A very quick post to share an article I found worth reading (and to keep the site on life support):
Turning Japanese: The seedy underworld of music moguls is a piece on none other than “the 77-year-old Don of Dubiousness, Johnny Kitagawa.” He’s the impresario behind all those bands like SMAP, and the other guys who look kind of like SMAP, and those SMAP-alikes on that other program. Um, anyway. They’re everywhere in Japanese entertainment, and they’re all his. Johnny has a sordid background that doesn’t get much attention in this country, thanks to the fact that a media organization publishing the dirt will get locked out of the Johnny’s loop when it comes to boy stars to stick in TV programs. Bye bye advertising yen.
I’m simplifying the dynamic and W. David Marx can give it a much more rigorous treatment, no doubt—and probably already has on one of his several dozen blogs. Anyway, the article pulls no punches and is refreshing to read.
Never photographed, never interviewed, the elusive Kitagawa was originally born in Los Angeles (hence the western first name), but came to Japan as a US marine remained there after his discharge. In 1963 he founded the organisation that would come to be Japan’s premier pop autocracy (Johnny’s Jimusho literally means ‘Johnny’s Office’). After a mediocre response to his first pop concoction—the not-so-innovatively monikered boy band Johnnys—in 1968 the Four Leaves ushered in the pop factory’s first hit. The momentum of his success has barely slowed since, as Johnny’s keeps relentlessly churning out airwave-dominating boy bands created with all the identikit charm of cheap plastic goods off a Taiwanese production line, which nevertheless manage to blindly seduce the hearts and plunder the piggy banks of each new generation of Japanese tweenagers.
(Via a browse through my NetNewsWire feeds so hurried I can’t remember where this one came from.)
