Kitagawa Johnny: The Showa Returnee Who Re-imagined the American “Musical” as Idol Teen Culture for the Heisei Era and Beyond.
In the past decade, the story of, Kitagawa (Hiromu) Johnny and his talent agency Johnny’s & Associates—known in Japan as “Janizu Jimsho” and hereafter referred to as J&A— has been explored by scholars working in both popular culture (Chaney 2000; Chun 2018) and cultural studies (Darling-Wolf 2004; Nagaike, 2012; Mansor, 2018). The research and publications of these scholars in the area of transnational cultural flow and gender-based fandom exists alongside the earlier work of well-informed Japan-based journalists and writers, most notably Poole (2012) and Brasor (2014). As journalists, the latter naturally put emphasis on issues relating to the impact of J&A on contemporary Japanese popular culture. As such, their work mostly explores the ways in which the organization has, in the past three decades, created a tightly controlled business model, one built around total control of the activities of their roster of male artists or tarento. Their research and publications, aimed at a general audience, have attempted to explicate the ways in which the agency has managed to dominate a significant segment of Japanese TV and entertainment, sometimes through questionable or unethical methods. The work of these journalists and the academics mentioned earlier, do of course, include the most pertinent details of the early life of Kitagawa and his efforts to create a new kind of entertainment model focusing on the female baby boomer demographic. They do not, however, have as their goal an explanation or evaluation of the place or status of J&A in the early entertainment and popular culture history of Japan. This article attempts to fill this gap, beginning with a systematic and chronological analysis of the early life of Kitagawa in both immediate post-war Japan and late-1940s Los Angeles. By exploring these early experiences in their historical context, an insight can be gained into the subsequent decisions made by this complex returnee to Japan during the first two decades of his career in the entertainment business (1962-82). In addition, by putting his efforts into the context of the rapidly evolving entertainment structures of the 1960s and early 1970s (explored by this writer in earlier publications), a partial reassessment of the contribution of Kitagawa to Japan’s larger post-war popular culture revolution can be made (Furmanovsky 2008, 2013).
Rethinking Kitagawa Johnny’s Contested Legacy in a Posthumous Context
The death of Kitagawa on July 9, 2019 at the age of 87 led to an outpouring of media commentary on the achievements of the enigmatic and often controversial boss of arguably the most successful idol-producing agency in pop music history. Two months after his passing, a 2-day tribute concert attended by a total of 88,000 fans at the Tokyo Dome baseball stadium, saw most of the boy bands that he had created perform in a lengthy tribute to the man that many likened, at least in public, to a father figure (Japan Times, September 9, 2019). Seven months before his death, Kitagawa would surely have been satisfied to see the full house for the last “Janizu” New Year Countdown concert of the Heisei era (December 31, 2018). After all, the Japanese-American producer who, in his rare interviews, had stated that his principal goal was “to entertain others while entertaining yourself,” could look back on a half-century in Japanese show business with considerable satisfaction (Arama Blog, 2011). Indeed, just eight years before his death in 2010, the Guinness Book of World Records had presented the reclusive entrepreneur with no less than two awards; the first for producing the
1
most Number One songs, an extraordinary 232 between 1974 and 2010, and the second for the most number of concerts produced—well over 8000 in the last decade alone (Guinness Book of World Records, 2012). While his legacy includes lingering controversies surrounding his possibly predatory relationships with the young men under his personal control that might, in a different country, have irrevocably tarnished his reputation, there can be no question that his legacy is one that can compare to any behind the scenes figure in post-war Japanese popular culture (Sims, 2000; Hoban, 2009). The J&A story, which is explored in detail below, begins in 1961, a year, when the Japanese economy grew at a record twelve percent (Yoshioka and Kawasaki, 2016). It was in this year that the Japan-born, America-educated young returnee to Japan first came up with the idea of a live entertainment model that would be based around teenage boys’ stage performance. Unlike pop music impresarios in the U.S who expected to achieve commercial success through record production and sales, Kitagawa seems to have envisioned an act whose dance moves in the context of a stage-based musical or variety show, rather than vocal ability, would be the primary selling point for attracting a young audience. Given that Japan’s entertainment industry was almost entirely devoid of dance acts, he could hardly have anticipated that this decision would ultimately play a role in the transformation of the entertainment culture of not only Japan, but much of Asia. Indeed, five decades on, the dance idol model he created with his first boyband, The Johnnies has become not just ubiquitous in the Japanese music industry, but has made most rival approaches to musical entertainment for those under twenty-five seem quaintly out of date. The power of the pop culture product that Kitagawa would ultimately develop can be seen by looking at the contemporary pop charts in Japan, and indeed much of East Asia. Even a cursory glimpse will confirm that a significant part of what constitutes pop music in the region today, is essentially synthesized dance music executed by highly disciplined and attractive dancer-singers. The most successful of these are of course the Korean K-Pop bands, who have universally embraced and refined the Janizu model. In recent years, a number of these meticulously trained combos have achieved major success outside Asia, most notably the seven-member dance troupe, BTS. In 2018 this Janizu-style boy band became the first Asian act ever to reach No. I in the American Billboard album charts, attracting an extraordinarily diverse international fan base for their dynamic choreography and creative use of video and social networks (McIntyre, 2018). What then, did Kitagawa Johnny know, understand or intuit in 1962, that would allow him, two decades later, to build a production and talent agency whose approach to the business of marketing pop music entertainment through young dancing boy bands, would so fundamentally shape Japanese popular culture? The year in which Kitagawa founded his agency was one in which the new girl-next-door female idol, epitomized by the diminutive twin Ito sisters (“The Peanuts”) and a handful of male equivalents, most notably Sakamoto Kyu, dominated the new pop music business. A significant portion of this business was under the iron grip of Susumu and Misa Watanabe, the founders of Watanabe Production. The powerful and innovative founders of Nabepro, as it was soon nicknamed, already controlled a large portion of the market for western-oriented popular music and was reaping profits from a hierarchical model in which new artists were carefully groomed and developed before making their debut (Furmanovsky, 2009, p. 6) So what could and did a thirty-year old Japanese- American, who had spend his formative years in Los Angeles bring to the complex and rapidly evolving world of Japanese show business? It is here is where the Kitagawa story becomes somewhat murky, despite the efforts of the aforementioned scholars and writers to make sense of his goals and activities. Japanese scholars too, have struggled to explore and explain the reasons for and
2
background to Kitagawa’s success, focusing mostly on his tight grip on the mass media or the scandals that have at times surrounded him and some members of his idol groups. While Kosuga Hiroshi’s Ino no Otoko Johnny Kitagawa [Strategy and Tactics of Johnny Kitagawa] (2009) and Ōta Shōichi’s Janīzu no shōtai entāteinmento no sengo-shi [Johnny’s Identity in Post War Entertainment History] (2016) are regarded as the most detailed accounts of the Kitagawa story in Japanese, a number of well-connected blogger fans and Japanese investigative journalists have offered additional and alternative insights and theories. Some of these are explored here alongside a historical narrative that puts Kitagawa’s formative years into the complex mix of factors shaping his achievements.
Post-War Los Angeles as Crucible for the Nisei Embrace of Pop Culture
The legend of Kitagawa’s unique and controversial show business career—it is generally accepted that the gay president of J&A engaged in sexually predatory behavior during his career—begins in 1950 in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo. His father Taido, raised in the Koyasan Shingon Buddhist sect in Wakayama, had been sent by the temple in February 1924 to serve the local Japanese community there. Arriving just months before the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act would ban Japanese immigration, he married a first-generation Japanese-American in 1926. His wife would die,
3
however, when Johnny, born October 23 1931 was a child, and in June 1942, the family would be further traumatized when they were deported to Japan. While details are unclear, it seems the family spent most of the war years in or around Wakayama with Johnny at one point narrowly escaping a U.S air raid (Vox Populi, 2019; Ōta 2016, p.27). After the war, when still in his mid-teens, Kitagawa’s fluent English allowed him to get a part-time job at the Ernie Pyle Theater, formerly a Takarazuka venue, in Yurakucho, Tokyo, while his sister Mary would join the Osaka Shochiku Theater (Yomiuri Shinbun, 2011). This experience of helping to produce musical entertainment for the occupation forces, seems to have contributed to a lifelong interest in the performing arts, something he was able to pursue when his family returned to Los Angeles in 1947. On his return to Los Angeles, Kitagawa found that, despite the massive trauma of the war years and internment, the vibrant pre-war society described by Valerie Matsumoto in her evocative book on Nisei life, was now at least partly reconstructed (Matsumoto, 2014). Indeed, in comparison with the devastation in almost any urban area of Japan, Little Tokyo in the late 1940s would have been a veritable paradise for those young people who were too young to have been deeply affected by the internment experience or were able to internalize it as part of their future aspirations. This small world of around 25,000 Nisei, which was protected in many ways from the lingering racism and exclusion that was a feature of Los Angeles society in the late 1940s, included regular trips to the movies as well as many hours devoted to music and sports on the radio. Dancing too was a major part of life and, as Matsumoto writes, urban Nisei “retained their love of waltz, tango and swing dancing (p. 215).” Indeed, for girls, dance was not only the single most popular social activity, but the dance floor itself embodied the promise of a non-arranged romantic encounter (p. 115). Given his fortunate residence just a few kilometers from the Broadway Theater District in Los Angeles and the Japanese American-owned Linda Lea movie house, Kitagawa would have had easy access to musical theater as well as the latest movies while attending Los Angeles City College (now UCLA). It was during this time (1949-51), that he seems to have had an experience that fits precisely the type of fateful transnational cultural intersection between Japanese and Japanese-Americans that Jayson Makoto Chan explores in his 2018 article (Chan, 2018). In July 1950, the then eighteen year-old college student was given the task of interpreting for 13-year old singer Misora Hibari when she and singer Kawada Haruhisa performed at the Koyasan Hall during their California tour, the first ever overseas tour of professional Japanese popular music artists (Bourdaghs, 2012, p. 58-9; Ota, 2016, p.31). This seminal event in Kitagawa’s life and a sense that he could be a bridge between two cultures, seems likely to have been a factor in leading him to try his luck in Japan some time in 1952.
1950’s Japan as Transnational Cultural Opportunity for Aspirational Nisei
In 1952, with the Korean War bringing an influx of American soldiers to Japan, Kitagawa was able to obtain an interpreter position with the American embassy in Tokyo, apparently also working with officials in GHQ. During the next few years he held a number of jobs, including a stint in Korea where he claimed to have taught English to orphans. Some time in the mid-1950s he also enrolled as a student in the Literature faculty of Sophia University and worked as a theater stage manager. It was what this early bilingual “returnee” did next, however, that has long been part of J&A and indeed Japanese entertainment mythology, repeated in almost every database-type account of the history of J&A, as well as those of scholars Kasuga and Chun. The details are still obscure but according to the legend repeated by Kitagawa himself in Poole’s 2012 interview with him, some
4
time in 1958, while working for the U.S embassy and living in a US army dormitory in Washington Heights, he began coaching a group of young teenage baseball enthusiasts from Yoyogi Junior High School in some nearby fields (now part of Yoyogi Park). He then organized the boys into a team who took the name “The Johnnies,” and apparently with some support from the well-known pro- wrestler Rikdozan, arranged for competitive games to be played games at Rikkyou University’s Ikebukuro campus (Poole, 2012, Shuto, 2017). After games, the boys would also visit his Kitagawa’s apartment to listen to music and eat imported snacks and, according to some accounts, also found themselves exposed to carefully planned predatory sexual behavior by their mentor, much like that perpetrated by Catholic priests in orphanages in several western countries during the same era. Whatever the truth of these allegations, and there is good reason, based on lawsuits in the 1990s and early 2000s (Sim, 2000) to give them credence, the boys continued to spend much of their time with Kitagawa, often visiting a Yotsuya bar owned by his sister Mary. Frequented by soldiers who would enjoy the latest jazz and pop coming from the USA (Pop No Sekai Database, 2000), the bar also provided spaghetti and imported sweet snacks, both almost unknown outside the Washington Heights enclave and obviously highly enticing for boys barely out of puberty (Ota, p. 39). During this time, Kitagawa also made the acquaintance of the aforementioned founder of Nabepro jazz artist Susumu and his astute and business-minded English-speaking wife, Misa. Misa, a former GHQ interpreter, had achieved national and international media attention as well as some notoriety, for helping to develop, promote and shrewdly monetize the rokabiri (rockabilly) boom of 1958-59 (Furmanovsky 2008, p.55). It would be his close connection with the so-called “rokabiri madam,” (as she was dubbed by the media), that would smooth the development of Kitagawa’s show business career in the next few years. The J&A legend then jumps to January 1962, when, Kitagawa took four boys Aoi Teruhiko, Nakatani Ryo, Iino Osami and Maie Hiromi to see the movie West Side Story. Featuring an extraordinarily ahead-of-its-time ballet-meets-jazz dance choreography performed to a dynamic Leonard Bernstein score, the dance scenes apparently so impressed the boys that would go to see it every day, spending their free time practicing the energetic moves that they had seen. For Kitagawa, too, the movie seemed to embody a powerful combination of music and dance that seemed ripe for a new, and potentially lucrative type of musical production; one that could appeal to the new female teenage demographic that had helped make the rokabiri explosion of the late 1950’s so powerful. In the following months Kitagawa began to conceptualize and develop the idea of using the four boys, not just as members of a musical cast, but also as a permanent dance vocal hybrid act that could appear in future stage productions. In order to implement this idea, a decision was made to set up a talent-training agency together with his business-minded sister Mary, in June 1962. This agency would be run as a type of subsidiary organization of Nabepro, providing the parent company with artists for musical theater and, with the growing dissemination of television sets, for TV music variety programs (Kumo No Ue Hitotachi Blog). Already run as a highly controlled hierarchy by Watanabe Misa, Nabepro had, by 1962, established itself as a new model for Japan’s burgeoning entertainment industry and was busy building up a mini empire of artists, songwriters and production staff as well as making ties with Fuji Television (Nagahara 2017, pp. 196-97). The organizations’ most successful act at the time was the twin sister vocal pair, The Peanuts. Barely out of their teens when discovered in 1959, the sisters were carefully mentored and coached by Misa and her team of producers, seamstresses and makeup artists. An immediate hit, their “girl next door” appeal and performances in ever-changing fashion styles, were squarely aimed at Japan’s growing middle class consumers, especially young baby boomer families (Furmanovsky 2009, p.5). Perhaps
5
not surprisingly, The Peanuts as well as other Nabepro female idols such as Ito Yukari and Hirota Mieko, had only limited attraction for the first post-war dankai no sedai baby boom generation of around five million teenage girls born between 1946-50. This new cohort of young teenage girls, around one million of whom would have lived in the Tokyo and Osaka regions at the time, had already seen the rapid demise of the male-led rokabiri groups whose hard-hitting on-stage presence had excited their older siblings. With considerably fewer idols than their male cohort to support, they were primed for a new outlet for their increasing levels of leisure time and spending power.
The Johnnies: Finding a Place in Japan’s Developing Music Business and Culture
In early 1962, with the goal of attracting a younger and more female fan base, Nabepro, by now firmly part of the entertainment establishment, put together its first ever non-rokabiri boys group, the Three Funkies. Emerging from a country and rokabiri music background, the teenage boy vocal group had, by late 1962, developed a fanbase built around their energetic stage performance of a Japanese version of Dion & the Belmonts’ hit “Runaround Sue” and the Chubby Checker-influenced “Desanoyo Twist” (History of Idol Blog, n.d). It seems reasonable, given his close connection with Nabepro and admiration for the astute Watanabe Misa, that Kitagawa’s decision to give his first boy band a persona built around a dynamic and animated on-stage performance, was in fact an effort to duplicate the success of this new Nabepro act. Indeed, he later commented that the group’s initial popularity with teenagers was boosted by the resemblance of sixteen-year old Hiromi Maie to the Three Funkies’ lead singer Nagasawa Jun (Hanoi Japanese, n.d). In mid-1962, under the name The Johnnies, the four-member group would appear repeatedly in the ACB club in Shinjuku and the Mimatsu in Ginza, both venues where Nabepro placed their acts to refine their performance skills. While fulfilling duties as a manager of Nabepro’s teenage enka sensation Mori Shinchi, Kitagawa worked to promote the four-member teenage boyband, gaining a modest breakthrough in August 1962 when the group appeared on the popular TV show Yume de Aimasho, as backup for Nabepro idol Ito Yukari (Kumo No Ue Hitotachi Blog). Despite this opportunity, however, the strategically minded J&A boss, chose not to record any singles and instead focused on refining the groups skills as back-up dancers. Indeed it was not until 1964 that he would negotiate with Ei Ryosuke and Nakamura Hachidai, the Nabepro-affiliated composers of Sakamoto Kyu’s optimistic anthem “Ue wo Muite Arukou” (and the most successful songwriting partnership in Japan), for a song, “Wakai Namida” (Tears of the Young) (Furmanovsky, 2013; Kayo Kyoku Plus, n.d; Hanoi Japanese, n.d). Perhaps surprisingly, given the track record of the writers, the song did not achieve any significant success. This was also the case with several other kayokyoku-style conventional pop singles recorded in 1964-65. In May 1965, however, the group scored a minor breakthrough with their participation in the long-awaited debut musical "Homura no Kabu” (Flame Curve)” written by well-known novelist Ishihara Shintarō. The excited reaction of teenage girl fans to the groups’ performances in the Nikko theater led to an invitation to participate in the prestigious New Year eve Kohaku Utagassen [Red & White Song Contest] where they performed the musical number “Mack the Knife” Chun, p. 151). It is this December 1965 performance that allows us to see for the first time, the rapid development of the group’s dancing skills. Far removed and improved in terms of dynamism and technique from their TV performance of “Boku no Tebukuro Yabure Teru” [My Gloves are Torn] a year earlier, the groups’ dancing provides a glimpse into the styles that would, fifteen years later, become the Janizu template. The progress imbedded in this 1965 performance is examined below as part of a larger exploration of
6
pop music dance performance in the U.S and its possible impact on Kitagawa and his teenage charges in the late 1960s.
Exploring Influences on J&A’s Adoption of an American Musical Style Dancing Template
Given the way in which J&A developed in the 1980s and its contemporary image, it is perhaps natural to see the early 1960s Johnnys and subsequent groups such as the Four Leaves, Tanokin Trio, Hikaru Genji, SMAP and Arashi, as immediate precursors to the modern Janizu boyband, with most of the characteristics already in place. However, while this view is in fact implicit in almost every academic article on J&A, it has received relatively little scrutiny or evidence-based research. If Kitagawa did in fact have a vision of a professional dancing and singing boyband act purely as a result of seeing West Side Story on screen, it would certainly have been an exceptionally daring and brilliant idea given that there were few musical models from the U.S from which he could readily draw on. Indeed prior to the mid-1960s, only a handful of vocal groups, almost all of them African- American, included more than cursory dance moves in their act. The idea of what is now called “vocal choreography,” a combination of energetic dancing while also singing, is generally attributed
7
to Cholly Atkins, an African-American jazz and tap dancer who, with his dance partner Honi Coles, had been post-war America’s premier tap dance “class act,” touring with most of the leading swing jazz artists. Although tap dance went into a rapid decline in the early 1950s, Atkins, a master of the soft shoe and shuffle, was able to find work later in the decade as a dance coach to the new breed of young African-American doo-wop groups. These included arguably the first ever dancing boy band, Frankie Lyon and the Teenagers, in the mid 1950s, an act that Kitagawa would certainly have been aware of. In the early 1960s Atkins was hired by Berry Gordy of Motown Records and given a chance to refine his innovative blending of jazz and modern dance. In 1963 his choreography for The Miracles novelty song “Micky’s Monkey” attracted wide attention and within two years, his skills were on display through the legendary million-selling international male vocal-dance acts, The Four Tops and Temptations (Atkins & Malone, 2001, 107-110; Malone, 1996, pp. 118-122). While there is no direct evidence that Kitagawa was directly influenced by the dancing groups choreographed by Atkins at the time he created The Johnnies, he could hardly have been unaware of the major changes in the role of dance in American live entertainment that were taking shape in the mid-1960s, in part due to Atkins’ influence. In addition, the J&A boss was known to keep an eye on American trends and it seems certain that he would have been aware of the new breed of music TV programs featuring in-house professional dance troupes, most of whom had Broadway experience. These included ABC’s Shindig! featuring choreographer Toni Basil and the even more dance- oriented Hullabaloo (NBC). The latter, a four man-six woman combo (the Hullabaloo Dancers) was led by former West Side Story actor and Elvis movie veteran David Winters and included future Broadway legends Michael Bennett and Donna McKechnie (Sandomir, 2019). Broadcasting from January 1965, the Hullabaloo Dancers West Side Story dance style is clearly mirrored in The Johnnys’ “Mack the Knife” performance mentioned earlier. Unfortunately for Kitagawa, the career boost of a dynamic performance on what was then Japan’s most prestigious entertainment program, Kohaku Utagassen, coincided precisely with the explosion in popularity of the Beatles- and Ventures-inspired Group Sounds (GS) bands featuring mostly high school-age boys playing their own electric guitars. The GS movement was now clearly poised to challenge the early 1960s idol singer template and perhaps even the hierarchical and highly controlled Nabepro show business model that Kitagawa had firmly embraced. As such, future prospects for The Johnnys and other acts whose main attraction was a sweet or boyish appearance combined with the ability to perform Broadway musical-type dance numbers, looked distinctly unpromising. Undiscouraged, Kitagawa ensured that his new group honed their dancing and singing skills in his agency—a practice now considered standard in Japan but highly unusual at the time. In August 1966, he took this professional seriousness to a new level, bringing the group to Los Angeles for four months of vocal training and dance lessons, an unimaginably expensive move. During these four months Kitagawa signed a contract with Warner Brothers to make an album that he hoped might be released in the U.S. The group also recorded the first ever version of the ballad song “Never My Love,” later a worldwide hit for The Association (Ota, pp. 53-54). Neither the album nor song were ever released, however, and the evidence suggests that by early 1967, the J&A boss was beginning to lose interest in the group and to consider new approaches to finding a place for a boy band within the Japanese music industry. One reason for this rethinking may well have been his exposure to the dynamic Los Angeles music business scene in general and the birth of a new kind of manufactured boys idol group, most notably The Monkees. Given his business acumen and connections in Los Angeles, Kitagawa would certainly have been aware of the new music business model that had been developing in the city shortly before his arrival. Epitomized by pop music producers and entrepreneurs Phil Spector and Don Kirshner, this
8
innovation was built around a factory-type approach to the development and treatment of young singers. The latter believed that, managed carefully, these kinds of acts would be able to attract those teenagers who were looking for a homegrown alternative to the “British Invasion” groups. On September 12, 1966, coinciding almost to the week with The Johnnys trip to Los Angeles, 32-year old producer-manager Kirshner and his collaborators launched the careers of The Monkees, a faux- Beatles group, with the first episode of their NBC TV show. The group’s short-lived but spectacularly successful career would be built around this zany comedy, featuring choreography by the aforementioned Hullabaloo dancer David Winters (Camote, 2016). While The Monkees had limited musical talent, they were competent comedy actors and entertainers whose diverse personalities allowed their rapidly growing army of young female fans the bonding experience and pleasure of being able to talk about and compare their favorite group members. These girls were of course carefully encouraged through creative marketing to spend their sizeable baby boom-era pocket money on photos and other promotional materials of the group, some of which were available only to fan club members. Both of these marketing approaches—appearances on TV and a tight control of intellectual property and physical souvenirs (or “goods” as they came to be dubbed in Japan) —would become an integral feature of J&A two decades later, and go on to survive the digital age.
The Four Leaves: Retooling the Boy Band Template for the GS era and Beyond
A year after The Monkees’ debut, Kitagawa, obviously still convinced that an idol-type group made up of dancing boys could achieve a similar kind of success, chose to disband the “Johnnys” and begin promoting the former’s backing group. The new group would use the name the “Four Leaves,” partly inspired by the then leading vocal group in the U.S, The Four Tops (Johnny’s Encyclopedia). This decision marked the beginning of an innovative management technique that would later become a J&A trademark, namely the grooming of a stable of future band members in a company-like setting in which future band members would live and train together. In fact, while the disbanding of the Johnnys may have seemed like an admission of failure, the J&A boss had no reason to be discouraged about his plan, having seen the wild or uncontrolled side of the GS movement easily tamed by Nabepro and others through the use of experienced kayokyoku producers and songwriters such as Izumi Taku, Aoshima Yukio, Iwantani Tokiko and Sugiyama Koichi. It was these old musical production and business hands who in 1967-68 gave carefully repackaged and managed GS groups such as The Blue Comets, Wild Ones, Spiders and Tigers, a steady stream of commercial unthreatening kayokoku-type pop songs for teenage girls. This was done while retaining (and often exaggerating) the slightly rebellious fashion and physical personas of the American and British groups on whom they were superficially modeled. The managers of these GS groups also strove to integrate the lives and personas of their teenage properties into the lucrative magazine industry, which by the late 1960s was producing pop music oriented publications for almost every age cohort (Furmanovsky, 2010, pp. 59-61). With his Four Leaves made up of four genuinely talented and attractive teenagers each with a distinctive personality (much like The Monkees), Kitagawa felt confident that this new group could be marketed to low and mid-teenage female fans, for whom long haired pop-rock bands, however tame their actual music might be, were still a little too threatening. The Four Leaves made their debut in 1967-68 with the album Olivia no Shirabe (1968) featuring an elegantly designed cover that showcased the four members in GS-style fashions styled by Kitagawa Mary. A modest-sized hit, the title track nevertheless created considerable attention and
9
would launch the group on a ten-year career. While never reaching the highest levels of commercial success, the popularity of the group among mid-teen girls, consolidated by numerous TV performances, confirmed that there was in fact a niche for the kind of act that Kitagawa had bet his career on. While hardly energetic on stage by later standards, the backflips of gymnastics-trained Kita Koji, a former backup dancer with the Three Funkies, added an element of excitement to their otherwise largely cute boy-based appeal and would soon become their trademark (JapanZone 2012; Koji Kita, n.d; Johnny’s Encyclopedia, n.d). Indeed a look at the group’s live performances in the years 1968-71, including a popular Coca-Cola commercial in 1968, shows a level of dancing proficiency and dynamism that can be compared to the mid-1960s vocal groups choreographed by Cholly Atkins at Motown Records. Featuring a genuinely talented singer and musician in Aoyama Takashi, and billed as the group in which each member was an equal, the Four Leaves would become the only non-GS male group to reach a mass audience in the late 1960s. Their peak years, however, were the early 1970s, following the precipitous decline of the GS boom and the splintering of the Japanese popular music scene into those (mostly university students), who chose to listen and perform western-style rock and folk and the rest of the baby boom generation. The latter would gravitate, following the debut of the TV idol creating program Star Tanjou, to the visual appeal of carefully manufactured and groomed female idols such as Minami Saori, Amachi Mari and Yamaguchi Momoe and former (male) lead singer of the Tigers, Sawada Kenji. Although the Four Leaves and subsequent J&A solo artist Go Hiromi (a backup singer for the group) achieved considerable success in the early 1970s, J&A entered a slump in the mid-1970s and the Four Leaves were disbanded and summarily discarded by the company in 1978, leading to considerable bitterness. Still regarded as a relatively minor player by the Japanese music industry, J&A saw their status and influence fall further behind the three major production companies, Nabepro, Horipro, and NTV, for the remainder of the decade. Indeed, rather than a J&A act, it would be the Okinawan based, “Fingā Faibu,” a sister and brother vocal group with an act built on the dance moves and pre-teen appeal of the early Jackson Five, that would became the first dancing idol group to reach a mass audience, selling in numbers that dwarfed all of Kitagawa’s artists at the time (Fingā Faibu Daisuki Blog, n.d) To compound matters further, 1975 saw Go Hiromi, Kitagawa’s biggest hope for all-round super stardom, unexpectedly quit the agency. This unprecedented event in J&A history came just as Kitagawa was poised to make him into the combined singer-dancer-movie star-entertainer that he had long dreamed of creating. In addition to being a huge personal blow to Kitagawa who almost certainly had attempted to bring the handsome singer into his orbit of sexual conquests, this unprecedented and never to be repeated breaking of contract led to a period of five years in which only a handful of the J&A roster, all of them solo artists, achieved any real success. The loss of Go would further Kitagawa’s resolve to maintain an iron grip on his artists future careers and to ensure that any future J&A artist who quit the agency would be effectively blacklisted from TV music or variety programs that wanted to feature or use any of his acts. It also reinforced his belief in the need for artists to serve a lengthy and rigorous apprenticeship under his and Mary’s full control before making their debut, an approach that would be appropriated and made even more rigorous by K-Pop production companies, two decades late (Thennary Nak Blog, 2019).
10
11
Psychosexual and Sociological Factors in the J&A Formula for Boy Band Success
While a discussion of the Heisei-era J&A is outside the focus of this article, it is clear that Kitagawa’s twenty years of alternating success and setbacks discussed earlier, built great resilience and a deep understanding of his audience. In combination with his unwavering ambition, these experiences would allow him to build a thirty-year-strong domination of the pop music industry through artists such as Hikaru Genji, the Tanokin Trio, TOKIO, Kinki Kids, Hey! Say! JUMP!, Kis- My-Ft2 and above all the ubiquitous SMAP and Arashi. The unshakeable belief that cute, rather than conventionally handsome, adolescent boys performing musical style numbers while dancing on stage, could attract a significant audience beyond a core of pre-or early-teen girls was one that no other agency foresaw. Indeed, there was no compelling reason to think that profits could realistically be made from school-age girls who, in the late 1970s certainly did not possess the discretionary income or leisure time of their American counterparts. Nor was there any objective reason to believe that such a template could survive in a musical industry that was built around a combination of enka for the older generation, western style rock for middle-class men in their twenties and doll-like female idols for lower- and middle-class adult men and women. Some of course might postulate the theory that his gay sensibility gave him an insight into the latent possibilities of the “boys love” homoerotic phenomenon that was then emerging through shōjo manga and for which his boy groups could perhaps provide an outlet. Others might suggest a darker side, namely a willingness to keep going because of his need to be surrounded by and in total control of easily replaceable pubescent boys who would do his every bidding. This theory of course has at least some credibility given later accusations by former members of improper sexual relations with his charges mentioned earlier. All of these explanations are plausible to some extent and of course the androgynous pretty boy appeal of J&A idols is well documented for the post-SMAP era by numerous commentators, most notably Darling-Wolf (2004, p. 361) and Nagaike (2012, pp.12-14). Yet could there be another one that only those with an understanding of the dynamics and emotional subtext of Japanese school-based teen life can fully appreciate? Kitagawa’s experience working with young teenage boys seems to have been a seminal one for him. Is it possible that this experience gave him some insight into the powerful emotions that are unleashed in the bonding experiences of young men (and women) as part of the Japanese Junior and Senior High school experience? Did he recognize the importance of the human attachments and emotional ups and downs that are generated through club activities, with their calibrated sempai- kohai relationships or the tightly knit family-type bonding that is often seen in the Japanese homeroom-class. Perhaps it was this understanding that gave him the idea in the early 1970s of the so-called “Johnny’s Juniors” system. Under this arrangement, J&A recruited boys into a talent pool; housed them in a dormitory—akin to a British boarding school—and trained them over a period of years. Just as British boarding schools involve a formalized hierarchy among boys, so Johnny’s Juniors were, and still are, expected to interact with older boys (their sempai) and patiently persevere with their singing, dancing and acting skills before making their debut as backup dancers for the older members (Thennary Nak Blog, n.d). This process also mimics the experience of a junior high school student in a sports club with all of its bonding rituals and emotional highs and lows, including the tear-filled retirement ceremonials. It is certainly possible that this understanding or insight by Kitagawa was a factor in the rapidly accelerating success of J &A from the early 1980s.
Refining the J &A Template for the Heisei Era Entertainment Industry
12
As any J&A or J-Pop culture fan knows, it was Hikaru Genji, J&A’s roller-skating flagship group, that would launch the agency into the upper realms of show business during the so-called golden age of boy idols, the 1980s. By the time the group made its debut in 1987, Kitagawa had already begun to use his increasing clout to place members of groups such as High Society and Shōnentai into occasional TV dramas and had launched the careers of the so-called Tanokin Trio (Masahiko Kondo, Yoshio Nomura and Toshihiko Tahara). This was of course also a refinement of Nabepro’s provision of movie vehicles and music-based TV shows for their idols in the early 1960s. The idea of farming them out to producers of non-musical TV dramas, however, was a new idea. While such a concept seems unremarkable in today’s Japan, the idea that pop stars could routinely function as credible actors or comedic hosts of variety TV programs, is one that was (and still is) quite unimaginable in any western entertainment market. If, however, we remember that Kitagawa initially saw his groups as potential performers in musicals or musical variety shows, then the concept does in fact seem consistent and indeed far ahead of its time. After all, J&A was, as we have seen, set up fifty years ago as an entertainment agency. Its goal was not articulated formally, but based on what Kitagawa himself has said, its interest was in bringing dance-oriented, musical- theater-style entertainment built around the appeal of energetic young male dancers to the world of Japanese show business. As such, a move into variety and comedy may well have seemed a natural one. The story of J&A after Hikaru Genji, culminating in the extraordinary success of SMAP, the ultimate entertainers, Arashi, the definitive all-round boyband and TOKIO, the “rocker” older brother outfit, as well as many others (Kinki Kids, Kis-My-Ft, Sexy Zone) is one that has been told many times in numerous Japanese publications as well as several publications cited in this article, most notably Chun (2018). Quite naturally, these accounts tend to focus on the agencies’ ruthless tactics. The most common of these is the alleged threat to withdraw from any TV channel or program that does not give priority to J&A stars when choosing performers for the most popular teen-oriented music shows and dramas. Yet whatever one’s opinion of his highly profitable, tightly- run empire, in which catering to the teen demographic always trumps musical performance, no one can question the extraordinarily high level of sheer professionalism matched with endurance and consistency that Kitagawa’s protégés display. On a literally daily basis, all but the most famous of these groups not only follow a rigorous practice schedule, but assume multiple and ever-changing roles and functions across the entire spectrum of the entertainment world. If there are doubts about the work ethic of today’s young Japanese, vis-à-vis earlier generations, they only need to look at the daily schedule that J&A’s highly disciplined and multi-talented units follow in order to cater to their adoring fans, perhaps often at great personal cost.
Issues in Assessing Kitagawa’s Place in Popular Culture
The controversial life of Kitagawa Johnny, in particular those criticisms related to his alleged sexual harassment and tight control of his teenage artists, mirrors that of numerous managers past and present. These include Larry Parnes, manager of many early 1960s male British idols, and Lou Pearlman, a man who exploited most of the top-selling 1980s American boy bands (such as NSYNC and Backstreet Boys) and was accused of inappropriate sexual predations (Newman-Bremang, 2019). In Kitagawa’s case, his alleged misconduct also includes the manipulation of TV stations to give favorable treatment to his stars in both variety programs and dramas or risk being permanently
13
cold-shouldered. While Kitagawa’s career clearly has some parallels with these figures, he can perhaps be more usefully compared with the pop music producer and svengali Phil Spector. The latter, now serving a prison sentence for murder, was not only a genius in the studio but connected genre-bending African-American performance, inspired Jewish-American songwriting and the highest levels of ingenuity by veteran jazz-trained session musicians. His work helped professionalize and elevate the status of pop music itself in the west (Macleod, p. 20,103). While Kitagawa did not himself possess great artistic skills, the J&A founder also connected several strands of post-war Japanese popular culture to create something new. There can be little argument that his vision of a new kind of dance-based entertainment, has enriched the lives of millions of junior high school girls across three generations and paved the way for today’s multi-billion K-Pop industry. Despite his controversial personal life and the question marks over his agencies’ methods, Kitagawa Johnny’s fifty years of breaking sales and concert records as well as integrating American musical-style dance performance into the pop music stage, assures him of a place in not only Japanese, but also world popular culture history.
References
Amino Blog. (2005). The Dark Side of Johnny & Associates. Article summarizing information from Koji Kita’s book To Hikaru Genji: the Forbidden Diaries of Ex-Four Leaves Member Kita Kouji (1988, Data House) and Nakatani Ryo’s Johnny's no Gyakushu (1989, Data House). Retrieved from https://aminoapps.com/c/japan/page/blog/ the-dark-side-of-johnny-associates.
Arama Blog. (2011). Blog on Japanese Entertainment News. Don’t Want to Lose to Broadway. A Talk with Johnny Kitagawa. Retrieved from https://aramatheydidnt.livejournal.com/ 2945475.html
Atkins, C., & Malone, J. (2001). Class Act: The Jazz Life of Choreographer Cholly Atkins. New York. Columbia University Press.
Bourdaghs, M.K. (2012). Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop. New York: Columbia University Press.
Brasor, P. (2014). Brush up on pop idol feuds before the exam. Japan Times, May 10, 2014. www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/05/10.
Canote, T. (2016, September 12). The 50th Anniversary of the Monkees. Retrieved from http://mercurie.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-50th-anniverary-of-monkees.html
Chaney, B. (2000). More Than "Sukiyaki" and Idols: Japanese Popular Music 1945-1999. Masters Thesis. University of Oregon.
Darling-Wolf, F. (2004) SMAP, Sex, and Masculinity: Constructing the Perfect Female Fantasy in Japanese Popular Music. Popular Music and Society, Vol. 27, No. 3.
14
Fingā Faibu Daisuki Blog. (n.d). Finger Five Information. Retrieved October 2, 2019 from https://ameblo.jp/1205-lelouch
Furmanovsky, M. (2008). Rokabiri, Student Radicalism and the Japanization of American Pop Culture, 1955-60. Ryukoku University Intercultural Studies. No.12.
Furmanovsky, M. (2009). Watanabe Productions and “The Hit Parade: A Comparative Study of Early Pop Music TV Shows and Artists in Japan and the UK in the Years Before The Beatles. Unpublished article.
Furmanovsky, M. (2010). Outselling the Beatles: Assessing the Influence and Legacy of the Ventures on Japanese Musicians and Popular Music in the 1960s. Ryukoku University Intercultural Studies. No.14.
Furmanovsky, M. (2013). Crafting the Showa Dream in Popular Song: “Hachi-Roku and the Invention of Modern Kayokyoku, 1959-65. Japan Association of Comparative Culture. No 106.
Guinness World Records. (2012). Japanese Producer Johnny Kitagawa Produces The Most #1 Acts By An Individual. Retrieved from http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2012/12/ johnny- kitagawa- most-1-acts-produced-by-an-individual-46316.
Hanoi Japanese (n.d). Blog on Japanese Idol History. Janīzu no kyōkasho. Dai 4-shō `shōnen kara otona e [Johnny’s Textbook Chapter 4: “From Boys to Adults]. Retrieved from https://hanoisan.hatenadiary.jp/ entry/20150706/1436192971
History of Idol. (n.d). Blog Introducing Japanese Idol singers. “The Three Funkeys.” Retrieved from http://fanblogs.jp/taisei64/archive/7/0
Hoban, A. (2009, February 11). Turning Japanese: The Seedy Underworld of Music Moguls. UK Guardian. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/music/2009/feb/11/turning-japanese-music- moguls
Japan Times. (September 4, 2019). Celebrities mourn death of Johnny Kitagawa at Tokyo Dome memorial event.
JapanZone Blog (2012). Four Leaves Ko-chan Dies of Cancer. Retrieved from https://www.japan- zone.com/news/2012/02/23/four-leaves-ko-chan-dies-of-cancer
Johnny’s Encyclopedia (n.d). Website devoted to J&A. Retrieved from https://jpedia.jakou.com/leaves.html
Kayo Koku Plus (n.d) Blog Focusing on Showa Era Pop. Johnnys Wakai Namida. Retrieved from https://kayokyokuplus.blogspot.com
Kita Koji. (n.d). In Wikipedia Japan. Retrieved from https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/北公次
15
Kosuga, H. (2007). Geinō wo biggu bijinesu ni kaeta otoko Johnny Kitagawa no senryaku to senjutsu. Tokyo: Kōdansha.
Kumo No Ue No Hitotachi Blog (n.d). “History of Johnnys.” Article that translates passages from the Japanese book History of Johnny’s: 45 Years of Light and Darkness.” Retrieved from https://kumonoue.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/history-of-johnny’s-part-1-prologue
Lovingood, M. (August 13, 2018). How Bringing Broadway West Could Transform DTLA. Retrieved from https://brighamyen.com/2018/08/13/how-bringing-broadway-west-could-transform- dtla
MacLeod, S. (2018). Phil Spector: Sound of the Sixties. Lanham, Maryland. Roman & Littlefield.
Malone, J. (1996). Steppin' on the blues: the visible rhythms of African American dance. Urbana. University of Illinois Press.
Mansor, A. (2018). Johnny’s Idol Persona Constructions and Transcultural Female Fandom Consumption. In Raphael, J. & Lam, C., Weber, M. Disassembling the Celebrity Figure: Credibility and the Incredible. Brill Books.
Matsumoto, V. J. (2014). City girls: the Nisei social world in Los Angeles, 1920-1950. New York: Oxford University Press.
McIntyre, H. (2018, July 18). BTS Is The First Group To Reach This Incredible Milestone On One Of Billboard's World Charts. Forbes.
Nagahara, H. (2017). Tokyo Boogie Woogie: Japan’s Pop Era and Its Discontents. Cambridge. Mass: Harvard University Press.
Nagaike, K. (2012). Johnny’s Idols as Icons: Female Desires to Fantasize and Consume Male Idol Images. In Galbraith P.W., Karlin J.G. (eds) Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture. Palgrave, Macmillan, London.
Newman-Bremang, K (2019). He Created NSYNC & Backstreet Boys-He Was Also the Ultimate Con Artist. Refinery 29. Retrieved from https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/03/228101/the- boy-band-con-the-lou-pearlman-story-lance-bass-interview
Ota, Shoichi. (2016). Janīzu no shōtai entāteinmento no sengo-shi (Johnny’s Post War Entertainment History). Tankōbon.
Poole, R.M. (2012, December 17) Johnny Kitagawa, Japanese Music Legend, Speaks Out. Newsweek.
Pop no Sekai Database (2002). Johnny H Kitagawa to musuko-tachi. Article reviewing Tenma Hiroshi’s 2002 book Fumetsu no aidoru ōkoku (Immortal Idol Kingdom). Bookman. Retrieved from http://zip2000.server-shared.com/jyanys.htm
16
Sandomir, R. (2019, May 3). David Winters, Energetic Dancer Turned Choreographer, Dies at 80. New York Times.
Schilling, M. (July 18, 2019). Johnny Kitagawa: Power, Abuse, and the Japanese Media Omerta. Variety. Retrieved July 29, 2019. Retrieved from https://variety.com/2019/film/asia/ johnny-kitagawa-power-abuse-japanese-media-omerta-1203271575
Seibert, B. (2019, March 13, 2019). Cholly Atkins Taught Motown to Dance. His Moves Get an Update in ‘Ain’t Too Proud.’ New York Times.
Shuto, Y. (2017, December 19). The Johnny’s” Entertainers Omnipresent on Japanese TV: Postwar Media and the Postwar Family. Translation of an article in Japan Policy Forum No 42. Retrieved from https://www.japanpolicyforum.jp/culture/ pt20171219165302.html
Sims, C. (2000, April 14). Lawmakers In Japan Hear Grim Sex Case. New York Times.
Tanokin BLOG (2007). Johnny's History part 1-3: Super Idol Go Hiromi. Retrieved from https://tanokin.livejournal.com
Thennary Nak’s Never Ending Music Power Blog (2019). History of Johnny’s Directory. Retrieved from http://never-ending-music-power.blogspot.com/p/history-of-johnnys-directory.html
Vox Populi. (2019, July 11). Johnny showbiz empire shaped pop music scene for decades.” Asahi Shinbun. Retrieved from http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201907110020.html
Yomiuri Shinbun (2011, October 21) Entertainment News. Retrieved from http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/ entertainment/news2/20111021
Yoshioka, S and Kawasaki, H. (2016). Japan’s High-Growth Postwar Period: The Role of Economic Plans. ESRI Research Note, No.27.
17