The Idol You Can Go to Meet ― The Invention Called AKB48

In the previous episode, we saw how Morning Musume revived the idol from the winter era by showing the ‘process of growing’. Not a finished product, but a story of growing up. Fans participated in that story in the form of cheering.

But the screen called television is, however far you go, one-directional. The one you want to meet exists only on the other side of the cathode-ray tube. Longing holds together precisely because there is an unreachable distance ― that had long been the great premise of the idol.

In 2005, an attempt to break that very premise began from a room in a multi-tenant building in Akihabara, Tokyo. The concept put forward by Yasushi Akimoto, a lyricist who had handled countless idols, overturned the common sense up to then in a single phrase. Namely, ‘the idol you can go to meet’.

From a Theater with Seven Customers

AKB48 was born from the idea of having a dedicated theater where, if you went there every day, you could always meet them. The base was the ‘AKB48 Theater’, built in a building in Akihabara. In December 2005, when the first performance was held here, the audience in the seats reportedly numbered only seven.

Not stars above the clouds, but still-nameless girls singing every day on a small stage right there. Rather than showing the finished form on television, showing the midst of growing up up close in a theater. The audience visited the same place over and over, learned the members’ names, and witnessed the changes in their expressions and the improvement of their singing. The more of a regular one became, the more the sense of having watched over them accumulated. To rebuild, through closeness of distance, an idol that had held together through distance’s farness ― that was the core of this attempt. At first, this concept also resonated with the distinctive context of Akihabara, a town that was shifting from an electronics district into a holy land of subculture.

This theater, which began with seven, eventually became packed day after day, and the members expanded into a team system on the scale of dozens. By having multiple teams take turns running performances, the theater’s light kept shining without ever going out. It differed, from its very design philosophy, from conventional groups that are consumed by a small number and then end.

The General Election and Handshake Events ― Fans Move the Story

Indispensable in speaking of AKB48 is the point that it institutionalized fan participation as a mechanism.

Its symbol was the general election. The members who would stand at the center of the next single were decided by a fan vote. This event, which began in 2009, became a great annual affair, together with speeches and ballot-counting events modeled on public elections. Who would stand at the center was chosen not by the management nor the agency, but by the fans themselves. It was the idea that the side watching held the ending of the idol’s story.

Voting rights were obtained by becoming a fan club member, or in the form of being enclosed in a single CD. From here, a phenomenon that drew pros and cons was born. A single fan, for the sake of the member they supported, bought the same CD many times over, and cast that many votes ― the so-called ‘AKB commercial method’.

The term ‘AKB commercial method’, after being taken up in a 2010 newspaper article, is said to have drawn debate from both sides. The structure of a single person buying CDs in bulk was sometimes spoken of by analogy to a shareholders’ meeting, where voting power increases according to the number of shares held. Members themselves were reported to have voiced their bewilderment at being made to buy many copies of the same disc. On the other hand, for fans it was not merely an expense, but also the felt sense of ‘participation’, of pushing up the ranking of their favorite one vote at a time with their own hands. Cheering came back as a visible number. Voices that criticized, and voices that grew fervent. Light and shadow were the front and back of one and the same mechanism. That is precisely why both condemnation and praise, on their own, miss the whole of the phenomenon.

The Boom Called the Warring-States Era

AKB48’s success redrew the very map of the idol world.

Exchanging words directly with fans at handshake events, sharing the story through the general election, and showing growth at the daily theater. When this ‘you can go to meet them’ model hit, sister groups were born in various places, and new groups with changed concepts appeared one after another. In the early 2010s, that boom came to be called the ‘idol warring-states era’. In an era when television music programs were decreasing and the CD market was shrinking, this method of selling the very experience of live performance and contact was, as an industry too, one way out. Idols were no longer the possession of a handful of stars, but spread into a world with a vast base, on which countless girls stood.

It was a scene that had come quite far from the starting point of the ‘unreachable icon’ we saw in episode one. Idols changed from something to be longed for, into something to go meet, to cheer for, and to raise up together. Fans became, at the same time as being spectators, the parties to the story.

Whether this change was for the good, or went too far ― that judgment is still not settled into one. But what is certain is that AKB48 re-invented ‘the very relationship between idols and fans’. The idea of erasing distance would be deeply inherited by the later culture of underground idols and ‘oshi-katsu’ fandom.

Now, what we have seen so far has mainly been the story of female idols. But in the same era, in the world of male idols, there had reigned a single kingdom for nearly half a century. In the next episode, let us look carefully at both sides ― its light, and the shadow later brought to light.