June 15, 2013

"[W]hen the votes of 2.6 million voters were counted and announced, the scandal-plagued outsider Rino Sashihara toppled the seemingly secure incumbent Yuko Oshima..."

"... to become the new 'president' of AKB48, Japan’s most popular female musical act ever."
AKB48 is a massive and massively successful conglomerate, with many local franchises. Group members start off as awkward amateurs and end up skilled professional entertainers...

The girls of AKB48 are sexual chimeras. Although often they are in fact young adults, they are made to look much younger thanks to outfits derived from school-girl uniforms and rehearsed childish mannerisms. The resultant child-woman is then resexualized....
That looks like this:



"The normally circumspect Japan Times denounced the group for framing 'women’s nature as responsive to male desires rather than as active and independent'...."
And to feed these fans’ fantasies some more, the group prohibits, by contract, its members from having sex or dating....

Most legal experts agree that AKB48’s contractual ban on sex has no force. But that didn’t keep Minami Minegishi, once among the group’s inner core of 20, from shaving off her hair in contrition and apologizing to fans after she was seen leaving a young male pop star’s apartment one morning.
That head-shaving + apology was discussed here on this blog back in February. Back to the first-linked article:
Voters in Saturday’s election seemingly rallied to upset these rules.... The race was tight, but in the end, voters rejected rules preventing young women from enjoying their freedoms. They elevated the disgraced Minegishi, her hair still boyishly short, to 18th place. And they crowned Sashihara, who had been banished from the core Akihabara group to an affiliate in Fukuoka after her own dating scandal....
AKB48 may be sexist and prey on prurient tastes....
Oh? Is it? What's the prurient taste for? Cake and jell-o, judging from the video. I thought it was very wholesome. It seemed perfectly clean... but also perfectly dirty in your dirty mind. Shame on you!

34 comments:

Baron Zemo said...

See. You should never vote for a Rhino.

Take that Chris Christie!

Bill, Republic of Texas said...

I had a Japanese girl friend once. It was very strange, erotic and disturbing. She presented herself like half woman and half teenager and she was almost 30! The sex was incredible though. She made noises like the sex was so good it was going to kill her. Talk about feeling like a man.

But all the immaturity and play acting gets old fast. I wanted a woman not a characture.

rhhardin said...

It looks Japanese to me. Everything is seriously weird.

Carnifex said...

As the great man once said "you can make anything sexual"

Carnifex said...

I think I am that great man by the way.

Big Mike said...

It seemed perfectly clean ...

Women made up to look underage and prancing (quite literally prancing!) in skimpy underwear is clean by Madison standards??? I should have gone to Wisconsin!

Krumhorn said...

Ann, you should check out Emo porn. There must be something deep in the male psyche of that country that is triggered by sex with girls in Catholic schoolgirl skirts and making them whimper in pain.

I'll bet that knowledge is informing the opinion of the piece.

-Krumhorm

Anonymous said...

But that didn’t keep Minami Minegishi, once among the group’s inner core of 20, from shaving off her hair in contrition

Thankfully, it was just the hair on her head.

Peter

cf said...

Wow! Ha ha, that was quite a romp.

I loved it's naughtiness even though taboos were just barely skirted.

I am the alien here, like an anthropoligist among an exotic electronic video tribe, part manga, part busby Berkeley, part Victoria's secret. Who is the audience again? Two million votes?

It also gives me that Dr. strangelove jitters -- i am laughing/enjoying a scene and must stop to gasp at its horror, in this case broken (feminist) taboos. Wonder what my L and her LGBT contingents would enjoy and not enjoy, maybe something like mine, but I never know, haha.

Thanks, Ann, as always, for joining me to something Out in the World I would not have noticed otherwise.

The Godfather said...

I do wonder more about who the audience is for this stuff than why the performers do what they do. The same people who go to "barely legal" porn sites? (I'm told there are such things.)

The other observation is that quite a few of the girls have Europeanized their appearance -- rounder eyes, lighter hair. I've never been to Japan. Is that the way things are there?

Blue@9 said...

So bizarre and fascinating. It's like observing an alien culture.

Known Unknown said...

This is what happens in largely homogenized island nations.

Eyeball licking and crap like this.

Known Unknown said...

What sucks about the eyeball-licking is that my eyeball-licking scene in my dystopian science fiction screenplay will not be seen as derivative, even though I wrote it awhile ago.

Of course, it wasn't human-to-human eyeball licking. It was the protagonist's way of getting high: by getting his eyeballs licked by a strange humanoid tentacle-tongue coming out of a receptacle in his bathroom.

Known Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
jr565 said...

How many girls are in that group? After they pay out royalties does each member get like 20 bucks a year?

Known Unknown said...

NOW been seen as derivative, not NOT. Ugh.

paul a'barge said...

I thought it was very wholesome.

Really? Srsly?

That's because you're old, dominant and clueless.

paul a'barge said...

@Bill, Republic of Texas:
My bet is she left you. At least partially because your spelling sucks.

Anonymous said...

That face, and the Chinese First Lady's face were made in Korea.

Stephen A. Meigs said...

Women pretending to be girls pretending to be women.

rcocean said...

"That face, and the Chinese First Lady's face were made in Korea."

Does it matter? A little eye-lid surgery never hurt anyone.

ricpic said...

Just a guess on my part but I'd wager more of their fan base is Japanese teen or tween girls than Japanese men.

ricpic said...

What Bill, R of T wanted was a part woman part charcuterie girl friend.

campy said...

sexual chimeras

"Chimera Inflater" is an anagram of my first & last names.

ricpic said...

Oh you chimera inflater you, such a tease.

30yearProf said...

Their MUSIC is great. It's about the only thing that will make me spend a hour on a bicycle trainer in the basement in the dead of Winter (3' of snow on the bike path).

A--K--B !!!

Joe said...

ricpic is right and it makes me wonder about all the adults who insist on over-sexualizing everything teens and pre-teens do.

Anonymous said...

rcocean said..."Does it matter? A little eye-lid surgery never hurt anyone."

A little eye-lid surgery, a little widening of the eyes, a little new nose, a little reshaping of the face. The problem is there are so few "perfect noses", "perfect face shapes" to choose from, that you can see the same face on different people. They call them "face crashing".

The question I really have is: how come Hollywood's facial rearrangement surgeries are so bad? Fish lips, cat eyes, puffy faces, startled look, ...

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG_duUhZ8IU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxBhcEsR5cM

Carnifex said...

AS the greatest cartoon ever(Archer) sez..."how is that even a genre?"(in respect to tentacle pron. The Fishermans Wife, and The Fishermans Wife II: the Re-Tentacling)

Rusty said...

It's got the Manga, Hostess Club thing going on.

Johanna Lapp said...

Watching the video, it's the greatest band ever.

Close your eyes and just listen and they totally suck.

Balfegor said...

Re: ricpic:

Just a guess on my part but I'd wager more of their fan base is Japanese teen or tween girls than Japanese men.

AKB is a reference to Akihabara, a former tech district of Tokyo, now completely overrun by anime and manga shops and maid cosplay cafes and that kind of thing. Pretty sure their target audience is 20-40 year old nerds. Maybe they've managed to attract girls too.

Mitch H. said...

Balfegor, I would have thought so too, but then I discovered that K-On, this otaku-bait anime about a "light music club" squarely in the center of the "cute girls doing cute things for the moe crowd" wheelhouse turns out to have a massive teeny-bopper following. I would have bet good money that it was solely a creepy fanboy sort of thing, but teenage girls will grab onto what they want to grab onto, and sometimes the results are unpredictable.