1 Kitagawa Johnny

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).

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