J-Pop Groups/Idols (Gillian)

To be completely honest, this is one topic that I personally do not hold much interest in. Having what I consider to be a relatively broad, if lazy, taste in music, I do like the odd famous J-Pop song. But as a musical genre I find the variety in J-Pop to be quite lacking. But for me to say that J-Pop is not cool would be ridiculous. Like boy bands in the 90s and winners of The X Factor in various countries in modern times, J-Pop is a sensation that sweeps the nation, causing men and women alike to swoon before its mighty feet.

So what is J-Pop? some of you foreigners out there may be asking. I would say that the definition of it varies from person to person (like a westerner trying to determine what sort of music fits into the “rock” genre). In layman’s terms, J-Pop is any mainstream music, sung by Japanese artists in Japanese (mostly - you get some generally ungrammatical English phrases cropping up in this music as well), that gains significant grounding on the Japanese music charts. Occasionally bands from a more unusual genre (Death Metal, for instance) will make their way onto these charts, but for the most part the charts consist of romantic love ballads, colourful bubbly choruses of pepped up genki-ness and the occasional rocking techno dance tune, sung by young men and women possessing astonishing beauty and a fantastic sense of fashion, if not necessarily anything resembling musicality.

Two of the biggest female artists currently in J-Pop, Ayumi Hamasaki (top) and Hikaru Utada (bottom).


It is harsh, perhaps, to say that J-Pop groups and idols have no musical talent. Perhaps I should clarify, and say that musical talent in J-Pop, rather than being non-existent, is irrelevant. I would say that is a fair statement to make. This leads me to believe that J-Pop is not so much about the music itself as it is about the image. And what an image it is.

Two of the more well-known J-Pop boy bands, KAT-TUN (top) and Arashi (bottom).


J-Pop groups and idols show up everywhere in Japan. Wherever you go, you are bound to see advertising billboards with some well-known J-Pop idol posing seductively and using the product in question, or posters on walls promoting a J-Pop group’s latest album, featuring the members of the group sitting would-be-casually in a room somewhere, all unsure as to why their clothes match each others’ so well. In the really central parts of major cities, those enormous TV billboards frequently show the latest J-Pop music videos, causing hundreds of adoring fans to stop and stare, transfixed, at the screen until the video is over. And of course, J-Pop stars show up on Japanese TV shows and in Japanese magazines all the time.

SMAP are one of the longest-running J-Pop groups around today. The upper picture is the cover from their first album, SMAP 001, released in 1992. The lower picture is them in 2010.


I am therefore left to conclude that the main purpose of any famous J-Pop group or idol is to look beautiful in public. And they manage this incredibly well (although, I must admit that the number of male J-Pop idols that look more like women a lot of the time is somewhat disturbing). The ability to dance appears to be quite essential, as no music video is complete without a smoking hot dance routine. And to be fair, a lot of them are great dancers. But what is dancing if not making oneself look good through movement? A lot of them also put their acting shoes on and act in dorama (more on that in my dorama article). You do occasionally get an unusual gem of a good actor amongst the J-Pop crowd (Kazuya Kamenashi and Jun Matsumoto, of KAT-TUN and Arashi respectively, have both delivered award-winning performances in dorama), but to be honest actual acting ability is, like musicality, irrelevant. They just need to look pretty.

And now to please any men reading this article… this group, known as AKB48, is more focused on theatre than on music. As its name suggests, AKB48 is made up of 48 members, or 16 members from each of the three “schools”. The group apparently holds a world record for most members in a single pop group. They are immensely popular in Japan.


I think that what makes J-Pop so popular has to do with how easy it is to become a fan. If you think about TV series’ like Glee, or book franchises like Harry Potter and Twilight, and how easy it is to immerse yourself in the world of the fans, with all of the websites and videos and merchandise available, J-Pop is very much like that. Not only do you have their albums and their music videos, but you have the clothes and the concert programs and the magazines and the knick-knacks with their pictures on them, sold in stores that specialise in J-Pop merchandise.


Even though I am not the biggest fan of J-Pop (and that is probably because the old woman in me likes to believe that music groups should be about music), I have to admit that it is fun discussing the J-Pop idols that you like and collecting the merchandise and watching the TV shows they appear in. Evidently a lot of Japanese people agree with me. Liking a well-known J-Pop group or idol will give you street credit among the Japanese, and there is no doubt that J-Pop is considered one of the coolest things about Japan.