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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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...