Producer, Felix Matschke, Bob Moore, Kyoko Miyake; cinematographer, Van Royko; editor, Anna Price. London, UK: Brakeless Ltd.; Quebec: EyeSteelFilm, 2017. 1 online resource (88 mins.) In Japanese, with English subtitles. URL https://kyokomiyake.com/#/tokyo-idols/.
Japanese idols are young, (mostly) female pop stars known for their childlike cuteness, their can-do attitude, their colourful costumes, and their relentlessly cheerful songs. By far the most famous and successful idol group is AKB48, which is composed of over a hundred members who move up and down in ranking in annual fan elections. As the documentary Tokyo Idols points out, Japan may still be in the midst of a recession, but the idol industry is booming: it’s worth an estimated US$1 billion annually. A disproportionately large number of hardcore idol fans are adult men, many of whom spend huge amounts of money to connect regularly with idols through “handshake” meet-and-greet events.
Tokyo Idols follows 19-year-old Rio, who seems to be on the brink of idol stardom, and a group of male fans in their thirties and forties known as the Rio Brothers, as well as numerous other idol groups and fans. We watch Rio and the other idol groups perform, interact with fans online and in person, and struggle to get wider exposure in an over-saturated market. We also watch the Rio Brothers and other fan groups passionately support their favoured idols: chanting and performing carefully choreographed movements at their live events, collecting endless pictures of themselves posing with the idols, and frequently insisting that there is nothing “impure” about men in their forties obsessing over teenage (and occasionally pre-pubescent) girls.
At 88 minutes long, Tokyo Idols does not have time to delve deeply into the many questions—about gender norms, ethics, and otaku culture, to name a few—that the idol industry raises. Still, it does accomplish something that’s rare when it comes to mainstream international reporting on Japanese popular culture: it moves beyond stereotypes and “Japan is weird” narratives in an attempt to understand what motivates some men to devote themselves to fantasy relationships with teenage girls, and what motivates so many young women to become idols. (To be clear, there are female idol fans, but the film gives them almost no screen time.) It’s also refreshing to see this reporting being done by a female director (Kyoko Miyake) with a unique perspective: Miyake was born in Japan but moved abroad at 26, meaning that she grew up surrounded by idol culture but has also had the chance to examine it from a distance.
Tokyo Idols doesn’t exactly let adult male idol fans off the hook for their deeply problematic obsessions, but it does at least try to present some of them as three-dimensional human beings. For Kōji, a 43-year-old salaryman who says that 19-year-old idol Rio has “inspired” him to live a better life, idol fandom seems to be a way to bond with other men and to imagine possibilities beyond a life full of disappointment. For him, Rio’s concerts, in which he dances with other men and chants support for her, appear to be one of his few sources of genuine joy. That isn’t to say that Rio’s good looks and her sexual availability have nothing to do with his obsession, but the appeal seems to be more about an idea of a person than an actual person.
Just in case audiences start to get comfortable with idol-fan relationships, though, the film challenges them by focusing on steadily younger women: first a group of younger teenage idols called Harajuku Story, and then, in a deeply unsettling segment, an idol group called Amore Carina, which features girls as young as ten. At a meet-and-greet, they’re dwarfed by the adult men who surround them to intently shake their hands. One man comments that he likes these idols the best because they’re not “fully developed,” and that if they were older they “wouldn’t interest” him. When two of the men say that they think of these girls as their “good friends,” the director, who is mostly invisible in the documentary, snaps back, “That’s a big age gap for friends.” The men look mildly abashed. “It’s not that big of an age gap,” they say.
At some points Tokyo Idols hints that female idols—at least the ones old enough to make their own decisions—have more agency than we give them credit for. They’re working within a system that they know is rigged, and they’re using the only tools available to them. The idol industry may be exploiting their youth and perceived sexual purity, but the women are just as happy to exploit lonely older men who feel like failures, or self-identified otaku who feel ostracized from mainstream society, telling them that they’re special in exchange for hundreds of dollars a month in “supporter” expenses. The women aren’t presented as malicious or manipulative, just practical.
Ultimately, Tokyo Idols shows us that idol culture is built on paradoxes. It succeeds by making fans pay for human connection through meet-and-greets, but these events are rigidly structured—there’s a timer and a collection of staff to physically move the fans if they linger too long. Both idols and fans exhibit a great deal of self-awareness about the fact that their “relationship” is a fantasy, and yet both work very hard to maintain the illusion that it’s real. Idol-land is a space in which women are taught that their worth is entirely based on whether or not men find them appealing, but it’s a space that plenty of women are happy to enter, arguably because, as one journalist in the film points out, it’s one of the few sectors of Japanese society in which they have a great deal of power. I wish that Tokyo Idols had taken more time to examine these paradoxes in depth, but the film does serve as an excellent starting point for a more meaningful conversation about Japanese idol culture in the non-academic world.
Lindsay Nelson
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan
pp. 217-219