Pleasure Principled

Revealingly Articulate Idol Worship

Take a trip back in time with me, to the year 2000. It was a new millennium and the height of the Hello! Project juggernaut. Kago Ai was a Fourth Generation audition winner for Morning Musume. She was 12 years old. That she was the youngest member the group had ever taken went without saying; but that she would also become one of its most enduringly popular had to have been at least a little expected. Kago Ai’s marketing was persistent and pitch-perfect, capitalizing on her strengths and turning her weaknesses (youth and a certain stupidity) into strengths as well. She even had equally charismatic group mates to temper her limelight and, before anyone knew what was happening, the Super Loli had won the hearts and minds of wota everywhere.

Enough of that, let’s come back to 2009. It’s been nearly ten years. I check updates on my favorite blogs and see talk of Frances and Aiko, an H!P Taiwan unit composed of a 6-year-old and an 8-year-old. A real unit with a real artist page. The average ages of Berryz Koubou and C-ute at their debut make Kago’s debut earn little more than an eye roll. Nice Girl μ is perhaps the most interesting of all, as little information has surfaced on their ages but the circulating videos would suggest that they range anywhere from 5 to 8. I won’t say any of these girls aren’t talented. The H!P Kids especially were riveting from the beginning.

But the appreciation of idols goes three parallel ways: Novelty, Musical, and Sexual. To approach the question of how young is too young, these three modes of appreciation must be considered. Other ways exist to appreciate idols, such as Aesthetics, Fashion, Personality, Brand Loyalty, and endlessly into the fringiest of the fringe, but in the end I’ve found that any basic mode of appreciation can be classified by one of the main three.

The wota populace at large gets eerily somber when pre-pubescents are discussed, and for good reason: two of the main modes of appreciation suffer, and the stigma isn’t worth the Novelty. Is it, therefore, our responsibility as wota who are distressed by the influx of U12 idols to voice our opinion in an effort to preserve what little integrity the idol industry might have?

Wota know what they are, for the most part, at least in the circles of non-Japanese wota I virtually run with. Even if our appreciations are primarily Novelty and Musical, we must accept and attempt to curtail allegations that our hobby is nothing more than glorified, dolled-up child pornography. These are touchy terms and I am not using them lightly. I saw Frances and Aiko prance onstage for the first time and I knew I had to hash out my own conflict. Putting into words why it doesn’t feel okay is vital.

It’s not a moral superiority thing, and it’s not a selfish thing. But wota have a right to draw the line somewhere. Where that should be, though, is up to us. Let’s analyze the situation a bit before carving anything in stone, before deciding what and whom we will allow to be marketed to us as “idols”.

First there is the concept of musical appreciation. A friend starts messing with your iPod or your laptop and inevitably asks “what’s all this Japanese music?” Whatever your explanation, any further development of this topic would probably lead to your friend (unless your friend is already similarly enamored) going “they’re so young!” So what’s the excuse? You like the music. The girls have nice voices, the beats are great, the dancing is really entertaining.

Even the most seasoned and critical music lover can appreciate idols musically. I know a few of them. These people can wax technical on the simplicity or complexity of any given idol’s catalog. Vocal skills are debated, harmonies are analyzed. Quality decay is viewed with stoic disapproval, and improvement is celebrated. On the side of rhythmic and movement oriented musical appreciation, fans will rigorously train to learn the dances of their idols, and only then will they realize how difficult the choreography is. Musical appreciation opens a whole new window on the difficulty of pop as a performance medium.

You like the music, don’t you? It would be very hard to become a wota without having even a bit of fondness for some of the songs. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that musical appreciation is the most popular reason for idol love. Why, then, is it still considered a sham excuse? Idol music isn’t legitimate as a rule, it isn’t “good” by virtue of the fact that it’s just a bunch of little girls – regardless of their ages. Because, let’s face it, the idol industry doesn’t “mature things up” very convincingly.

What we would be saddled with as a matter of course in daily justification of idol love would only become, well, true in the face of a pre-pubescent idol invasion. You can’t rightly appreciate the music of a 9-year-old. She may have a nice voice for her age, but young vocal chords cannot support tone the way older, more well-trained ones can. Melodies can be mimicked, at best, but harmony is something that is learned. The music of a very young idol group is simple by necessity and rarely makes it past the stage of novelty appreciation.

So, supposing the idol industry doesn’t unearth the next Charlotte Church, the wota always have Novelty to fall back on. But the cute factor only works for so long, even if an idol is legitimately talented. Kusumi Koharu is a chief example of this, notably as half of the much-maligned duo of Shige-Pink and Koha-Pink. ‘Rainbow Pink’ from the Morning Musume album Rainbow 7 is enough of a chore to listen to once, but even imagining an entire album of songs from the duo is excruciating. The two girls were chosen for their youthful nature and “cuteness”, and the songs they sing are an obvious send-up of hyper-attuned idol girliness. The novelty of ‘Rainbow Pink’ is fleeting but it serves its purpose, as do filler tracks from acts like Berryz Koubou or Canaria Club.

If a group of girls got together in the later days of elementary school, that is hopefully the type of song they would sing. This performance simplicity combined with a natural cuteness ensures one thing if nothing else: that we never forget they are just girls. They are having fun and chasing their dream and being adored by fans.

After all, young idols can get away with a lot more, musically, simply because they have the excuse that they are young. This leads to some really interesting musical experimentation that you wouldn’t hear from some established idols without fan backlash for deviating from a formula. Many fans prefer this unexpected, unpolished, “young” sound simply because it is always a little zany and unpredictable. Some would even argue that the quality of acts like Berryz, Aya Matsuura, and even Ayumi Hamasaki have suffered when they embrace, or must embrace, a more “mature” sound.

Loving an idol means you automatically are loving something with a short shelf life, so starting early is sometimes a good thing. But it can also foster resentment when the idol gets older. Therefore, another means of appreciation is usually handy in case you find yourself at an unfortunate crossroads with an idol’s music or personality no longer holding your interest.

Idols are rarely selling a product other than themselves. Unless it is a tie-in, there is no show and there is no corporation. There is the agency, and there is the idol. There is a sacrosanct honesty about Japanese idols, and this is reflected in the wota, who consider a favorite girl to be beyond reproach or above criticism.

The product is a girl. It’s something we cannot get around, so we have to get through it instead, and find our own definition of an idol’s appeal. She may be charming, clever, sweet, mischievous, or slow. Loving the personality is just one more form of love. The simple fact remains, whether you love an idol for the way she looks, acts, or performs: you love her.

The bond we share with our idols is much like the bond we share with an object of infatuation. More often than not, the attachment includes some manner or another of sexual appreciation. The idol world has never been dismissive of this allegation. They are, in fact, rather blatant about it. Sexual appreciation is therefore a thorny but omnipresent subject, and comes to the forefront in discussions of youth in idoling.

For my own part, I’ve visited, revisited, knocked down and rebuilt my own take on the matter. I used to be opposed to the concept of sexualizing idols until I started to really love idols. I don’t think this viewpoint is a rare one, either, whether a wota be straight, gay, bi, or lesbian. We are, as sexual beings, drawn to the idea of shining stars, of worship objects, of idols in the unattainable sense. Unattainable for us in so many ways, sexually being only one form but also the most controversial.

Little girls – truly little girls with no sexual identity - simply have no business being subjected to this kind of scrutiny. And no self-respecting wota wants to entertain even the concept.

We must take into consideration, when approaching any discussion about sexual appreciation of idols, the Lolita facor. There is a taboo but widely-practiced deification of young, innocent-seeming girls. I don’t think it has to do primarily with sex, of course. I know that the Lolita factor has its roots in a desire for a return to childhood, to a simpler mode of romance, dating, and relationship roles. Humbert Humbert may have loved Lolita because she offered him a chance to reclaim what he’d never had as a boy stunted in his sexual growth. Regardless of your interpretation of Nabokov’s masterpiece, the point still stands – sexual appreciation is not necessarily pornographic.

The songs younger idols sing tend toward the playground idea of romance, and a very loose definition of love. These songs are non-threatening, and these girls are so unreal and far-away that they, as well, are non-threatening.

The concept becomes all the more complicated when we view it from the other side. Young women – teenage girls of high school age or a little younger – are some of the most sexually-fixated people you will ever meet. It’s not the fault of the media or bad parenting or anything like that. It’s simply the way biology works and the way the mind develops. To imagine for a moment that the girls in AKB48 didn’t have at least a little personal connection to the lyrics of “Seifuku ga Jama wo Suru” is an exercise in denial.

When you begin to champion a girl’s purity over her humanity, that’s when you become a wota who has been lapped by the Lolita factor. To negotiate the possibly vulgar reality of a healthy teenage mind and the sugar-sweet chastity of an idol persona is difficult, but it is an intriguing adventure. These are real girls, after all.

But the younger these girls are, the more it tends toward the monstrous notion of pedophilia to even face the suggestion that they are sexual creatures. With idols of 14-17, you know they must at least be aware of something larger than themselves, something which they wield. Even if it’s just the idea of having an ice cream date with Ayana Omoto (and for some of us… that’s really what we’re fantasizing about!!) and making her giggle girlishly, you can’t imagine a 9-year-old would have a conversation with you on any adult level.

It is not out of the question to say that we, as wota, are decrying the agencies for being tempters; not because they expect a sexual appreciation from us, but because we are apprehensive about a sexual appreciation even having the chance to develop. Integrity of personal values is entirely dependent upon stimuli, of course, and over a period of time an inundation of Frances and Aiko would take its toll on the wota collective subsconscious. This, perhaps, indicates how easily influenced we are by the idol industry - but if a line can be marked anywhere in the sand, it can be here.

There also exists the possibility that we are angry over the decaying quality of idol music in the hands of these too-young idols. If anyone can be an idol on their first day of primary school, what is the prestige of being one of the elite idols? If Nice Girl μ just get up there and have fun, why worry about the girls who sing the best or dance their hearts out? It’s all novelty. It’s all a big joke. Novelty and Musical appreciation cannot be allowed to melt together, and that is precisely the danger of which we might be apprehensive. Even if it is on a thoughtless level, we are attached to idol music and do not want to see the quality suffer for “cuteness” sake.

Or do wota really have a very decent center beneath the black, crusty layers of shameful, shameful lust? I like to think this is it. I, for one, view Morning Musume as fantasy sisters and friends, maybe even daughters by a long shot, and would not want them being tarted up too much before they were ready. I happen to think that 14-15 is pretty much “ready”, especially based on the sort of outfits I see girls wearing these days. Not yet old enough to be women, but too old to keep pretending to be little girls.

I desperately want to tackle this issue from a moral standpoint, but when sex and decency get muddled up with law, religion, and difference of opinion it makes it difficult for my opinion to hold any water. Even a well-thought-out opinion bows under the strain of a dominantly conservative society viewing the idol industry in and of itself as exploitative and wrong. And maybe it is; it all depends on perspective, personal ethics, and closeness to the topic.

Because our fandom is, by and large, a privately-celebrated one with little connection to the everyday, we run a certain risk of accepting things we normally wouldn’t. Is this the nature of the beast? Without the judging eyes of our peers, are we more likely to lust after younger and younger girls?

If it happens, and if it is encouraged by the marketing and the trending of the industry, even one slip-up, even one out-of-control wota could blacken the name of the idol industry forever. The double standard of the society in which we live will probably subconsciously view young women as temptresses until cultural psychology evolves, and therefore I could never see the scantily-clad U18 idols really being viewed as victims of the more maniacal wota who might even do them harm. It’s just a sad fact of society’s underbelly, especially a patriarchal one like Japan.

But U12, U10 girls are still innocent, still protected by traditional thought, free for the most part from the devil of puberty. U12 gravure in Japan is still viewed as a very niche market. But if that niche becomes mainstream, wota all become perverts, they all become predatory pedophiles. Regardless of the other modes of appreciation, the face of idoling may be besmirched with a stigma of deviance.

It is important, then, to set ourselves apart from this abhorrent fringe, to recognize that idoling and sexualization are inextricably linked and the youngest girls who enter the industry are, sadly, putting themselves at risk. We must search for a boundary within the community itself, regardless of our appreciation.

Either the boundary will set itself when numbers prove dismal, or the trend will continue with idols getting younger and younger. Hopefully the idol industry has reached the top of the arc and the pendulum will begin to swing back. Perfume is just one very gratifying example of style and substance taking precedent over simple marketing gimmicks. Their popularity is encouraging for those who would like to see and hear a more respectable product from J-Pop’s girl machine. There also exists an encouraging trend of line-blurring between idol pop and rock, with acts like SCANDAL and Tomoko Kawase proving that musicality can be as valuable as sex appeal.

A devaluing of sex appeal is laughably unlikely in any forseeable span of time, but when musical appreciation can be legitimately touted, and when sexual appreciation becomes a lot more than simply aesthetic thanks to the other aspects of a growing business model, things are looking up. The novelty of idoling will always be around, but the face of the idol has changed so much in the last 25 years that who knows what will happen to the archetype?

Maybe in six years we’ll have an answer. And maybe then, Frances and Aiko can pick up where W left off. That’s a long shot, I know. But stranger things have happened.