Japan’s Queen of Weird

The first video clip shows a beautiful Japanese woman kneeling on a tatami mat in the centre of an elegant, dimly lit room. She adjusts her bright red kimono, blinks and then starts reciting from Stolen, a Japanese best-selling memoir written by Aki Kimura, who was sexually assaulted by three US marines on Okinawa Island in the 1990s. In the second clip, she spends twenty minutes talking in explicit detail about an alien abduction. In the third, she lectures on why Sun Air crash survivor Hiro Yanagida is a national treasure, a symbol of Japan’s endurance and identity.

These clips, which first appeared on the Japanese video-sharing platform Nico Nico Douga, have gone viral, attracting more hits than any clip in the history of the site. What makes them so compelling has little to do with the eclectic subject matter of the woman’s monologues, and everything to do with the woman herself. You see, the woman isn’t human. She’s a surrabot–the android doppelgänger of Aikao Uri, a former pop idol who hit it big in the 1990s before retiring to marry politician Masamara Uri. Aikao is no slouch when it comes to notoriety. Rarely out of the news, she started a fashion craze for shaved eyebrows in the early 2000s, is fervently anti-American (this is rumoured to stem from her failure to make it in Hollywood in the mid-nineties), always wears traditional Japanese dress as a rejection of western fashion ideals and most controversially of all, recently shared her belief that she has been abducted by aliens several times since her childhood.

Watching Aikao Uri’s surrabot talk is disconcerting. It takes several seconds before your brain adjusts and you realise there’s something just… wrong about the otherwise eloquent woman. Her cadence is unemotional, her mannerisms just a split second too slow to be convincing. And her eyes are dead.

Aikao freely admits that she commissioned her own surrabot after the news broke that Sun Air crash survivor Hiro Yanagida will only communicate via the android doppelgänger made by his father, a renowned robotics expert. Aikao believes that speaking through surrabots, which are controlled remotely, using state-ofthe art camera and voice-capturing equipment, ‘will bring us closer to a pure way of being’.

And Aikao isn’t the only one who has embraced this ‘pure way of being’. Known worldwide for their ‘out there’ fashion sense, young Japanese trend-setters are also jumping on the surrabot bandwagon. Those who can’t afford their own surrabot (the cheapest android doppelgängers can cost up to 45,000 US dollars) have taken to purchasing realistic mannequins and sex dolls and modifying them. The streets around Harajuku–where cosplayers traditionally congregate to show off their style–is buzzing with fashionistas, both male and female, eager to flaunt their own versions of the surrabot craze, which has been dubbed ‘The Cult of Hiro’.

There’s even talk that girl bands, such as the wildly successful AKB 48 ensemble and the Sunny Juniors, are creating their own all dancing, all lip-synching surrabot line.