Long time no see, blog world!  Recently, with university and a few personal events I haven’t been blogging, but I still feel like I need a medium to get what I want to be said out there.  While I have forums and personal friends to tell about it, I think blogging is the easiest and most expressive way to get things out there, and I’ve recently found myself in an idol slump.

Don’t get me wrong; I really really love idols.  They are an endless source of entertainment for me and as I get better and better at Japanese I see myself watching things over again and finding them even more entertaining on the fourth or fifth watch.

While the world of idols might seem like the land of milk and honey, especially for fans of AKB48 and it’s sister groups like myself, I’ve actually found that as their popularity has gone up, I find myself more and more bored by their news and new releases.  I want some variety, and AKB just doesn’t seem to have that nowadays.  So, without further ado, here’s my first batch of opinion cookies for how I would fix AKB.

AKB48 and its sister groups, NMB48, SKE48 and SDN48 seem to have everything going for them. Their releases are consistently selling hundreds of thousands of copies, they’re constantly in the news, it seems like everyone knows about them. With all their success, it seems like everything should be perfect and running smoothy, right?

Wrong.

There are some things that have been consistently bothering me about the way they handle their girls and their promotions, as well as the overall quality of their releases.  I know that there have been a lot of things that I’ve been alone on with what’s been bothering me, but today, while watching a few stage shows, I found myself utterly displeased with what’s been happening in Akihabara.

My most major concern has been a concern of mine since they released Namida Surprise! back in 2009: The SKE48 factor.  Recently it’s moved on to both NMB48 and the inner workings of the group itself, but calling it the SKE48 factor gives it a scapegoat and I like that.

Recently, AKB has taken their in-promotion a little too far.  However, before I go on and on about how the girls from Sakae are a poison that should be eradicated, let me give you, my reader(s?), a little history lesson.

Since the beginning, AKB has been a group of girls working hard to promote themselves.  The group was originally meant to be a stepping stone into the limelight, with most members leaving the group and moving on their own into the entertainment industry, whether they became a musician like Hoshino Michiru or an actress like Masuyama Kayano (or even followed other categories of entertainment like Nakani-er.. Yamaguchi Rico), the point is, everyone in AKB was in it for themselves, not to be a member of AKB48. That said, it is still an idol group, and as an Idol group that is meant to have 48 members, it needed a group of girls to focus on as kind of means to keep yourself from getting too lost in the halls of the 8th floor of the Don Quixote in Akihabara.

That was the “SukaHira7″‘s job. When AKB48 first started performing, they had a unit called Skirt, Hirari, and the members of this stage unit were meant to be the fronts of the group throughout it’s life. While this didn’t completely come to fruition, 4 of the 7 original members are still with the group, and 5 of the 7 led the group throughout their entire career with it. With this SukaHira7, as it came to be called, it became very predictable would would be leading songs and fronting singles as they appeared, and, to some extent, allowed for the lower rankings of the group to have more variety as girls tried to be noticed.  This was why in the time immediately following Skirt, Hirari’s release, AKB48′s senbatsu was the most random it has ever been.  Girls like Sato Natsuki, Kobayashi Kana and Noro Kayo made senbatsu in AKB48′s beginnings, all while the predictable SukaHira 7 (or 6, after Narita Risa became a lost cause) led the songs.

This is no longer the case.

After the first AKB48 General Senbatsu Election in 2009, AKB48′s roster of single a-side singing girls hasn’t changed much, save one or two replacements as girls have lost grace with the management and fans. It’s gotten to the point that they’ve had two singles without any change in the participating members, something that has never happened in AKB48 history.  Their most recent single, Everyday, Katyusha, allowed for more girls to be in senbatsu, but instead of shuffling other girls out or adding only a few girls, they almost doubled the number of girls participating in the a-side from 16 to 26. This is just a ridiculous number(it’s more than half the group), and with this number of girls it’s impossible to effectively promote them the way they could with a 16 or even 18 member roster.

But where is the fault in this? For me, this kind of heavy, non-changing promotion started when AKB48 changed from DefStar Records to King Records and released Oogoe Diamond. This single, which featured SKE48′s Matsui Jurina as center, was a success for the group, but also featured the biggest number of girls on a single since their debut (which featured all 20 members of the original Team A), and was promoting a girl who wasn’t even in the group, and had never performed before, in a big part. Since then, Jurina has been in every management chosen a-side senbatsu, as well as placing in both General Senbatsu Elections. While it seems like a great way to promote a new group, it’s completely skewed priority for the girls in her group and has made things extremely difficult for the girls of SKE48 to properly promote themselves.

That’s why, when the results for Iiwake Maybe‘s senbatsu election were coming back to us, I was excited to see Jurina barely placing in senbatsu.  I was thinking ‘with her ranking this low, maybe management will back off’ I remember being excited because of Jurina ranking so low. However, even after ranking 19th in the first Senbatsu Election, she came back even stronger after, being placed in the subsequent 16 person single River and then continuously being pushed to the front of the group.  I began to dread seeing election results for the next year, and as I expected, she jumped a whole 9 spots ahead and ranked among ‘media senbatsu’ for Heavy Rotation.

At this point I was still content with AKB48 itself. They hadn’t done me any wrongs, and my favourite, Takajo Aki, was constantly rising in popularity.  That is, until this commercial came out.

Sashihara Rino (who, as a gag from her management, was called Sashiko officially for about three days) was given a thirty second commercial to promote herself.  She immediately grew exponentially in mixi rankings and mad her way into senbatsu for subsequent songs. In a comparison of her mixi ranking from December 1, 2010 to May 1, 2011, she grew 142% and has breached the overall top 10 for AKB48, which includes the remaining four members of the SukaHira 7, Itano Tomomi, Maeda Atsuko, Kojima Haruna and Takahashi Minami. This was unacceptable to me (at least in retrospect it is now. At the time I was just worried that her career would take a weird turn. Stage names like that always make me feel uncomfortable). Why was this girl who barely made senbatsu for Heavy Rotation getting her own commercial during one of the most watched events in Japanese TV? Since this event, Sasshi has been the only girl we’ve seen on TV.  She has her own TV show, she’s consistently been single senbatsu (and has been slowly passing up my favourite Akicha) and has been in the front row promoting alongside the past favourites. While I don’t have a problem with promoting new girls to the top to keep the lineup different, sacrificing promoting all other girls for the sake of giving one girl a push above all the rest is a little excessive to me.

Following in Sasshi’s footsteps is the first kenkyuusei to be promoted since the Team Shuffle, Yokoyama Yui.

Yui was promoted to Team K in October 2010 following Ono Erena’s graduation.  Erepyon had always been in the front of the group since her debut, so her graduation shook the fan community pretty hard, and it gave whoever was to take her position some pretty big shoes (and costumes) to fill. As a result, her promotion almost immediately made her the front of Under Girls (a group similar to senbatsu, but not promoted the same way; think of it as the second tier of popularity for AKB48), and she immediately started participating on Music shows, variety, and eventually she was put into a unit (with Sashihara Rino), given a lead role on AKB48′s drama Majisuka Gakuen and appears as senbatsu in Everyday, Katyusha.  While there are plenty of fans here that are completely hating on Yui because of this push, I’m not. I actually enjoy a brand new face, but I’m not a big fan of how they’re pulling it off.  Like I said with Sasshi, pushing one girl over all the others just isn’t right, and the way it’s working isn’t keeping the level of variety that I loved about AKB48 where it should be.

So here’s how to fix it:

First things first, let the sister groups fend for themselves.  NMB48 has performed to a full house over 100 times since just January of this year and SKE48 has released numerous singles, with most of them selling upwards of 150,000 singles, including a number one. Obviously these groups do not need to ride AKB48′s coattails to the extent that they have been.  I understand that this can be a lot to bite off, especially since Matsui Jurina has been an omniscient presence since her debut in 2008, but she lives in Nagoya, not Tokyo, so there is no need for her to be traveling back and forth every day to work for a group that she’s not even in.

NMB48, meanwhile, has done a miraculously good job of promoting their girls at a fairly balanced pace. At last check, the top 8 on mixi were 7 of the management’s top 8, so obviously things are working properly. There isn’t any girl that’s being completely shafted in favour of other girls, and, while the rankings are a little top heavy, things like that make sense because, although it’s a new group, its relation to AKB48 immediately puts it at public attention. I understand that it’s a little harsh to a team that it was expected to have help from AKB48, but I think that leaving them to fend for themselves will make them work a little harder to get famous.

Next, take care of management. The girls are in different agencies, and that’s all well and good. However, those agencies are NOT  a part of AKB48. Therefore, a girl should NOT be favoured in AKB48 because of their agency. Yokoyama Yui’s unit, Not yet, features girls rom Ota Productions, which is a relatively powerful talent agency in Japan.  As a result, these girls from Ota Pro have been pushed to the front of AKB48 over and over since they decided to stick their heads into AKB48. This includes Maeda Atsuko and Oshima Yuko, both of whom have been signed to Ota for quite a while. Basically, it’s all well and good if you want to promote a girl outside of their group with your agency, but who is promoted in the group is not up to you. I would like to see them give their girls in lesser agencies that they’ve taken interest in a chance, but with Sasshi and Yui in the way it seems like that will never happen.

Last, which is probably something that will be handled in a future entry, solve the senbatsu issue. I don’t want to see a 26 girl group ever again (especially not with a PV as campy and poorly produced as Everyday, Katyusha’s is). I want to see some of the variety of the DefStar AKB, both in who is singing and what they’re singing. I won’t go into a lot of detail since that’ll take up another 2000 words, so just look forward to that.

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