Before holding forth on poetry and thought, remember that certain things begin in wonder and awe.
“He is the living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the world; and this not as a kindled lamp only, but rather as a natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven; a flowing light-fountain …”1
“You must risk death … as in writing poetry or bullfighting … Danger has its reason: it compels you to achieve perfect precision. The slightest slip will send you falling, to death or permanent injury—and this precision will make your dance beautiful.”2
Taking Zombie Land Saga as my starting point, I will discuss idols in the narrow sense of Japanese idol entertainment, then look beyond it for a glimpse of the distinction between the idol as elite figure or hero and the idol as mass-cultural figure or star.3
Those of you who switch “wives” with the anime schedule—Mazi on Thursday, Rikka on Sunday—
may be further than you think from the guys who spend eight- or nine-hour shifts thinking about collectible idol photos and grinding for high scores.
Even without studying theories of idol culture in cultural sociology, communication studies, or other disciplines, it is easy to imagine commentators taking opposing sides and going on the attack. After all, the idol occupies a peculiar position between sacred image and simulacrum. We onlookers can neither stand outside it nor enter very deeply into it: should we see it as a delirious feast for those who consume to excess under the dominion of the culture industry, or as a lamp in an empty world for those thrown into it? Many scholars have ceased worrying about whether mass-culture idols are good or bad, turning instead to the phenomena surrounding idol culture. Is there a perspective from which we might approach the question again?
Zombie Land Saga gave this modest essay its occasion. From its depiction of how Japanese idols behave and live to its portrayal of live performances, the series bears various hallmarks of idol anime. As the reach and influence of this well-made, much-discussed idol anime change, more and more anime viewers want to understand idol culture. An introductory essay such as this may be of some help.
Ⅰ
As the stage lights dim and the excitement slowly cools, what holds us spellbound: the captivating figure gracefully departing, or the happy hours shared with thousands under one roof? This is a question of perfection and imperfection, documentary observation and design, stability and flux, fiction and reality.
In Japan’s idol music scene in 1985, Star Tanjō! still had a name; Yoru no Hit Studio and The Best Ten had yet to go off the air; the Checkers’ popularity had not declined much. Seiko Matsuda was newly married, and Akina Nakamori still held the record as the youngest Japan Record Award winner. Miho Nakayama had appeared in a television drama and won the Japan Record Awards’ Best New Artist prize; Kyoko Koizumi had just sung for Doraemon: Nobita’s Great Adventure into the Underworld. The idols of the celebrated class of ’82 were nowhere near washed up. Yui Asaka, fresh out of junior high, came to Tokyo to pursue her dream; Yoko Minamino appeared in Sukeban Deka at the end of the year …
Yet it was in this year that the kind of idol I want to discuss—neither a professional singer nor a star actor—first took shape. Yasushi Akimoto launched Yūyake Nyan Nyan on Fuji TV. Its name drew on a smoking scandal involving an underage member of a children’s-song group hugely popular in 1983, together with the show’s sunset broadcast slot. Early on, it recruited high-school girls as assistant hosts. Several fairly permissive rounds of auditions did indeed produce a line-up of uneven abilities. Somehow these girls, with virtually no relevant background, became idols, and their two brilliant years really did leave a mark on idol history. Individual members’ popularity rose and fell; popular group members came and went. What may have been the earliest true idol group of the kind we are discussing finally disbanded amid soured relations with the television station, infighting among its leading idols, frequent scandals in Shūkan Bunshun that damaged its natural, innocent image, and the public’s waning sense of novelty. But those dreaming of a glamorous career in entertainment had glimpsed a new path: one on which even professionals with no training could qualify to become idols—where it was possible, where they had a chance.
In the 1990s, enthusiasm for idols cooled along with Japan’s economy. Yet even in this difficult period, often called the idol “ice age,” groups such as SMAP and Morning Musume still found success. If the excitement of fifty thousand records sold in five days might be explained by comparison with packed American cinemas during the Depression, SMAP’s differences from their predecessors Hikaru GENJI nevertheless reveal much about Heisei-era idols. Rather than striving, like Shōwa-era idols, to present themselves in a state of perfection and display increasingly accomplished talents, they invited fans to accompany them and witness once-unknown performers growing (onstage). Heisei idols’ competitive advantage lay in their documentary appeal. Fans did not simply appreciate the carefully designed performances presented to them; they also enjoyed the idols’ relatively unembellished, less accomplished everyday moments. Nothing was as fixed as before. Idols were no exception: their public image could change at any moment. The assumptions established in this era of documentary idol presentation would themselves soon be overturned. (Of course, this realism and documentary quality are relative.)
Then came the more familiar era of idol groups rising and falling. Being more recent and amply documented, it needs no further account here. The public occasionally encounters the term idol otaku in negative news stories; handshake-event tickets, collectible photo prints, and CDs matter more than television ratings. Looking back over the past decade or so from the “hyper idol” age, after the “idol warring states” period, some have fallen in love with idols for their inspiring spirit, passion, rebelliousness, and other qualities; others have left after discerning standardized signs beneath their public personas. For every fan delighted to watch an inexperienced girl become a polished, seasoned idol who meets the profession’s demands, another is dismayed to see an idol held back or unwillingly “graduate”—leave her group. Objectively speaking, the moral scolds’ tired complaint that Japanese idols do nothing but pander to their audience through sex appeal and hormones is one-sided. Yet Japanese idols can hardly be said to transcend the broader category of mass-culture idols altogether. Saga, a work that professes to try to “convey a way of life as an idol,” also gives us a glimpse of this distinctive group’s appeal.
Is the rise of mass-culture idols nothing more than a convergence of the mob’s desires? That hardly explains why those supposedly “desperate for release” would spend a decade or more taking such a roundabout route. Countless more convenient, less expensive ways of satisfying desire exist: why spend so much time and money on idols? And if steadfast devotion to elite idols is said to mean reverence for some spiritual quality they possess, elites and heroes often have more peculiarities about them—and those same spiritual qualities may well appear in mass-culture idols. The hopes invested in mass-culture idols can also give old friends a reason to meet, or sustain a fervent wish to help someone else’s dream come true. And, to be a little facetious, Cartier-Bresson’s photograph of Camus in a trench coat really does make his novels more attractive.
After Kafka’s painstaking description of a strange execution machine in a remote place, after Dostoevsky’s Mikhail repents before Zosima and confesses publicly, only for no one to believe him, we can hardly avoid recognizing our awkward predicament. The problem is not an empty spiritual realm left behind by God’s departure, as morality and religion gradually lose their former force. In fact, man is dead: we no longer have the capacity to believe. When we are liberated—like the face in the sand about to be erased from the shore in the final section of The Order of Things, like the last generation in One Hundred Years of Solitude confronting parchments swept up by the hurricane—we often choose to cling to idols to resist fear and the absurd, rather than seek the meaning of existence.
Ⅱ
When Zombie Land Saga began airing, the scene in its first episode where the protagonist steps outside and is knocked flying by a vehicle went viral even more widely than Granblue Fantasy fans’ bait-and-switch pranks.4 The original meaning of “absurd” is musically out of tune, contrary to logic and reason. By that original definition, a story about zombies striving to become idols is already absurd enough. She declares that a heart-pounding, laughter-filled everyday life awaits her; then come twenty seconds of close-ups, from multiple angles, of her being hit by a vehicle. Such violent contrasts and abrupt shifts in style are routine in this series.
Viewers, too, work hard at analyzing the series as a mystery, just as they previously did with Revue Starlight, applying meticulous logic to a work that at first glance seems utterly unreasonable. This is quite in keeping with the style the series itself conveys, and we are happy to regard it as an excellent, preposterous comedy. In other words, viewed from the perspective of the Theatre of the Absurd, this absurdity does not arise because we live like Chaplin in Modern Times, nor does it have anything to do with being denied entry to heaven because we do not believe in God. The sense of absurdity begins when we question the meaning of a life repeated day after day, a life following a predetermined path. Reflection yields this answer: there is no such thing as meaning, and no transcendent being capable of conferring it. We have forgotten the way home and can find no way forward. We have neither memories of a happy home nor hopes of a dreamlike future. Time no longer has an order; existence no longer has a purpose. We live for tomorrow simply because the day after is still more doubtful.
Quality aside, several idol anime this year have championed an entirely different idea: we ought to live with a jewel-bright flame burning ceaselessly in our hearts, going through fire and water as though peril were nothing to attain that idol radiance. Having once witnessed that magical splendor is enough—why withdraw from the crowd to search in anguish and wallow in self-pity? As the opening theme sings, “Even withered, running with all our might is life to us.”5 We all know that much writing about sex concerns neither eroticism nor desire—the sections on Kafka in Testaments Betrayed, for instance? So it should not be difficult to understand that behind Saga’s absurdity and hysteria lies a celebration and release of exuberant vitality. Compared with subtle philosophizing, rigorous reason, or warming doses of inspirational reassurance, perhaps this series offers a consolation we can feel more directly: it asks for no fuss, insists on no great depth, and wants only to portray a way of life as an idol, only to give us a genuine laugh.
To my mind, the “zombie” identity assigned to Saga’s protagonists is a device for creating absurdity through identity and motivation, one that needs no special emphasis. It is like Lurie, the lecturer in Disgrace, who, after being dismissed from his university, still cannot put aside his plan to write an opera called Byron in Italy, even while working in the countryside. As we intuitively understand it, all the benefits of becoming an idol—being noticed, being loved—amount, for “zombies,” for the walking dead, to that question: “For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself …?”6 The search for a “right” identity and meaning after identities no longer fit, are lost, or become unstable—and the drama this produces (for instance, the conflict between identities before death and present roles as idols, the clash between older and newer conceptions of idols, and the difference between the living and the dead themselves)—really does give this idol story a special charm.
Ⅲ
An analogy with music makes the point easy to grasp. When discussing popular and serious music, we often unthinkingly attribute their differences to a difference in level, like a prophet dismissing foreign gods as wholly human fabrications. Yet only careful examination and rational analysis can help us understand the respective domains, origins, and relations of following elites or heroes and loving mass-culture idols. From an onlooker’s cursory perspective, a hero or elite figure is not necessarily nobler in character than a singer. Nor is it clear that the much-derided frenzy of consumption ranks below the defense of a hero’s authority. Standardization is also an important characteristic of mass-culture idols as products of the culture industry.
Idols’ qualities and lives can hardly be called narrow or monotonous. Yet when I set these vivid, full-bodied celebrity images beside certain people known only through a few lines in biographies or even memoirs, I sometimes still feel that much of what the former display really does contain an element of design. Take the pairing of “Lost My Pieces” with the scene in episode 19 of Toradora!: such exquisite design really can move me. But one thought always sticks in my throat: the creators want to move me, and that aim comes before anything else. Among the elaborate public personas of mass-culture idols, there are bound to be some that suit my tastes. Personalities, likes and dislikes, well-known memes—all are laid out online. Even the pickiest customer can eat their fill. After all, that was the point.
Let me restate what this standardization in mass-culture idols consists of: traits exist to be displayed, and individual traits are loosely connected to the overall image. The difference between portrait busts exchanged by friends or sold by street vendors and sacred images in a cathedral lies not only in craftsmanship or the effort their makers expend. The former, which emphasize “exhibition value,” lack the latter’s irreproducibility and authenticity. To take a clumsy example: suppose we want to create an idol whose selling point is cuteness. We might give her a fondness for lemons, pink, and stuffed toys. Whether she actually likes lemons or strawberries is immaterial to this process. Indeed, adding or subtracting such traits usually makes little difference to the idol’s public image. In the traits of mass-culture idols, it is exceedingly difficult to find originality or genuinely vivid individual characteristics. Everything is filtered and controlled by the company, serving the construction of a predetermined outward image. Reading Roland Barthes on the ugly professional wrestler who works so hard to sustain his ugly image, and on the contrast between professional wrestling and boxing, may also help make sense of this paragraph. (None of this is a denunciation of idols, nor is my purpose to summon some elite idol back from the dead.)
Perhaps we can think about mass-culture idols this way. We gladly accept these people who live as celebrities, sparing neither money nor effort, willing to argue and quarrel with others. We enjoy their growth, their success, even their departure. As the saying “idols belong to everyone” suggests, we may not love indiscriminately, but it is difficult for us to remain faithful to the same beloved for very long. We free them from worries about food and clothing and make them radiant. Yet however unique they are, however completely they enthrall us, we eventually realize that they can be manufactured. Beside legendary heroes of genuine originality, mass-culture idols cannot help but pale.
A month ago, I began this paragraph with: “The retreat of heroes and rise of idols is an event from which it is difficult to stand apart.” But on reflection, perhaps we are already “no longer beguiled by those elemental spirits of the universe.” We no longer have to obtain from behind sacred images only what we are permitted to obtain. We no longer envy the exploits of heroes like the swift-footed demigod on tumultuous battlefields. Though we may not want to admit it, discussions of justice are often less appealing than inconsequential topics. If we acknowledge that the images of the scholars, generals, and heroes we love have, to varying degrees, been shaped and directed before reaching us, perhaps we should not accuse the pandering or manufactured traits of mass-culture idols of making our culture ever more degenerate and dull. Both are products of myth constructed through a form of language. The culture industry’s painkillers, used to ease emptiness and bewilderment, should not receive greater condemnation on that account.
Let us examine the question one last time. Has the rise of mass-culture idols squeezed heroes out, sending people flocking to the hollow reputations the market creates while the doorsteps of the truly great stand more deserted than ever? Or should we examine the mechanisms behind mass-culture idols’ popularity, rather than rage like a moral scold at some innocent idol, often adrift like duckweed? Can we hold only one set of values, one aesthetic system?
What is certain is that before mass-culture idols were being produced, the masses did not turn their hearts toward these so-called heroes and sages either. Between the two, I have seen neither passive inculcation and admonition nor active participation and creation. Some opposition, some distinction, does stand here, but we cannot dismiss it simply by invoking differences in level, changes of medium, or differences in kind. I seem to have demonstrated that an impartial survey of the relevant views and arguments does not do very well at giving us an answer we find satisfying.
Man bekommt einen trocknen Hals bei dieser Lektüre und zuletzt nichts zu trinken!
Reading this leaves you parched—and at the end there is nothing to drink!7
Editor’s note: Reviewing this prose and trying to suggest changes wore me out. What you’re reading is already the revised, toned-down, “harmonized” version. If you want the original, try the other platforms.