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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.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).
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.
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.]
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no subject
Date: 2013-02-09 09:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-09 05:42 pm (UTC)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxOQP7_CY9I
When Momoiro Clover released this video, the conversation that followed was one of the most radicalized things I’ve ever seen: places like Arama saying that they were sluts like AKB, and fans acting like this was a mistake, something that never should be talked about. And people like me that thought it was just another game with popular culture (biker gangs eating ice-cream in a defiantly way) treated as if we were retarded. Then later, not so long ago, when they decided to do one of their routines during a live show (walking over the crowd), somebody touched one of the girls on their genitals in a non-accidental way. Somebody linked to a forum about the group and the reactions I saw were so brainwashed, so inbreeded with their own PR (who could like the members of the group in a different way than the one we do?), it was such a case of “thought police”, of “it is inadmissible to thought about them on a sexual way”, that obviously, what you get is that people really admire that, their purity. If is not an issue, you don’t talk so much about it.
And the thing with idols is that this sort of thought police always appears. Is almost never a “macro” thing, something that is so abject and exploitative that looks self-evident (but check AKBN 0 (non-related) to see a case where that thing is really happening, and there is certainly people that follow them, I hate that group) is mostly the “micro” realm where you can see how things are evolving, how everything is dumbing down, how the new fans are taking as the gospel the worst tendencies in the fandom, etc. And suddenly, the chair where you sat is not there anymore. The things that I hate with AKB for example are fan charts where fans explain which girls are nicer/professional on handshake events, the fixation people have with the oshimen/oshihen thing or when people dismissed one of the girls that recently graduated because she wasn’t enough compromised with the group because she didn’t attend the show that allegedly was “their dream” (the event management has been selling as their big objective for years). Or really, all the micro-machismos.
Is not just with this fandom, I’ve followed other groups from other countries and it is always the same.
no subject
Date: 2013-02-09 05:44 pm (UTC)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92fm1HdORYY
Currently, when they sing that part, the audience does a response. Is a sort of “uh”, as if they were blushing by that revelation. Again, around 3:10.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YBum55SwAg
Then you remember, that the old fans sometimes were called “older brothers”, and you remember that the little sister fantasy (sexual but not mature, friendly and close but not unknown as a stranger) is really popular in that community. And somehow, the entire song meaning has changed (again, maybe is implicit in the lyrics). Your choice is to join the chorus or get pissed off.
What I mean, is that doing that, alienating everybody that doesn’t act in their way, they can self-mythologize themselves, be the “real” fans (of course, if everybody else run away), decide in how things should be done*, and mainly, prioritize their narratives over other people (there was a market study about the potential of the otaku consumer, and with a very broad range of things you could be an otaku (I should mention how things that girls or women mostly do, like reading mobile novels weren’t considered for many people to be “real” otaku things) and the potential market was something like 3 or 4 million people. Japan’s population is around 127 million. Boy bands have been monopolizing the charts for decades, but do you get stories about them? Not, you get how this or that AKB fan bought thousands of copies of the same single. So again, those girls are nothing, look what a “real” fan is. Is really monochromatic, and the way they are usually criticized, with moralistic overtones and all that, is part of the same “strange loop”. Otakus are very interested on theory written about them, so they behave in a way, that everything becomes a feedback process. Critique becomes useless and they still are being talked about. Trolling, in other terms.
*There are lots of small groups where the manager or the composer is an otaku. Some of them are quite great. I don’t want to paint a very black or white picture, there are positive outcomes, and lots of things I dislike. For example, T-Palette Records is a record label that only releases idol music. The guy behind is a Hello! Project otaku, and also is, I think, the main guy for Tower Records in Japan. The first group they got was Negicco, a local idol group that has been going around for nearly a decade almost never playing out of their city (promoting onions). The main composer of Negicco, also was a fan of the group that decided to show his (very nice) music to them. And right is when people are starting to become aware of them.
no subject
Date: 2013-02-09 06:34 pm (UTC)I actually love those charts. You're assuming that people react the same way to those charts in how they judge the girls, but at the same time there are those who like that Lovetan and Paruru are pretty much terrible at handshakes, so much that they made jokes about Paruru, Milky, and Daasu's manners in that sense during one of the best MCs during this year's Request Hour concert. Just because we make those charts doesn't mean that we take it all seriously.
Oshimen thing, eh. Call me MD.
Dismissing Yuka? It's not all dismissal. Her forgoing Tokyo Dome makes sense for her own career, but it's also a legitimate sign that she's ready to leave this franchise.
The self-performance aspect interests me, because the dynamics associated with Big-Name Fans and how fan communities relate to each other, and the external world, can exist somewhat independently of the subjects of the fandom.
With the advent of geek-chic, there are various romantizations of the nerd/geek/otaku, in different forms. There are old-guard who oppose the mainstreaming of fandom and want to return to more isolated experiences, while self-proclaimed otaku idols reclaim previously derogatory labels like otaku, hentai, lolicon, and hikkikomori, turning them into endearing joke traits. So you get BNFs preening under the attention and deciding to act as epitomies of stereotypical otaku behavior, both the good and the bad. As more "normal" people enter fandom territories and try to draw lines of appropriate behavior, ("we won't be those kind of otaku") they react by shoving the undesirable aspects into the newcomers' faces. Whether new fans succumb to fandom dictates or are driven away because of it, it reinforces the pride of the otaku troll acting out.
no subject
Date: 2013-02-10 02:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-10 07:55 pm (UTC)Momoiro certainly share a pattern in image terms (even the same songwriters) with groups from that same company (some came before, some are related, some not). A really “clean” image. Maybe the group has transcended those origins, or that image is mediated in a different way, in another context, for another audience. But certainly is there. Maybe they don’t do gravure, but they also appear on those same magazines. Just not doing gravure, just being goofy, or funny, being “themselves”. Even if they are a lot of fun, and people love them because of that, or their energy, or how they act, I think, as women, their public image is very narrow. I mean, Reni this year is 20 years old, Kanako is 19. Do they really have the chance to act in another way? Express themselves in different ways than how they are perceived by the mainstream public or how their fans expect them to behave? In that way is how I think “purity” is omnipresent for the group, as something they can leave behind. Maybe is not on their contract, but certainly there are people that want them to be in that way without changes.
As a side commentary, after watching how many minor idols are almost starving to death, or their income is so dismal, I see gravure as any other source of income. Most likely by their choices or the chances they had, they are not going to get good jobs. Having an idol life is sort of the same chain of mini-jobs and exploitation, but having fans, sort of having fun with what you do. That is the reason why I’m very picky about fans acting and behaving with the privilege of consumers and rating their “emotional work” (their emotions, intimacy, bodies,lifes) to use Arlie Russell Hochschild’s terminology as mere disposable products. I think is a complete lack of empathy for the human beings you say you are a fan of. And also, doesn’t make the world a much better place.