Crazy in love? The man who ‘married’ a hologram

Pneumonia to kill 11m children by 2030

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

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

In fact, none of Kondo’s relatives attended his wedding to Miku — an animated 16-yearold with saucer eyes and lengthy aquamarine pigtails — but that didn’t stop him from spending 2 million yen ($17,600) on a formal ceremony at a Tokyo hall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Creepy otaku!’

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

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

Kondo’s marriage might not have any legal standing, but that doesn’t bother him. He even took his Miku doll to a jewelry shop to get the ring.

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

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

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

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

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

Two-dimensional characters can’t cheat, age or die, he points out.

“I’m not seeking these in real women. It’s impossible.”

Even in a country obsessed with anime, Kondo’s wedding shocked many. But he wants to be recognized as a “sexual minority” who can’t imagine dating a flesh-and-blood woman.

“I believe we must consider all kinds of love and all kinds of happiness,” he said.

PARIS — Pneumonia will kill nearly 11 million children under 5 by 2030, experts warned on Monday — a global day aimed at raising awareness of the biggest infectious killer of infants worldwide.

While in the developed world the severe lung infection mainly affects the elderly, in developing nations it is children who bear the brunt, with hundreds of thousands dying each year from the easily preventable disease.

More than 880,000 children — mainly aged under 2 years old — died from pneumonia in 2016 alone.

A new analysis conducted by Johns Hopkins University and the aid group Save the Children using forecasts based on current trends showed more than 10,800,000 under-5s would succumb to the disease by the end of the next decade.

Furthermore, a handful of countries are set to carry the highest burdens, with 1.7 million children set to die in Nigeria and India, 700,000 in Pakistan and 635,000 in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Yet there is some good news.

The study, published on World Pneumonia Day, found that scaling up existing vaccination coverage, coupled with cheap antibiotics and ensuring good nutrition for children could save 4.1 million lives.

Pneumonia, an inflammatory infection of the lungs that may be contracted via viral or bacteria infection, is treatable if caught early enough and the patient’s immune system isn’t compromised.

But worldwide it hits young children who are often weak through malnutrition, killing more infants each year than malaria, diarrhea and measles combined.

“It beggars belief that close to a million children are dying every year from a disease that we have the knowledge and resources to defeat,” said Save the Children CEO Kevin Watkins.

“There are no pink ribbons, global summits or marches for pneumonia. But anyone who cares about justice for children and their access to essential healthcare, this forgotten killer should be the defining cause of our age.”

2030 is the target date for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which includes a pledge to “end preventable child deaths” by the end of the next decade.

BEHROUZ MEHRI / AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE Akihiko Kondo poses next to his “wife”, a hologram of Japanese virtual reality singer Hatsune Miku, as he holds the doll version of her at his Tokyo apartment.