So I’m about a million years late on this, but to be honest I probably never would have heard about Minami Minegishi shaving her head if it weren’t for the outcry of Western media outlets. My colleagues and students are all pretty blase about the whole thing. After all, the management of idols in Japan has always been borderline creepy.
I never got particularly into the girl idol groups (though I adore this dumb song by Morning Musume), and I’ve only been exposed to AKB48 since moving here, but I do have a long, mildly painful history with Japanese boy bands. I fell in love with KAT-TUN because the boys were charming and their music videos were ridiculous, and the deeper I fell into the fandom, the more I learned about the company that produced and managed them.
Johnny’s Entertainment holds a monopoly on boy bands in this country, and they keep a very firm grip on things. The boys, like most girl idols, are not allowed to date or marry without approval from management, so that they can remain attainable objects in their fans’ eyes. And any “bad” behavior is unacceptable. Although KAT-TUN made buck by being a group of ~rough~ boys, most of the other bands keep a squeaky clean image, and even KAT-TUN members are expected to dust off the roughness from time to time. These are boys you can squeal over and bring home to grandma.
Any boys who cause too much trouble are swiftly punished. Two members of the band NEWS were demoted to “trainee” status (the same as Minami) when they were caught drinking underage. They never quite made it back as full members of the group. Here are the other members of NEWS apologizing for their behavior during a concert:
When KAT-TUN member Jin Akanishi fled to America back in 2006 and produced a bunch of incriminating photos of him drunk and hitting on college girls, it was a minor miracle he wasn’t kicked out of the group forever. Later, when he married another idol (and got her pregnant) without management approval, he was immediately suspended.
Of course, there are a lot of gender issues at play here, too. Women are still very much on an unequal playing field in Japan (more on my experiences with this another time), and it is not surprising that Minami would feel enough guilt and pressure to not only tearfully apologize, but also shave her head, whereas a lot of male idols just go the apology route.
In any case, it doesn’t seem to matter how much earning potential an idol has, or how much money the company has already invested (Jin had recently recorded a single with Jason Derulo, and was supposed to start a second US tour when he was suspended). If you break a rule, you are punished severely.
And management is even creepily controlling and mysterious before the boys have a chance to break the rules. KAT-TUN, despite being wildly popular before officially debuting (aka releasing a CD), had to wait while two other, less experienced groups debuted. Then management gave one member of KAT-TUN a CD debut and decided the success of that CD would determine if KAT-TUN could debut as well. That member dropped to like 40kg during this period of time. It is a stressful work environment, is what I’m saying.
This is a huge departure from American pop stars, who can get away with pretty much anything so long as they keep producing dancey tunes for everyone. Hell, underage drinking and sexy flings are practically a rite of passage! Even the Disney kids, who are kept on leashes the way Japanese idols are, are eventually allowed to toddle off into the bright lights of casual drug use.
Part of the pressure to remain pure in the public eye is probably connected to the incredible effort made to make fans feel like they know these idols. Remember those little interviews in rags like Tiger Beat, where N*SYNC would list their favorite colors and stuff? I literally have hundreds of scanned interviews like that for all the members of KAT-TUN on my hard drive. Plus a million backstage interviews and television spots and heartfelt, Oprah-style discussions of their families and hardships. Fans of idols here don’t just know that their favorite idol is super hot and likes turquoise. They’ve watched their idols sleepily talk into a camera before bed, literally jump off ledges for one another, wearily curl their hair before shows. It is weirdly intimate, in a way most Western idols have a hard time matching. Doing anything to damage that bond, to show the cracks between the persona and the person, is dangerous to the brand. And management reacts accordingly.
So it’s hard to be shocked by Minami’s story. This kind of (over-)reaction to seemingly innocent crimes is par for the course. This is the environment these kids are raised in (and they are invariably kids when they are trained), after all. Just another day in the Japanese idol factory.
