The Birth of the Idol — The Day a Word Crossed the Sea

‘My favorite idol,’ we say without a second thought. Someone on the other side of the screen, someone singing inside it, someone waiting at the end of a handshake-event line. Yet the word ‘idol’ found its place in the Japanese language not so very long ago. Trace it back, and it was neither English nor Japanese in origin but a word that crossed the sea carrying the sound of French. In the 1960s, in the midst of Japan’s high economic growth, something dazzling that was neither singer nor movie star — something later called an ‘icon’ — quietly began to appear. The day the word idol arrived. From that story, a long journey begins.

The Idol Was Once an ‘Object of Worship’

The English word idol, traced back, is said to reach all the way to Greek, to a word meaning ‘image’ or ‘phantom.’ In time it came to refer to something people revered and prayed to — an object of worship. The heart that reveres what is not divine as if it were. A being that gathers fervor and longing all to itself. This old nuance seems to cast some shadow even on today’s image of the idol.

Still, it was not as though the English idol was carried into Japan and took root as it was. Behind the spread of the Japanese word ‘idol’ as a term for a young, attractive entertainer, it is said, lay a single foreign film: a coming-of-age picture that arrived from France. Words often cross borders aboard unexpected vehicles. The word idol, too, came to Japan from beyond the silver screen.

Until then, the objects of people’s longing in Japan had been called ‘stars,’ ‘singers,’ or ‘actors.’ The great stars of cinema, the giants of the music world. They stood on distant heights, beings to be looked up to. But after the postwar recovery, as society began to sprint toward prosperity in the 1960s, the shape of what people longed for slowly began to change. Rather than unreachable giants, something closer, more life-sized — a new vessel for longing was being prepared, still without a name.

A Word Carried by a Single French Film

The film said to have given that vessel its name is the 1964 French picture released in Japan as ‘Aidoru o Sagase.’ The original title was a different phrase, but the word ‘idol’ was placed in the Japanese title, and it was enjoyed at the time as a lively musical film for young audiences. The title song of the same name, sung by the star Sylvie Vartan, also became popular, and the sound of ‘idol’ was etched into Japan’s younger generation along with the film.

Spurred by this film, the Japanese mass media is said to have begun using the word ‘idol’ as a term for a new kind of star popular among young people. Not the weighty ‘master’ or ‘great star,’ but a being who was young, approachable, and seemed to breathe the same air of the same era. It must have been a word that fit perfectly the contours of that new appeal. It was the moment a single word that had crossed the sea quietly took root in the landscape of Japanese entertainment.

Yet just because the word had spread did not mean its meaning solidified at once. In the 1960s, what ‘idol’ referred to was still vague, and people received it differently. A singer? An actor? Or something else entirely? The word arrived first, and its content would gradually be filled in by the young stars yet to come.

The Gosanke — The Prototype of the Icon Appears

The first generation to take on that ‘content,’ often named in this context, was the three called the Gosanke — Yukio Hashi, Kazuo Funaki, and Teruhiko Saijo. In the Japan of high economic growth, they appeared one after another and won enormous popularity as young singers. ‘Koko Sannensei,’ sung by Kazuo Funaki in 1963, mirrored a life-sized youth in a school uniform and is said to have struck a chord with many young people. Like ‘Itsudemo Yume o,’ which Yukio Hashi sang together with Sayuri Yoshinaga, their songs were themselves the very hope of an age moving from recovery toward growth.

The name Gosanke was originally an old word denoting rank and lineage, but there was something new in using it as an affectionate term binding three young stars together. Not one solitary giant, but three side by side. Fans chose their own favorite, talked about them, and cheered as if in friendly competition. Whom you came to love became an expression of who you were — the bud of an enjoyment that would lead to later idol culture had already begun to show its face in this period.

And so in the 1960s, the word ‘idol’ that had crossed the sea met the young stars who began to fill it, and Japan’s icon culture drew its faint outline. Yet the popularity of this era still spread mainly through records, radio, and movie theaters. When television reached every household and the living room became the place where the nation’s gaze gathered, the idol would come to be ‘manufactured’ at an entirely new speed and scale. A device for mass-producing stars — the age of television was just around the corner.