Documentaries on Japanese Pop Culture: “Tokyo Idols”

Publisher: KimStim (USA)
Format: Region 1 DVD, NTSC, Japanese Dialogue with English Subtitles
Length: 92 minutes
Production Date: 2017
Currently in Print (as of writing): Yes

I was planning to do a new series on documentaries on Japanese pop culture, but realised I don’t quite have enough examples to make it ongoing. Instead of making it a regular feature, I have decided to cover them as I find them. First up is Kyoko Miyake’s recent doco on idol culture;

The bulk of this documentary, seemingly shot between 2014 and 2016, follows the then 19 year old Rio Hiiragi as she tries shooting towards her dream career of being a singer. In order to reach this goal, she has entered the world of independent, underground idols. Though she is quick to point out that she never wanted to be an idol, this part of her career is just to get her to her goal. Rio originally began her idol career as a member of an idol group in a themed café when she was 16. While she does have a manager of sorts, Rio is mostly a one woman show. She runs her own online shop selling various goods and CDs, has meet and greets after shows and does daily live streams to her fans. Over a relatively short period she has gained a small but very dedicated following.

We are then introduced to 43 year old Koji. Formerly a salary man, he discovered Rio and instantly became a fan. Fed up with the mediocrity of the salary man life, coupled with his fiancée leaving him and realising his life hadn’t turned out like he thought it would, astonishingly he quits his job and decides to help out promoting Rio via her passionate fan club the Rio Brothers. Koji is most certainly not your typical idol fan. He has spent most of his savings on idol related merchandise and went to 700 idol shows in a year. However as you’ll soon discover the only type of idol fan Miyake interviews is Koji’s type. As the film progresses, Rio’s career starts to gain traction; she does exceptionally well at an independent idol contest, lands a record deal with small label, a big time idol producer writes and produces a song for her, she has her first solo show, and goes on small nationwide promotional tour.

Miyake continues her odd focus on middle aged males in idol fandom, interviewing a guy who calls himself Mitacchi. In his late 50’s or older, Mitacchi discovered his idol obsession via a flyer handed to him by a waitress at his local pachinko parlour. The flyer was for a local idol themed café centred on indie underground idol group P.IDL. Going to the café, Mitacchi gets a crush on Yuka who is probably in her early 20’s. Amazingly Mitacchi dumps his girlfriend and begins to obsess on Yuka. He is constantly creating various bits of P.IDL and Yuka themed merchandise, some of which he gives her at the café. He later admits spending ¥200,000 a month on idol merchandise. The documentary shows him living in an old rundown apartment complex.

Two other young idols in small independent / underground idol acts are also briefly profiled. First is 14 year old Amu who is part of a group called Harajuku Story. Though bubbly and energetic, due to the large number of group members and the small stages they perform on, management practically forces her and other members to win the support of her fans who vote in a limited number of girls to perform. Again the focus here is on the fans. Miyake asks her if she feels weird that her fans are the same age as her father. Confused, Amu replies that her fans are of all ages, which bears out in the footage which does indeed show many of Harajuku Story’s fandom in their early 20’s or a little older. The final idol interviewed is 10 year old Yuzu who performs as part of the child group Amore Carina. Yet again Miyake implies to Yuzu’s mother that the fandom is made up of lecherous middle aged men, but she is just happy that her daughter enjoys what she is doing and is pleased she has gained some independence at such a young age (in regards to her traveling alone on public transport to get to shows).

In between these segments, Miyake interviews several people (I’m not going to call them experts on idols or pop culture, because they aren’t) in regards to idol culture. We are treated to some rather bizarre takes. Newspaper columnist Akio Nakamori attempts to make comparisons with modern day Japan to the depressed state of the United Kingdom's economy of the 1970’s, drawing links between the emergence of punk in the UK and the increased popularity of idol culture in Japan. While to a large degree hard core fans of idol culture are railing against society, this is a bit of a stretch. Another writer suggests the handshake events, popularised by idol group AKB48, are inherently sexual and that until recently handshaking was seen as sexual in Japan and oddly handshaking events inhabit a “legal grey zone” (I’m going to suggest that both statements are utter rubbish). One commentator flippantly suggests that idols should be banned because he has anecdotally heard collage aged men say they would rather follow idols instead of getting a girlfriend.

Unsurprisingly feminist author Minori Kitahara despises idol culture and suggests that “instead of connecting with women in their everyday life, the men choose girls they can dominate. Girls who are guaranteed not to challenge or hurt them. This society will stop at nothing to protect male fantasies and provide comfort for men”. I find this remark to quite off the mark in regards to most of the men interviewed for this film. But this is the preconceived notion Miyake pushes right from the beginning of the film. The doco starts with various pieces of footage of idol acts, mostly established ones that are on major labels. Over this footage is AKB48’s “Seijun Philosophy”, a slightly obscure B-side to their 2013 single “Heart Ereki”, with the lyrics “I want to protect my purity/Until I take off my school uniform”. Miyake's obsession with middle aged male fandom dominates much of the film. While in reality there is a sizable amount of fans who do fit this demographic, she constantly ignores the on camera presence of younger men in their early 20’s (who seem to make up the bulk of the audience) and surprisingly female fans, particularly the ones in Rio’s fanbase.

In a lot of ways I really despise these sorts of documentaries. In cases like this, the point is not to educate the audience, it’s to insert the filmmaker’s ideology or biases into the subject. I think it’s even worse when you’re dealing with a subject most westerners are completely unfamiliar with (despite the recent interest in the west of idol acts such as Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and Babymetal). Watching this documentary alone would lead people to believe that the idol phenomenon is a relatively recent one and is entirely comprised of female only groups and soloists with an entirely male fanbase. I completely understand that there is only a limited time within the documentary format to explore the long history of idol culture, but the film outright ignores it’s origins in the 1970’s with groups like The Candies and Pink Lady becoming superstars and the formation of modern idol fandom culture in the 1980's. Male idols marketed at an adoring female fanbase such as Johnny & Associates acts like Arashi, V6, SMAP and Hey! Say! JUMP, most of whom exploded in popularity in the mid 1990’s, are also conspicuously absent, considering how they dominate the media landscape. Miyake also ignores the burgeoning alt-idol scene which includes anti-idol acts like BiS (Brand-new idol Society), crossdresser Ladybeard’s death metal inspired Ladybaby and Deadlift Lolita groups and anonymous shoegaze inspired group ・・・・・・・・・ (pronounced “Dots”).

In promotional interviews for her film, Miyake feigns ignorance to idol culture as a whole, which seems really implausible considering how ingrained idols are in the Japanese media landscape and have been so since the 1970’s. While Miyake was born in Japan in 1976, she left to live and study in England around 2002. Now I know the popularity of idols waned in the 1990’s (but did explode in popularity again in the mid 1990’s with male idol groups such as SMAP), but there is no way in the world Miyake could have not known about them. One of the biggest groups in the 1980’s was Onyanko Club, whom would later inspire their producer and lyricist, Yasushi Akimoto, to create the infamous AKB48 in the mid 2000’s. AKB48 is ripe for criticism in this type of documentary, not just for the scandals surrounding them and the poor treatment of the women in the group, but also for the way fans are exploited in terms of acquiring tokens for handshake events and the like. However apart from the song at the opening of the film (which isn’t attributed to the group) the only criticism we see of the group is in terms of the Senbatsu Election process where fans select the group’s top eighty members for that year (the 45th Senbatsu Election in 2015 is depicted in the doco).

Miyake also tars everyone in the film with the same brush; Rio is lumped in with the other idol groups, P.IDL, Harajuku Story and Amore Carina which is absurd because Rio is a free agent while those other groups are run by mostly male management and the girls in those groups are paid employees. The fans also receive the same treatment; all are male, all don’t want girlfriends, all are fanatical about young women or girls. There’s little to no nuance, no real questioning why these men have poured all their free time and money into these groups. There’s also little time or effort to explain why these fans might reject Japanese society, especially salary man culture. Instead Miyake paints the fans as strange and possibly even paedophilic. In one telling subtitle translation, a fan of Amore Carina states that he likes the group because “Their selling point is that they’re not fully developed”, implying that he likes prepubescent girls over women. However in Japanese he actually says “kansei sarete inai”, most likely meaning the girls in the group are not as polished or as developed as professional performers. In fact this is one of the key reasons why fans like amateur groups, but obviously it did not fit Miyake’s preconceived ideas on idol fandom.

As I said before, these documentaries about subcultures, especially foreign subcultures, aren’t created to educate the public about them. They generally don’t exist to empathise with those who are involved in them or to explain their motives. They exist to suggest these subcultures are odd or even flat out immoral or repulsive. And because the general public and even western based fans of these subcultures in general aren’t all that familiar with daily Japanese life or pop culture in general, viewers of these types of documentaries can come to conclusion that Japanese society is odd and impenetrable for westerners. This is of course utter nonsense. Miyake doesn’t even take the time to explain why she has filmed some of the material. For example we see several shots passing by Akihabara Sixteen, a live venue for independent and underground idol acts where Rio performs. However this is never explained in the film.

Instead it’s lumped in with other random shots of Akihabara streets and other unconnected shots of Tokyo streetscapes. I also believe much of Rio’s story is presented out of sequence on purpose for dramatic effect. For example the film ends with Rio recording a single with a famous producer; however I believe this took place well before her 21st birthday concert. Much like Vice’s “Schoolgirls for Sale in Japan”, this doco takes a pop culture oddity from Japan (in that case idol group Kamen Joshi and their fans) and presents it as sinister and commonplace. Sure “Tokyo Idols” is hardly as sensationalistic nor does it cover the sex industry, but in many ways it feels similar. Much of the controversy and issues surrounding AKB48 are downplayed or ignored in favour of criticism of lower rung idol groups and their fans. It’s odd because you’d think Miyake would want to celebrate Rio’s independence and success against the odds. Idol culture deserves to be criticised and explored in much more nuanced and thorough detail. “Tokyo Idols” fails to do that on every level.