This girlfriend is actually a Nintendo computer game called Love Plus, which comes as a small portable tablet.
Nurikan and Yuge take their girlfriends, Rinko and Ne-ne, on actual dates to the park, and buy them cakes to celebrate their birthdays.
Nurikan says he keeps Rinko a secret from his wife, and hopes he never has to choose between them.
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They are a generation of geeks who have grown up through 20 years of economic stagnation and have chosen to tune out and immerse themselves in their own fantasy worlds.
It seems they no longer have the ambition of the post-war alpha males who made Japan such an economic powerhouse and no interest in joining a company and becoming a salary man.
They have taken on a mole-like existence and, worryingly, withdrawn from relationships with the opposite sex.
A survey by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in 2010 found 36% of Japanese males aged 16 to 19 had no interest in sex - a figure that had doubled in the space of two years.