The Underdogs' Revenge ― The Growth Story of Morning Musume

In the previous episode, we saw the ‘winter era’ in which the very word idol lost its luster ― amid the band boom, the rise of J-POP, and the independent image of women symbolized by Namie Amuro. Handing a finished star down from above ― that conventional method no longer reached the cooled eyes of consumers.

Then came TV Tokyo’s late-night program ‘ASAYAN’. It was a show that presented the audition process for young people aiming to become singers or models like a documentary ― not only the glory of passing, but also the tears of rejection and the setbacks. Viewers watched from the other side of the screen as amateurs who were still nobodies struggled and grew.

From that program came a group that would rewrite the history of idols in Japan. A collective that turned not perfection but the very state of being unfinished into its charm ― that was Morning Musume.

An Impossible Task Handed to the Rejected

The story begins with defeat.

In 1997, the ‘Sharan Q Rock Vocalist Audition’ on ‘ASAYAN’, where Tsunku, the vocalist of Sharan Q, served as a judge, is said to have drawn around 9,900 applicants. The one who won the crown was Michiyo Heike. But the program prepared another path for the five who were eliminated in the final round ― Yuko Nakazawa, Aya Ishiguro, Kaori Iida, Natsumi Abe, and Asuka Fukuda.

The condition was strange even in hindsight. Sell 50,000 indie CDs, by your own hands, in five days. If you cannot do it, there will be no major debut ― that is what they were reportedly told. The five who should have lost bowed their heads on midwinter streets and handed CDs, one by one, to strangers passing by. Not the polished figure of professionals, but the figure of amateurs clinging on desperately, was broadcast just as it was. Before they knew it, viewers were cheering for these girls whose victory or defeat was uncertain, gripping their hands in suspense.

And the five achieved the quota. Together with the very story of the underdogs’ revenge, they won their debut. The group name Morning Musume was reportedly coined by Tsunku. This was the starting point of Morning Musume. The fact that the story had begun before the debut was decisively different from idols up to then.

The unfinished striving earnestly to grow ― it was the precise inversion of the old idol image that handed perfection down from above.

Tsunku, the Designer

Behind this story lay the design of a single musician. Tsunku of Sharan Q was the group’s creator and at the same time became the sound producer who wrote the lyrics and composed nearly all of its subsequent songs. A professional bandsman seriously built up the format of the idol.

The greatest invention Tsunku brought was the mechanism of a group that is never fixed. Members rotate. Through new auditions, juniors join, and elders ‘graduate’. The group continues for years like a single living creature, renewing its members. Rather than being consumed and finished the moment it is complete, its structure keeps the story alive by constantly changing.

The rotation design also had a side that imposed hierarchy and the tension of replacement on members. If a newly joined junior suddenly stood at the center, the senior would have to yield that seat. It was not a mechanism of light alone. But that very tension generated an inexhaustible interest among the viewers outside the screen ― ‘who will grow next?’ The idol became an endless serial drama, repeating graduation and admission.

‘LOVE Machine’ and a National Group

The turning point came in 1999.

Due to the poor sales of the previous release, the group was on the brink of survival, several members have recounted in later years. It was the edge of a cliff: if the next one did not sell, they would disband. There, the just-joined Maki Goto ― whom Tsunku reportedly praised as ‘a talent who comes once in ten years’ ― served as center in line with that talent, and the seventh single ‘LOVE Machine’ was released.

Released in September 1999, this song became the group’s first million-seller and is said to remain Morning Musume’s best-selling song to this day. In a period when the mood of the world had sunk amid the long recession after the bubble burst, it sang out with a bottomlessly bright dance number that Japan’s future was bright. That groundless euphoria, on the contrary, fit perfectly into the gaps of the times. Perhaps, in a sunken era, people were seeking brightness. The same year, they appeared for the first time on NHK’s Kohaku Uta Gassen ― the girls who had been hand-selling CDs on the streets stood, in just a few years, on the national year-end stage. From rejection to a national group ― that journey itself was the greatest drama.

What Morning Musume proved was that an idol could be a being that shows not a finished product but the very process of growing. Fans overlaid themselves on the figure of still-clumsy girls advancing one step at a time, and participated in the story through the act of cheering. The living room, which should have cooled, recovered its fever for idols once more.

And this discovery of ‘sharing the process’ would eventually be pushed to its extreme in another form. Not only showing the figure of growing, but fans choosing the ending of that story with their own hands and meeting the person right up close ― such an idol would come to rewrite the next era. Let us move the story on to another revolution, one that began from a small theater in Akihabara.