BY SPECIAL GUEST BLOGGER JONELLE PATRICK
At Japan Expo 2009, with hair.
Early one morning at the end of January, Minami Minegishi – a popular 20-year-old member of the all-girl “idol” group AKB48 – is caught sneaking out of the apartment of her boyfriend (a member of all-boy “idol” group Generations) thinking a flu mask is enough to disguise herself (ahahaha).Caught red-handed, she shaves her head, makes a video apologizing to her fans, and uploads it to YouTube. [It’s been taken down, but clips are available.] Posing against an Alcatraz-like gray background, she tearfully states,
“It was a thoughtless act and I was completely lacking self-awareness as a senior member of AKB48. Although I didn’t think I would be forgiven for this, the first thought that went through my head was ‘I don’t want to leave AKB48.’ This is a place where I’ve blossomed together with my dear group mates, and it’s unimaginable to even think about leaving the group.Everything I did is entirely my fault. I am so sorry.”
I blew it.
As punishment, she’s demoted by AKB48’s promoter to the trainee group, effectively flunking her out of college and sending her back to kindergarten. This is a fairly shocking move, because it’s usually the fans who decide who gets moved up or down the ladder, not the promoter.
AKB48 actually has eighty-eight members, split between Team A, Team K, Team B and the kenkyūsei (trainee) group. The A team gets the most visibility, B team the least, and the kenkyūsei team least of all. A unique aspect of AKB48’s popularity is that an idol has a real stake in pleasing her followers, because it’s the fans who keep her voted into the top group, featured front and center on TV, and can get her the ultimate privilege: recording a hit single. The once-a-year fan votes are what usually make or break a girl’s career.
So, keeping in mind the strange alternative universe in which Ms Minegishi lives, how does this video score on the Apology-O-Meter?
First of all, in Japan, shaving your head isn’t usually a sign of mea culpa, mea culpa – it’s what’s done when someone goes through the ceremony of becoming a Buddhist priest or nun. Many ordinary people do this as a sign of devotion, not because they intend to enter a monastery. It’s a demonstration that someone is renouncing attachment to things of this world. Interpreted in this light, the video is saying “I’ll never do this again, cross my heart and hope to die,” not “I’m filled with deepest remorse for my sins.”
It was also reported in the English language press that the idol had been forced to shave her head and publicly apologize by her management, like some latter-day Hester Prynne. But the fact is, she did it herself without management knowledge or approval, hoping that a groundswell of pity from her fans would convince her promoter not to punish her by replacing her with one of the sixty-eight girls eager to take her place.
It was unfortunate.
Because of course, that’s exactly what happened. Although she was a star, she knew she was utterly replaceable. The key talent of girls chosen to be in AKB48 is, strangely enough, not to be talented. Their appeal is based on being the nothing-special girl-next-door who makes it big. Most of them have crooked teeth. Can’t sing or dance any better than the average kid in a middle school production of Fiddler On The Roof. Typically, their first stage appearances in the “trainee” group end in tears, as they trip on the stairs and sing off key. That’s why their fans love them. They’re imperfect. And as the promoter whips a girl into shape with singing, dancing and acting lessons, the fans upvote her in the annual polling, believing it’s their personal support that’s turning the ugly duckling into a swan. It goes without saying that it’s the idol’s job to continue to be accessible to her fans and act like the girl-next-door, even after she’s winking from every billboard looming over Shibuya Crossing. Getting caught sleeping with a fellow celebrity totally destroys her value to the idolmaker and her fans.
And she knew it.
That happened.
I think even the most junior SorryWatcher can spot that video as a publicity stunt designed to tug at fans’ heartstrings to get around the fact that the newly-bald offender knew full well she was violating the contract she signed and would be kicked to the curb if caught. She wasn’t sorry she violated her contract – she was sorry she got caught. But the video might still do what it was really made for, which was to excite enough fan sympathy to rocket her back to her place among the stars in the next fan vote.
An interesting sidebar to this incident is the widely differing reactions to it.
General public reaction in Japan was: She signed a contract and broke it. She deserves to be demoted.
Painting by Hugues Merle, showing Hester Prynne meditating her next upload.
The reaction from outside Japan was much stronger: It’s a human rights violation! It should be illegal for a promoter to hold his adult performers to a contract saying they’ll never have a relationship! And it’s discrimination – even though the boyfriend is also in an idol group and under the same contractual obligation not to enter into a relationship, he didn’t even get a slap on the wrist! But unlike the diverting tempest in a teacup of an idol offering up a faux apology when she gets caught with her hand in the cookie jar, apologies for big societal issues like discrimination and institutionalized oppression of workers will probably never be featured on SorryWatch. Because it’s unlikely anybody in Japan is going to apologize for those.
(Jonelle Patrick lives in Tokyo and San Francisco. She speaks and reads Japanese well enough to get into trouble everywhere from maid cafés to hot spring resorts for dogs. When she’s not writing the next book in her Only In Tokyo mystery series, she’s rabbiting on about plastic food and How To Glue Your Eyelids on her Only In Japan blog, or discovering new destinations for her website, The Tokyo Guide I Wish I’d Had. The third book in her Tokyo police detective series, set in the world of the Japanese music industry’s “idol factories,” is due out from Penguin/InterMix in September.)
