Pleasure Principled

Revealingly Articulate Idol Worship

If ever the idol industry could come up with a perfect Valentine for their American fans, this is it. Morning Musume will be performing for the first time in the United States for a non-Japanese audience. And lemme just point out: I called it over a year ago. Okay okay, I got the details wrong - but I did bring up the possibility of Morning Musume at Anime Expo or Otakon, and that Hello! Project was priming to break into the U.S. otaku market. Of course, I wasn’t the only one to think this, but don’t rain on my parade of “I told you so”. I knew this was going to happen - that is, I sorta pulled the idea out of my ass and now look what happened, much much later.

Clearly, Morning Musume coming to Anime Expo 2009 is a momentous occasion for American fans. That said, the nature of its importance may be given short shrift. The most obvious and least interesting aspect is being able to see Morning Musume live, something many American fans figured would require a trip across the Pacific to ever happen. That progress is quite exciting, and I’m positive it’ll be a concert many of us will remember for years upon years afterwards. So yeah, that alone could be worth crossing the country for. Maybe. But the immediate thrill of the live show, the promise of (a highly relative) instant gratification, may keep some people from seeing how much of a watershed event this can become, how much can hinge on this for our particular community of J-bloggers.

Part of why I say all this is a personal bias: as I’ve made plain repeatedly, I lost interest in Morning Musume sometime last year. Actually, it may have been the year before that. I still hold some fondness for certain members - Aika, Koha, Sayu - but that’s less to do with their contribution to the group as to their eyecandy-liciousness. I’m hopeful, though: maybe the prospect of seeing the current MM line-up will revive my interests and force me to re-evaluate them. Maybe I’ll do an about-face and discover some previously unseen qualities in the recent albums and singles and PVs. At the very least, I’m expecting a very lively and dynamic show - and an audience whose passion will match the performers.

And that is what I actually find most exciting about the event: the audience. And by the audience, I mean: us. American wotadom. This can be a big moment for us, a gathering unlike any before it. In short, it can be our Wota Woodstock. (You can insert a brown acid joke here, if you like.)

American wotadom has been waiting a very long time for Morning Musume to perform outside of Asia - and now that it’s happening, many of us are saying we’re going to make it to see this momentous occasion. I have no idea how big this is going to be, but I suspect that this will be the largest gathering of wota to take place in America. (Which is fitting, since AX is the largest gathering of otaku in America.) If even half of the people I talked to who’re saying they’re definitely going to be there (myself included) show up, it will be quite a gathering. And that’s just one contingent. I’m sure Hello! Online will be well represented, as well as MM-BBS and others. If anything, this may be less like Woodstock and more like The Warriors.

Many overseas wota live out the fandom part of their lives almost exclusively online. We don’t have the luxury of going to nearby stores to pick up merchandise, or assuming there are numerous other fans nearby just waiting to hang out and enthuse over the latest PVs. When Wotacon 2008 was held last October, it was just five members of Intl Wota hanging out and visiting New York City together. Despite some nasty weather conditions, it was a great bonding experience; personally, I felt more committed to the long-range plans put in place years earlier. (Also, the incriminating photos and videos during Wotacon will prove useful in the future.) It was worth it just to see maiZe teach my daughter Haruna “Yuke Yuke Monkey Dance”, a song I personally detest but which now has a special place in my heart due to the efforts of a single Canadian.

So am I expecting one big kumbaya moment at AX, where all the wota are united in their love of Morning Musume and set aside their  differences? Hell no. (Okay, maybe if MM perform “Dekai Uchuu Ni Ai Ga Aru”. I’ll hold hands and wave if that happens.) Internet drama will likely bleed into the real world, and Lord knows the rambunctious personalities we enjoy online will be given full play in person. I’m positive tempers will be tested and tolerances stretched. (And I’ll probably be testing a lot of people’s stretching tolerances, if you know what I mean.)

But I find myself eagerly anticipating that as well, if only to make the interactions with my fellow wota feel that much more real, that much more consequential. Whatever the case, face-to-face time with like-minded folks can mean a world of difference - especially if the objects of worship are present as well. New friends can become unlikely allies online, while old buddies on the interwebs can become truer friends in person. It can happen over a shared beer or a shared trip to the men’s room or a shared shower. You just never know.

And with any luck, enough people from IW will be present that plans can be made and carried out to see us through to Cake Day 2010 and beyond. The changes in the year from Cake Day 2008 to Cake Day 2009 have already been phenomenal. Once we take a true measure of each other in person, who knows where it can go in the months and years to follow? 

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There is another aspect of MM+AX that should be considered carefully: the fan base of America is not only being put to the test among ourselves, but by the business side of the idol industry. Their test can be summed up with a single question: “Is your money worth our time?” This isn’t just happening at the con, with Morning Musume present and their merchandise hopefully flooding the vendor floor - there’s also JapanFiles.com which will be carrying MM’s music as well as related merchandise.

Western Jrock fans have already proven their purchasing power, if the waves of bands touring the United States and Europe is any indication. The likes of Dir en Grey and The Gazette are not traveling thousand of miles to take in the sights - they’re building fan bases and assuring themselves as diverse a revenue stream as possible. In their cases, it’s good business. And that should also apply for the likes of Buono! and AKB48 and Perfume.

The spending power of idol fans is well-known among fans - I mean, we pay ridiculously high prices for all kinds of merchandise and are willing to show off our profligacy with photos and lovingly detailed reviews. Well, it’s time to make that even more obvious. We need to have MM’s management go, “Damn, these American fans spend as foolishly as our fans at home. We’ve got to make it easier for them to spend even more for our merchandise.” Though if anything, I fear that the vendors at Anime Expo will underestimate the popularity of Morning Musume and continue to focus on Naruto headbands and cheap Last Note wallets instead of Koha photobooks and JunJun life-size body pillows. But MM’s prominence as the first guest of honors this year should hopefully emphasize just how big this can be, retail-wise.

The last possible consequence of MM+AX I see is actually more of a hope: that there is a blogosphere-wide re-evaluation of how we cover our idols. Little by little, Japanese musicians and idols are becoming aware of people writing about them overseas. Up to now, many of us just assumed that people who live in a whole other country and who read a whole other language won’t bother to find out what fans in America would think of them. If anything, they may be astonished at the idea that they had American fans at all. In turn, that may have given some of us - not all of us, but some - a greater sense of license, that we can say whatever we want because we don’t matter to them. Their feelings can’t be hurt if they can’t read what we say. Now it seems more likely they’ll be looking up our websites, seeing what some of us write… and be offended.

I’m not advocating that bloggers be nicer or less critical or more considerate if they don’t want to be. Certainly, I have no intention to be any less vulgar when my muse strikes me as such. But I do think that J-bloggers’ increasing awareness that their subjects may also be their readers can be a source of both soul-searching and self-empowerment. It may make someone think twice about the public declarations they make. “Do I really want Tsugunaga Momoko to know I’m an obsessive pedo-lover with a penchant for bad poetry?” “Am I embarassed if Takahashi Ai reads that I think she has no personality?” “Do I want Mitsui Aika to know I think she has the best rack in the current Momusu line-up?”

I’m sure it’ll be a little different when you’re on a handshake event line and getting ready to meet them. What do you tell them so that they remember you? “Koha, you’re so wonderful, I’ve compared you to a lobotomy victim on my website!” Or how about, “I photoshopped your face on Maria Ozawa screencaps and it looked hawt!” 

All that said, they’re still idols and we’re still wota and there’s still something of a chasm between their lives and ours. That’s how it should be. And even if they’re reading what we write now, the importance of it remains questionable: after all, I’m sure there’s a great deal more passion and praise and vulgarity and invective among the domestic fans of Japanese idols on the web. We’re still taking in junk culture from another shore. It is still very much an imported product with the air of the esoteric to it.

But maybe, just maybe, we can finally factor into the greater conversation in the J-music and J-idol industry between fans and musicians, between wota and idols. What we think and what we want may be taken into some consideration - our existence as a part of the great geinou ecosystem may finally be acknowledged, as miniscule as it is. If so, this will have less to do with respect for our opinions than the leverage of our buying power - but of course, opinions and buying power often go hand-in-hand. And the blogosphere is the closest thing to an active punditry for idols.

Up to now, wotadom in the West have inhabited a wilderness - cut off from J-idol civilization, largely unacknowledged because we were unknowns, a Conradian whiteness on the map. With any luck, the MM+AX event means we’re no longer inhabiting an uncharted wilderness, but will now be percveived as a far-distant outpost populated by a bunch of Kurtzes. We’ll not only get news from civilization, but make them care a little about what’s going on out in our corner of the world  (and blogosphere) as well. The wota home and hearth may still be far away, but at least we know there’ll be people there who keep us in mind. And you know, that comfort alone could be worth crossing the country for.