."

182. The Japanese, as relayed by Ayumi as she read the comments for the audience in the room, was, "Shō! Shō! Shō! Shō! Shō!"

183. Returning to Tokyo after fieldwork, I was reminded of Fukumimi's popularity. In May 2016, walking down Chūō Street, which is the main thoroughfare of Akihabara, I noticed that hundreds of men were using a particular fan to cool themselves. Given away as a promotion by Sofmap, a major seller of *bishōjo* games located on Chūō Street, the fan featured a character designed by Fukumimi. The cute girl character appeared to be between 10 and 12 years old and was wearing a cheerleader outfit that exposed her bellybutton, which I overheard men discuss as both cute and erotic. So a sexualized girl-child character on fans used openly throughout Akihabara, where these images did not look at all out of place. Certainly Fukumimi is

not an outsider in Akihabara or the *bishōjo* gaming world, and his popularity suggests that whatever problems he has should be considered shared ones. For an image of the fan, see: http://blog.goo.ne.jp/omaketeki/e/cf2666aaf13 cfa05fa0dd937e4c85f55.

184. Harata translates "rinri" as "morality," but there is already a word for that in Japanese, "dōtoku." Ethics seems to more accurately capture the philosophical dimensions of what Harata and others are discussing in contemporary Japan.

185. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes come from a personal interview and subsequent interactions (both on April 26, 2015).

186. For his part, Harata draws on the writings of psychiatrist Saitō Tamaki, who has worked with "otaku" and defines them as people sexually attracted to fictional characters (Saitō 2007; Saitō 2011). Based on his personal and professional experience, Saitō argues that "otaku" are aware of the distinction between fiction and reality, are attracted to fiction as such and, despite their perverse sex lives in fictional worlds, are sexually "normal" in the real world. Harata takes from this the idea of "virtual sexuality" (*vācharu sekushuariti*), for example something distinct from pedophilia in "*lolicon*," or an attraction to cute girl characters in manga, anime and games.

187. The Japanese is "genjitsu no ningenzō towa mattaku betsujigen no kyarakutā." Recall the discussion of dimensions and the two-dimensional in Chapter 1.

188. In fact, Harata criticizes approaches to manga, anime and games as always and obviously "two-dimensional" as "simplistic" (Harata 2006: 114). For Harata, such approaches are political stances against treating "otaku" as a "reserve army of criminals." The challenge is to go beyond a simplistic position against another simplistic position to the nuanced reality of lived experience.

189. For example, Harata points out that the more seriously and objectively one attempts to apply the law to the discussion of virtuality, for example whether or not a fictional character is old enough to legally consent, the more that the law itself confuses and conflates reality and fiction (Harata 2011: 133). This is a fundamental problem with virtual regulation.

190. Harata suggests that scholars observe "otaku" and see if ethics encourage them to severe fiction from reality in action and practice (Harata 2012: 9). As I see it, we must not only observe "otaku," but also live and struggle with them to understand and negotiate lines.

191. Harata also refers to this as "realization crisis" (*genjitsu-ka kiki*) and "latent risk" (*senzai-teki kiken-sei*) (Harata 2012: 6). By way of comparison, I find somewhat problematic anthropologist Shaka McGlotten's discussion of the men featured on *To Catch a Predator*, who intend to meet children they have encountered online (McGlotten 2013: 37–38). These are not merely "creepy online fantasists" (McGlotten 2013: 38), but men who wanted to interact with real children, thought that they were doing so and sought to meet them in real life. If *bishōjo* game players are on the side of fiction, then these men are on the side of reality. The distinction is an important one that we must not lose sight of. Although inspired by his approach to virtual intimacies as that which "might be actualized, or not" (McGlotten 2013: 136), missing here are ethics that discourage actualization that can really harm others.

192. While the law deals with rights, and right and wrong, it has trouble with an expanded sense of justice as defined by anthropologists Don Kulick and Jens Rydström (2015). For them, "a just society will be one that both protects its citizens from abuse *and* provides possibilities and opportunities for individuals to develop their sexuality together with others" (Kulick and Rydström 2015: 287). Beyond rights in a narrow sense – "Is sex a right?" – this approach considers how protection and provision work to acknowledge and facilitate, rather than just deny and prevent, the capacity for intimacy and sexual satisfaction. Part of this would be, I argue, understanding and supporting emergent forms of media literacy and ethics that decrease the possibility of harm and increase the possibility of developing sexuality with others. To make illegal the imaginary sex in and around *bishōjo* games would be, for Kulick and Rydström, unjust. Indeed, I encountered a *bishōjo* game player who was also a lawyer and argued for constitutional protection of imaginary sex as part of "the pursuit of happiness" (*kōfuku tsuikyū*).

193. Lambek argues that ethics are not an object to be located, but rather "intrinsic to action and practice" (Lambek 2015b: 128). The question is less what ethics are than the when and how of ethical action. For Lambek, "ethics emerges at multiple scales of performance" (Lambek 2015b: 131). Resonating with the ethics of *moe* as a response and "performative ambivalence," Lambek writes, "It is precisely because practice is not mechanical, automatic, or fully determined that we have ethics. We must continuously exercise our judgement with respect to what we do or say. The criteria by which we do so are made relevant, brought into play, by means of performative acts" (Lambek 2015b: 129). Performative acts are marked by contingency and precariousness, because "the outcome is always at stake" (Lambek 2015b: 130).

194. For more on the development of media literacy and ethics, see Chapter 2. Harata builds on Saitō's insight that there is nothing natural about being attracted to fictional characters, which means that one "must be trained" (Harata 2006: 115). I heard similar statements from Saitō and Honda Tōru in personal interviews (February 26, 2010 and September 26, 2009, respectively).

195. For the full language of MacKinnon's proposed anti-porn ordinance, see Dworkin and MacKinnon 1988: 99–105.

196. As feminist legal philosopher Drucilla Cornell glosses it, MacKinnon makes "an argument of 'addiction,' premised on her understanding of the viewing of pornography as two-dimensional sex. The man who has two-dimensional sex will want more. He will want to enact the scene on a real woman. A fantasy object will no longer be enough for him. […] For MacKinnon, then, there is an inevitable causal connection between the consumption of pornography and the way in which men will be incited to act in the real world" (Cornell 1995: 123–124). Pornography thus is a clear and present danger to girls and women and must be regulated. Whether or not "otaku" will "turn two-dimensional sex into three-dimensional sex" (Cornell 1995: 124) is the question.

197. Personally, I find MacKinnon to be wildly imaginative and creative, which takes her reader in unexpected directions. For example, MacKinnon writes that, "Pornography is masturbation material. It is used as sex. It therefore is sex" (MacKinnon 1993: 17).  This is as perverse as it is provocative, and MacKinnon comes to sound like a manga/anime fan (Lamarre 2006: 375–380). "Twodimensional sex" is a turn of phrase that MacKinnon and "otaku" share, and both agree that it is real. In this way, MacKinnon unintentionally opens up "different dimensions" of what is commonly thought of as "sex" (Shigematsu 1999: 128). Much as literary theorist Leo Bersani returned to MacKinnon to develop a theory of sex as subject-shattering (Bersani 1987: 213–218), one finds in her writing glimmers of a radical theory of sex with images and its reality.

198. Sociologist David Oswell states that, "The ethical intensity of the virtual image lies precisely in its capacity to refer to a scene beyond itself" (Oswell 2006: 258), which has been interpreted as a reference to a scene of real crimes against children. See: http://www.ecpat.net/sites/default/files /Thematic\_Paper\_ICTPsy\_ENG.pdf. When considering "manga/anime-like realism" (Ōtsuka 2003: 24), however, one wonders about the supposedly necessary connection to "objective reality" (Oswell 2006: 258).

199. This drives home a point made by cultural critic Laura Kipnis, who once asked, "What kind of a society sends its citizens to prison for their fantasies?" (Kipnis 1996: 3). The question was rhetorical, as she went on to discuss the case of Daniel DePew, a man sentenced to 35 years in prison for sexual fantasies about "a crime that never happened" (Kipnis 1996: 4). To be more specific, the victim was "a fictional, nonexistent child" (Kipnis 1996: 12), which DePew imagined abusing. So what kind of a society? One like the United States. Or the United Kingdom, Australia or Canada.

200. As an introductory American textbook on criminology puts it, Handley's "behavior was criminal and not merely deviant" (Siegel 2011: 15).

201. See for example: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/874283114062766080.

202. While a striking example, this is just one of many times that *Comic LO*  drew this kind of line. On the front cover of the March 2005 issue, which is as usual dominated by drawings of cute girl characters, enormous white text reads, "These are not children." The back cover is an advertisement announcing that, "we will never forgive criminals." After drawing this hard line comes a reminder: "Yes! Lolita. No! Touch."

203. Harata refers to this as "diverse 'law'" (Harata 2012: 8).

204. For his part, Condry goes as far as writing, "To say this is somehow separate from the '3D world' makes no sense" (Condry 2013: 201).

205. This has been noted among manga/anime fans in other parts of the world, as well. Even as fans orient themselves to fiction and so "deliberately […] break from reality" (Zanghellini 2009: 173), they at times "militate against any realistic interpretations" (McLelland 2005: 69), which reflects an explicit and deliberate separation.

206. The date in question was May 5, 2014.

207. See: http://tsukiyume.com/.

208. See: http://hajikon.binarypot.info/.

209. This comment was made by an event organizer on the morning of May 6, 2014.

210. The logic here is not unlike that of the Comic Market and the manga industry's unspoken agreement with fanzine publishers (Pink 2007).

211. In separate work, Wood describes her method as a way to address "the experiential and phenomenological *act* of watching television" (Wood 2009: 106). For Wood, texts are too often treated as "two-dimensional," and social interaction with texts adds "a *third* dimension" (Wood 2009: 106). One of my aims for this chapter is to address the missing third dimension of *bishōjo* games, which are rhetorically and emphatically described as "two-dimensional" (*nijigen*).

212. Alternatively, Skeggs and Wood refer to "affective noises" such as tuts, gasps and sighs, which speak to "a powerful nonverbal response" (Skeggs and Wood 2012: 127).

213. The initial experience is not unlike a noise event (Novak 2013, chapter one).

214. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnaZlw1czMs.

215. I am thinking here of Azuma Hiroki, a philosopher who has done much to introduce *bishōjo* games into critical discussions in Japan. In early writing, Azuma describes *moe* as follows: "On exposure to certain characters, designs or character voices, the same picture, or voice, will start to circle around in their skull as if the connectors in their brain had been snapped, as if they were possessed. Not a few *otaku* talk about the experience in those terms" (quoted in Kinsella 2006: 75). This can be observed at Club Moonlight Dream Terrace in *moe* responses to the images and voices of characters as they flash on screen and pour into the space.

216. For more on the dynamic of vulnerability and trust in the phenomenon of public sleeping, see anthropologist Lorraine Plourde's account of cat cafés (Plourde 2014: 124–125).

217. See: http://twipla.jp/events/123291.

218. The religious undertones of this should not be underestimated. Recall that men kneel in front of the screen when overwhelmed by moving images. Even as they call certain games "god games" (*kamigē*), here they kneel before the power of the cute girl character as "god."

219. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q-Z4ei2axY.

220. The date in question was May 5, 2014.

221. Personal interview (December 18, 2009).

222. These men, sometimes called "*himote*" or "the unpopular," are sexist in different ways than *bishōjo* game producers and players. In activist literature and social media, self-identified *himote* sometimes blame their failure on unreasonable and demanding women, which shades into open misogyny. The underlying assumption that women should be available to men speaks to a profound sense of entitlement, which, when lost, can lead to violence. To put this into the terms that I have been using in this book, *himote* seem to be confusing their fiction of what women are and should be for reality, and in the process pressuring real women to conform to their fiction. Forcing a human being to be an image is, as Žižek puts it, mortifying (Fiennes 2006). While *bishōjo* game producers and players may be sexist, they make a distinction between fiction and reality and struggle to not confuse or conflate them. The producers and players I came to know did not think that women or society owed them anything, and they had no desire for a return of "normal" relations between men and women. In the politically fraught arena of contemporary Japan, the distinction between *himote* and *bishōjo* game producers and players matters.

223. Saitō posits that not only work relations, but also personal relations such as family can be toxic, which he refers to as "the bad side of bonds" (Saitō and Jō 2014: 155).

224. In *Anti-Oedipus*, philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari critique psychoanalysis for focusing on representation instead of production, substituting a theater for the factory of the unconscious, limiting interpretation to the family and the Oedipal triangle and thereby pinning down and pathologizing the subject (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). The family-myth displaces the true couple: desiring-production and social-field. Deleuze and Guattari theorize that all desire is social investment. For them, Oedipus is a means of "integration into the group" (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 103), which reproduces the family in service of capitalism. (There is also a national dimension.) This only works to the extent that desire is blocked at prearranged impasses. Oedipus reduces desire to familial determinations that no longer have "anything to do with the social field actually invested by the libido" (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 62). This is why Oedipus must be destroyed: "Destroying beliefs and representations, theatrical scenes" (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 314). After the destruction, engineers work on machines to support their productive working and undo the blockages. The work is of "ensuring this functioning in the forms of attraction and production of intensities; thereafter integrating the failures in the attractive functioning, as well as enveloping the zero degree in the intensities produced; and thereby causing the desiring-machines to start up again" (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 339). While I am interested in "strange flows" (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 116), I am less convinced than Deleuze and Guattari about the revolutionary potential of desire.

225. In full: "The question posed by desire is not 'What does it mean?' but rather '*How does it work?*' How do these machines, these desiring-machines, work – yours and mine? With what sort of breakdowns as a part of their functioning? How do they pass from one body to another?" (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 108). While I have no interest in returning to or rehabilitating Freud, his *Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality* (originally published in 1905) is brimming over with wild ideas that make a good deal of sense out of the context of psychoanalysis and as everyday observations and insights. For example, boys are attracted to trains because of "mechanical excitation" and "the pleasurable character of the sensation of motion" (Freud 1962: 80–82). Such language certainly resonates with Deleuze and Guattari.

226. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmXb3gFJK8o.

227. Others have referred to this as "a life in descent" (Mukaiyachi 2006: 3–4), which is intended to allow even those with no experience of success to live at ease.

228. I am thinking here of McGlotten's discussion of pornography as part of "a creative and enlivening practice of life in the twenty-first century" (McGlotten 2013: 14).

229. As anthropologist Naisargi N. Dave writes, distance from "moral norms" and "institutional power" are "the *condition of possibility* for the creative practice of new, and multiple, affective relational forms" (Dave 2010: 373). An event such as Hajikon allows for "the imaginative labor of *inventing* formerly unimaginable possibilities" (Dave 2010: 373).

230. In the introduction to her book *Violation: Rape in Gaming*, feminist thinker Clarisse Thorn recounts an example of fiction and reality getting confused in a rape scene. For this live-action-role-playing game, the players were locked into a building overnight. One player, male, raped another player, female, but it was unclear whether or not this was the character, person or both. The female player was traumatized and pressed charges, but it was difficult to prove that it had not been "play," because the lines of fiction and reality were so blurred (Thorn 2012: 21–22). The result of this dangerous game was real harm.

231. While talking about living with a cute doll and playing dress up with it seems to be maintaining a line, it is potentially crossed when Ōtsuka elaborates on forming post-family units with highschool girls who are drawn to his home by his domestic partner's *shōjo* manga (Ōtsuka and Nakamori 1989a: 71–72; Ōtsuka and Nakamori 1989b: 239–240).

232. See: http://erogetrailers.com/video/9705.

233. At times they can hear the voice as it cracks, which reveals the limits of the human vocalist. They can hear the voice's "grain," which indexes the body (Fiske 2011: 230–231). It is telling that Roland Barthes, the theorist who discusses the voice in this way (and is cited in Fiske 2011: 230–231), uses sexual metaphors (i.e., orgasm) to explain its affect.

234. Although there is insufficient space here to fully expand, I find Lamerichs' approach to anime conventions useful in multiple ways. Not only does she treat these conventions as affective space, but also "imaginative space," where fans "reiterate a story again at a site" and are "reliving it again" (Lamerichs 2014a: 268). They are also "social space," where fans "enjoy things together" (Lamerichs 2014a: 269). This is clearly applicable to *Hajikon* and *bishōjo* game events like it.

235. This title is homage to *Neon Genesis Evangelion* (Shin seiki Evangerion, 1995–1996), specifically episode 25 of the original animated television series, which is titled "A World that's Ending" (*Owaru sekai*) in Japanese and "Do You Love Me?" in English. Section one of this conclusion, "Take Care of Yourself," is the English title of episode 26, and the final section, "The Beast that Shouted 'I/Love' at the Heart of the World" (*Sekai no chūshin de "ai" o sakenda kemono*), is the Japanese title of episode 26. I have translated "*ai*" as "I/Love" because it is written in katakana in the Japanese, which suggests a

phonetic pronunciation of "I," but *ai* also can mean "love." This is plausible given that the title is itself homage to Harlan Ellison's story "The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World" (1968). The middle section of this conclusion is titled in reference to the films *Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth* (Shin seiki Evangerion gekijō-ban: Shi to shinsei, 1997) and *The End of Evangelion* (Shin seiki Evangerion gekijō-ban: Ea / Magokoro o, kimi ni, 1997).

236. Quoted in Roe 2018.

237. The date in question was August 17, 2014. Day three of the Comic Market was concentrated on fanzines targeting male fans.

238. See: http://upfg.lullsound.com/akiba-u.ac.jp/.

239. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touhou\_Project.

240. The dates were September 27 and 28, 2014.

241. *Sōmen* are fine, white noodles, which we went to eat on several occasions during the tour.

242. When my partner, who was born and raised in Tokyo, heard this story in November 2016, she repeated the words several times, as if in disbelief and thinking them to be mistaken or somehow foreign. "Go-anzen ni? Go-anzen ni? Go-anzen ni?" When I assured her that it was really what these men said in dozens of audio recordings, she retorted, "Hen na hitotachi!"  The greeting is not, it turns out, limited to Akihabara University, but it nevertheless struck my partner as something strange and imagined.