Minami

[koganbot]

warthoginrome writes:

I don't know if you had the chance to run into this news, so I wanted to point it out, because the topic is common to the entire asian pop scene.

The story is about Minami Minegishi (20 y.o.), member of the japanese group AKB48. A tabloid published some photographs of her leaving the apartment of her boyfriend, Alan Shirahama (19 y.o.), member of the boy band Generations.

As you may guess, Minami is bound to a "contract" which prohibits any kind of relationships. After the bomb exploded, she decided (spontaneously?) to cut her hair and record a public apology. In the video she apologizes to colleagues, family, and fans, reproaching herself for having been "thoughtless and immature," and specifying that "I don't believe just doing this means I can be forgiven for what I did, but the first thing I thought was that I don't want to quit AKB48." In the meantime, the agency demoted her from the "senior" to the "trainee" rank, for "for causing a nuisance to the fans."

I don't really know why, but as soon as I saw the video, the T-ARA controversy came to my mind, because I find it hard to tolerate the unlimited power of the so called netizens (better, customers). This is really too much. I know that, after all, Minami is more fortunate than many boys and girls of her age living in much tougher conditions around the globe, but I feel bad for her anyway.

Checking this out myself, I see that American news outlets have been all over this story, reporting that the incident has provoked pushback and even outrage in Japan, people calling the treatment of Minami unfair and saying it amounts to bullying (many people assuming she had little choice in the matter of close-cropping her hair).



Some American (I assume) commentators at The Young Turks provided their own perspective, and my crap detector says that they didn't actually research the culture, that they're making guesses as to the attitudes behind the no-dating rule. ("You're no good unless you're virginal, you're no good unless you're pure, you're no good unless I actually have a shot at sleeping with you sometime in the future.") But then, I haven't researched it either. And just because they're guessing doesn't mean they're wrong.

Minami's in a better position than T-ara was as far as garnering sympathy, since the Netizens who were bullying T-ara were portraying T-ara as bullies themselves, which meant that attempts to defend T-ara (and to understand and accept T-ara and their overmatched CEO as humans who get to screw up) could be cast as attempts to defend bullying. On the other hand, T-ara are full-scale stars with a fanbase that's not going to completely abandon them, whereas Minegishi is one replaceable member of a vast enterprise. On the third hand, I know little more than zilch about J-pop and Japan and AKB48, and I don't assume Japan is Korea, and I don't assume there's a homogenous thing called "Japanese attitudes" and "Korean attitudes" anyway, any more than there's a homogenous thing called "American attitudes": there are always arrays of behavior and ongoing tensions and arguments over gender and sex issues (there wouldn't have been an injunction against adultery in Moses' day if people weren't committing adultery (as well as worshiping false gods and failing to honor mommy and daddy)).

Readers who understand K-pop and J-pop more than I do should comment. In the T-ara affair, fans and Netizens didn't hold just one view, and I think in general agencies and performers are far too timid in giving way to what they imagine are fan desires. (Not that all agencies impose such restrictions in the first place.) But also, performers like HyunA, for instance, are able to get energy from the limits that some fans and censors try to impose on them, since part of HyunA'a act is to cross the border into what she's supposedly not allowed to do. I wouldn't imagine it would ruin her image or devastate her fanbase if she were found to have spent the night with a guy. But I don't know. I assume (though I've not researched this) that Brown Eyed Girls are expected to have affairs and dates etc., and are even willing to stoke the rumors that they're sleeping with each other. And one of the Wonder Girls just got married.

By the way, I didn't attend much to G-Dragon's marijuana scandal in 2011, but my impression at the time was that it wasn't that big a deal, nor was it that potentially damaging (his hair follicles tested weakly positive for marijuana, and he explained this away by saying that he imagined it happened 'cause of a time he'd gotten massively drunk and someone offered him a cigarette, which he assumed was tobacco, and he felt he'd have been rude to refuse; this doesn't seem like the most convincing or contrite explanation). If you're going to be a bad boy, you gotta do something bad every now and then.

Something I'm curious about is whether, in Korea and Japan, rock and hip-hop stars (as opposed to pop stars) are expected to hew to limits in the same fashion. By "hew to limits" I don't mean "are subject to the same behavioral injunctions," since I assume they're not (I assume they are allowed to date and that rock and hip-hop guys are supposed to seem sexually active), but rather the idea that you don't want to offend or challenge your fans or appear genuinely arrogant rather than grateful to them for your success. I'd think, in contrast, that you'd lose cred if you seemed too compliant, too full of gratitude. But that's me looking at things from my perspective, here in America.

One thing about Netizen behavior: although it may not be absolutely pure self-expression — you have to have Internet access, you have to have time (both of which require money), and anyway the messages that have money backing them up become the ones sloshing around the culture and are therefore more likely to be the ones that spontaneously come out of people's mouths, even poor people's — it still, as expression goes, is more bottom-up than most. And though minority opinions can be drowned out, they can't simply be shut up. Anyway, I recently read this excerpt from Tom Slee's No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart, which is on a different subject — how free consumer choice can sometimes have results that no one wants. I don't make a direct connection in my mind between his thesis, on the one hand, and, on the other, the combination of paparazzi and fan selfishness that afflicts Minami. But when something seems not to be working, it's good to think why, and what could be done. Can a mass of people teach themselves how to think, how to plan? Is there a structure that could help us think and plan better?

At a minimum, what if some record company or agency announced that it would never make disciplinary decisions for any reason without first waiting two weeks?

*[UPDATE: The apology video was taken down from YouTube; here are some excerpts that are still up.]

Comments

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I heard about this and was too disheartened/shocked to even bloviate about it on Tumblr, frankly.

Of course it's the original assumption -- that fans need to buy into the fantasy of their idols' romantic availability -- that's deeply flawed. Like so much that is harmful, things are done this way now solely because it's always been done this way, which allows entrenched interests (in this case, the agencies) to retain their power. I've heard the argument that it would be a nightmare for agencies if the 200 girls they had in groups and in training were all allowed to date, because they would rotate in and out of tabloids and netizens would be engaged in stalking them full time -- which is just putting the onus on the victim not to be victimized by others' bad behaviour. And frankly, not to be a stereotypical leftist about it, but when you see those in positions of power making arguments that amount to "the masses just aren't ready to cope with this level of freedom," it's time to be skeptical about whether the issue really lies with the masses. If the no-dating policy disappeared across the board one day, I suspect a few fans will write strongly-worded Internet comments, one or two otaku will make deranged gestures (not like they don't do that now), and 99.9% of the rest will get with the program without sounding the industry's death knell.

Then again, it's sort of like mass shootings in America -- to me the solution is simply to remove as many guns as possible from circulation, and it stuns me that there are actually people out there arguing the opposite: that all kindergarten teachers should be armed in their classrooms. But even those people agree with me, so to speak, that the status quo is problematic.

Maybe the backlash to this will act as a wake-up call -- who knows. It might take a KimuTaku or someone like that to piggyback on it and start a petition movement or some such, but that's unlikely... I remember, back in the 1990s, reading a very famous (and rather lurid) girls' manga called Zetsuai: in one episode, the bad boy rock star protagonist intentionally seduces a teen idol with a "pure" image and leaks it to the papers, in order to create a scandal as a distraction (from a gay love affair, of course... I did say it was lurid teen lit). Her reputation is ruined, and his is basically unaffected. But I guess exposure of the gay love affair would have done something.

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

If the no-dating policy disappeared across the board one day, I suspect a few fans will write strongly-worded Internet comments, one or two otaku will make deranged gestures (not like they don't do that now), and 99.9% of the rest will get with the program without sounding the industry's death knell.

No death knell for the industry, but there would be large financial impact. Yes, the 48 franchise can arguably break away from the purity fanatic group and survive, but ALL Jpop girlgroups get started on devoted fans who do everything to try and make their group break through, the ones who buy 10 copies or more even without a handshake incentive. Those are the ones who take a chance on shitty music, ridiculous outfits, and girls with no performance talent because they're feeling the purity. I can't really believe individual "enraged fans burn the merchandise they've bought for a member with a scandal" accounts nowadays because the story is so common that current instances feel tongue-in-cheek, but I don't rule out the existence of the practice, and again, these are the people who are pumping the most money into the indie idol scene, the newcomers, and allowing other groups to take over 10 years to decline before disbanding. The industry will survive, but individual idols, groups, and agencies will not, and so those individuals do everything they can to exploit and prop up the system.

The 99.9% don't have enough stake in idols to empty their wallets every month on them, so they contribute no weight to an opposing force if they were all opposing.

[koganbot]

Don't know when I'll have time to read the stuff you linked. Several questions jump out at me: (1) Why do the fanatic fans insist on "purity" in the first place? Why wouldn't some fans become fanatics over an idol precisely because his/her image is opposite to that?* (2) Is it true that a massively successful group can't jettison its "original" fans and "true" fans? It's not obvious why they couldn't. (Think this might be different in collectible-based Japan as opposed to download-crazy Korea, or is there less difference between the two businesses than I've heard?) (3) Are there groups that succeed without the purity image? In Korea, the answer seems to obviously be "Yes," but then I may be misreading Korea (but: Brown Eyed Girls, 4minute, Psy; and presumably someone's banking on GLAM). Are Big Bang/GD&TOP fans, for instance, insistent on a purity and no-dating rule? I actually don't know this, only knowing those performers through their music and videos. But, like, you know, lotsa chicks in vids, and such.

History, which I also don't know about: Did Seo Taiji & Boys have a purity image, and a self-imposed no-dating rule?

*What did the Japanese and Koreans make of the international fame of, e.g., Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Steven Tyler, Stevie Nicks, Donna Summer, Johnny Rotten, Madonna, Axl Rose, Beyoncé, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Ashlee Simpson, Rihanna, Justin Bieber (plus anyone else who became famous in Anglo-American music in the last 60 years)? What do Koreans make of the ongoing career of Baek Ji Young?

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

Big Bang's fans are as guilty of insane jealousy as any idol fangroup's. They routinely harass Japanese model Kiko, GD's rumored ex, and basically hound, internet stalk, maybe real-life stalk women who appear in pictures with them.

Today, Big Bang don't have that safe idol image, but at one point in time, they did. Jay Park has a similar problem, even though he was barely an idol and isn't one anymore - check out the comments when he tweeted a picture of Biggie and Tupac (http://omonatheydidnt.livejournal.com/10588336.html) recently.

I actually suspect a major condition of Big Bang renewing their contract with YG last year was that they wouldn't have to hide as much of their real personalities as they had previously. I also suspect they are banking on being World stars as a kind of safety net against backlash-fueled loss of popularity in Korea. GD's marijuana scandal was no big deal internationally, but it was a big deal in Korea, even among dedicated Big Bang fans.

The way it was explained to me is that idols in Korea are like politicians in the US - they are made by the public, live and die by public opinion, are held to stricter standards of morality than other people, and serve and belong to the public, not to themselves.

Ask a Korean also wrote something (http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2012/10/aak-music-gangnam-style-by-psy.html) about the division between "artists" - who can be challenging and controversial - and "entertainers" - who are lucky to be able to work in their chosen profession and should be grateful for what they have. There's a class difference implied by the two terms, in some cases.

Big Bang is kind of an interesting case in the artist vs. entertainer divide because GD is one of only a few idol rappers who also have that "artist" label. He and TOP also come from pretty well-off families, IIRC, unlike the other three members of Big Bang, who had been well-off before the IMF crisis, but weren't afterwards. Taeyang and Seungri went into entertainment in part so they could support their families - and they're far from the only ones. Anyway this goes a long way toward explaining the horrible conditions of the idol system, to me.

More on purity in next comment.

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

Even international fans who "know better" than to expect that the idols they like are really single can get caught up in the dating restriction insanity. I've seen people say that they know the stars they like are probably sexually active, but they don't want to "know" about it, so it's up to the stars to be "discrete" ie to cover it up. But then people - sometimes the same people! - will react badly to "scandals" because they were "lied to" and are insulted by the attempts to cover it up.

The expectation of virginity hurts coming and going, in other words: you are expected to lie to maintain the image, but then you're on the line for "betraying" the fans when the truth comes out. (K-netizens at this point would probably say that the solution is to not be a slut in the first place, but anyway.) Like Sabina said, it's a sick and self-reinforcing system. Idol image control in Korea is pretty thorough and there are plenty of people who believe it. "There's no way I'd have time to date" is honestly just another tactic of image control - no time for a traditional relationship maybe, but there's always time for hookups. And established stars tend to have a bit more time and leeway.

That's all Kpop stuff, though. I'm honestly surprised that a Jpop idol is under the same kind of pressure to be pure... there's a well-established dating culture in Japan, it's a freer society in many ways, in Japanese slang "third base" is sex and "homebase" is pregnancy, famous pop stars have been getting shotgun married for ages without it sinking their careers (although the need to get "shotgun married" is its own kind of restriction), etc etc. Maybe it's what anhhh says above, AK48's otaku core audience being mostly otaku. 2chan is a really conservative message board, there's a lot of nationalistic fervor and anti-Korea, anti-China rhetoric on that board.

As far as why these purity restrictions are so important... people says it's about the importance of maintaining the fantasy of availability, but I really don't think that's the best explanation. Maybe for a minority of truly delusional fans. (Which, to be fair: when lots of delusional fans gather together in one place, like an internet message board, they can reinforce each other's delusions and the delusional way of thinking can become the "new normal" - something that does seem to happen with Kpop and some Jpop groups.) But honestly, I don't think most fans are that delusional, particularly casual fans.

For most fans, purity is more about maintaining a connection with the audience. Teen middle school girls are expected to be too busy studying for high school entrace exams to have time to date. Otaku boys are frustrated because they aren't seeing any action, either. Or sometimes otaku boys are into sublimating their sexual desires because they are deemed inappropriate, and preferring gentler fantasies instead. Good Korean girls aren't supposed to have sex before they are married. The entertainment world is impossibly removed from everyday society, in Korea it's a small international progressive enclave inside a largely conservative society, like Istanbul in Turkey. Dating restrictions on idols make them more relateable , not more available.

But then their are also sexist double standards imposed on male versus female idols, and you can only go back to sexist double-standards in society.

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

And the companies will do whatever helps sales. SM entertainment is notorious for encouraging stalking - or at least not taking the appropriate steps to prevent it - because the stalkers set a fervent tone for the rest of the fanbase, provide "normal" fans with a yardstick to measure themselves against ("I might be obsessed but at least I'm not as crazy as those people"), and buy tons of merchandise. They're good for business.

I think a lot of this is changing as everyone's standards of living improves and as more talent enters the idol field. You see less "so and so is lucky even to have a job, I have nothing and there are hundreds of pretty faces to replace her" then.

The really crazy thing is that the idol industry has only been around for - what? - 30 years in Japan, 20 years in Korea? Before that it was pretty much expected that "female singer" was barely a step up from "female prostitute" and that all the entertainment companies were run by gangsters (which, of course, many if not most still are).

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

The really crazy thing is that the idol industry has only been around for - what? - 30 years in Japan, 20 years in Korea?

Actually, Japan had Golden Age of Cinema-style idols since the 50s.

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks for that. So there's at least a precedent for the Japanese system... even if it's a precedent from 60 years ago...

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

Why do the fanatic fans insist on "purity" in the first place?
Read the "idol-purity-the-no-boyfriend-rule-talk-thread" link. As I said, it contains some people explaining why they support the system.

Why wouldn't some fans become fanatics over an idol precisely because his/her image is opposite to that?
They do. SDN48 was the sister group that contained older members and were allowed to date, and held only 18+ stages. They had a respectable fanbase, and disbanded because their existence was contingent on a CM contract with AKB that ended. Rising star within the 48 franchise Watanabe Miyuki was a designated face for sister group NMB48, had a scandal, was dropped from one NMB single, and then continued on her merry way, still a face of NMB, consistently part of AKB A-sides, and ranking in at #19 this summer. Her image is pretty much "two-faced girl gets off on manipulating fans with fan service," and everyone's eating it up.

Is it true that a massively successful group can't jettison its "original" fans and "true" fans?
No matter how successful a group is at their peak, they're not going to let go of the "original" fans because those are the ones that will allow them to exist 10+ years past their peak in a slow decline after everyone else has left them.
Before AKB began its true climb in 2009, all of the main faces of Jpop were artists with 10+ years of history, still chugging along with a steady amount of sales per single. All of them are still chugging along, although the idol groups are now experiencing an uptick in sales because they've also adopted the handshake model in addition to riding the idol wave AKB has pioneered.
It's not that group can't, it's that it will ALWAYS be a better decision financially not to. Perfume might be considered not idols anymore, but in the future after they've run their race, the same people who supported their underage-risque Hiroshima products will do their best to keep them afloat out of sentimentality. (Whether or not Perfume themselves will choose to disband instead of ekeing out an existence like that is another matter)

Are there groups that succeed without the purity image?
Depends on what you mean by purity image. There are many subversive idol groups that have overtly sexual or subversive images, and have members whose gimmick is to be "the sexy one"
AKB itself is known for being less "pure" than its mainstream predecessors already, what with the Seifuku Ga Jama wo Suru and Heavy Rotation, and members being as shippy with each other as Brown Eyed Girls. NMB girls have admitted to reading erotica, and one of their faces made masturbation jokes on TV. And J-variety is much less beholden to make idols look good. They make pokes about scandals to the idols' faces all of the time, and the good idols joke back, and the fans don't rage about it like they do in Kpop.
But these groups still technically fall under the purity system in terms of the no-love ban.

I don't know of any groups other than SDN allowed to date, but the indie and gravure scenes have so wide a variety that there are probably other examples out there. But it all comes back down to money, and because of Christmas Cake and other such "settle after marriage" expectations on females, I can't think of any non-actress female artists or idols that have maintained mainstream front-runner popularity after getting into a relationship, even if it doesn't damage their career.

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

Did Seo Taiji & Boys have a purity image, and a self-imposed no-dating rule?
The Jpop boyband powerhouse that Seo Taiji aped the system of, Johnny's and Associates, technically have a no-dating rule, and they exploit purity just as much as any Jonas Brothers band. It's well-known knowledge that members of popular bands party and sleep around and such, though, and scandals always damage the female party instead.
However, apparently marriage has to be cleared by head honcho Johnny himself, and permission seems to be given only systematically. Akanishi Jin was a frontman of KAT-TUN, broke off to do his own solo career in America that tanked, and then knocked up Kuroki Meisa and had a shotgun wedding. Gossip is that another older Johnny's member from another group is super pissed because Jin's marriage basically stole the slot he was angling for, (and had Johnny's blessing for) and now has to wait a couple of years.

One of the rookie Kpop boybands, either Teen Top or Dalmation, made a point of saying they aren't under a dating ban. Of course, they go on to say that they aren't dating because they're so busy. Yeah, right.

But, like, you know, lotsa chicks in vids, and such.
There is definitely more gender segregation overall in Jpop compared to Kpop. Yet Japan has succeeded where Korea has failed: multi-gender dance group AAA has a sizeable fanbase. (At their prime, probably NKOTB level popularity?) Both hetero and homosexual pairings within the group have been explicitly promoted in official releases.

What did the Japanese and Koreans make of the international fame of, e.g
I feel like Japanese and Koreans treat international stars with different standards than they do their own. Boa, Britney, Westlife, and DBSK in 2004. Bonus points if you spot After School's Gahee. But the contrast between Britney and Boa clearly hasn't affected their popularity with the crowd.
Kpop is also pretty much the house that Michael Jackson built.
Primarily, I feel that they treat international western stars as sources of music over all else, and thus don't pay much attention to anything outside of their careers. The presence of international stars in talk and variety settings is more fodder for the fans of those they interact with. Interviews are centered around the interviewer, who often intentionally making things awkwardly comedic for the sake of entertainment and self-promotion.