Dreaming of Date Kyoko is as close to her as we can get. She is a dream girl, a virtual character only ever seen in digital pictures and animations. Date Kyoko was created in 1996 by a company called HoriPro Inc, who used the computer graphics software talents of another company, Virtual Science Laboratory, to create the images of her. Her name was deliberately coined to use the initials DK, for Digital Kid. Her purpose: to sell records, consumer goods, anything. Along with a name, she was given a brief family history, a friend, Adam Soft, a boyfriend, Yuyan, a birthday, a blood group, and an eye prescription (0.2 left, 0.3 right). Kyoko was elfin, with hair cropped at half-ear length. She was cute, but not particularly sexual. Her legs were long and often bare, but she could have been any age between thirteen and twenty-four. She was the first digital aidoru, the Japanese for idol.

Aidoru had already existed in Japan, and still do, in human form (the actress-singer Namie Amuro is a well-known example). They are the manicured marionettes of the entertainment industry, and are just as strictly controlled by their masters as any digital character. Usually teenagers with malleable personalities, they are the commercial capital of mass media marketing operations. An earlier example of real flesh and blood aidoru is Matsuda Seiko, born in 1962. Her every trivial detail, including for example her body mass index of 16.61, was pored over and discussed by the Japanese girls who formed her target market. An indication of the slavishness of this audience is the fact that she had twenty-four consecutive number one hit singles in Japan, surely a feat that sheer musical talent alone cannot account for. In a Japanese TV poll, more women wanted to be reincarnated as Matsuda Seiko than anyone else.

In A Japanese mirror, Ian Buruma captures the true function and raison d’etre of aidoru, also called talento:

Talentos are the products of advertising companies using the most sophisticated marketing techniques. They rarely last long, but while they are around, their ubiquitous and inescapable presence makes them a major social influence. Everything they say is carefully programmed by the people who created them. It never veers from the most conservative morality: how wonderful it is to be Japanese, how glad they are for all the help from their seniors, how hard work is the prime virtue of the Japanese people and how finally they would like to get married and raise a family.

It is obvious from reading this, first published in 1984, that when digital replacements for such robotic figures became feasible in the 1990s, it was inevitable that they would be created. There was never much a real person could contribute to the role of an aidoru. The aidoru was almost entirely in the hands of the management. With digital creations to play with, the control of the Svengali over the aidoru, previously merely enormous, finally became total.

Almost. Love Communication, Date Kyoko’s first single, was released on 21 November 1996. The CD also contained video files that showed Kyoko walking through the streets of Tokyo and New York. She gained a small following. A fan club was set up. There were hundreds of love letters, there were even several proposals of marriage. The fan phenomenon took on a life of its own.

The demand for Kyoko spread overseas. Kyoko had to be made to appeal to the Korean market too, so a new version, called Diki (Digital Kid, again), was ‘written’. Diki spoke Korean, but with a Japanese accent. She took holidays in Japan. There was a website that allowed the voyeuristic to look around her bedroom.

But problems lay ahead. Kyoko’s attraction was her unreality, and it couldn’t last. In feeding the market’s need for her, Kyoko could only ever become more real. Moreover, her life and repertoire were not as effectively exploited as they might have been, and within a year she was nearly forgotten. HoriPro had never understood what they had created, and they failed to maximise the interest in Kyoko that briefly arose in Europe and North America. As a musical act, Kyoko died. In the cyberworld, however, she remained a figurehead. Kyoko fans set up homage websites, shrines, not just in Japan, but also in Germany, Spain, Italy, and Hong Kong. Several years later many of these are still being maintained.

Our interest in Kyoko was probably more prurient than HoriPro would have liked. It was better satisfied a few years later by a bustier and altogether more provocative successor to Kyoko, Lara Croft of the Tomb Raider games. Lara excited the simmering libidos of the digital fraternity, and soon there were downloadable patches that allowed players of Tomb Raider to watch an unauthorised near-naked version of the cyber-gal, running and shooting her way through her adventures. A virtual industry of photo-editing soft porn pushers littered the net with images of Lara naked, sometimes with her ‘own’ body, sometimes with a real woman’s. The demand for Lara’s flesh was only satisfied by putting Angelina Jolie, a real actress with real breasts (albeit augmented), in Lara’s clothes, and letting her loose on the populace.

Perhaps the unnerving future of the digital aidoru can be seen in Idoru, by William Gibson, in which an aidoru, Toei Rei, adapts interactively to her fans’ desires, so that she constantly fulfils their strongest needs. The book has many nods towards virtuality: vodka-analog (a drink), Whiskey Clone (a bar, perhaps), synthespian (the aidoru). In the story, which is set in Tokyo’s near future, Rez, a singer, falls in love with, and intends to marry, Rei. She, it transpires, is equally eager to marry him. Others in the business are less sure that the marriage is a good idea, but the concerns are more to do with software engineering than with society. The marriage eventually takes place. Many of the bizarre ideas in the book, such as buildings made of urine, are imaginative extrapolations of Japan today, where urine is turned into bricks for ease of disposal.

We are not there yet, but virtual women (virtual men are less popular and less populous) are hovering into focus everywhere. At the less realistic end of the spectrum are the anime aidoru like Parapara and Yui Haga, for whom real people sometimes stand in at public appearances. More real now is Ananova, a sexy virtual newscaster. Aki Ross stars in the full-length movie, Final fantasy, and occupies 87th position in Maxim magazine’s top 100 hot girls. The Elite model agency has developed Webbie Tookay, a virtual supermodel who will do anything, wear anything, anywhere, for nothing. She can even handle extreme close-ups.

The phenomenon of virtual women is now attracting serious academic attention. Sociologists are grappling with these people-things, which barely lie within their bailiwick, but obviously challenge them for explanations. And the technology just keeps on getting better. It is now possible to create highly realistic virtual pornography, which will probably have legislators all over the world scrambling to redefine the boundaries of good and bad in imagery. The floodgates have opened.

And there in the new virtual sorority that she founded is a familiar face: Kyoko! She has been brought back to life by HoriPro, as conveniently as she was wintered. She now works under contract in San Francisco, as a PR agent for Oz Interactive, a company that creates 3-D web streaming software. It is not as glamorous as the life of an aidoru, but I’ve heard she feels she has grown out of that anyway.