Idols in Anime - An Idealised Vision of Perfection

Written by Alex Cairns-Doran on 29 Jul 2015

Every country has idols - those artists and boy or girl bands who are often portrayed as the ideal; the perfect incarnation of what it means to be human. Their public image attempts to show a clean personality, somebody without any character flaws or little vices that might bring them down to earth like mere mortals. However, Japan takes this portrayal of the ideal further than in the west, presenting a vision of perfection that we know must be fake and selling a dream - an image that people either aspire to or covet. Japanese idols, and especially female idols, are often a jack-of-all-trades - singing, dancing, and acting; smiling constantly; effectively doing as they are told by an army of producers, advertisers, and various assorted middlemen (and it is mostly men, although that is not to say the industry lacks women). Anybody who has had even a passing interesting in the Japanese idol industry will have noticed that almost everything they say or do is immediately transmitted to millions of fans through magazines and television, and thanks to the world of social media and the Internet the dissemination of this information has been made that much quicker. What they say is carefully chosen by the people who created them and their agencies, so that it never veers from the most conservative social morality: how wonderful it is to be Japanese, how glad they are for all the help from their seniors, and often how they would love to get married and raise a family. Interestingly, this strict social conservative message and publicity, while universally applied to Japanese idols, isn’t necessarily imposed on male idols in the way as it is for females.

This image of sweet innocence is very powerful, and when scandals do become public (and many tabloids will make sure that they do) the reactions are predictable, and to the west astonishingly cruel. When it was revealed in 2011 that Aya Hirano had been sleeping with members of her band, she was dismissed by her label Lantis, and seemed to disappear from the public eye only to return later in more subdued roles, yet her fans never quite forgave her. Another example is of AKB48's "no boyfriends" rule, and what happened to Minami Minegishi when she broke it. Her subsequent demotion, followed by an apology video in which she is seen with a shaved head and sobbing through her apology to the fans seems especially shocking to those in the west. The idol must go through a humiliating public apology, something like those self-criticism sessions in China during the Cultural Revolution, telling us how sorry they are and how frightful the effects of their actions are. Only after this tearful demonstration of sincerity and food intentions can the wrath of the public-spirited media abate, and the idol in question can get back on with her job of singing, acting, and smiling.

Arguably these individuals (and others - there are more examples out there) biggest mistake was not that they happened to like men, or want sex, or because they were being innately wicked. No, the problem was that they were not able to keep their private lives a secret - they caused embarrassment and rocked the social boat. Nobody seems to care much about what people do in private as long as they conform in public, especially when they have a specific image to maintain. In many ways idols in Japan fulfil the function of royalty; they are models of propriety as well as entertainers, and their images are carefully created and moulded to fit the vision of perfect humans who represent the socially conservative ideal. However, as the earlier examples point out, once this vision - the façade of the perfect human - has been removed and these individuals are shown to be as human as everybody else they are discarded, ready to be replaced by the next all-singing, all-smiling model of propriety.