Guest Post: More Primers on Japanese Music

part two: the utaite and the idols

Shiina Ringo, about whom we spoke at length in the previous installment, built a reputation for herself as a master craftsman of Japanese pop music. She is an artist everyone wants to work with, and continues to write songs for others behind the scenes. And thus we ease nicely into the realm of youtube vocaloid cover singers, called utaite, the most successful being a faceless young woman named Ado, for whom Shiina Ringo wrote a song a few years back, “Yukue Shirezu” (“Missing”), which served as the theme for a movie.

Somewhat of a recluse, Ado created a youtube channel of herself hiding behind (mostly) blue-haired anime avatars singing covers of electronic music in her closet at home. Her miniature studio came to include a decent microphone and lots of soundproofing. Her voice is phenomenal (and even saying that it feels inadequate: the range of tones she has mastered, her power, how dynamically she can use it all, there is no one else like her on the planet) and it was thrust right into everyone’s ears in her breakout song “Usseewa” (“Shut the Fuck Up”). Listen to it, and then ponder the fact that the owner of that voice was 17 years old at the time. Yes, the youthful lyrics come across as a little silly, but who cares? Her performance is awesome. She is now selling out stadiums where she prances around a stage (backlit so you can’t see her face), and there are videos of her out there freaking the fuck out over how embarrassing that creature on stage is. I should mention that she is one step removed from being a hikikomori,¹ and without the success her otherworldly voice brought her she would still be living in her parents’ house eating cup ramen and watching anime. Instead she’s making April Fool’s songs where she sings in different registers to make herself sound like four different people, including male singers (convincingly, too).

Regarding “Usseewa,” the overnight success of the youtube video spawned dozens and dozens of covers. This was how I came across her, a cover by all-girl heavy metal band Nemophila (we’ll talk about them later), although not all covers were done in such good taste. There was a live performance on the long-running, very popular Japanese music show Music Station by ToshI, the lead singer of 1980s and 1990s heavy metal phenomenon X Japan. The words ring hollow coming out in his voice after his decades of success and high status as a Japanese music icon.² If you’re a successful millionaire rock star in your 60s, you should probably just leave the youthful rebellion to the young.

This is Japan, so of course there is also a cutesy version, best exemplified here in a not-really-apology for “Usseewa”: “Atashi wa Mondaisaku” (“I’m a Controversy:” original Ado version, Yoshino cover). Yoshino is friends with Ado behind the scenes. There is a clip channel of them and male utaite Jaku Sansei singing karaoke together. Mostly vocaloid and anime theme songs, but Shiina Ringo (there she is again!) is one of their go-tos. All three of them collaborated on the single “Ready Steady.”

Yoshino’s voice is a lot cuter than Ado’s. When you listen to them sing together, it is clear that Yoshino’s pitch is superior to Ado’s (…at least until she runs out of breath at a live show; maybe she needs to do some more cardio). A soprano, she has a killer kobushi (a sort of stylish crack in the voice kind of like a yodel, often to break off the end of a long note but used throughout Japanese songs, extensively in enka; once you know what it is you can hear it all the time, even in Western music).

A lot of the vocaloid music they sing is astoundingly dark. It shouldn’t be a surprise, really. The target audience tends to be nerdy outcasts. There is a lot of loneliness there… navel-gazing, too. Here is something to cheer them up! A bubbly pop song called “White Happy,” it must be about unicorns and cotton candy! But it’s actually about how pointless life is. Should we even bother falling in love? Who cares, nothing matters, whatever. Oh, well, here is a touching song about two schoolgirls in love — wait, that one is actually about the regret one girl feels over bullying a classmate to suicide, possibly over a crush the deceased had on the narrator. Ah, here’s one, a catchy dance tune, it just makes you want to get out and wiggle your butt with your Beats on, doesn’t it? …except it’s about withering away in a toxic relationship. When you listen to a Vocaloid song and it sounds positive and upbeat, be aware that the lyrics may convey something else entirely.

Many songs make no effort to hide their darkness. “Wozuwarudo” adopts a muted style and a plodding tempo to go with its lyrics about fame, guilt, and suicide. “Shadow Shadow” is about selling yourself to get ahead, presumably to make it big in showbusiness, but straight up prostitution isn’t out of the discussion.

Ado and Yoshino are the only two utaite I spend any amount of time listening to, so I am not knowledgeable about the others. And boy are there so many others. I know Mafumafu exists, but only so I can avoid his creepy-ass voice and off-putting presentation. Ado is the only one worth listening to, although like I said, I prefer Yoshino. They (along with the other utaite) also perform original music, whether written for them or by them (“Usseewa” was one of the former), and some songs are quite good. Yoshino’s “Tenkousei,” about never really fitting in, is a compelling listen.

I had planned on using the Yoshino cover of the Yoasobi song “Idol” to transition into the topic of female Jpop idol groups, but it is not working out how I had hoped, so here is an ill-fitting paragraph about Yoasobi. A male/female duo, with the girl out front singing and the man hiding his ugly face behind the scenes and doing the songwriting, they write and perform a lot of anime theme songs and get a lot of streams (originally I wrote “sell a lot of records” but that really isn’t true anymore outside of the actual Idol machine) and are so boring. Yoasobi’s vocals are bland to the point of being aural Ambien, but they’re popular, so whatever. Consider yourself warned if you go looking for more of their work.

The song “Idol” is about the two-faced nature of showbusiness, particularly regarding the way the girls in these roles have a totally different public persona compared to their private life. It’s not breaking any new ground with that subject, entertainment makes people do whatever they think they must to get ahead and is nasty and cutthroat behind the scenes. But if you’re a girl and you’re not hideous and you like singing and dancing and dressing up you can try out for one of these idol groups. The groups have gone through changes over the years, although school uniforms and approachability have remained part of the image. O-Nyanko Club was marketed like an after-school club.³ Members collaborated with each other in side projects and “graduated” to solo careers or marriage and family, something that continues through today’s groups… sort of.

The 1990s saw comedy added to the slate of talents girls joining idol groups had to showcase. Morning Musume is the most famous group of the late 1990s and early 2000s,⁴ and they were invited on the Golden Time variety shows as guests. Their rise coincided with the rise of a massive wave of popular comedians and comedy variety shows that petered out in the latter part of the decade. Several members married and had kids and still go on to make appearances on the remaining shows, be it as regulars or as frequent guests. One Mo-musu member in particular became known for her comedic timing, spawning a “King and Queen” special prank show where she faced off with a male comedian: who could handle being pranked the best.

After Mo-musu, AKB48 and their clones in multitude took over. They were marketed as the attainable idols, appearing at handshake events and other meet-and-greets. AKB is shorthand for Akihabara, the anime/tech capital of Tokyo that spawns a lot of the weird shit we have come to associate with Japan. And there were 48 members of the group, with more in the junior wings waiting for their moment to shine. Not all of them could follow Maeda Atsuko into film/TV success which makes one wonder just what happens to the dozens of others (more on that later).

Even Ado has an idol group. She auditioned members for Phantom Siita, which takes its aesthetics from Japanese horror. Their videos feature lots of sampaku eyes and the schoolgirl outfits make them that much more off-putting. Unlike most of the other idol groups, the members of this group are skilled singers. They don’t hide their voices in large numbers and can show up and do it live without electronic trickery or adjustments.

There are anti-idol groups, too. Girls who had been rejected by other groups tried out in 2024-25 on a show called “No-no Girls.” The winners ended up as members of the anti-idol pop group HANA. They have some sort of relationship with rebellious pop/hip hop star Chanmina (we’ll get to her later, too), but their big draw is their skill as dancers, with the presumption that their earlier rejections were due to the girls’ looks being unfit for other idol groups. Everyone loves an underdog story.⁵ Their sound is a lot more pop with a heavy R&B influence than the other idol groups, and that makes sense given their relationship with Chanmina, just like how Ado’s strange idol group is strange like Ado.

The idol industry in Japan is a machine. There are routes to success, but like showbusiness in the West there are a lot of bodies littering them. Indie idol groups perform at malls and shopping plazas and parks, wherever there is open space. Wander around any random weekend and you will see them, such as the group who was performing in the Aeon Mall near my wife’s hillbilly hometown on a random Saturday in January.⁶ Performing with one of these indie and junior-league groups means financing your own costumes, helping find cover space, and paying your own way to and from venues. Some of these venues are malls where only the toothless, moonshine-drinking, barely literate Japanese live, like my in-laws.

Like every profession in Japan, aspiring idols put in long hours. They sweat and suffer and there is a lot of busy work involved. There are so many more girls who want to be idols than there are positions as successful idols. Why would anyone put themselves through the bullshit to achieve a position as something that many Japanese themselves find off-putting? Because, according to one indie idol, if they can make people happy by dancing and singing, they want to work as hard as they can to do so.

There are lots of costume changes involved in idol groups, and the idols themselves are desirable to a significant swath of the population. That desirability is an attractive point for women, particularly the women who want to become an idol. Many of the most famous, most popular idols of the past have married very successful men. Not just the famous actors or comedians they meet on variety show sets, but the executives and producers who control the whole thing behind the scenes. The important men. The powerful men. So you could marry the salesman or shopkeeper who will live in obscurity in Gunma, the hillbilly capital of Japan, for the rest of his life, or you could take a shot at an entertainment exec and get to live in Minato-ku and wear fancy clothes and get driven around in the back of an Alphard Executive Lounge.

If they want that kind of success, aspiring idols have to put up with a lot of bullshit besides the practice and being responsible for paying for all their costumes and practice time and transport to and from venues. With AKB marketing themselves… that is, being marketed as the attainable idols, you have to put yourself out into direct contact with the fans… some of whom are fanatical and perverted. While I am sure they have devised ways to weed the creeps out of the lines by now, there are photos of horrified idols circa 2010 having just shaken the semen-covered hand of a man who was masturbating in line.⁷ Rest assured, there are more depraved acts these women have to endure,⁸ and not all of it is from the fans.

Male idol groups exist in Japan, as well. The boy band. Johnny’s & Associates is was Japan’s preeminent boy band factory. They set the tone in the 1980s with Shonentai, and in the 1990s and 2000s SMAP and Arashi provided them their biggest successes. Members of SMAP crossed boundaries into variety shows and serious acting, and Arashi had the company’s biggest musical sales successes. Even if you’ve been isolated from Japanese culture, there is still a chance that you’ve accidentally seen members from one or both groups in your lifetime because their faces have been everywhere since their debuts in advertisements, TV shows, and movies. Like the girls, their music is formulaic and generic and generally not worth bothering with, and their looks are all polished to the point of femininity. And of course, the founder of Johnny’s, Johnny Kitagawa, was guilty of abusing the boys in his entertainment conglomerate, sexually or otherwise, crimes which were repeatedly covered up by the Japanese media thanks to the tremendous influence the man exercised.

The company has gone on to restructure into two new entities, with some key people stepping down (and naturally this all came to public light after Johnny himself died and went to Hell, not by the Japanese media, but by the fucking BBC because Vice was busy trying to figure out which Democratic nominee had the best rack or something⁹), and they now promise transparency so that this sort of abuse does not happen again, just like how no more girls were harmed after Epstein killed himself.

The male and female idol groups all operate under contracts with such draconian rules regarding their personal conduct that it is difficult to believe anyone would read and willingly sign such a document. They must always act in a certain manner. They must maintain body weight within a certain range. They are not allowed to date, to maintain the illusion of accessibility. In one highly publicized incident circa 2010, an AKB48 member was caught leaving the apartment of a male performer one morning. She went online and issued a teary apology after shaving all her hair off. She remained with the group, but I’m not sure anyone has ended up living happily ever after.

Where Johnny’s basically ran the entire boy band scene, Akimoto Yasushi was the creator of O-Nanko Club and AKB48 and many of its clones. Akimoto was part of the 2020 Olympic Committee in Tokyo and was recently given some medal by the government. One can only speculate on the abuse he oversees that will come to light only after he dies and goes straight to Hell (it is possible he’s clean).

The idol machine is interesting for its behind-the-scenes drama. It is a billion-dollar (hundred-billion-yen) industry where youthful good looks are prized above all else. It is a running joke that SMAP member Sakai Masahiro can’t sing, but he is handsome and very charismatic, and the girls hide their voices in choruses dozens strong (that 48 is not just a number chosen at random). There is little or no musical value in what they do, so in this section there are few links to their work. The massive sales successes the machine enjoys is largely due to the, uh, innovation of meet-and-greet handshake events brought into unholy existence by Akimoto and his AKB48 group. Fans are encouraged to purchase as many copies of the singles and albums as they can, as the physical album cases contain tickets which can be used to gain entry to these handshake events. I have seen the system described as both a lottery that results in frantic searches for the lucky tickets like we’re in a Roald Dahl novel, or as simply whoever has the most tickets wins. Whatever it is, the result is that it is a prominent part of the Japanese recording industry and is thus impossible to ignore.

1. A hikikomori is a Japanese person who has dropped out of society entirely. Usually they are supported by their parents. They do not go outside. They do not have an education. They do not have a job. It is a slow-burning domestic crisis. The Japanese government’s wuhanic plague freak-out did nothing to help matters.

2. I looked EVERYWHERE for video proof this happened, but Music Station is extremely active about removing unapproved links so you’ll just have to take my word for it that as good a performer as ToshI is, his version of “Usseewa” was a cringefest.

3. In Japanese schools, you join a club and do it year-round, so if you played baseball you practiced baseball with your teammates after school every day all year, you didn’t get to play football in the fall and basketball or wrestling in the winter.

4. They continue on to this day with new members in the current “attainable idol” era.

5. Mrs. MD was extremely offended I’m including HANA in the idol section, expressing the opinion that they’re so much more, so much better than any sad, pathetic, creepy idol group. Regardless, this is where they belong.

6. Mrs. MD is from Gunma, home of Subaru, Yamada Denki, and the only Haagen Dazs factory in Japan. The popular JDM meme is that Gunma is a wild, jungle-like place, and people post pictures of a jungle or a lost Indiana Jones-style temple and say it’s Gunma. The prefecture is viewed similarly there as West Virginia or the UP are viewed in the USA.

7. The internet claims these stories are fake, that the crowd is vetted and approved for handshakes, but it is Japan and the stories have the ring of truth about them, although I could not find the pictures.

8. There was an infamous handsaw attack where a maniac snuck his weapon through the line and attacked and injured a couple of AKB48 girls and some staff members before he was subdued. They improved security following this incident.

9. I know Ryan Long does not work for Vice, but the joke is simply too good to pass up.