Idols and Society: A Short History of Japanese Female Idols

English edition note: References to “this year,” “now,” and the present are to November 2023.

Introduction: What Is an Idol?

Before discussing female idols, we must clarify what an “idol” is. A precise definition is difficult. Wikipedia describes an idol as “a person who shares their development with fans and makes a career out of their very presence.” Tsunehiro Uno wholeheartedly agrees, emphasizing that “idols do not need to sing well or be accomplished actors; fans share in that person’s growth and support their existence,” and that “as a definition, all we can say is that an idol is ‘someone popular.’” This raises several problems. Most importantly, the idea of fans sharing in someone’s growth seems difficult to measure, especially when it comes to contemporary actors whose careers rest on their acting. Haruka Ayase and Yui Aragaki, for example, also went from young actresses to successful ones. It would be untrue to say their fans did not share in that growth, yet no one considers them idols. Popularity is an even less scientific criterion: the top places in Nikkei’s celebrity power rankings invariably go to actresses such as Ayase, Aragaki, and Keiko Kitagawa, not idols such as Atsuko Maeda. Similarly, Dentsu’s rankings are led by established singers and actors such as Dreams Come True and Tomoko Yamaguchi. Clearly, idols cannot match established singers in popularity either.

I discussed this issue in my earlier article “The Transformation of Japanese Female Idols”. The identity of Japan’s female idols changed in the 1990s. Those active before then were now working as established singers or actors, while newer idols developed along lines of accessibility and growth that fans could follow and support, giving rise to Morning Musume and AKB48. Uno corroborates this, calling it the “diffusion of the idol phenomenon”: mainstream actors and singers adopted the approaches of pre-1990s idols. Seiko Matsuda and Atsuko Maeda therefore clearly occupy different ecological niches. Lumping them together under the definition “popular people” is not scientifically sound.

On this point, I found a more suitable approach to definition in Galbraith’s AKB48. The author writes:²

Idols encourage intertextual and intimate media engagement across platforms, contexts, and venues.

Broadly speaking, this means that idols encourage media interaction across platforms, settings, and venues. One fundamental characteristic of idols is their presence across the whole range of media platforms: television dramas, live performances in theaters, internet platforms such as SHOWROOM, magazine covers, commercials, even variety shows. There is nowhere you do not see them. Most importantly, they construct their identities through these cross-media interactions. As a multimedia performer, an idol always operates within a system of meanings and codes that refer to other texts. Through its capacity to activate audiences, idol intertextuality underpins Japan’s media structure. This is something conventional singers and actors do not possess. They appear on television too, but generally to promote a series or a song. The division of labor also means less overlap between non-idol singers and actors; few non-idol entertainers both perform live and appear in dramas. Television, in particular, is crucial to female idols’ success, because intimacy within domestic space defines the medium. The setting in which television is consumed makes public figures such as idols as familiar as family members. Television creates intimacy through both the quantity and the quality of images of public figures. It structures the experience of celebrity as a form of mediated voyeurism, with close-ups offering greater intimacy—an intimacy that only increases with high-definition digital broadcasting. Digital television’s clarity and detail produce lifelike images in which every facial detail can be closely read. Television allows entertainers to become much more intimate with viewers and win large numbers of fans. We can say that Japanese idols emerged through their dependence on Japan’s powerful publicity media.

1. The 1970s: Idols Make Their Debut

The birth of idols is inseparable from the spread of television in Japan. The 1964 Tokyo Olympics provided an impetus for television ownership; together with rapid postwar economic growth, this brought television into almost every home by the 1970s, marking a major transformation of Japanese media. Meanwhile, Japan experienced its most intense New Left movements in the 1960s. Inspired by the masses across the sea, people participated in movements ranging from the All-Campus Joint Struggle Councils, or Zenkyōtō, to the struggle against the US–Japan Security Treaty, only to find that they seemed unable to change anything in reality. The psychological blow to this generation was enormous. The songs written at the time by the great band Happy End, for example, had no sense of politics, no sense of belonging to any particular group or of life as it was lived—only “an empty ‘landscape’ devoid of any positive meaning.” The “political age” ended at this point too. People turned from “changing the world” to “changing themselves,” marking the arrival of consumer society. As politics withdrew from the center of life, a new culture had to fill the gap, especially a culture associated with consumerism. Takuro Yoshida, who had once sung folk songs criticizing society, began writing hits to make money. Songs began celebrating the value of the self.

Yoshitaka Mōri also points out that Japan entered the age of “post-Fordism” in the late 1960s and early 1970s. On the one hand, large-scale industrial production of material goods—the secondary sector—accounted for a declining share of the economy, while employment grew in finance and other tertiary industries. On the other, a new middle class gradually emerged as Hayato Ikeda’s economic development plan drove growth. “Post-Fordism” relies on workers’ flexibility to respond to market changes. It marks the end of mass production and consumption and the beginning of production and consumption on a smaller scale, with products becoming heterogeneous rather than homogeneous. The boundary between work and “leisure” blurred, and everyday life itself became part of production. Private concerns such as the pursuit of selfhood and personal value became objects of immaterial labor. This system introduced the concepts of “personal value” and “pursuing the self”: post-Fordism seeks homogeneity in the labor force and the active display of individual creativity. Instead of the handful of superstars who had dominated society in the age of cinema, people began seeking a variety of entertainers with different personalities. This laid the intellectual groundwork for idols’ popularity.

Before 1970, the most representative female actors and singers—Kinuyo Tanaka, Setsuko Hara, and Hibari Misora, for example—relied on films or vinyl records to expand their fan bases and influence. They were generally respected as singers or actors in their own right. Recorded music lacked immediacy, while films supplied too little screen time: a film runs for at most 150 minutes, and how many films can you watch in a year? Neither could match television’s immediacy or its accumulation of images. A television drama gives you 45 minutes per episode and eleven episodes per series. Watch one series in each of the year’s four seasons and you have 45 × 11 × 4 minutes of screen time—and that is before counting variety shows. This gave rise to the first generation of female idols. Their emphasis was not on accomplished acting or exceptional singing technique, but on how they looked on television. Visual appeal was the selling point of their pop music. Representative of this generation was Saori Minami, the “original idol,” who debuted in 1971. Known as a “teen idol,” Minami not only sang hits such as “17-sai” (“Seventeen”) but also appeared frequently in the media; wherever she went, fans followed. She displayed the defining characteristics of an idol: frequent media appearances; a distinctive look—dark skin and long black hair—with an appealing youthfulness; and the ability to mobilize fans on a scale that made television networks and talent agencies a fortune. This also meant, of course, that these female idols had to sign with major talent agencies after their debuts, since the agencies exercised considerable influence over the allocation of television resources. Nor were major agencies pursuing higher artistic standards. They allowed major stars to be poor actors, poor singers, and unskilled dancers. When deciding which newcomers to promote, they did not place particular weight on innate or acquired abilities—a powerful voice, accomplished dancing, acting skills—because these were only indirectly related to the most profitable work: corporate promotion. When a singer is simply a singer, promotional work may damage their reputation, especially when an endorsement conflicts with the substance of their work. Their appeal is also confined to the smaller audience directly interested in their music or cultural output rather than their fame itself. Talented performers are usually not the “pretty faces” that satisfy a broad audience.

Also in 1971, the television program Star Tanjō! (“Birth of a Star!”) began producing idols. It was a talent competition in which contestants performed for producers for a chance at the big time; the show held out the prospect of becoming an idol. This was a consequence of television’s enormous expansion. In 1972, thirteen-year-old Momoe Yamaguchi applied to appear on the program by postcard. Although she finished second, she still made her debut as a professional idol. Yamaguchi leaned toward a “bad-girl” style. She debuted at just thirteen—and was only twenty-one when she retired—but her mature appearance and low voice contrasted sharply with her age, making her immensely popular. Akai Kizuna (“Red Bonds”), one of the “Red” television dramas in which she starred, achieved ratings of 29.5 percent, the second-highest ever for a drama with a female lead. She, Masako Mori, and Junko Sakurada were known as the “Flower Trio”: all three debuted in 1973, were the same age, and were in their final year of junior high school.

Yamaguchi’s rise brought an entire industry into being to produce, promote, and profit from idols. By 1975, an estimated seven hundred new idols had debuted in Japan, prompting talk of an “idol boom.” Apart from Minami and Yamaguchi, Pink Lady and Candies were the two most representative idol groups. Both had countless fans at their peaks and achieved enormous record sales. Pink Lady was one of very few acts to take the singles, album, and total sales-revenue crowns in the same year, an indication of just how sensational their success was. Compared with Yamaguchi, these pioneering idols still placed greater emphasis on being singers. Their composers were still folk singers such as Shinji Tanimura or composers of conventional Japanese popular song, or kayōkyoku, such as Ryudo Uzaki. Their careers were exceptionally short. Among the Flower Trio, for example, Yamaguchi and Sakurada both chose to retire after marriage: this was the fate of female idols in that era. Only in recent years have 1970s idols who became mothers, such as Ran Ito of Candies, been able to make new debuts—even appearing on this year’s Kōhaku Uta Gassen, the year-end Red and White Song Battle.

At the same time, however, singers associated with Japan’s New Music movement, notably Yumi Matsutoya, were beginning their careers. They would go on to change the style of these idols and of Japanese music as a whole. It was they who created the city pop of the 1980s.

2. The 1980s: Idols Come of Age and the Boom Takes Hold

The 1980s were the familiar age of the bubble economy. I will not rehearse here what the bubble economy was or what it was like. This was Japan’s golden age. The country came close to realizing its dream of “one hundred million, all middle class.” Economic growth was rapid, businesses were thriving, and Japanese people were extraordinarily optimistic about the future. Yet because culture lagged behind, Japan during the bubble economy remained fundamentally “poor,” perpetuating the postwar era’s “fundamental poverty.” The joy people took in frantically buying imported goods offered only an illusory abundance, foreshadowing the bleak atmosphere of Japanese society in the 1990s.

This was also a period of rapid growth for the female-idol industry. Television was now unquestionably the dominant medium, and television idols proliferated. Seiko Matsuda, who debuted in 1980, marked the beginning of this development and was one of the greatest female idols of the decade. Compared with Momoe Yamaguchi’s “grown-up act”—incidentally, the two did appear together—Matsuda presented a sunny, cheerful image, with an exceptionally clear, high voice, alongside an “affected” little-girl manner. In those empty, moneyed 1980s, her style was enormously popular, and for a time she was Japan’s most popular idol. Following Matsuda came Kyoko Koizumi and Hiroko Yakushimaru, who debuted in 1982. Their defining feature was their head-on opposition: Koizumi followed Matsuda’s path as a television idol, while Kadokawa Pictures launched Yakushimaru as a film idol to compete with her. Both became immensely popular in Japan. Yakushimaru accumulated seven film successes in starring roles, an all-time record among actresses. Of the female idols who debuted in 1982, however, the most famous was undoubtedly Akina Nakamori. Her style was closer to Yamaguchi’s than to Matsuda’s, expressing a wealth of emotion through a low voice. At her peak she went head-to-head with Matsuda in what became known as the “Seiko–Akina War.”

What made these four female idols revolutionary was that their songs largely broke away from kayōkyoku and moved toward city pop, or New Music. Leading New Music figures Yumi Matsutoya and Mariya Takeuchi supplied songs for Matsuda, Yakushimaru, and Nakamori. The great New Music lyricist Takashi Matsumoto, along with Yasushi Akimoto, who would later shake up all of Japan, wrote lyrics for Matsuda, Yakushimaru, and Koizumi. Arrangers such as Masataka Matsutoya also took part. We can say that with this generation, J-pop definitively became the core of idol music. These songs’ lyrics concentrated on shallow recollections and expressions of everyday feelings such as love. In that sense, they continued the songs of the 1970s, but there were changes too, particularly in composition and arrangement. The piano, an instrument embodying urban life, and electronic instruments fashionable in Europe became especially important. These idols also had longer careers than their predecessors, making career transformation something they had to consider. From 1982 onward, for example, Matsuda showed a more mature side through “Akai Sweet Pea” (“Red Sweet Pea”) and began attracting female fans; she later became a singer-songwriter who wrote her own music and lyrics. Nakamori also changed direction after the “gold-screen incident,”³ while Koizumi became a fully fledged mainstream actress, even winning the Kinema Junpo Best Actress award.

Beyond these representative idols, the bubble years also changed the way Japanese people viewed the world. The admiration for America that had prevailed in the early postwar years became a new state of mind, in which inside and outside, self and other, Japan and America, even the national and the global, fell out of alignment. Japanese culture began importing Western styles and exotic elements on a large scale. But this was not simply a matter of borrowing: it was a displacement of identity. Japanese people treated “Japan” as an other, viewing their own style through the eyes of foreign tourists and constructing a fictional self to fill an empty culture. The clearest example was Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), which exported Asian culture abroad and used its Western fame as a springboard at home, turning itself into an imported product. Meanwhile, discos, which had been enormously popular in Europe and America, arrived in Japan. This suggested a new strategy for Japanese idols and Japanese music more broadly: conquer the disco. The most representative idol in this respect was unquestionably Yoko Oginome. Her songs had a pronounced dance-music style, ideal for Japanese youths who imagined themselves foreigners to dance to all night. Disco and dance music profoundly changed the harmonies of Japanese music. The 4536 “royal road progression”—IV–V–iii–vi—derived from European dance music, became Japan’s dominant chord progression; dance music also influenced the Komuro progression. Later AKB48 signature songs such as “Heavy Rotation” and “Koisuru Fortune Cookie” (“Fortune Cookie in Love”) continued this disco style. What distinguishes these songs is that almost anyone gets carried away singing them: they quickly draw people into the atmosphere and allow them to project themselves onto the original singer. This requires composers to put considerable work into melody and arrangement.

One anomaly among the idols emerging in the mid-1980s was Onyanko Club, produced by Yasushi Akimoto. It is generally regarded as a precursor to AKB48, and in some respects there is genuine continuity: exploiting scandals and blatantly pandering to men, for example. Onyanko Club’s signature song “Sailor Fuku o Nugasanaide” (“Don’t Take Off My Sailor Uniform”) played on Tomoko Takabe’s scandal. AKB48 also inherited elements of the model in which fans follow and support members’ growth, along with the large-group structure in which members “graduate,” or leave the group. But the greatest difference is that AKB48 is a live idol group, sustained by handshake events and theater performances, whereas Onyanko Club was a television idol group. It drew more heavily on the hugely popular television production styles of its day, such as showing the “backstage” of variety programs and group life—a technique that bubble-era television, especially Fuji TV, used to attract viewers. Onyanko Club’s idols were presented as “real” people whose life experiences were closer to viewers’ than those of stars. A successful member won fans’ support not through talent but through diligence and perseverance. Beginning with an “amateur” image, the group deliberately showed viewers the backstage process of shaping individual personas, positioning fans as “participants in the making of idols.” Equally important, the way members were positioned made Onyanko Club a showcase where idols could be compared with one another and seek support during their brief moments in the spotlight. The model encouraged fans to organize around particular members. Many of these fans were adult men, intensifying this member-centered dynamic. The proliferation of members—approachable in their ordinariness, precarious in their standing, and in need of support—made Onyanko Club a collection of competing idols and fan groups. This was fundamentally different from earlier idols: it drew sales directly from affective alliances between idols and fans. Onyanko Club was phenomenally popular at its peak, but ultimately went into free fall because of internal disciplinary problems. Akimoto learned his lesson and imposed strict discipline on AKB48.

After the idols of the early 1980s, the most famous were the “Four Heavenly Kings of Idols”: Shizuka Kudo, Miho Nakayama, Yui Asaka, and Yoko Minamino. Kudo and Nakayama clearly achieved more than the other two. Kudo was an idol oriented toward singing, with Miyuki Nakajima and Tsugutoshi Goto writing lyrics and music for her. Nakayama pursued both acting and singing; early on, she was a formidable draw for television dramas, a ratings queen. Minamino and Asaka had fallen silent by the 1990s, chiefly because disputes with their agencies led to their being sidelined. Japan’s major talent agencies are extremely powerful. These conventional idols were signed to them, and once relations broke down, being put on ice was their only fate.

The Four Heavenly Kings were active in the twilight of the idol golden age. The idol ice age of the early 1990s awaited them, just as it did their contemporaries Chisato Moritaka, Wink, and other female idols.

3. The 1990s: The Idol Ice Age and Transformation

I have already discussed idols’ transformation. While that was taking place, Japanese audiences grew tired of their endless activity, lost interest in “idols,” and longed for something more “real.” Idols began to fall on hard times. The years 1990–1993 saw a boom in bands and acts affiliated with Being, with rock bands such as B’z and ZARD occupying the top places on Japan’s Oricon charts. The 1990s also saw the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy. Yet the cultural prosperity of the bubble years continued, and Japanese recorded-music revenue reached its peak in 1998. This was because political and economic cycles are relatively short, while cultural change takes longer; the bubble economy’s cultural prosperity consequently lasted into the late 1990s. Hidetomi Tanaka points out that idol development in 1990s Japan closely coincided with economic crisis. The crisis reduced employment, and women unable to find work were more likely to become idols in search of a chance at fame. Idols also became a source of hope for them, bringing solace to their lives. SPEED, for example, became famous in 1997, just as the Asian financial crisis left Japan’s economy with a large burden of bad debt. The later success of Morning Musume and AKB48 was likewise connected to the deflationary culture of economic stagnation.

Although singer-songwriters thoroughly overshadowed singing idols in the early 1990s, idols who came from acting and modeling remained active, particularly since the decade marked the peak of television ratings and magazine print runs in Japan. Examples include the three actor-model idols known as the “3M”: Rie Miyazawa, Alisa Mizuki, and Riho Makise. Miyazawa would later become an actress respected for her craft, while Mizuki was the idol with the greatest number of television-drama starring roles of any Japanese actress. Compared with their predecessors, these three actresses were atrocious singers. One could even say that they had no signature musical works to speak of. They were already scarcely different from the actresses we know today.

Magazine sales gradually increased during the 1990s, giving rise to another kind of idol: the print model. They did not compete in the same arena as actors and singers, but made their money modeling in print magazines. They endorsed products too. In earlier Japanese advertising, endorsements depended primarily on looks rather than fame, and many products were endorsed by models rather than actors. But as the cultural-industry boom ended in the late 1990s, these print models also began to decline.

Naturally, female idols such as Hiroko Moriguchi also began turning toward variety television, influenced by male idols such as SMAP, who had started appearing on variety shows and even making them their principal activity. Later, Morning Musume’s Kei Yasuda and AKB48’s Kayo Noro and Rino Sashihara all followed this route. Their main job was to join in freewheeling conversations on television, clown around, and entertain viewers.

By the late 1990s, there were signs of an idol revival. Television networks had begun reducing the number of music programs during the decade, and many musicians found they needed to appear as guests on non-music shows to maintain their exposure. Although this ultimately benefited sales and the diversity of content in the music market, the change in taste threatened conventional singers’ business model. Bands were less suited than idol groups to media saturation and product promotion, and the idol industry adopted a more “real” style to win audiences back. As Being-affiliated acts declined, singers and idols associated with Tetsuya Komuro rose. Here, idols were more often entertainers whose primary work was singing and dancing.

But 1990s idols were already different from their predecessors. The decade’s most representative idols were SPEED; a broader definition could also include Namie Amuro and MAX. These were all female idols from Okinawa, and they worked almost exclusively as singers rather than both acting and singing like the female idols of the 1980s. Amuro, who was regarded as an idol, owed much of her success to how cool her female fans found her. In other words, she relied more on her personal history and appearance than on her music to attract fans. The Okinawan wave represented by Amuro also reflected Japanese fantasies about the power of postwar America, particularly in Okinawa, a region with US military bases and exceptionally close ties to America. The success of the four-member SPEED also involved something of Yamaguchi’s childhood performance of maturity: they sang intense songs while still visibly children. Ayumi Hamasaki, on the other hand, was a singer-songwriter but more closely resembled an idol in the usual sense. She had acted early in her career and was a fashion leader at her peak, becoming hugely popular through the combined effects of multiple media beyond music. This stood in stark contrast to Hikaru Utada, who almost never gave concerts and seldom appeared on television.

Ryoko Hirosue, who followed slightly after Hamasaki, was the last classic female idol to become famous as a solo performer. She was accomplished in both acting and singing, with well-balanced abilities. For Uno, she just about qualifies as a representative of those 1990s performers who “broke out of television music shows and subsequently developed into actresses.” The “Hirosue whirlwind” she stirred up in the late 1990s brought her immense popularity and name recognition.

4. The 2000s: The Internet and the Mainstreaming of Otaku

The arrival of Windows 95 in Japan in 1995 marked the beginning of the country’s internet age. By the twenty-first century, internet users accounted for more than half the population. The internet’s greatest effect on Japan was to produce vastly more information than before. Everyone became an information producer, multiplying aesthetic choices and making it increasingly difficult for idols to achieve the broad national popularity they once enjoyed. This actually contributed to the decline of idols who worked as print models. As their appeal to the wider public diminished, advertisers seeking to maintain revenue chose actors with large numbers of die-hard fans instead. Magazines also preferred popular actors or AKB48 idols because they could substantially increase sales, steadily taking work away from gravure idols, or glamour models. Photobooks featuring Nogizaka46 idols can easily sell hundreds of thousands of copies. What fans care about is the idol herself, not what she actually looks like or whether she is suited to modeling.

Another important change in the 2000s was the growing emphasis on live performance. After recorded-music revenue peaked in 1998, revenue from recorded music, chiefly CDs, declined year after year and has now stabilized at around ¥300 billion. Meanwhile, live-performance revenue has gradually increased. At the root of this shift is the fact that everyone in the internet age disseminates information. This fundamentally changed how ordinary people participate in music. Audiences no longer see themselves as recipients but as performers on the stage, and consequently want to participate in performances just as those onstage do. This greatly expanded the live-music market.

Another noteworthy development in the twenty-first century is the gradual movement of otaku into the social mainstream. During the booming bubble economy of the 1980s, otaku were still a marginal group, in contrast to the centrally positioned Shibuya-kei style. Tsutomu Miyazaki’s serial abduction and murder of young girls, in particular, tarnished their image. For a long time, otaku remained stuck in the positions “Society is wrong, so I will not participate” and “Participating in a society that is wrong would hurt others, so I will do nothing.” But with the twenty-first century, what could be called the essential structure of the postmodern condition finally became visible. In the 1990s it had been obscured by the shocks that rendered earlier systems ineffective. Confronted with “little narratives” that could not be grounded in “grand narratives” such as history or the nation—and were, at bottom, groundless—people could only choose among them, take them as their core values, and shoulder responsibility themselves. In the early to mid-2000s, the dominant popular tendency was toward works conveying a sense of having to survive, with a certain “decisionist” inclination: “Stay shut away at home and you’ll be killed—so struggle to survive by your own efforts alone!” The self-absorbed sekaikei manga of the past were gradually replaced by nichijōkei, or everyday-life manga.⁴ Everyday-life manga emphasized the ideal of the “here and now”: otaku retained their rejection of grand narratives and focus on their own lives, but also actively joined in social life. They grew in number and gradually became a mainstream presence. This enormous group would become AKB48’s core audience and the foundation for its takeoff.

Idols were rapidly becoming ideal role models for young Japanese women. This had been an aspect of idol culture since the 1970s, but now seemed more intensive than before. A career as an idol had become something one could readily embark on, even receiving support from higher education institutions. All this accelerated the industry’s expansion in the twenty-first century. Performers such as Perfume and Hikari Mitsushima, for example, initially debuted as idols, and underground idols were highly active in Tokyo and elsewhere. Among these singers, the most representative were AKB48 and Morning Musume.

Morning Musume debuted during the idol revival and economic stagnation of the late 1990s, produced by Tsunku, lead singer of Sharam Q. The group drew on the experience of earlier Japanese idols. On the one hand, its early members sold their CDs on the street, bringing idols closer to ordinary people and winning substantial grassroots support. Morning Musume generated word of mouth through different forms of contact with audiences; interactions with fans and appeals for support were central to its story. On the other hand, its image of “small, nonthreatening girls” appealed to men psychologically wounded by the economic and social turmoil of the 1990s. It exemplified the soothing, or “healing,” idol. Its songs cheered society on, telling not “its own story” but “society’s story,” and won popularity across age groups. Like Onyanko Club, Morning Musume also captured viewers’ interest by showing the entire audition process on television while revealing only half of what happened behind the scenes.

AKB48 can be called the most emblematic development in the history of Japanese idols. The three pillars of AKB48 as “idols you can meet” are theater performances, handshake events, and the Senbatsu General Election, in which fans vote to choose a performing lineup. Ultimately, the group relies on “affective economics / consumption of emotional connection” to bring solace to Akihabara’s otaku, making money by building affective alliances between idols and fans.

AKB48 gives regular performances at its theater in Akihabara. Although the theater is small and pillars obstruct the view, its architecture helps form an audience of fans precisely because only a small number can attend each live performance. When someone comes onstage, the audience is very close: the front row is just two meters away. The theater’s two large pillars block some spectators’ views but also encourage them to focus on the idols who appear within their limited sightlines. In short, the theater is an intimate space that ensures a powerful sense of co-presence. Being face-to-face with an idol during a performance can produce an illusory experience of “love at first sight.” The theater songs Akimoto writes for AKB48 ensure that popular members have brief solo or duet passages, giving fans opportunities to call out their idols’ names and show support. The onstage chat segments, or “Talk,” also provide important opportunities for audiences to get to know the idols better and shout responses during the conversation. AKB48’s theater performances are themselves a result of the growing audience preference for experiencing performances live. Fans can participate extensively and experience what it is like to be performers. Nor is the theater model without historical precedent: there is the Takarazuka Revue and Japan’s stage tradition. Takarazuka’s model sought to attract middle- and upper-class audiences living along the Hankyu railway lines who enjoyed cultural activities such as opera. Its theater initially targeted only this small section of the public, seeking to make them loyal core customers and secure a regular audience who attended stage performances from time to time. AKB48, by contrast, targeted Akihabara’s otaku. These otaku initially disliked idols because they were too close to mainstream culture. But as they kept attending performances, commenting online, and generating buzz, AKB48 consolidated its die-hard fan base while steadily expanding its influence. The theater’s low ticket prices also made it affordable for otaku to attend, even during an economic downturn.

Alongside theater performances, handshake events are another very important component of the affective economy. Cuteness is fundamental to the Japanese idol’s appearance. A phenomenon of media and consumer culture, it emerged in the same decade as idols, who have become role models for many girls and women. The idol’s symbolic function is to show how to mature successfully as a member of society, shaping a “publicly adorable” persona. Magazines and television present idols as ideals for the young people of their time. They also convey information about lifestyles and fashion. As models, singers, dancers, celebrities, and actors, idols embody the ideal of a creative, communicative subject who works well with others and wins their love and support. Within the affective economy, cute idols can produce “a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion—even a sense of connectedness or community.”⁵ On this basis, AKB48’s revolutionary model is that “direct contact and concerts are the key to CD sales; direct experience is the main offering, and CDs and songs are its tools.” In other words, what AKB48 principally offers is not music but direct experience, accessible by purchasing a CD. This ultimately produced the strategy of selling CDs bundled with handshake tickets. Onyanko Club and other idols anticipated this practice decades earlier, but AKB48 has done more than any other group to systematize the relationship between CDs and premium experiences—or the purchase of a physical object to gain an opportunity for co-presence and connection. Yuki Kashiwagi has even said in her own livestreams that handshake sales matter more than anything else within AKB48, and management uses those results to decide which young members to promote.

As AKB48 began moving into mainstream media on a large scale in 2009, growing fan numbers made it increasingly difficult to attend handshake events and theater performances. This intensified fans’ frustration at being unable to see their idols. To strengthen their sense of participation in idol activities, Akimoto created the General Election system. Building on the idea of “the member I support,” he told fans to step forward and decide for themselves who would take AKB48’s featured “center” position, becoming its most popular and visible member, and which members would join the selected lineup around her. The election marked a major recognition of fans’ affection, attachment, and activity as sources of value. If voting is love, fans who love their idols more will buy more CDs so they can cast more votes and express that love. In turn, idols strive to win their fans’ affection. This is affective consumption, something rational economics cannot measure. AKB48 idols resemble club hosts who sell fantasies of romantic relationships; fans buy CDs and vote so that their efforts will be recognized. This affective economy is embedded in service and entertainment businesses such as Japan’s host clubs. Thus the General Election not only resolved AKB48’s crisis of losing fans, but also gave a considerable boost to its soaring sales. Its highest-selling singles have all been releases bundled with election ballots, including “Sayonara Crawl” (“Goodbye Crawl”), “Labrador Retriever,” and “Teacher Teacher.”

AKB48’s model of growth in public, supported by fans, is another much-praised feature. With the rise of affective economics, audiences’ desire for authenticity in performance has also changed. Amateurism has become a valuable quality in contemporary popular music. As fans invest emotionally in performers, they begin to see themselves as idols’ co-producers; through accessibility and mediocrity, idols draw closer to their audiences. The author traces this phenomenon to the growth of amateur performance brought about by the rise of karaoke in the 1970s. Idols such as AKB48’s members are about the process of “becoming.” It begins with a radical idea: performers who are not fully developed or ready should be put onstage to fail, struggle under the audience’s scrutiny, and grow with its support. This represents the emergence of a new symbiotic relationship between performers and audiences. Many female idols graduate at around nineteen, and their careers are closely tied to becoming sexually attractive women. In selecting women and young women without professional experience, AKB48 aims to ensure what Akimoto describes as “roughness” in personality and appearance. An idol’s rough-edged personality and unpolished performance are crucial to her perceived authenticity, unlike the pop diva’s pursuit of flawlessness in every aspect of performance, from hair and makeup to singing and dancing. Placed in the context of everyday Japanese life, AKB48’s ordinariness becomes a version of the archetypal “girl next door.” Its members are ordinary but more “real,” while professional artists are spectacular but “unapproachable.” AKB48 attracts audiences because of their desire for authenticity, as part of the turn toward ordinary people reflected in reality television and talent competitions.

AKB48 is the culmination of a line running from Onyanko Club through Morning Musume. It took accessibility as far as it could go. Standing in its path was the talent-agency–television system that dominates Japan’s entertainment industry.

5. The 2010s: The Idol Warring States Period and the Unshakable Old System

Television ratings began falling in the 2010s, a fact evident in the ratings for Japanese dramas. Yet television remained Japan’s foremost medium. In 2011, 89 percent of people watched television every day; it was unquestionably the country’s most important everyday mass medium. AKB48 began entering television in the late 2000s, launching programs such as Weekly AKB and AKBINGO! It also frequently promoted its songs on long-established music programs such as Music Station and increased its visibility by appearing alongside traditional male television idols such as SMAP and Arashi. AKB48 reached its own peak in 2011–2012, beating Arashi to the sales-revenue crown two years running. (Note: Arashi took most of the annual revenue crowns between 2012 and 2016.) It also won the Japan Record Award in consecutive years with “Flying Get” and “Manatsu no Sounds Good!” (“Midsummer Sounds Good!”). At the same time, Uno criticized the group for falling back into the mold of “media idols” rather than continuing along the new path of “live idols,” whose relationship with fans was built through live encounters. I think his criticism is one-sided. The central issue is that AKB48’s theater is so small that it can hardly accommodate more casual fans, let alone publicize individual members’ appeal. Had the group missed out on television, Japan’s largest medium, at that moment in 2011, it could scarcely have achieved what it actually did. Uno also overlooks something: AKB48 was founded by Akimoto in partnership with Dentsu, Japan’s largest advertising company. As a television-centered business, Dentsu’s involvement made it inevitable that AKB48 would not forgo television resources. At the group’s peak, its members appeared in numerous commercials. That was Dentsu’s power, and it gave them influence across Japan. Even now, the growing size of the live-performance market does not mean that singers capable of drawing huge live audiences—Johnny’s idols, for example—neglect television. On the contrary, they work both fronts. AKB48 has never abandoned live performance either. Its regular theater performances and handshake events prove it.

In 2012, Atsuko Maeda, AKB48’s undisputed ace, graduated, dealing the group an enormous blow. Her departure cost it many die-hard fans, and the following year it lost the annual sales-revenue crown. Although it sold more CDs, sales of the expensive theater editions declined. The years 2009–2012 were the era of Maeda versus Yuko Oshima; 2013–2017 were the era of Rino Sashihara versus Mayu Watanabe. Compared with the earlier era, the next generation’s greatest challenge was fan fatigue. The group consequently appeared more often on television and variety shows to maintain its appeal beyond the committed fan base. As Zhao Dingxin points out in his analysis of democracy, a voting system with a large number of participants makes each voter feel that their vote is inconsequential. This discourages people from voting and ultimately lowers turnout. Japan’s current political system displays this tendency, with young people showing little enthusiasm for voting. Uno has also raised this issue.

Female groups that stood opposite AKB48 in the 2010s included the 46 groups, or Sakamichi groups, a collaboration between Akimoto and Sony, and the Stardust groups, backed by the major agency Stardust Promotion. Compared with the “unorthodox” approach of the 48 groups, the 46 and Stardust groups were actually more conventional in their publicity and promotion. The 46 groups do hold handshake events, but unlike AKB48 they do not give regular theater performances, nor do they need to hold on to a particular constituency of fans. Their style therefore maintains more distance from fans than AKB48’s does, making them more like “media idols.” Among the three Sakamichi groups, Nogizaka46 long cultivated an image of “refined young ladies from privileged backgrounds,” wearing long skirts rather than AKB48’s preferred miniskirts or even swimsuits. This won it more female fans and gave it greater influence over women’s fashion than AKB48—it sold more photobooks too. Behind this were Sony’s resources and Akimoto’s focused production work, which improved the quality of Nogizaka46’s music. Keyakizaka46 followed the same promotional route but developed a different style: rebellion. Its undisputed ace, Yurina Hirate, made a powerful impression by expressing determined resistance to oppression in the songs, and the group’s live performances were striking. This set it on a distinctive path, but one that could not lead into the mainstream in the way Nogizaka46’s had. Even if it wanted to sing ordinary J-pop, the label of rebellion was not so easily removed. The group finally ended in an implosion—Hirate’s departure. It was, one could say, a great experiment.

The Stardust groups are even closer to traditional idols than the Sakamichi groups are, with Momoiro Clover the most representative example. Like Perfume, Momoiro Clover styles itself as “artists” rather than “idols.” The key to becoming an artist is producing music with which listeners can “identify,” apparently conferring higher standing than ordinary idols possess and allowing access to places such as established music festivals, which traditional idols cannot enter. Backed by the long-established Stardust Promotion, home to major stars such as Takako Tokiwa and Keiko Kitagawa, the group could draw extensively on media resources to join the ranks of mainstream musicians. Although it makes its money from touring—it is one of only two female idol groups to have completed a dome tour—this is a result of media resources, rather than live performances establishing a fan base as they did for AKB48.

Beyond the Sakamichi and Stardust groups were female idol groups such as Idoling!!! and Tokyo Girls’ Style, as well as the long-established Hello! Project family, which includes Morning Musume. The number of female idol groups exploded in the 2010s. In Tokyo, their numbers surged from around fifty in 2008 to more than 350 in 2015, and the renowned Tokyo Idol Festival, or TIF, also developed. This period, with female groups set against Johnny’s male groups such as Arashi, SMAP, and Kanjani Eight, became known as the “idol Warring States period”—an era of proliferating rival groups. Female idols flourished, and male and female idol groups occupied almost all the top places on the Oricon charts. Singer-songwriters such as Gen Hoshino could only shift their efforts to streaming. Yet this period did not shake idols’ media-centered character. The old talent-agency–television system remained powerful. Without the necessary resources, a female idol group’s ceiling was plain to see.

6. The 2020s: The End of the Idol Warring States Period, the Pandemic, and Streaming

This is the fourth year of the 2020s, so I cannot predict what will happen in the future. But on the basis of present realities, I can identify a few trends:

1. The pandemic hit the handshake business. Idol groups such as AKB48 and Nogizaka46, which rely on handshakes to sell their songs, no longer achieve million-selling singles, and sales have still not recovered. This marks the end of the idol Warring States period—what kind of Warring States period is it when girl groups can’t sell records?

2. Streaming revenue continues to eat into physical-music revenue. In 2022, it was already close to half the revenue from physical releases, compared with less than a third in 2018. Today’s hottest act, YOASOBI, is a textbook streaming band. The physical market has become Johnny’s territory.

3. The old system is beginning to come under pressure. Johnny’s has broken up because of the Johnny Kitagawa scandal, while actors such as Ko Shibasaki, Masahiro Nakai, and Yui Aragaki have done well after becoming independent of their agencies. “Do entertainers really need talent agencies to succeed?” is a question worth exploring. As television ratings decline, online viewing platforms such as TVer become more popular, and social media grow more important in Japan, the relationship between talent agencies and television networks is no longer so secure.

4. A greater variety of idols is targeting more diverse audiences. The three female groups produced by Rino Sashihara, for example, are still media idols, but their audience has become female. An estimated 70 percent of concertgoers for =LOVE, one of the three, are women. How idols can develop further potential audiences is a subject that will have to be studied. Since the 1970s, music production has gradually become more differentiated to target distinct audiences. Idol production now needs to differentiate its styles further to respond to increasingly diverse tastes.

And so on.

7. Conclusion

Japan’s female-idol industry emerged in the 1970s, a product of the post-Fordist era, political disengagement, and the spread of television into households across the country. Female idols reached their greatest flourishing in the 1980s, notably filling the cultural emptiness of the bubble years. In the 1990s, the bubble’s collapse and audience fatigue plunged idols into an ice age for a time. But in the late 1990s, as the economy deteriorated and unemployment rose, people needed greater psychological consolation. Idols’ presentation of a more authentic side also met audience demand, and they made a comeback. By then, they were different from the idols of the 1970s and 1980s: “more ordinary, less elevated” figures, and less accomplished as multimedia performers. In the 2000s, the mainstreaming of otaku culture, the growth of live performance, and the spread of the internet brought success to Morning Musume and AKB48. AKB48’s concept of “idols you can meet,” in particular, was seen as a possible way to break through the postwar entertainment system. Yet in the 2010s, most idols returned to the traditional condition of media idols, even as female idols reached another peak in what became known as the “idol Warring States period.” In the 2020s, that period has ended, and female idols are heading in a more uncertain direction.