If someone asks, "Is this news?" The answer is, well, this is Japanese TV news.
A morning program on Japan's Mainichi Broadcasting System (MBS) did a feature on the world of "netoge haijin" or "online game invalids".
This morning show interviewed online gamers like this man. He's a slob and his house is a complete mess. Near his computer he has a bottle he uses for a toilet when gaming. The gentleman points out that the mouth of a regular plastic bottle is "small", which is why he uses this one. To stick his penis inside and urinate.
He does not explicitly say that last bit, but that is the mental image with which we are unfortunately left.
Yeah.
The slang "netoge haijin" went mainstream in 2009 in part due to news reports like this. There was also a book by journalist Osamu Ashizaki cleverly called Netoge Haijin, published in May 2009. Hardly a Japan-only trend, the book explored the dangerous of online gaming.
And while South Korea has, after unfortunate incidents in which online gamers have died from exhaustion, taken steps to address online game addiction, Japan has not. Since those measures do not exist in Japan, stories like this are prime fodder for Japanese television — which is sometimes accused of creating and/or fabricating stories called "yarase" in Japanese. (You can read about yarase here.) Many on the Japanese internet seem to believe this was faked as well.
While morning shows sometimes do report breaking news and do have hard hitting pieces, they are not always meant be taken seriously. They are often scare pieces (drunk driving is on the rise! an earthquake will kill us all!), playing on raw emotions, while subconsciously contributing to the country's zeitgeist. And totally made up.
ペットボトルの中におしっこをするネトゲ廃人は本当にいた [はちま起稿]