Dear SSJ-Forum members,

I hope all of you are enjoying a nice beginning to a happy and healthy 2014.

Because I’m not the expert on party politics and elections that others on the list are, I am stepping into this issue with a bit of trepidation. But I was wondering, is it just me, or were the political subtexts of the recent NHK Kouhaku more interesting and deeper than the obvious one?

My assumption is that most of the ink soon to be spilled by Martin Fackler and others at the New York Times will focus on the announcement during the show that Oshima Yuko, the longtime dominant force in AKB48 politics, would graduate from the group. At the elderly age of 25, she would be likely to see only dwindling chances in the group’s annual elections, and she may be positioning herself to segue to what might be a lucrative career as a media pundit and writer. It’s surely an important story, not least because of Oshima’s tactical brilliance - her manipulation of
AKB48 voting districts and rules to achieve postal reform was breathtaking - but I also think that we’ve seen this sort of thing before. It doesn’t strike me as a game-changer, even if it will be treated as such by those who take a kind of “Great Idols of History”
approach to understanding politics. With all due respect to its practitioners, I view that kind of AKB48ology as being more journalistic than social scientific.

More important, in my view, was the triumphant return of Sashihara Rino, particularly in light of her efforts to transform crucial political and legal institutions; these changes would long outlive Sashihara herself.
SSJ-Forum members surely need no reminding of Sashihara’s career trajectory. One of AKB48’s most visible leaders, she was forced in 2012 into exile in HKT48, the “Hakata” branch based in Fukuoka.
Sashihara, of course, had herself experienced a dramatic rise in 2006-2007 as an uncommonly fresh face in the world of AKB48 politics, though many attributed her popularity to her strident stand on the North Korean abductions issue. But she gained a reputation as a somewhat feckless and incompetent leader (which was already pretty evident in her television show, "Sashiko no kuse ni - kono bangumi wa AKB to wa mattaku kankei
arimasen”) even before the sex scandal that engulfed her in 2012. The disputed revelations in a shukanshi about her sex life produced a surprising (and somewhat
suspicious) health scare: the much-discussed hyperventilation incident in the middle of one her concerts. At that point, she really had no choice but to accept demotion to regional politics.

Sashihara’s comeback has been nothing short of remarkable, which suggests that she has genuine political skills that most of us had likely underestimated, given the attention we tended to pay to Oshima. I myself have to admit to having ridiculed her book “Kawaii kuni e” (Toward a Cute Country) as the ravings of a rabid but perfectly coiffed nationalist.
Its opening chapter, which straightforwardly aimed to rehabilitate the image of her spiritual grandmother, Matsuda Seiko, created fodder for Japanese political and entertainment critics for months. As you all know, Seiko-chan produced national outrage in 1990 for her hasty and possible illegal decision to ram through a midnight agreement with the American idol community that resulted in her duet “The Perfect Combination"
with Donnie Wahlberg, the bad boy of New Kids on the Block (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR7jpCAGpEI).
While somewhat blithely viewed in the United States as the cornerstone of the US-Japan entertainment alliance, that crisis brought 500,000 demonstrators to the streets of Tokyo in protest, ending only when Koizumi Kyoko entered the scene with her Kawaisa Baizou Keikaku (Cuteness Doubling Plan). The rest, as they say, is history. Despite the survival of the idol scene, Seiko-chan herself has been trying to repair the damage to her own reputation for decades, most recently with her duet with international karaoke champion Chris Hart
(http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x16fcyb_pv-松田聖子-
クリス-ハート-夢がさめて_music); the performance by the two at the recent Kouhaku was an event highlight, immediately trumpeted by the United States embassy as part of its Tomodachi Initiative. With friends like these, I thought…. but then decided there was little to be gained by penning an angry op-ed about all the tomodachi stuff, as tiresome, self-serving, and illiterate about Japanese politics as it is.

Since winning the recent AKB48 general election, Sashihara has seemed to be trying to demonstrate that she’s a pragmatic, capable leader, not the angry ideologue so often criticized in media outlets overseas. Aside from doing her best to maintain stable, if not necessarily friendly, relations with An Youqi, Cindy Yen, and all Nine Muses, she has also attempted to shake the Japanese idol economy out of its doldrums.
Though praised initially by Paul Krugman, Sashihara’s inflationary efforts have unnerved a number of experts in Japan. After all, it at first seems great that, under her leadership, AKB48 has now set up branches in virtually every mid-sized city of Japan, with TKB48 serving as kind of an exclamation point; who knew there were potentially 48 idols in Tsukuba? But with Japan’s declining population and the constraints of the roman script, it seems that we are rapidly approaching the demographic and alphabetic limits of this kind of expansionary policy. “Sashikonomics" remains a popular buzzword, but without structural reform to idol groups, it’s difficult to know how much of an impact it will have over the long term. I think many of us remain worried that her real goal is to try to create SKK48 and TKS48 (Senkaku and Takeshima, respectively), which would have predictably disastrous results for Asia-Pacific security. That said, even a critic like me should give her credit for her restraint thus far.

Sashihara was clearly wounded by the dating/sex scandal, and Minegishi Minami’s tearful video
(post-head-shaving) this past year showed the continued costs to Japan’s cute community of media leaks and open reporting. And it’s there where I think her appearance at Kouhaku - teaming up with elderly enka singer Itsuki Hiroshi for a thrilling performance of “Hakata A La Mode” - provided the evening’s most interesting political subtext. After all, Sashihara’s championing of a media secrecy initiative that would severely punish journalists and whistleblowers alike for leaks was reflected in the choice of the song, with its compelling point about the need to hide one’s tears (“namida kakushite”), which you can’t very well do if your ex-boyfriend’s going to rat you out to Shukan Bunshun for your sexual proclivities. And that seems, to my mind, to be much more germane to the issue than the tatemae put forth by MOFA: that the new secrecy rules simply protect the mysteries of J-Idol cuteness from competitors overseas, that a PYY48
(Pyongyang) and BJN48 (Beijing) would readily emerge should the secrets of Japanese success be revealed through Wikileaks or another whistleblower site.

Japanese constitutional scholars have long argued about the “cuteness-vs.-privacy” tradeoff (I mean, we can’
t very well find these idols cute if we know what they’re really like), and I think one can respect the proponents of either side. But the problem with Sashihara’s initiative is that it’s so vaguely written, so broad in the administrative authority it provides the leaders of AKB48, that it threatens to make the group’s democracy a bit of a sham. I don’t want AKB48 elections to be marked by the kind of negative campaigning that defined the West Coast vs.
East Coast rap scene in the US in the 1990s, but if it turns out that an AKB48 member is taking payoffs from TEPCO, I’d like to know it before casting a vote for her as my favorite member. Sashihara’s media secrecy initiative seems to me at least to threaten even a
YKI48 kenkyuusei in Yokkaichi who might simply be trying to make sure the otaku can make an informed choice. And this is where my own concerns lie, in that it suggests that Sashihara, for all her talk of democracy and values-oriented entertainment, is really interested in democratic values only as a rhetorical cudgel to bash rising (and avowedly authoritarian) challengers like E-Girls.

It’s unsurprising that Washington immediately applauded the initiative as an essential part of the entertainment alliance that Seiko and Donnie started.
I’d like to think that Secretary of State John Kerry is merely poorly informed rather than deliberately dishonest in his recent claim that this will finally allow the US to start sharing secrets of its boy bands’ success with Japan without worrying that they’
d immediately show up in the pages of Spa! or Josei Seven. Sashihara may be comparatively well-liked in DC because of an apparent commonality of interests, but it’s unclear that anyone actually trusts her. It might be more accurate to say that misdiagnosis and overreaction from the Michael/Janet/LaToya Jackson debacles have overwhelmed any sense of balance in DC, making paranoia and panic the “new normal” in American soft diplomacy. And after the Bieber Incident(s), the Obama administration can’t afford any more costly mistakes. If Sashihara is using the new initiative simply to protect herself, she’s one canny operator; but if she thinks that she's going to see genuine interoperability between AKB48 and anyone on the Disney Channel, she’s taking a sucker’s bet.

Anyway, because of my interests in security politics, this was the issue that jumped out to me, though I assume that people interested in local politics may have been more focused on the Kouhaku appearance by Funasshi, the militantly unofficial mascot of Funabashi City. I’ve long worried that he’s nothing more than a rip-off of Jitters the Panicky Squirrel, the mascot of Hartford, Connecticut. But who knows? Those kinds of things are awfully hard to prove, and I suppose it’s irresponsible of me to write it without having some evidence.

I know many other SSJ-Forum members have done a lot more research on these issues than I have, so I defer to your collective judgment on whether I’m reading Kouhaku politics correctly.

Happy 2014 -

Dave