Читать книгу Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential - Brian Ashcraft - Страница 9

On the eighth floor of the Don Quixote building in Tokyo’s geek capital of Akihabara, throngs of AKB48 fans stand waiting outside a theater dedicated entirely to the famous all-girl pop group. Above them is a marquee proclaiming “Japan’s most sophisticated show.” The fans are mostly male. But a few girls dressed in uniform-like fashion—way too skimpy to be seen in school hallways—linger at the edges. Inside is a single row of seats reserved for female fans like these, and another row for families. On one wall of the lobby dozens of small brass plaques bare the names of the diehards who have attended over a hundred concerts, and there is little room for more. These fans worship AKB48 the way idols are meant to be worshipped, with an almost religious fervor.

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AKB48’s penthouse theater represents the pinnacle of success. But out in the streets of Akihabara there are plenty of wannabes. Sidewalk idols appear in the area singing gooey pop songs in hope of creating a grassroots fan base among the otaku (geeks or fan-boys) who congregate there. These street idols are considered more “real” than inaccessible pop idols because regular folks can see them up close and personal. They are called aidoru (会いドル), a word play on the Japanese pronunciation of “idol” (aidoru; アイドル) with the Japanese kanji “ai” meaning “to meet.” Interaction with fans is essential to their success: they hold intimate concerts, pose for photographs, sign autographs and even partake in handshaking events where thousands of fans line up to meet members, but only if they first purchase the group’s latest single. AKB48 is a product of an era in which social networking sites seemingly make everyone accessible and everything personal. So far, it’s working: in 2009, AKB48 set a record for first-week sales by female artists with the chart-topping single “River.” In 2013 the group beat their own record, becoming the biggest selling female group in Japan ever.

Just like the girls struggling at ground level, the girls of AKB48 are approachable but just out of reach, and true fans would not have it any other way. “What if I did actually date an AKB48 girl?” says one waiting fan. “Then all my friends would be jealous and maybe even hate me. And what if dating her was not as I imagined? What if I was disappointed?” What if, what if?

AKB48 is the brainchild of Yasushi Akimoto, the lyricist and record producer of the original girl idol super group of the eighties, Onyanko Club. With AKB48 he has tapped into the desires of the otaku who hang out in Akihabara, with the “AKB” being short for “Akihabara” and the “48” referring to the number of group members (though the real number hovers close to ninety). The concept behind AKB48 is to offer fans a huge selection of girls to adore, make sure each girl has a different personality for fans to identify with, and make the girls perform live often enough for fans to see them regularly. The group is split up into several teams, each of which take turns performing at the theater seven days a week. When they perform, they’re typically in school-uniform-inspired outfits, while their music videos are often set in schools. AKB48 is

the schoolgirl super group.

Sixteen girls in matching school blazers scuttle on stage. Pre-recorded music strikes up as they go into a choreographed dance sequence and start singing. They’re young and cute. They chatter between themselves and banter with the audience, which reacts with its own performance—of chants and synchronized dance moves. The atmosphere is festive, everyone is happy, and the theater is throbbing. It’s summer 2009, and AKB48 is on the verge of going supernova.

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After the show, team member Rino Sashihara—decked out in a frilly light blue tutu, Mickey Mouse jumper, and white cowboy boots—ices down her calf. “There’s a mosquito in here,” she warns, “it stung me.” Then adds in English, “Oh my god!” gesticulating wildly. Rino has been an official member of AKB48 since October 2008. Ditto for her schoolgirl compadres Moeno Nito and Tomomi Nakatsuka, who are also taking a break between shows. “I was a fan of AKB48 a long time before I auditioned,” the sixteen-year-old Rino says. “I love idol music. Onyanko Club were super!” She and Tomomi gush about following AKB48 before joining, while Moeno is frank: “I’d heard of them, but I wasn’t a big fan or anything.” She was, instead, into Gothic rock and decorating her nails.

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“There aren’t just lots of girls in AKB48, there are lots of different types of girls,” Rino says. Tomomi, decked out in a track suit and sneakers, chimes in. “Yeah, there are cute girls, beautiful girls. Everybody is different. I think that’s really what makes the group unique.” Tomomi, for example, likes manga and video games, and Rino’s hobby is eating udon noodles. Scan the profiles of other AKB48 members and you’ll find girls into professional wrestling, horror movies, or anime. It’s an idol smorgasbord where fans can find at least one idol to his or her taste. The music might be what draws folks in as listeners, but it’s the girls who turn them into fans.

“The big difference between AKB48 and other mainstream idol groups is the interaction with the fans,” Tomomi points out. “We try to make a connection with the crowd,” Moeno adds. With weekly performances, TV shows, radio programs, recording and video shoots, the AKB48 girls are busy. “Sometimes it’s hard to always be smiling and happy,” Rino says with a wide grin. “Not that I’m horribly depressed—the furthest thing from it!” Sharing these feelings and personal issues with fans is something idols tend to avoid. It’s too much information, and a total buzz kill for the escapism that idols buffs want.

In the wake of World War II escapism and hope was provided by a trio of schoolgirls dubbed “Sannin Musume” (“three girls”). Hibari Misora, Chiemi Eri, and Izumi Yukimura made their name covering jazz standards and belting out entirely new Japanese creations. The three starred in a couple of MGM-style musicals together, and the biggest star, Misora—the Shirley Temple of Japan’s post-war war era—captured the ears of a nation with her 1949 smash hit “Kappa Boogie Woogie.” The East-meets-West ditty was about a mythical Japanese creature getting his boogie woogie on.

During the 1950s, American G.I.s and Japanese greasers alike rocked out to local cover bands doing their best Elvis impressions at live venues across the country. Covers soon gave way to original tunes and the first Japanese language rock songs. When rockabilly started attracting thugs and bikers, music producers decided they needed a new sound and a new look. Out went the leather, pompadours, and uncontrolled hip wiggling. In came clean-cut kiddies and choreographed dance routines. The “idol age” was dawning.

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Thank the French for helping popularize the word “idol” in Japan. In 1964, the comedy film Cherchez l’idole hit Japanese theaters, and Sylvie Vartan’s “La plus belle pour aller danser,” the movie’s theme song, sold a million copies. As a wave of Gallic tunes from young, pretty French chanteuses were snapped up, cover versions of the Franco hits were released to capitalize on the trend. What the burgeoning Japanese idols lacked in French sang-froid, they made up for in cute.

It was in the 1970s that girl idols would truly come into their own. This new generation of Japanese popstars had grown up in a very different period from their parents. It was an era free of Japanese imperialism and American firebombing: the Olympics had taken place in Tokyo in 1964 and the World’s Fair was held in Osaka in 1970. The future was now, and girlish dreams of becoming a pop star were possible. Unlike the matinee idols of the 1950s and 1960s, idols during the 1970s were created on television in living rooms across the country. On talent-search TV shows like A Star Is Born!, stars really were born. Schoolgirls like Momoe Yamaguchi, Junko Sakurada and Masako Mori were the top three idols of the day and the media dubbed them “The Schoolgirl Trio.”

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Yamaguchi was only thirteen when she showed up to her first recording session in a sailor-style school uniform. She raised eyebrows in 1973 with songs like “Unripe Fruit,” peppered with raunchy lyrics such as “You can do whatever you want with me,” and “It’s alright to spread rumors that I’m a bad girl.” The suggestive songs she sang were in sharp contrast to her age, and the more conservative acts of other idols. The thrill for male fans was in the power of suggestion and her coquettish schoolgirl image.

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For these idols, image was everything, and everything was controlled as the idol grew into her role. The clothes. The hair. The likes and dislikes. Idols were the girls girls longed to be, and the girls boys longed to be with. According to media specialist Tatsu Inamasu, idols appear to be very pure, but they are actually doing something very impure: trying to get money from people’s pockets. “The fans understand that the act is a lie,” says Inamasu in his book Idol Engineering, “but they enjoy it. The whole thing is a fantasyland game.” It doesn’t matter if the idol can’t sing. To be worthy of idolatry, the singer’s talent doesn’t have to be perfect—she has to be. It’s easier to develop a strong attachment watching a pure, awkward young woman become an accomplished performer than simply seeing the final product. Fans want someone to root for, to cheer on. There’s an emotional investment and gradually an I-knew-her-when nostalgia emerges.

The so-called Schoolgirl Trio had hit on a nerve. Throughout the 1970s idols appeared in print magazines and on record covers in their sailor suits—like on Nana Okada’s 1975 top ten single “Jogakusei” (Schoolgirl). In the following decade the schoolgirl trend continued with the likes of TV star Tsukasa Ito, and her 1981 debut album Shojo Ningyo (Girl Doll). The title couldn’t have been more apt. Ito was thirteen years old and, of course, appeared on the cover wearing a sailor-style uniform. Her name was scrawled on the album cover in childlike writing and when she appeared on music programs to promote the album everyone knew what she would be wearing.

A perfect schoolgirl storm was brewing. And it hit hard in 1985 when Fuji TV’s late night program All Night Fuji—which had been using college-aged girls as eye-candy—hosted a special on high school girls. The program’s producers created a schoolgirl band dubbed Onyanko Club (Kitty Cat Club) with a logo of a pussy cat bent over, flashing her bloomers. The bonus pun? “Nyan,” is Japanese for “meow,” and “to do nyan nyan” was 1970s slang for sex. None of this was lost on the show’s predominantly male viewers.

The group’s sound was heavily influenced by early 1960s American girl acts like the Ronettes, but instead of the Wall of Sound, Onyanko Club had the wall of schoolgirls. At their debut, there were eleven of them. Their first song, “Don’t Make Me Take Off My Sailor Suit,” was a top five smash, with blunt lyrics that didn’t beat around the bush—the song contains doozies like “I want to have sex before all my friends.” If the subject matter did happen to be lost on listeners, the “nyan nyan” refrain in the background would have clued them in. All this was coming from a gaggle of regular looking schoolgirls who didn’t exactly ooze sexuality—which is exactly what the fans found so damn charming.

Even though most of their matter-of-fact lyrics were written by a man, (Yasushi Akimoto, who went on to found AKB48), and seemed to be aimed at legions of leering male fans, there was something oddly empowering about Onyanko Club. They didn’t dress trashy, and they definitely did not let anyone take off their sailor suits. They sang about telling their teacher to stop putting the make on them, or about calling out some pervert on the train.

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They were good girls, ones you could admire, emulate, and dream about. But to make sure they stayed pure in the eyes of the public, Onyanko Club girls had to abide by a rather conservative set of rules: no boys; no dance clubs; no skipping school; no smoking. Normal high school stuff, you’d think, but these weren’t normal high school girls. They were idols, and if they broke the rules the consequences were harsh.

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The no-smoking rule cost a handful of the group’s original members their jobs. Two weeks after the first episode of the group’s hugely popular after-school variety show Yuyake Nyan Nyan (Sunset Nyan Nyan), six of the original eleven members were embroiled in a smoking scandal. A weekly tabloid caught the underage girls puffing away at a coffee shop near their recording studio and all but one of the girls got the axe. The “Tobacco Incident” became a taboo topic of discussion—it would be bleeped out if it was brought up on air.

Suddenly, one of the remaining members, Eri Nitta, was thrust into the spotlight as the group’s leader. While numerous celebrities start out as idols, many are reluctant to talk about their time as an idol, as if they are ashamed of how they made their careers. Not Nitta, who chats openly about her Onyanko Club days. She was seventeen at the time and had originally only auditioned because the five thousand yen a day paycheck (about twenty-five US dollars during the 1980s) was better than some dopey part-time gig after school. “I didn’t set out to be an idol,” she says, “but, before I knew it, I had become one.” Even as the group was poised for superstardom, she had been mulling over leaving. But with the smoking scandal, the number of members dwindled to half; if Nitta quit there would only be a few left. “I wanted to be professional,” she says about her decision to stay and see how things turned out.

Things turned out well. Really, really well. Onyanko Club churned out hit singles and had a hit TV show. Each Onyanko was given an ID number, and the group had a song in which each girl would introduce themselves by number. Nitta was number four but always went first—something she says she didn’t like: “But I suppose being at the top of the heap is better than being at the bottom.” The newly minted star found herself juggling normal school-girl life with being an idol. “Things got difficult when Onyanko became famous,” she says, “but my classmates didn’t suddenly change on me. They protected me, they supported me.” The number of Onyankos swelled, and fifty-two girls became members over the course of the group’s two-year lifespan—though not all at the same time.

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Seiko Matsuda

POP MUSIC IN JAPAN can be divided into two epochs: Before Seiko Matsuda and After Seiko Matsuda. She was a new breed of idol, an über idol of sorts, and was dubbed “burikko,” which means a woman who acts young and girlish to appeal to men.

Making her debut in 1980, she caused a sensation, belting out a record-setting string of twenty-four number one singles in a row. Her bobbed hairstyle was the most influential hairdo of the day with schoolgirls clamoring to get the iconic “Seiko-chan cut.”

CBS/SONY MUSIC

Onyanko Club were a step towards the “real” idols that populate Akihabara today. People could identify with them, and cheer them on. They weren’t the most polished singers, and they weren’t the best dancers—heck, they weren’t even good dancers—in fact it sometimes looked like the group had just learned their dance moves backstage. Besides the obvious appeal of school-aged girls singing about sex, Onyanko Club was popular because it was comprised of fairly normal young women. They were slightly awkward and seemed genuine, or at least, slightly more real than the previous generation of polished, overly controlled idols. The greener the better. “Before us, idols were dolls,” Nitta says. “Today’s idols are human beings. We were somewhere in-between.”

In order to keep the group sown with fresh faces the group’s TV show ran “idols wanted” notices, and new members would audition in what could be described as a beauty pageant of sorts, complete with swimsuit and talent competitions. To make room, Onyanko Club regularly “graduated” members in surprisingly depressing episodes of Yuyake Nyan Nyan—all before a studio audience of grown men.

Graduating members were marched out on stage, given flowers, and told to sing their way through Onyanko Club’s standard showstoppers, a difficult task through the shower of tears and sniffles. Then, to a background of “Auld Lang Syne,” they’d say goodbye to their cohorts. For the Fuji TV producers and managers, the hope was that these girls would then go onto be successful solo artists. A few did stay in show business. Others simply assimilated back into society, working as office ladies, becoming mothers, or even teaching yoga.

Two-and-a-half years after debuting, Onyanko Club called it a day, and the remaining members hung up their sailor suits. The final concert was held in September 1987 at Yoyogi National Gymnasium with present and former members alike. Everyone graduated, and Eri Nitta was the last member to leave the stage. It was a dramatic, fitting end to Onyanko Club after setting a trend for groups hoping to capitalize on the schoolgirl craze. Not surprisingly, the blueprint Onyanko Club drew up would be mastered by the biggest girl group act of the following decade, Morning Musume.

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In 1997, the pop impresario simply known as Tsunku —who writes his name with the Mars symbol—held live TV auditions to find a new singer for his band Sharam Q. He found her, but he also found five other girls who intrigued him but didn’t make the cut. Their consolation prize was to be a founding member of the biggest idol group of the late twentieth century, Morning Musume (Morning Daughter). Before that was to happen, though, there was one condition: the girls had to sell fifty thousand copies of their first single in just five days. It was grassroots-marketing-meets-reality TV, with camera crews following the girls around as they tried to promote their then unknown group. The public couldn’t help but root for them, and with live concerts held in the cities of Osaka, Fukuoka, Sapporo, and Nagoya, Morning Musume finally broke the fifty thousand mark.

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By 2003 the group had expanded to sixteen members, becoming so successful that

Tsunk quit his band to focus on managing these girls. But while the dapper Tsunku was the public face of the band, the real mastermind lurked in the shadows. As the media-shy talent agency president Naoki Yamazaki said in a rare October 2001 interview with print magazine Cyzo, “I entrust all the music stuff to Tsunku. But which members graduate and who enters the group is all decided by me. The real producer isn’t Tsunku, but me.”

Idol thoughts

So what do the Morning Musume girls think being an idol is all about?

Junjun: “Being an idol is innate. It’s expressing all the various emotions inside yourself with others.”

Sayumi Michishige: “Idols are cute. Whenever and wherever, it doesn’t matter, I think idols have to be cute.”

Linlin: “Idols make people feel good and happy!”

Reina Tanaka: “Idols give dreams and hope to little girls and grown men.”

Aika Mitsui: “A charming person everyone likes!”

Over the years, Morning Musume became less of a band and more of a music institution, or better yet, a factory for churning out female idols. The group took its cues from Onyanko Club: lots of young girls and graduating members. But they pushed it even further with Morning Musume spin-off groups and sub-units like Berryz Kobo (Workshop), and C-ute—which could be cross promoted on its morning TV program, Hello! Morning. All the singers belonged to the corporate label “Hello! Project,” and even after they graduated they still remained signed to the group’s talent agency to be filed away for another group or launched as a solo artist or actress. It was the Onyanko Club model perfected and expanded.