Sick Otaku

On March 11, a 26-year-old salaryman in Takasaki City, Gunma Prefecture, was arrested on suspicion of having murdered a neighbor’s daughter. The girl was in her first year of primary school.

Commenting on the slaying, the “Focus on Topics” column in Nikon Gendai (March 19) notes that when police searched the man’s apartment, they carried off enough comic books, videos, figurines and other assorted paraphernalia appealing to “Rorikon” (as Lolita complex is abbreviated in Japanese) to fill 25 cardboard boxes.

The Rorikon phenomenon is not especially new; but crimes by geeks who entertain such fantasies appear to be in the process of becoming increasingly fetid and violent.

The center of activities for geeky males with a predilection for pubescent females is the Akihabara electronics district, where shops openly display a variety of goods catering to the Rorikon trade.

“Most of our customers are in their 20s and 30s,” says a clerk at one such store. “A lot of them appear to be ordinary white-collar workers. One of the most popular items has been unpainted female figurines, which sell for between 5,000 to 8,000 yen. The customers paint the figurines themselves. One that’s life-size will cost about 100,000 yen. These come with options, like school uniforms or ballet tights, and even wigs. It’s rare to hear anyone grumbling over the high prices.”

One of the items displayed at the store is a highly realistic figurine of a primary school girl clad only in underwear. In the hands of males who, increasingly, seem to lack the ability to differentiate between fantasy and reality, it goes without saying that such products give cause for concern.

“Around 1990, the scale of the market related to ‘enjo kosai’ (juvenile prostitution) was estimated at about 30 billion yen,” says Takashi Kadokura, an analyst at the Daiichi Research Institute and perhaps Japan’s best known specialist in the underground economy.

“Our survey in 2003 indicates it’s now around 60 billion yen, so the figure has doubled in a little over a decade. I believe this is due largely to such influences as the Internet and animated films, which have exacerbated geek-like behavior among adult males, growing numbers of whom are not able to get along well with women of their own age group. I suppose this phenomenon will probably continue to increase.”