Tokyo Damage Report: Interview with an ex-Visual Kei record executive

A lot of mysteries with this interview — is there really a Satoh-san? why does he speak such colloquial English? why is he giving away all of the industry’s secrets? — but I would like to assume the information is being presented in good faith. This is a must-read article, in any case. We at least learn the kinds of things we should be looking for in order to verify the industry portrait contained within.

There are a few points that match up the Visual-kei “con” well with patterns of the larger Japanese music industry that we know exist:

• Total management company control of artists. In both Visual-kei and idol worlds, the companies hire talent as salaried employees and determine every part of the total package. While this is seen with manufactured pop stars in other countries, it is disappointing to learn that even the crazy indie rock bands in Japan are basically cookie cutter. This also proves again that the business model is forcing super fans to buy the music as one more character good rather than creating “good” songs that appeal to a wider audience. In other words, companies abuse the culturally Japanese praxis of demonstrating loyalty: consumption. The system does not just de-emphasize musical talent, but also de-emphasizes good songwriting and production. No one needs to even try.

• The entertainment industry is a massive tax-evasion scheme. With the arrests of Rising (now Vision Factory) CEO Tetsuo Taira and Avant-Garde CEO Makino on tax evasion charges in the last decade, it is clear that the entertainment business allows for — and according to Taira’s court statements, requires — massive tax evasion. Satoh-san in the interview states in concrete terms how the practice works, with padding receipts between companies as a way to launder money. A few famous indie fashion brands got in trouble for something very similar back in 2005, so this not just the music industry. Since most of this is happening on the jimusho side, major labels from giant companies (Sony and Toshiba, etc.) may not be directly participating in this. But it would be a big surprise if they did not know it was happening. The other big question is why the Japanese government allows this to continue, thus robbing itself of huge tax revenue.

• The false appearance of corporate diversity. By changing the name of labels and management companies, the Visual-kei market appears to fans as if it has healthy competition. In reality, one company basically funds the entire operation. This is also how the alleged Burning “Keiretsu” is purported to work, although with no actual above-the-board evidence, we have to trust industry insider accounts. A scan of the Oricon pages will show hundreds of little management companies, but in reality, they are all organized into larger groups led by a central management company. The only way to prove the links is to look at publishing and corporate records, but most of the super secret connections exist in a plane totally unaffected by official documentation.

• Industry practices as “secret knowledge.” The most disappointing thing about this Visual-kei interview or any insider entertainment industry gossip is that it must remain in the gray zone of knowledge. There is often circumstantial evidence that supports the ideas — for example, Suzuki Ami did disappear suddenly after a “successful” legal battle with her management company — but we never have the mass media or government giving us concrete proof that something illegal or unethical is afoot. The closest we get is the arrest of jimusho managers as the police cannot hide the arrest. But the mass media, greatly dependent upon talent for profit, would not dare expose the entire industry. Those arrested are just “bad apples.” How the Japanese entertainment industry works is full of rules and regulations that can never be made public. So we are stuck having to read suspicious accounts in third-rate publications that often do not mention full names in order to protect themselves from libel. Wikipedia Japan refuses to consider this information in its articles. The truth is essentially cast out to media limbo, while the tatemae facade remains the most legitimate narrative of how Japan works.

1. J-Pop: From Peak to Weak

I recently heard rumors from Japanese music executives that Japan has become the world’s largest market for recorded music. Consumers in the U.S. can no longer be suckered into buying $18 CDs. Meanwhile the loyal Japanese music fan still shells out ¥3,000 — this is not a typo: ¥3,000! — for the third “Best” album of their favorite artist, even though they already own every track. The trick of selling CDs as loyalty-proving “character goods” rather than musical content likely softened the decline for the Japanese music industry.

Despite this very relative success, however, the J-Pop market is a total cultural disaster. The best selling artists of the 21st century are the best selling artists of the 20th century — with a few local “hip-hop” faces and over-manufactured rock bands thrown in the mix for good measure. Any country where the non-idol, non-singer, non-entity Shibasaki Ko is a chart-topper means it’s all over. At least Johnny’s Jimusho acts — NEWS, Arashi, SMAP, etc. — are a weird freak subculture where young women lust over unremarkable, untalented yankii boys sent in from weird corners of the Japanese countryside. Seeing B’z in the top Oricon slot is just sad: Great, they’ve produced another featureless musical cog that their institutional consumers have already slotted into their provisional expense budgets. For the best-selling bands in Japan, fandom is all rote.

Few J-Pop songs are able to bring together ad hoc audiences of non-core fans. They are no “society-wide” hits — just bands playing the commercial game “Who has the most fans?” J-Pop was once about the “mainstream” — now it’s about isolated silos of people with specific mainstream tastes.

And there’s also the old people problem. The elderly make sure that the highest ranking music show every week is “NHK Kayo Concert” (NHK歌謡コンサート) — featuring old people music — rather than shows like “Music Station” or “Hey! Hey! Hey! Music Champ” that in the past helped bring in new genres and bands.

It wasn’t always this bad. Consider Sony back in 2000. Puffy had peaked at that point, but that epoch-making female duo released a killer remix project that year — on three vinyl records, natch — featuring Captain Funk, Malcolm McLaren, Fantastic Plastic Machine, and Cubismo Grafico. Supercar’s fanbase somehow grew despite their abandonment of melodic shoegaze rock for abstract techno. Denki Groove’s VOXXX came out in Feburary 2000 and contained probably the pinnacle track of J-pop’s clash with club culture: “Nothing’s Gonna Change.” Even Judy and Mary had a few labyrinthine melodies left in them.

A few years later, things were still okay at the company. The Yuki/Chara double-drummer side project Mean Machine was all girl power and no songs, but “Suu Haa” was a most brutal piece of candy. Tommy February 6 did the ’80s revival to an obsessive technical degree only possible in Japan — not to mention the perfectly-realized visual component and the inside jokes about alcoholism. J-Pop was alive and well… and this was just Sony!

Now Sony is creating things like throwback boy band East West Boys and gyaru singer Nishino Kana. They also keep milking the Judy and Mary template with derivative bands like Chatmonchy.

I was already feeling the angst about J-Pop’s future in 2003 (villains of the era: pornograffiti, Soul’d Out, Kick the Can Crew, the proliferation of Morning Musume side projects) but it ended up being a relatively good year. When Halcali debuted in 2003, I thought they were a Puffy-rip-off, but the debut album Bacon has managed to stand the test of time — mostly due to the ingenious premise of forcing two 15 year-old girls to “rap” over fun sample-pop beats. The strength, however, was the project’s roots in Shibuya-kei aesthetics: Shindo Mitsuo did a video, Scha Dara Parr did minimalist grooves, FPM flexed his old latin sampling muscles. The follow-up Ongaku no Susume was alright and had the drama of the Noda Nagi-Aida Makoto pakuri cover. Then Sony bought them and promptly ruined the entire fun.

Shiina Ringo’s 2003 Karuki Zaamen Kuri no Hana (named after three things that all have the same semen smell) is easily the J-Pop album of the decade — if it can be considered J-Pop. Listening recently, it hasn’t aged as well as I would have hoped, and the songs are not her strongest. No one, however, has ever pulled off such conceptual framework and dense production. The opener “Shukyo” and closer “Soretsu” appear at first to be about religion and death but are respectively, meta statements on the constrictions of the Japanese music industry and the challenge of original creation. Many sensible people will find lyrics like「不條理を凝視せよ」to be out of the realm of good taste but this is real innovation and progression above the everyone else’s「抱きしめたい」poison banalities.

2. Japanese Indie Scene: The Old Guys

What happened with “indies”? Here I mean the old confrontational, progressive, internationally-minded indie artists — not the farm league major label mainstream pop bands who now dominate the genre.

Things were super hot over at Escalator and Trattoria as the new century broke. Cubismo Grafico’s bedroom house music peaked with Mini (2000) and Untitled (but one wish (2002). Citrus’ Wispy, no mercy — arguably the best 10 minutes of music ever produced in Japan — also hit the shelves in 2000.

The rest of the decade was not a good one for this subculture. Shibuya-kei decided it was over being Shibuya-kei, and everyone went in different directions. The album that defined the post-Shibuya, “Nakame-kei” sound was Tomoki Kanda’s landscape of smallers music. The sound was gentle and atmospheric, void of any cultural references, heavy beats, or foreign samples. Cornelius followed the same deconstructed course with the stripped-down and song-free Point (2001) and Sensuous (2006). Kahimi Karie went free jazz, then even drowsier. Yoshinori Sunahara abandoned his Pan-Am obsession and degraded-sample grooves for the relentlessly cold and slow Lovebeat. Then he disappeared. Citrus broke up, and Emori took almost seven years to make his abstract bossa-nova chanson landscape of Yoga’n'ants. Salon Music’s output was also relatively “Nakame-kei” but New World Record in 2002 was a great set of sonic experiments. Escalator completely threw away its unique brand of sample pop to become Japan’s answer to the techno-punk Electroclash — a total disaster other than the incredible Yukari Rotten album of 2004.

But there was ultimately an economic component to the “good indie” collapse. The vinyl market bottomed out very quickly after its peak in 1999. Quintessential Shibuya-kei record stores Zest and Maximum Joy both closed in 2005. The magazine Relax dropped the whole “My most obscure 100 records” column and then promptly folded. Beikoku Ongaku put out its last issue in 2005. In a panic, retro-lounge hound Fantastic Plastic Machine reinvented himself as an Avex-friendly house DJ who could command the floor at ageHa. Pizzicato Five’s Konishi Yasuharu started working with Johnny’s Jimusho. A generation who was rewarded monetarily for sonic experimentation suddenly wasn’t being rewarded at all. This was not encouraging.

So the Shibuya-kei scene faded away, but those were all old guys anyway, in their 30s, past their prime, looking to create some kind of stable income stream through music. What about the artists born in the Aughts?

Things started relatively well, mostly thanks to two labels: Vroom Sound and Usagi-Chang.

Vroom had the edit-frenzy of Plus-Tech Squeeze Box, the immaculately produced bossa pop of Petset, and the bedroom funk of Fab Cushion. The PSB tracks that hit in 2003, “fiddle-dee-dee!!!” and “starship 6″ (aka “打ち込みで派手な曲”) are still, hands down, the most revolutionary pop music pieces of the last decade. Both utilize the full potential of hard-disc recording to cut between thousands of samples in a single minute, to do away with traditional song structure, and take the listener close to the edge of the speed of light. The album that finally followed cartooom! in 2004 had its moments but felt like a pop compromise on the PSB premise. Hayashibe of PSB is busy doing commercial background music last I heard.

Petset meanwhile produced its masterpiece mini-album Sound Sphere in 2003, recorded in lush 8-track tape with vintage instruments, textured guitar strum, a Rhythm Ace drum machine, double live drummers, harmony boy-girl vocals and a sentimentality that somehow avoided being too twee. Both PSB and Petset, however, have basically retired from the thankless Japanese indie scene. Petset’s last EP Flow Motion,Feather Light was a slight wrong turn into sterile digital synths.

Usagi-Chang, on the other hand, was a short lived phenomenon but managed to invent an entire new genre of “pico pico” or “pico pop” — a term Trevor from Music Related and I are still convinced we invented. (I am pretty sure we stole it from a Japanese reviewer in hindsight.) Usagi-Chang will be always remembered as the guys who discovered YMCK — led by an ex-metal cover band member who pushed Nintendo 8-bit pop into jazzy chord progressions and squirted every possible sound out of that old chip. For me, the real Usagi-Chang heroes were MacDonald Duck Eclair — easily one of the most under-appreciated bands of the last decade. Both short short and The Genesis Songbook are masterworks of songwriting and production: As if Atari Teenage Riot composed a John Hughes soundtrack with a cast of Japanese café kids. The Genesis Songbook in particular is refreshingly noisy and aggressive — with points that seem to push the kitsch of bad ’90s J-pop into weird avant-garde composition. And even the bossa nova tracks match the mood. Usagi-Changs’ other artists Aprils, PINE*am, Misswonda, and Sonic Coaster Pop were all pretty solid. Hanger-ons Sylvia 55, Hazel Nuts Chocolate (the faux lo-fi years), Strawberry Machine, and Eel were also fun. Uinona were the only melodic punk band who had a foot in the old indie spirit.

Unfortunately, however, the energy got sucked out of the movement around 2006. Being in the 21st century Japanese indies scene is a thankless job — especially when the only people vocally championing you are penniless foreign bloggers who procure all their music from Rapidshare. Your best friends are nice enough to pay ¥3,000 to see you play in hostile clubs, but this doesn’t really get you anywhere. But the problem was, selling out after 2005 was not even an option. The only real artistic solution was to get more weird, but the record labels did not want to go further into debt and no one really had the heart. Most of this generation had seen the Shibuya-kei guys succeed both financially and critically at making interesting indie music and wanted to follow that path.

As of 2010, this particular entire indie scene has basically imploded, with zero new records from almost anyone. Capsule — who became the face of this scene somehow thanks to Yamaha’s advertorial largesse — are still hanging on, thanks to Nakata’s success with Perfume. They started the decade as a Pizzicato Five clone and then moved towards Daft Punk when that didn’t work. They are not so much a band as an industrial concern: 12 albums in seven years!!! — all of which have been brick-wall mastered to destroy your ears and stereo and soul.

4. Shugo Tokumaru: My Vote for the Messiah

The real star of Japanese music in the Aughts was Shugo Tokumaru. Shugo not only produced the three best albums of the entire decade but built up a legion of fans both Japanese and foreign. His Tokyo concerts sell out. He makes music for Mujirushi Ryohin (MUJI) and NHK. He shows up in kids’ shows. He is closer than anyone to following the old Shibuya-kei model of broad indie success.

2004’s Night Piece is deceivingly simple. It’s a quiet album. There are rarely drums — almost like he was secretly recording the songs in his room after his parents had gone to sleep. There are glimmers of what was to come: the sped-up guitar antics of “Paparrazi,” the bassy psychedelics of “Lantern on the Water,” the toy instruments of “Funfair.” By 2006’s L.S.T., all of those ideas were mashed into a super prog-pop freak-out with moments of Shins-like clarity drifting between squeaky toy box rhythms and lysergic black holes. Tokumaru claims that “L.S.T.” wasn’t a pun on LSD and his name, but I don’t believe him.

2007’s Exit, however, is listening to a man fully in control of his art. He reigns in all of the previous “excesses” to create songs that sound like charming pop concoctions to the average person but reveal a multi-layered, fourth-dimensional Rube Goldberg of arrangement on further listen. Tokumaru loves to make dueling pianica lines in 7/8 and has probably figured out how to use steel pan in the least annoying way since the instrument’s inception. “La La Radio” is the kind of full out pop symphony that would send Brian Wilson back to his therapist, containing more ideas in five and a half minutes than the entire J-Pop industry was able to come up with in ten years. Even “Button,” with its easily digested J-indie melody is clanky and bizarre.

This relative smattering of fame has not gone to Tokumaru’s head at all. He still sticks to his guns about being a terrible interview — saying nothing, but too polite to tell you that he doesn’t really want to talk about his music until the very end. He’s also a good barometer for whether anything interesting is happening in the J-indie world. When I ask if there are any good bands, he usually says, “No.” And he means it. When he says he likes Nhhmbase, that meant they were great. And they were great.

5. Honorable Mentions and Dishonorable Discharges

Otherwise, there were a lot of well-meaning guitar bands out there, whom we can pretty much ignore. Everyone still wants to sound like The Blue Hearts. I am sure these bands have lots of fans and stumble into some relatively solid songs, but so what? As much as we all laugh at ’80s soulless over-digital pop music, at least it sounds like ’80s music. Rock music of the 2000s could barely muster anything remotely signature — and I’m not just talking about Japan. I love the White Stripes’ “Fell in Love with a Girl” but I am sure it would have been a hit in 1995 too. So, yes, every song with full-crank Autotune will have to be re-engineered in the future to take out that hideous vocal effect, but at least when we hear it, we will remember the cultural nadir of the Paris Hilton decade. When I hear 175R, I will be like, “Wow, 1997!” and then, “Who was 175R again? Was that a Hi-Standard side project?”

Honorable mentions for the decade go to Afrirampo for managing to do the Osaka freak-out on a Sony marketing budget. I would love to go in detail about the genius of Kiiiiiii — especially the genius of (not my wife) Lakin’ as a song-writer — but I would rightly be accused of nepotism. DJ Codomo has hit upon one of the more unique soundscapes of the decade — toy-synth micro-funk? — but is not someone we can rely on to provide giant epic tunes. Oorutaichi makes music that I literally cannot wrap my head around, which is never a bad thing. Rip Slyme had a few good joints, like “Joint.” m-flo’s EXPO EXPO also had its moments, and they deserve credit for taking J-Pop in directions it clearly did not want to go. OOIOO’s Taiga was a grand culmination of the band’s past experimentation. Yura Yura Teikoku used the August to move into legendary status.

6. The Prospects for Japanese Indie Music Before We Are All “Left Behind” in the Coming Rapture

Here in 2010, the entire infrastructure for good indie music has completely been wiped out, and those who were once our greatest hope to “save” Japanese music have retreated into doing things more rewarding than commercial music — eating, breathing, sleeping, throwing things against other things, counting clouds, quietly reading, personal hygiene. I still do not buy the idea that economic calamity was good or will be good for Japanese pop music. There will surely be some decent musical artists in the next ten years, but they will have a much harder time getting started, being heard, winning fans, and selling records. The pre-Flipper’s Guitar “indie scene” was tiny, inconvenient, and relatively inconsequential. We romanticize it now only because Flipper’s Guitar exploded and led to giant visible scene later in history. As much as we want to believe that music is a “pure” artform that can exist without a market framework, we still unconsciously value market success when it comes to judging albums’ relative importance.

This decade taught us that selling records has never just been a commercial act but a social one as well. More records sold meant more fans, more people to share the music with, more cultural touch-points, more physical spaces to go where those records are sold or the music is played live. To a certain degree, the corporate pursuit of money in a bullish market created a strong environment for good Japanese music. Without this commercial structure, Japanese music will likely retain a creative value, but we will no doubt find it less “valuable” without its communal value. The money is not coming back, so we have to figure out how to cherish music without the ingrained prejudices of the 20th century.

In the English-speaking world, “Santa Baby” has been the go-to Santa-as-lover song for ladies since Eartha Kitt’s original 1953 version. The lyrics propose, slyly but unmistakably, that the dynamics of a hypothetical relationship with Santa, while grotesque, would nevertheless be topologically conjugate to the norms of postwar US gender relations.

Santa baby, slip a sable under the tree for me.
Been an awful good girl, Santa baby,
So hurry down the chimney tonight. [...]

Think of all the fun I’ve missed,
Think of all the fellas that I haven’t kissed,
Next year I could be just as good,
If you’ll check off my Christmas list [...]

Santa honey, forgot to mention one little thing: a ring.
I don’t mean on the phone, Santa honey…

Having located a potential lover of unlimited means, generosity, and kindness, the narrator of “Santa Baby” reveals herself as a true Homo economicus. Through both double entendre and frank bargaining, she outlines her terms: material comfort in exchange for exclusivity of erotic access, socially legitimated by marriage. The erotic frisson — still felt by many today, to judge by the unbroken stream of cover versions — arises from the directness. There will be no dating, no manipulation, no need to work around the rules of propriety: bring enough boxes from Tiffany, and you can “trim my Christmas tree” tonight.

What is the equivalent in Japan? I put it to you that it is “Koibito ga Santa Claus” (”My Lover is Santa Claus”) by Matsutōya Yumi. Originally released on her 1980 semi-concept album Surf & Snow, it became a monster hit a few years later as the theme song for Watashi o ski ni tsuretette! and has been the Christmas pop song in Japan ever since.

In “Koibito ga,” the narrator recounts an episode from one Christmas Day in her childhood on which a glamorous next-door neighbor claimed to be expecting a visit from Santa at eight o’clock (sharp).

“Chigau yo, sore wa ehon dake no ohanashi”
Sō iu watashi ni wink shite
“Demo ne, otona ni nareba, anata mo wakaru, sono uchi ni [...]
“Koibito ga Santa Claus, se no takai Santa Claus…”

“No way, that’s just a story from picture books”
I said, and she replied with a wink:
“When you grow up, you’ll understand too, one day [...]
“My lover is Santa Claus, a tall Santa Claus…”

“Many winters” later, the “glamorous neighbor” long gone, the narrator recalls this exchange and hints at her own imminent enlightenment. The song is about the awakening from childhood innocence, excitement and impatience for the passage into adulthood. The contrast with the knowing come-ons of “Santa Baby”, its playful yet fundamentally cynical take on gender relations, could not be starker. At the root of these differences is the approach to Santa himself.

In “Santa Baby,” Santa remains unchanged as a concept. Although it is not explicitly stated, there is no reason to believe that this Santa is not the jolly, toy-distributing, entirely asexual figure of childhood fantasy. It is these characteristics which enable the narrator to access the outer limits of her utility curve, grossly distending the expected pattern of a romantic relationship. (If the narrator went on to date and buy gifts for a sexy elf behind Santa’s back, it would be Honda Tōru’s “Akahori System” in its purest form.)

But in “Koibito ga,” Santa is the one who changes. Present-bringing is included as only one of his characteristics, but the fact that he is “tall” — that is, conventionally attractive — is repeated twice, and what the narrator seems to be looking forward to most is the excitement and knowledge of the outside (which is to say, adult) world that he will bring.

Nevertheless, the references to whirlwinds and cities of snow ensure that the song remains firmly grounded in fantasy, if you will — unlike, say, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” where Santa is forced into the real world so completely that he ends up just being Dad. (The fact that the glamorous neighbor’s Santa suddenly “took her to a distant town one day” is a highly realistic outcome for a postwar salaryman Santa, though, and might be a nod at the drab realities of domestic life that lie beyond the thrill of young love.)

Does this represent a greater Santaic fluidity in Japanese culture, perhaps owing to the tradition’s shallow roots here? Or is Santa’s transformation into a trim, handsome suitor an unsurprising result of Christmas being hijacked by lovers?

There is a standard protocol for Japanese record labels when their artists are arrested on drug charges or for any other anti-social acts: they pull all of the artists’ CDs from stores. When Makihara Noriyuki was arrested for amphetamines in 1999, Sony dutifully removed the singer’s records from record stops. This kneejerk reaction even applies ex post facto: when guitarist Suzuki Shigeru of ’60s hippie band Happy End was arrested for marijuana in February of this year, all the classic Happy End records — perhaps the most canonic recordings of Japanese pop music history — became unavailable through major commercial channels.

The idea is not just that these recordings are “tainted” by a drug using artist, but that companies must self-censor their catalogs to make sure that the offender does not profit during the criminal proceedings. But this behavior also conforms to a Japanese cultural principle: 「臭いものにふたをしろ」”Put a lid on things that smell.” In other words, companies want bury anything controversial as soon as possible. By removing the CDs, record labels feel like they are quietly erasing any legacy of the criminal artist’s existence.

So when Sakai Noriko was arrested for amphetamines in August, her record label Victor Entertainment — as is the convention — took all of her albums out of distribution. And in this digital age, Victor also had to remove all her songs from iTunes. But here’s where the label messed up: they forgot to remove Sakai songs that showed up on compilation albums.

Horror! There were free-floating Nori-P songs out there on iTunes. Surely the Japanese people — who we are told again and again have a low moral tolerance for drug use — rose up in outrage against Victor, Apple, and Sakai for the oversight. Or maybe in more predictable Japanese style, everyone just ignored these offending tracks.

Actually, that’s not what happened at all: Sakai’s 1995 hit “Blue Rabbit” (「青いウサギ」) was the number one song on iTunes for the week.
Continued »

The following interview originally appeared in the June 2009 issue of Japanese magazine Cyzo (previously available online, but currently unavailable; Google cached part one and two). We have published this translation without the publisher’s express permission. We do not confirm, condone, or endorse the content, but merely provide the translation as a way to view into the discourse of the Japanese printed media on the Japanese entertainment world.

In the interview, veteran entertainment reporter Honda Kei discusses Suhō Ikuo — CEO of management company Burning Production and widely understood to be the most powerful single person in the Japanese entertainment world. (He is often called the “Don of the geinoukai.”) Despite such power, Suhō almost never appears in the media, is rarely photographed, and few people outside of the industry would know his name. Many publications (and previous incarnations of his Wikipedia entry) have subtly hinted at Suhō’s alleged relationships with the so-called “underworld,” but Cyzo’s Honda interview is one of the few times where someone has made claims of this matter on the record.

Burning CEO Suhō’s True Face and Means of Power, as Seen from a Man Who Continues to Fight with the “Don”

Entertainment journalist Kei Honda is a man who continues to offer outspoken criticism of the (management company) Burning Production and its CEO Suhō Ikuo — normally said to be a “taboo of the entertainment industry.” In an entertainment mass media that is uniformly “Burning-friendly,” Honda has, up to this point, been sued five times by Burning. He also says he has been intimidated by mob members… so why does this man keep fighting with his pen?

—Mr. Honda, how many times have you been sued for slander by Burning Production’s Suhō Ikuo for writing critical articles about him?

Honda (H): I have been sued five times, for writing about Suhō’s dark associations with crime syndicates, the nature of his media control, and his true face. He demanded compensation for damages for the slander and I was sued. Out of the five, he withdrew the charge or we settled out-of-court four times. None of the suits reached final court judgment. The remaining one is currently pending in appeals court. Suhō apparently is telling people, “Even though we settled, it’s a crime of conscience that he keeps writing very similar things.” But no matter how many times I write, Suhō doesn’t ever change his ways.

—When did you first encounter President Suhō?

H: It was when I just started out as a novice writer for Shukan Post (Shogakukan), so it must have been 35-36 years ago. At the time, I found out about a sex scandal involving singer Minami Saori (currently married to Shinoyama Kishin), who was in Burning. I got a tip that a writer from Shukan Shincho got into a fight with Suhō about the incident and had his glasses broken. In order to confirm the story, I went to the Burning office and asked “Is Mr. Suhō here?” Suddenly the man who was cleaning the office wielded his mop like a sword. I remember that the mop guy was Suhō.

—Was that grievance what made you point your spear of criticism towards President Suhō?

H: No, it wasn’t anything personal. The big thing was, at that time, the owner of a big management company had told me in real grief, “The Japan Association of Music Enterprises has finally allied with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department to try to sever the ties between the yakuza and the entertainment world. And even though they are cleaning everything up, Suhō is doing the exact opposite.” Suhō, through wielding power, was able to further cultivate associations with the mob.

—Why does Suhō associate with the crime syndicates?

H: Maybe he likes them? When Suhō came into the entertainment world, the mob was involved in running management companies and promoting singers. So there would have been points of contact all over. And I think that world of “duty and obligations” maybe agrees with his skin. It’s just that kids look up to the entertainment world and so it must conform to social norms. We can’t allow those kinds of associations. There was a consensus in the industry to move towards getting rid of the mob, but if the leader of the industry, Burning, wasn’t following those rules, what can you do?

—Why do you think President Suhō came to be called the “Don of the Entertainment World”?

H: This is my theory, but Suhō focused on the music publishing business, and at the time, he partnered with Watanabe Masafumi (now deceased), who dominated TBS’ music shows. Suhō turned the “race” for the Japan Record Award into a business. He took the sports paper writers and music critics involved with the awards out to high-end clubs and threw them big parties on their birthdays. He gave them presents. For weddings and funerals, etc. he would send unprecedented amounts of money, and with that, he was able to create cozy relations with the entertainment media.

So all the management companies and record labels that wanted to win a Japan Record Award would rely on Suhō, and in return, he would get that singer’s master recording rights or publishing rights. And if the singer won the award, those rights would create even more money. Using the conduit to the entertainment media he cultivated at that point, he could then suppress scandals. And Suhō, who had amassed huge financial power, was able to bring in great people working for him. He would also assist aforced the music publishers in his keiretsu to give him copyrights and the entertainment companies to give him business rights, and he created a money tree. He had money, controlled the mass media, and created a real business model. If you can do that, you are absolutely “the Don.”

—As an entertainment reporter, what do you think of the mass media people who are subservient to Burning?

H: I though it was inexcusable! After all this, I quit my job at Shukan Post and became a freelancer, doing a lot of work for Tokyo Sports. The bureau chief at Tokyo Sports at that point approached me and said, “Our Culture Department is way too cozy with the management companies. So you should do as you like.” I thought, “what, am I a bullet?” No one in the Culture Dep’t liked me, but I started to cover the entertainment world. Even though the mass media knew about Suhō’s dark associations and scandals about Burning talent, they stayed quiet. I thought, if that’s the case, I will just cover it all myself and bring scandals about Burning talent to light in not just Tokyo Sports but in media like Asahi Geino (Tokuma Shoten) or Tsukuru (Tsukuru Publishing), or Hanashi no Channeru (Nihon Bungeisha).

—President Suhō never tried to win you over?

H: He did. I don’t know if it was him acknowledging defeat from my attacks, but about twenty years ago, through a friend, he had a couple of plans for conciliation. As a result, I had the chance to dine with Suhō, and for a while, we had friendly relations. I was taken to a performance by Hosokawa Takashi at the Shinjuku Koma Theatre and got to go backstage. There, I heard Suhō ask Hosokawa, “Did you greet oyabun Noda?” “Oyabun Noda” was the godfather of a huge crime syndicate. Discovering these clear associations with the mob made me realize that I just shouldn’t be hanging out with Suhō. So I separated from Suhō about a half-year later, and because of that, I was told suddenly by him, “Tomorrow I am going to wire ¥2 million to you, so could you tell me your bank account?” I refused, saying, “I have no business receiving that,” and that was it with Suhō.

—After that, how were your relations with Suhō?

H: I personally strengthened my criticism of him. When I did that, I received anonymous calls to my home. My wife picked up and the guy said, “I am a classmate’s of Suhō. Because the Anti-Organized Crime Law has made things complicated, I can’t say the name of my syndicate, but tell your husband to make nice with Suhō.” The substance of the call made it clear that it was a threat. I could not allow this intimidation of my wife, who is not involved in the industry. I eventually figured out who called, and it wasn’t his classmate, but a guy who was in one of the mob groups that he runs with. But even after that, I kept writing about scandals related to Burning. When I did that, I was finally sued for slander.

—Do you think President Suhō hates most when you write about his relations to crime syndicates?

H: Maybe he hates that, but in my memory, he has never really said that my concrete statements about his connections to the mob have no basis in fact. Basically, he insists that the entire article is slander. He sued me for my book The Crumbling of the Johnny’s Empire (『ジャニーズ帝国崩壊』) published by Rokusaisha, and in there, there is an eyewitness account that when Fifth-Generation Yamaguchi-gumi’s Lieutenant Takumi Masaru (now deceased) came to Tokyo, Suhō went to meet him frequently at the ANA Hotel in Roppongi. But that particular part was not challenged.

—From what you saw, has Suhō’s power only risen over the years?

H: They say that Suhō got scared and stopped coming to the office after the shooting incident at Burning in 2001 [where someone shot a bullet through the office window] . Around then, he purchased a golf course in Okinawa and started working as the owner. He got hooked on golf, and they said that he started to slowly lose the unifying force worthy of a Don.

But from my point of view, I just couldn’t see where he had lost power. At that time, Suhō had expanded his conduit with the financial world. He was beloved especially by a now-deceased former chairman of a giant paper company. He also created connections with powerful politicians and had a honeymoon relation with former NHK Chairman Ebizawa Katsuji. And he built up connections even with people in the judiciary. They say that Suhō’s son is even involved with the company Japan Risk Control, which employed Norisada Mamoru (who lost his job at the Tokyo High Court Counsel because of a sex scandal) as a top advisor.

When K-Dash chariman Kawamura Tatsuo came to prominence, the entertainment industry was a flutter with things like “Suhō’s power has fallen” or “the Suhō era is over,” but that’s ridiculous.

In the fuss over the marriage between Fujiwara Norika and Jinnai Tomonori last year, Suhō wielded power behind the scenes to the degree that Yoshimoto Kogyo (Jinnai’s agency) couldn’t move hand or foot. From the leaked information about their engagement to the exclusive live broadcast rights given to Nihon Television, that was all Suhō’s own work. I wrote about this in the magazine Kami no Bakudan (”Paper Bomb”, Rokusaisha), which brings us to the fifth suit against me I mentioned earlier, currently pending. Just as always, Suhō sues with legal means those who cannot be controlled by the carrot and the stick. But the fact that Suhō has come to do it like this, I think is a reason why the mass media succumbs to him.

I love the entertainment world and all the people who work hard so hard in it. But I don’t plan on dropping my pen as long as the industry is being controlled by dirty people.