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.

The latest in a series of graphic design tools for Néojaponisme readers: a number of red, white, and black patterns based on Modern Japanese graphic design from the 1950s.

These patterns are free to use for non-commercial applications. (For commercial applications, please contact us for a license.)

The patterns are provided in Illustrator CS3, Illustrator CS, and Adobe PDF format. You can download a zipped file containing all three formats here.

As evidenced by this poll of “Perfect Mothers” and the recent appearance of multiple magazines dedicated to being a stylish “gyaru mama,” we seem to be living in the midst of a “young mother” boom in Japan. The domestic-yet-glamorous lifestyle of famed young moms like 22 year-old Tsuji Nozomi (ex-Morning Musume) has become prime-time television fodder, and the most prominent heroines in the gyaru subculture — namely, Popteen’s Masuwaka Tsubasa and Koakuma Ageha’s Momoka Eri — flagrantly balance busy careers with child-rearing. The Japanese slang yanmama (ヤンママ) has lost its original pejorative context, no longer meaning delinquent “yankii mother” but now just “young mother” in a politically-neutral tone. Yanmamas are not just heartwarming — they’re fashionable.

Many of these young women surely owe their bold new maternal identities to the consequences of barrier-free reproductive activity. Everyone loves to excuse a total and thorough disinterest in birth control pills and patches by claiming a “widespread use of condoms”, but I think we all secretly know that Japanese young people cannot be bothered to use any form of contraception at all. So you end up with a substantial amount of babies, and with the Japanese traditionally relying on social obligation to chart all life courses, most of these teenage moms end up getting properly married to their boyfriends before the water breaks. (These stats call all pre-marriage babies “out-of-wedlock births” but I would guess most get married after conception.)

At least in my understanding, the unplanned and hasty move into parenthood has always been a major part of Japanese rural working-class culture. The curse of late childbirth mainly afflicts educated working women who cling to selfish “life goals” and want trivial things like “careers.” So even if yanmama have become a media boom, the young mother phenomenon strikes most directly amongst women outside of the traditional “good girl” white-collar (or white-collar husband finding) career path: whether than means “reader models” for gyaru magazines like Masuwaka, young pop idols like Tsuji, or high-school drop outs in Ibaraki. Tokyo University is not ravaged by pregnant students. These days, however, Japanese society has dropped all pretense of being a nation of “universal middle-class sexual values.” In fact, mainstream pop culture now looks more to previously-ignored working-class subcultures than to snobby Tokyo art-school kids from good families. The mainstreaming of young mothers is most likely not a trend in itself, but a subsidiary trend in the larger mainstreaming of yankii values. There were always women who had kids at 18 or 19, but it’s no longer something to hide or dismiss as deviance. It’s a cause for celebration, and those celebrations are taking place out in the open.

So there had been young mothers, but the new “cool factor” seems to be dependent upon the changes in the meaning of child-rearing within the paradigm of youth. In the past, having a kid was the ultimate sign of “graduation” from adolescence. Even the yankii bad boys would hang up their tokkofuku at 20 to get a soul-crushing job and support the new family. This is 2009, however, and the entire idea of “responsibly-timed youth deviance” feels a bit old-fashioned. The latest growth market in the gyaru style community is gyaru children’s clothing, because young delinquent mothers want to dress their future-delinquent babies in identical outfits from their favorite Shibuya 109 brands. There is no longer a need nor requirement to “graduate” — only a journey of self to find the perfect balance between individual expression, work, and child-rearing. In the recent issue of Brutus on gyaru culture, Masuwaka Tsubasa claimed that she spends “99% of her time on family and home, and only 1% on work.” This ratio is not physically possible, seeing that Tsubasa is always up to some new cross-promotional activities and magazine modeling, but her style leader status faces no threat from the fact that she defines herself first and foremost as a mother. Being both a mom and a model perhaps has come to embody the Japanese ideals of perseverance and hard work more than dedicating solely to just one single identity.

For whatever reason, the “young father” oddly does not seem to be part of this particular phenomenon. In most gyaru media, boys vaguely exist somewhere off-screen — whether because girls want a repose from constant sexual advances or just take male interaction for granted. It is also worth mentioning that many of the Koakuma Ageha hostess-model heroes are “single mothers” (シンママ), whose young marriages fell apart almost instantly. In most post-industrial societies, early marriage has a much higher rate of failure than later marriage, and anecdotally-speaking, there is not a lot of promise: almost all the Japanese celebrities who trail-blazed the young mother boom — Amuro Namie, Shiina Ringo, Tsuchiya Anna, etc. — divorced within a few years. Current celeb moms like Saeko and Tsuji are happily married for the moment, but the odds are against them. I assume that the de-emphasis on “young fathers” unconsciously takes this harsh reality into the equation. More likely, the potential dad pool is not daydreaming about sacrificing the peak years of libertinage for a single woman and sober family life.

Of course, any talk of baby boom pricks up the ears of social policy planners and amateur pundits, who are eager to know how this pop culture moment impacts Japan’s apocalyptically-low birth rate. I am not sure there are enough Shibuya 109 yanmama to make up for the older cohorts’ abject failure to adequately reproduce, and more critically, I am not sure 19 year-old moms are pumping out the kind of dedicated worker drones required by the bureaucratic blueprints of Kasumigaseki. Many will have a hard time avoiding the question, are the wrong kind of Japanese reproducing? The American film Idiocracy took up a similar topic and expounded a predictable moral panic on the impending dominance of lower-class values. For better or worse, the same population principle could be applied to contemporary Japan: the least elite kids are churning out lots of babies, and apples don’t fall far from the tree.

Here is Katori Shingo’s tearful apology on behalf of fellow SMAP member Kusanagi Tsuyoshi, who was arrested last week for indecent exposure after being found by police drunk and naked in a Tokyo park.

Shingo’s performance is, if anything, enhanced by contrition. The lump in the throat, the stuttering, the long pauses, the repeated phrases (”SMAP ni… SMAP ni… SMAP ni…“), the downcast eyes: all combine to great effect. The Youtube comments (now deleted), too, were mostly sincere and supportive, like the encouraging words of an uncle at an unenthusiastic nephew’s Bar Mitzva: “just go through the motions, it’ll all be over soon.”

The obvious question is, what prompted the surrogate apology? Could he really have been so torn up by all this? Is he acting out of concern for the disrupted well-being of fans? For the reputation of his ichiban shin’yū (”#1 best friend”) Tsuyoshi, or his own hide, implicated by association?

But most viewers were indifferent about the whole affair, and despite the few canceled contracts, Shingo knows that neither of their careers is in any jeopardy; in fact, the incident may only increase their celebrity. And so neither fears of profit loss nor concern for the mental health of fans can be said to be the primary cause. It’s clear that something deeper is at work here. Even if the immediate explanation is simply that industry powers that be thrust him onstage to minimize damage, the question of why they care when nobody else does remains.

In making this apology, Shingo was, to borrow Heidegger’s phrase, simply “doing what one does, as one does,” that is, behaving in a typical way that conforms to the prejudices of the group. The apology itself is meaningless — in fact, impractical — as there were no victims in the first place, no amends to be made. It seems unlikely that the authors of the bland, supportive comments of the audience on YouTube had ever been upset or angered by the affair. Rather, it is as if the ritual itself demands to be performed, and that not performing it would be a transgression far greater than the original transgression of running around in the buff.

Much can be said about all this — about the custom of the shazai kaiken (”apology conference”), the psychological dynamics of shame, the unwritten rules of social interaction, the tacit understanding between viewer and actor, apologist and apologee, etc. However, not being qualified to comment, I thought I’d instead quote from philosopher-critic Slavoj Žižek, who in a recent interview made the following remarks:

What I see in Japan — and maybe this is my own myth — is that behind all these notions of politeness, snobbism etc., the Japanese are well aware that something which may appear superficial and unnecessary, in fact has a much deeper structural function. A Western approach would be: who needs this? But a totally ridiculous thing might, at a deeper level, play a stabilizing function we are not aware of. […]

The usual cliché now is that Japan is the ultimate civilization of shame. What I despise in America is the studio actors’ logic, as if there is something good about self-expression: do not be oppressed, open yourself up, even if you shout and kick the others, everything in order to express and liberate yourself. This is a stupid idea — that behind the mask there is some truth. In Japan, even if something is merely an appearance, politeness is not simply insincere. […] Surfaces do matter. If you disturb the surfaces you may lose a lot more than you accounted for. You shouldn’t play with rituals. Masks are never simply mere masks. Perhaps that’s why Brecht became close to Japan. He also liked this notion that there is nothing really liberating in this typical Western gesture of removing the masks and showing the true face. What you discover is something absolutely disgusting. Let’s maintain the appearances. (European Graduate School website)

According to Japanamerica author Roland Kelts, Patrick Macias is “an American otaku and blogger extraordinaire.” More accurately, he is the author of multiple books in both English and Japanese and currently the Editor-in-Chief of Otaku USA. Mr. Macias was in Tokyo a few weeks back, and we met over a discount tonkatsu lunch to talk about the state of Japanese recession and the current yankii cultural takeover. Luckily, a recording device captured our dialogue (and my total inability to enunciate words or complete sentences).

So please enjoy the hour-long mp3!

Download: The Tonkatsu Tapes: Marxy vs. Patrick Macias on Japanese Recessionary Culture
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