Back in 2009, I spent a few very busy weeks conducting, editing, and translating fifteen interviews with leading Japanese musicians, fashion designers, and photographers for the Onitsuka Tiger book Made of Japan. While the project was a great chance to get into the minds of individuals who shape contemporary Japanese culture, I also wished at the time that I could turn my attention at some point to the rich history of Onitsuka Tiger itself.

So earlier this year, in warm welcome from the company, Ian and I raided the archives of old catalogs and industry circulars in Onitsuka Tiger’s Tokyo office dating from the early post-war onwards. The photos, graphic design, and copy of these catalogs alone perfectly chart out the development of consumer culture in Japan. The two-color printing of 1960s’ materials, for example, looks identical to 45 rpm singles of that era. And by 1976, the catalogs were filled with foreign athletes with impressive moustaches — very much in the same mold as the first issues of era-defining men’s magazine Popeye.

Our humble web journal has always been dedicated to the intersection between Japan and global culture, and in these catalogs, Ian and I were excited to find the story of a local company working tirelessly to position its Japanese technical know-how as the material means to international athleticism. Beyond today’s kneejerk embrace of the Olympics games as a glorious sponsorship moment, founder Kihachiro Onitsuka seemed obsessed with the wider conceptualization of the Olympic tradition — the celebration of global diversity in the opening ceremony, the huge variety of competitive games, the jet-setting descent of VIPs upon world capitals, the modernist virtues. As part of that Olympic framing, the company overtly and tirelessly referenced the games in catalogs and shoe names, and more broadly, built an Olympian-scale product strategy that offered specific shoes for every possible athletic activity — from marathon, track, volleyball, yachting, and baton twirling. (They also made a “referee shoe” at some point.)

Onitsuka Tiger asked Ian and I to work on essays related to these catalogs, and Ian has also produced two new fonts Kirimomi Swash and Kirimomi Geometric Sans (download here) based on the catalogs’ old lettering work. We will also be publishing two essays. I wrote a piece on the history of golf in Japan, based on glancing through materials on Onitsuka Tiger’s golf shoe brand GOOD SHOT and some solid library time. Until now, I had never looked much at the history of Japanese sports but I was intrigued to find that the pattern of importation and adoption echoes the model seen with other kinds of Western culture coming to Japan. (Hint: It’s “trickle down.”)

Ian meanwhile looked at the development of Onitsuka Tiger’s visual identity in the context of Modernism, both the chronologically-defined art movement and the broader idea of 20th century social development. The visual tone of Onitsuka Tiger’s early ads and catalogs encapsulate and document the recent history of typography in modern times.

So stay tuned as we roll out these essays over the next month.

At Book Off last week, I picked up an English translation of Tsutsumi Seiji’s Japan’s Consumer Society: A Critical Introduction 『消費社会批判』. Tsutsumi is, for those who do not know his legend, the man behind the Saison retailing group and its sophisticated retail chains Seibu Department Store, PARCO, Loft, Mujirushi Ryohin (MUJI), Wave, and Seed. He is also a former Marxist and award-winning poet/novelist who used his industrial power to support avant-garde artists such as Terayama Shuji.

The title of Tsutsumi’s book is a bit misleading: The volume is mostly abstract and theoretical, quoting Barthes, Bourdieu, and Baudrillard rather than talking about the specifics of Japanese consumer society. Written in 1996 — just as the Bubble had popped and the consumer market was about to peak — Tsutsumi offered many critiques to the Japanese industrial system. He, however, sounded most worried about Japan’s lag in the information technologies. When framed within the context of mobile phones and video games, this may have seemed like a silly concern. The following facts about the state of computer usage within Japan, however, grabbed my attention:

[A] 1993 study…of the diffusion rates for personal computers in the office showed Japan at 9.9% and the United States at 41.7%. Looking at Internet-connected systems as of January 1995, Japan had only 96,632 compared to the United States’ 3,179,170, and the gap is widening year by year. (174)

This data reveals a very significant difference in the centrality of the personal computer and Internet within the two perspective societies — even when held for population.

Of course, Japan eventually “caught up” and now boasts an impressive Internet diffusion rate. Thanks to highly-evolved mobile phones, even non-PC users can connect to the Internet (or its i-mode simulacra). Yet when you look at the “cultural development” of the Net, Japan still feels stunted. The most obvious example is that a very niche site like 2ch still works as the central hub for Net cultural creation and sets the overall tone, despite the core users’ non-mainstream values such as obsession with little girls and bitter neo-right-wing tendencies.

These computer diffusion numbers from 1995 help explain what is happening: Internet culture does not just rely upon the current state of usage but a compounded set of familiarities and expectations about the medium forged over a broad historical period. If less than 10% of the working Japanese population used computers in the 1990s and very few families had computers at home, that means that most Japanese people are not likely to be comfortable with computers nor communicating through them. Even those who have embraced computers in the last decade do not have a lifetime of knowledge about them from which to pull.

Personally speaking, my father’s work on math and statistics meant we always had a PC at home — from a TRS-80 to a Mac Classic II. Part of my joy of using computers and belief in the power of the Internet comes from my good fortune of being exposed to both PCs and the Net at an early age. And I do not think my case was that rare.

Conversely you cannot expect a population without these experiences to somehow make a full psychological embrace of the medium. This is especially true for older Japanese who likely never used computers at work nor saw their peers and neighbors use them with any kind of regularity. And based on the relative recentness of PC diffusion, we should expect that the top decision-makers in Japanese companies — who have always traditionally been in their 50s and 60s — do not have a deep-seated familiarity with the computer.

In this sense, I would argue that while Japan has caught up in terms of infrastructure, the idea of using computers as a social and communicative tool is still very young within a great majority of the population.

Over the previous three installments (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) I have attempted to show that artist management companies — known colloquially as “jimusho” — are the dominant power in the Japanese entertainment industry due to their power to exercise labor control over performers, their organization into larger and secretive keiretsu groups, their ownership of master and publishing rights, as well as probable associations with organized crime. The remaining issue is this, what is the effect of the jimushos’ power on the actual content produced in Japan? And how do the particular business needs of the jimusho change the kind of talent they groom and debut?

The Jimusho Control Who is on TV, Therefore Who is Popular

Terrestrial television (地上波) has been, hands down, the most powerful and influential medium in Japan for introducing new entertainers and performers to the wider public. Stars who appear on variety shows on a constant basis are the ones understood as “popular.” In the case of music, TV has been mostly responsible for directly driving sales. In the Recording Industry Association of Japan’s 2004 music media user survey, the top four “information sources leading to purchase” were network TV programs, TV dramas, TV commercial songs, and TV commercials for music, respectively. In the market’s peak of the 1990s, especially, songs repeatedly heard on TV became hits. While the decline of the music market has changed this to a certain degree, jimusho still greatly depend upon TV stations in order to turn unknown talent into profitable stars.

This seems like it would create a symbiotic relationship between television and management companies, but jimusho retain the decision-making power about which performers appear on which TV programs. This mainly goes back to their ability to leverage access to their most popular stars. Use of established artists becomes conditional on TV station support of new and upcoming ones. This gets to the point where there basically is no “open casting” in Japan and top stars such as Kimura Takuya have shows built around them.

In my own Master’s Thesis research on the effect of jimusho collusion with TV music programs on the Japanese music market, I found that the vast majority of stars appearing on network music programs Music Station, Hey Hey Hey Music Champ, and Utaban came from the top jimusho keiretsu. Competition should be fierce for appearance slots (only 4-6 per week) as the shows have traditionally been the number one driver of sales. But since the TV stations need actors, models, and performers to appear on their other programming, the larger jimusho have an upper hand in placement. This gives them the most leverage in demanding appearances. You can see this clearly in the link between music show guests and the program’s hosts. For Hey Hey Hey Music Champ, comedy jimusho Yoshimoto Kogyo — a company that produced no talent directly for the music industry until the launch of the show — secured 125 artist slots from around 2,000 up until 2004. Now with the power to launch musical talent, Yoshimoto created musical talent. This ended up blocking 125 other artist appearances from companies focused specifically on music.

So overall, in the case of Music Station from 1988 to 2004, the top five jimusho keiretsu (in this case, Johnny’s Jimusho, Burning Productions including Avex and Rising, Up Front Agency, Sony Music Artists, and Nagara Production Group including Being) made up around 50% of all appearances (2692 of total 5212 slots). This generally held true for the other shows as well. In other words, over half of TV appearances are doled out semi-automatically to the most dominant players and a great majority are doled out to the top dozen jimusho groups.

When you then compare these appearance numbers with Oricon yearly chart hits, the number of music show appearances almost perfectly correlates with chart hits. Simply put: The more you are on TV, the more you are likely to have a hit record. And with dominant jimusho having a lock on the few artist appearances available, this means they generally can also control who gets a hit and who does not. And even when a jimusho produces no hits in a year they still receive preferable placements on TV shows than smaller companies with hits. Johnny’s Jimusho acts failed to have a single chart hit in the early 1990s yet continued to appear on Music Station week after week.

Of course artists from non-major jimusho do get hits once in a while, but the constancy of major jimusho acts appearing means that independent artists become essentially “short-term successes” rather than long-term ones. In my data set, I found that when a new artist from a large jimusho got a chart hit, the average number of hits for that artist in the next two years was around 3 — compared to only 1 for an artist from a small independent jimusho. This is likely related to the fact that the large jimusho new artist on average got 8 TV appearances in the next two years after his/her hit, compared to only 1.8 for the small jimusho artist.

The data in my research strongly suggested that control over TV appearances helped major jimusho keep a strong position in the Japanese music market. Although I have not done the same kind of data-based research on other fields, anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that this jimusho dominance carries over to fashion magazine covers, variety show appearances, and other core categories of the mass media. So the question is now, if only a few firms control the Japanese entertainment world, what kind of talent are they choosing to create and debut?

What kind of performers do the jimusho create?

The first thing to remember is that the jimusho create idols and talent rather than just manage successful performers. In other words, jimusho scout unknowns and then “debut” them to the public with a intentionally crafted look, personality, and style. Model Marie was positioned as “model from a rich family” like Paris Hilton, while Nishikawa Ayako is the “cosmetic surgeon talento.” For Yoshimoto Kogyo, the company has been debuting a never-ending list of “one-gag” talent who are given a particular persona and a single joke.

Jimusho also play a big role in the determining the kind of talento that are tolerated in the market. Johnny’s Jimusho has been able to effectively stop any other company from producing boy idol groups. With Johnny’s boycott power in effect, even the major jimusho Rising Pro (now Vision Factory) had a hard time making their acts Da Pump and w-inds big players in market.

The jimusho system is a closed world of small firms, most of which have long-standing position within the entertainment world. In fact, most of the senior people working within today’s management companies helped produce enka singers in the 1960s and 1970s. Enka singers, as documented by Christine Yano in Tears of Longing, have also been openly “crafted” singers rather than self-created. The general industrial structure of the jimusho world — especially the fact that new firms have a hard time entering — means that essentially the same people have been responsible for crafting new stars decade after decade. Japanese pop is often criticized for churning out “generic” idols and pretty faces who act in a certain way, and we can assume that the consistency of personnel behind these idols is a strong factor in the industry’s conservatism. Johnny Kitagawa — age 79 — still plays a hands-on role on the output of Johnny’s Jimusho acts. (Needless to say it’s hard to find a parallel to this in the U.S. market.) AKB48 are incredibly close in nature to ’80s idols Onyanko Club, mostly because they have the same creator Akimoto Yasushi. Despite 25 years of cultural change, basically the exact same people have the keys to the J-Pop kingdom.

Regardless, there is a stronger economic logic at work in the industry’s preference for “created idols” rather than managing more independently-minded stars. Most jimusho handle multi-field performers, ones who are likely to put out music, appear in bikinis on the cover of Weekly Playboy or Shonen Jump, banter on talk shows, and act in the occasional TV drama or film. The fees from these activities can add up to a nice source of income, and in the case of music, a million-seller can be extremely lucrative.

Yet none of these particular activities tops the greatest income stream: corporate/product sponsorship and promotion. Appearing in a single ad campaign for Coca-Cola or 7-11 will guarantee an extremely high source of revenue for the jimusho through a relatively small amount of work. Compare this with the hard-to-obtain music hit: promoting singles takes millions of dollars in marketing to the public. An ad sponsorship, meanwhile, only takes buttering up Dentsu and Hakuhodo and a few key corporate executives. The rate of investment for an ad campaign is much higher than other activities.

This has always been true, but in recent years, the crash of the music market and decline of TV viewership means that jimusho have more reason to pursue advertising work over payment for actual “performance.” In most cases, the actual performance work should be understood as promotion for the star to eventually secure advertising deals; acts usually have to prove popular before becoming a viable spokesperson for a consumer brand. AKB48, for example, are finally reaching peak profitability now as they move beyond their Akihabara theatre and record sales into dozens of product sponsorships. As the jimusho makes almost all the money from the star’s total body of work, rather than just a single field of artistic endeavor, the industry as a result moves towards explicitly commercialized pursuits rather than artistic ones. You can argue that a pop song is also “commercial” but at least the vehicle is melody, harmony, and rhythm — and not a placard upon a vending machine. Culture is not just a body of ads. But the jimusho’s true business goal is creating a body of ads for their performers.

If the ultimate economic goal is a strong line-up of promotional deals, what kind of talent do jimusho prefer? The firms have a clear logical reason to push stars who lack any barriers to becoming national spokespeople for firms. This obviously tilts the balance towards “nice” female idols. And when making a decision among which newcomers to push, the jimusho will not particularly value inherent or learned talent — a strong voice, skillful dancing, acting chops — as these are only indirectly related to the most profitable work. When you have a singer who is only a singer, promotional work can get in the way of their reputation. While plenty of talented performers end up doing ads — Shiina Ringo, Southern All-Stars, even Oyamada Keigo — they are much less likely to do every ad the jimusho requests and may get in trouble with advertising clients for exerting too much personal opinion/attitude into their work. Their appeal is also limited to a smaller audience interested in their body of work rather than their fame itself.

But general “talento” are expected to do this kind of promotional work, and it’s most lucrative for the jimusho to focus on performers who are not too specified. And for the music market, the main TV shows spend as much time interviewing the stars and probing their personalities as actually seeing them perform their songs. The end is result is that the jimusho allow big stars to be poor actors, bad singers, and pathetic dancers, but they can certainly not be controversial, unattractive, or otherwise disruptive. Jimusho face major repercussions when their stars get in trouble for personal scandal — first and foremost because companies have invested massively in using their “clean” image to promote their products. This is why “uncontrollable” talent such as Sawajiri Erika become toxic within the industry. (Although the constant advertising deals of Tsuchiya Anna are a true mystery…) Sakai Noriko’s recent drug scandal seemed tame compared to Hollywood foibles but after years of her corporate sponsorships, there was serious industry reputation at stake. Jimusho supply Japanese corporations with promotional vehicles, and Sakai turned out to be highly defective. Best not to push stars who are likely to generate this kind of business risk.

Even when stars do possess levels of talent, jimusho schedule their activities disproportionately towards promotional work rather than the artistic side of their duties. For example, most TV shows are shot in a “one-take” style as performers do not have time to dedicate their full schedule to the show’s taping. As long as there were no major mistakes, dramas take only one cut of every scene. The business logic is solid here — time should be spent on pursuing promotional work for big companies — but the overall “craft” in Japanese entertainment takes a hit.

Conclusion

So economically-speaking, artist management firms in search of profit pursue advertising deals over performance fees within this particular Japanese industry framework. The end result, however, is that these firms (1) promote “created” idols over self-motivated talent (2) emphasize pleasant looks and demeanor over artistic talent (3) invest most time and resources into lucrative advertising deals rather than creating “culture.”

Every pop culture system focuses on commercialized culture — in other words, crafting pop songs with the greatest chance of broad audience and high sales — but I would argue that the Japanese system, due to jimusho business logic of having performers organized inside companies, goes one step further in direct commercialization (advertising) over creative works (the culture itself).

The missing equation in this, however, is the audience. Japanese consumers have every right to reject this model and demand culture that is “cultural.” There have been times in Japanese history where the public rejects “idols” and its related culture for something more “real.” The most famous was the Band Boom of the late 1980s when Music Station and other standard music shows lost their audiences to live houses around the country. While this was ultimately good for the music market, it was not good for the jimusho system as these bands were less suited towards product promotion than idols. The industry, however, adapted towards the more “real” style to win back the audience, and once they had them back at the same media points (Music Station), they slowly moved the audience back to an idol model in the mid-1990s. There are socio-cultural reasons why the Japanese audience prefers “what is popular” over “what is unpopular but well-crafted” and the jimusho’s control of this system means that they have very strong influence on the long-term state of Japanese cultural tastes.

Yet in the 2010s, as the music market implodes, TV viewership becomes marginal, fashion magazine readership declines, and youth-oriented “popular culture” generally loses its influence among the Japanese psyche, the jimusho are likely to face an existential threat. That being said, small firms are most likely to be first to take a major hit. TV stations will cut budgets on shows, but make up for it with more variety programming — which of course need talent from the large jimusho. Most importantly, the idea of sponsoring products with stars is deeply ingrained within corporate culture in Japan, and whatever its cost, few decision-makers are likely to take the risk of trying a different approach. You can’t get fired for doing a campaign with AKB48 but you may get fired for trying something radically new using Popteen dokusha models. This is why you see Perfume advertise for chuhai alcoholic beverages despite the fact that they are not likely stars who appeal to those drinks’ consumer base.

At least for the next decade the jimusho structure is set, and structural inertia will keep the top jimusho afloat.

Over the last six months, there has been a precipitous increase in the number of young Japanese women wearing giant, thick-rimmed glasses with no lenses. These are somewhere between your garden-variety, Woody Allen ironic hipster glasses and toy spectacles worn by kindergartners in school plays. Just to make sure you understand what’s going on here, let me repeat: These glasses do not have fake lenses, they have no lenses. You can see them on women here and here although I observe them normally in the gyaru variety seen here and here (scroll down for myriad examples).

The lens-less frames are apparently an Asia-wide trend, and I have been in a few Twitter spats with people assuring me that everything must have started in Taiwan or Korea. I personally am fine with a theoretical non-Japanese origin for Asian fashion trends, but I remain skeptical. Young Japanese women have basically zero opportunity to get information from the Taiwanese or Korean fashion media nor even see many images of Taiwanese or Korean women beyond K-Pop idols. (And at least in the post-war period, the Japanese have never really considered Taiwanese and Korean women to be style icons in any institutionalized way.) Meanwhile both Koreans and Taiwanese are avid readers of Japanese media (a few Japanese magazines are republished in Chinese), and based on this alone, I would guess the trend started in Japan and spread out from there.

But to make sure, I went back and looked at photos from my MEKAS. trend-spotting days, and the earliest visual record I have of these fake glasses is in late 2007, worn by an incredibly colorful CUTiE-esque shop staff girl at a party (click on the Photo Gallery icon). The article’s main conjecture — that Harajuku cutie style and hardcore Shibuya gyaru style were starting to blend — has held up to be relatively accurate, and over the last few years, we have seen a lot of trend overlap between these once rival subcultures. The giant lens-less glasses definitely look more like a prop from the crazy Harajuku wardrobe, and I assume that they drifted slowly over to mainstream Shibuya style, likely through the magazine PopSister, which is solely dedicated to building a bridge between the two adjacent Tokyo neighborhoods.

Even Japanese fashion insiders, however, have been stunned by these women’s bold rejection of cures for myopia. One of my favorite Japanese fashion bloggers Dale at Elastic did a piece last October about his “culture shock” at seeing gyaru mag Jelly state “It’s common sense to take the lenses out of your fake glasses.” Jelly claims two reasons for this practice. First, lenses tend to smash against gyaru’s enormous fake eyelashes. Second, the reflection from the actual glass in the frames ruins photographs. This may sound familiar: The editors’ logic is explained identically in the Michael Jackson video for “Bad,” where the goofy guy in Wesley Snipes’ gang says that his giant fashion glasses have no lenses because he won’t have to worry about the reflection from the flash when paparazzi snaps him. Needless to say, the guy’s explanation does not feel particularly convincing — at least to Michael Jackson’s character “Daryl.”

Whatever the exact origin, these lens-less glasses are interesting in that they illustrate a core principle to Japanese women’s style: Fashion in Japan is explicitly costume. We’ve read enough FRUiTS over the years to know this to be true in the deep backstreets of Harajuku, where the history of fashion signifiers frolic and intermingle in a mostly meaningless lysergic whirlpool of color and pattern. Yet even with the gyaru — who wear a uniform of sorts based in working class delinquent subculture — everything about the style is allowed to be obvious play as long as the adherents use approved symbols (leopard print, heavy makeup, dyed hair, general gaudiness). Extreme costume, rather than natural aspect of their daily lives, marks the affiliation.

Compare this to the implicit rules of Western fashionistas, where clothing, outfits, and accessories must all be worn with plausible deniability. If someone were to comment, “I like that dress,” the fashionable individual must reply, “Oh this? This is my mom’s. I found it in the attic.” No matter how immaculately coordinated the look, the trendy wearer must make it sound like the entire thing was lying on her floor when she woke up and her random and lazy assembly of garments that day just happened to all work out for the best. The fundamental philosophy here is that (1) the individual is naturally blessed with excellent taste and that (2) the individual is not trying to look fashionable because trying to look fashionable is not cool.

For these very reasons, lensless glasses don’t work in the Western cultural milieu. Giant hipster glasses with lenses can be explained away under a variety of reasons: medical need, hand-me-downs from parents, “the glasses I wore when I was thirteen,” “I found them in a living room drawer under my dad’s college ribbons,” economic expediency, etc. Giant hipster glasses with no lenses are so clearly beyond the pale, so clearly for costume that no excuse would sound remotely plausible. The wearer absolutely, positively woke up that morning and said, today I will wear a pair of giant glasses with no lenses to be fashionable because I am trying to be fashionable.

This is, of course, completely a fine statement for gyaru because the entire point of getting dressed in the morning is playful allegiance to a certain subculture and peer group. And it’s fine for zany Harajuku girls because their entire concept of fashion is “wearing the most insane things possible before taking on the dull responsibilities of adulthood.” More importantly, Japanese society has not been affected by the “cool” concept: the slightly poisonous value set where effort itself is suspect. The primary way to succeed in Japan is to try very hard, and the secondary way is to look like you are trying very hard. Allegiance in Japan requires effort. Affectation is a dirty word in English, but the idea of going the extra mile in fashion — perhaps through glasses with no lenses — is a perfectly correct move for the Japanese subcultural woman.

This is the third in a four-part series. See Part One and Part Two for more background.

As I have suggested over the first two parts of this series, artist management companies wield an enormous amount of power in the Japanese music industry — a power with which they dominate other institutions and influence overall decision-making. This should not necessarily be self-evident: The jimusho are not particularly large companies, nor highly-profitable companies (on paper, at least). So why is it that the jimusho have historically controlled the Japanese entertainment industry rather than record labels, TV stations, or publishers? The following will show that their power originates from three main sources: possession of master and publishing rights, mass media dependence upon star talent, and perceptions of “extralegality.”

(1) Possession of Master and Publishing Rights

Owning music-related rights can be an extremely powerful tool in the Japanese entertainment industry, especially when most “talent” release music in addition to acting and variety show appearances. And since management companies usually take responsibility for songwriting coordination and recording, they are rewarded with the master rights to the recording. This bestows them with control over the work’s eventual mechanical duplication and third-party use. (Toshio Azami’s 2004 book Who makes popular music? 『ポピュラー音楽は誰が作るのか』 outlines the complex politics behind these rights in much detail.)

In the American industry model, record companies pay for their artists’ recording fees and subsequently receive the master rights. But ever since the 1960s, the larger management companies in Japan have invested heavily in recording and coordination themselves, entitling them to all consequent privileges and decision-making authority. At the time this practice began, Japanese record labels were accustomed to making licensing deals with American record labels. So the practice of leasing master recordings from outside parties was easily extended to domestic companies.

Today, large jimusho often hold master rights exclusively or share the rights with other organizations like record companies and publishing companies. Smaller jimusho usually lack the resources for investment in this area, so the artist’s record company will often finance the master tape production. When management companies hold the master recording rights, record companies must license the master tapes to be able to mass produce the audio media. This is a significant source of revenue in itself and means artist management companies are directly entitled to high profits from record sales — something that is not true in most other music markets.

In addition to master recording rights, artist management companies that organize the songwriting process for their talent often lay claim to the publishing rights which control copyrights for individual songs. These rights allow the collection of mechanical royalties on the duplication of CDs, performance royalties for public usage of the song, and variably-priced synchronization licenses for media usages. Publishing has the most potential for long-term revenue streams, because songs may be re-recorded by future artists or used in other media long after initial CD sales have dried up. As we saw in Part Two, larger jimusho often receive “tribute” from smaller jimusho by taking their artists’ publishing rights.

Holding both master rights and publishing rights gives management companies ultimate decision-making power about a song’s usage, and other parties looking to utilize the song in a new context must win approval from the jimusho. Featuring a song in a TV commercial, for example, requires permission of both the master rights holder and the publisher. With artist management companies normally holding one or both of these rights, they generally keep control over a large portion of musical content, and therefore make themselves a major player in the music market overall. The jimusho are the ones who get to say yes or no to most projects involving music, which over the last 30 years, has been a significant part of the wider geinoukai.

(2) Media Dependence Upon Star Talent

The second source of the jimusho’s industry power emanates from media companies’ profound dependence on management for access to star talent. Television networks and magazine publishers create content for the specific purpose of attracting audiences to sell to advertisers, and the simplest way to do this is to hire celebrities and well-known talent.

In Japan, decision-making authority about artist appearance and performance lays squarely with the artist management company, and therefore, media outlets must negotiate with the jimusho — not the record company nor artist — for access privileges. This may be generally true in other music markets as well, but in Japan, artists’ inability to exit these firms (as laid out in Part One) creates large-sized jimusho with a sizeable “stock” of in-demand talent — often not just in the field of music, but also in acting, sports, and modeling. The management firm’s total negotiating power is proportional to all its stars’ cachet, which means that jimusho benefit from a compounded star power.

Negotiations on the use of one star have implications for the use of other jimusho members. Often large jimusho require networks to take smaller or newer talent on the network’s other television shows as “barter” for use of well known celebrities — a form of tying. Of course, management companies rely on media exposure to sell their talent, but healthy competition between the five major networks and the firms’ ability to limit access to a wide number of talent means management firms have the upper hand: They can threaten to give better treatment to other stations if demands are not met.

Using pre-established celebrities as leverage, large firms are therefore able to get more of their new talent into the media, which in turn, creates more overall popularity for their artists. Celebrity stature thus directly shapes market power for artist management companies, and networks are beholden to the firms for access to creative inputs. Networks may be able to forgo the use of one specific artist, but the jimusho system raises the stakes of negotiation to all artists under a companies’ auspices. This can be a huge number in the case of Burning, who controls hundreds of talents organized into dozens and dozens of subsidiary companies.

Johnny’s Jimusho have been one of the companies to conspicuously leverage this power with the media. As a general principle, the company refuses to allow its boy bands to appear on any TV shows with other rival boy bands. In the 1990s, this meant popular groups like Da Pump or w-inds from the Burning-backed Rising Production had a very difficult time appearing on the Johnny’s-dominated music show “Music Station.” In recent years, hit Korean group Toho Shinki (TVXQ) had similar issues. So when Fuji TV music show “Hey! Hey! Hey! Music Champ” decided to throw its lot in with Da Pump and the rival Johnny’s groups in the late-1990s, Johnny’s Jimusho effectively would not let their talent appear on the show for over five years. When a new producer came in and stopped offering guest spots to non-Johnny’s boy bands, Johnny’s acts came back with full force. (More here.) This is a perfect example of jimusho power in action: Even when the TV station tried to challenge Johnny’s Jimusho, they eventually had to give up the strategy.

(3) Perceptions of “Extralegality”

A few of Japan’s largest jimusho bolster their market power through widespread perceptions within the industry that they are likely to carry out punitive actions outside of legal and commercial barriers. In other words, the more powerful jimusho are understood to be linked to organized crime. While the first two reasons for jimusho power focus on measurable economic advantages that can be used as leverage in industry negotiations, the final one may be primarily psychological.

So are the yakuza involved in the Japanese entertainment world? Unfortunately there are no clear answers to this question, as the mainstream media rarely handles the topic, not even to debunk it as “myth.” What we do have, however, is a lot of compelling circumstantial evidence.

Many writers and scholars of Japan have mentioned the general idea of links between the two worlds. In Islands of Eight Million Smiles idol scholar Hiroshi Aoyagi writes of friends warning that “some agencies might be acquainted with the underworld.” Kaplan and Dublo’s Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld makes note that the Yamaguchi-gumi syndicate was deeply involved in the entertainment business. Most famously, members of that family directly managed the career of enka singer Misora Hibari.

In Takarajima’s Complete True Record of Taboos of Heisei Japan 『実録!平成日本タブー大全』, author Suzuki Tomohiko writes that crime syndicates openly managed and coordinated artist performances in various creative fields for the first half of the 20th century. While police since 1964 have apparently fought to keep the yakuza from working in the entertainment industry, links dating from the prewar have not been fully eradicated. Ugaya Hiro, writing in What is J-Pop? 『Jポップとは何か』, notes that the “dark side” remains strong in the music industry despite its absence in contemporary film and video game production fields. Veteran entertainment writer Honda Kei meanwhile has named specific links between the industry and yakuza bosses, but for this he has been sued multiple times for libel.

Police action of recent years, however, has at least highlighted some of the more structural corruption of the market. Jimusho heads have been arrested and jailed for tax evasion, including Taira Tetsuo from the market leader Rising Production (now Vision Factory) and Yamada Eiji from AG Communication (a Burning subsidiary that produced Suzuki Ami). Tax evasion does not necessarily imply organized crime, but consider the case of Rising’s Taira: At his trial, he begged for leniency from the courts, citing the necessity of “underground” (urashakai) financial measures in the music business. In general, the tendency of artist management companies to keep financial information private, change official firm names on an extremely frequent basis, and splinter into informal groupings creates an industry environment in which improper financial transactions can go easily undetected by authorities. While this would likely be how organized crime would run the music business, this is not solid proof of their involvement.

The best concrete evidence we have of links between top jimusho and organized crime comes from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department — although not intentionally. In 2007, a not-so-net-savvy cop leaked many confidential police files to the Internet, including a spreadsheet outlining companies related to the Goto-gumi crime family. As reported in magazines like Cyzo and Jake Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice, the file lists top jimusho Burning Productions as a “client business” (クライアント企業). A footnote in Adelstein and David McNeill’s Japan Focus article “Yakuza Wars,” also mentions, “In December of 2007, the National Police Agency sent out a formal request to the Federation of Civilian Broadcasters asking them to sever ties with organized crime groups.” If there was no organized crime in entertainment, the National Police Agency would clearly not need to make such a request.

While the role of organized crime in the Japanese entertainment business is still shrouded in mystery, the most important thing to understand is that industry workers act under the assumption these rumors are true. All of the industry sources for my master’s thesis believed that many of the top jimusho have links to organized crime. Few are interested in talking about this on the record, of course, but the entire idea — even if an urban myth — still rules the psyche of people working within the entertainment market. Needless to say, jimusho that did have mob backing would grow stronger by being able to make credible threats of violence and being able to tap into a free flow of dirty money. Yet even if these links do not exist or are weaker than imagined, the widespread perception of extralegal punishments would guide actors to avoid unnecessary conflicts with firms alleged to be allied with the underworld.

These suggestions of criminal connections cannot explain artist management companies’ power, and it is good to remember that there are plenty of strong artist management companies like Sony Music Artists who operate above the board. But the possibility of connections to the underworld has the effect of making smaller firms’ deferential to the larger, possibly dangerous management companies. Organized crime presence creates significant market distortions since conflicts would be solved outside of market and legal spheres and decisions made for reasons other than rational market logic. A member of the production team for a network music television program commented to me that one of the larger jimusho received preferred treatment in casting because the firm was “scary.”

Final installment: Why jimusho “production logic” rules the Japanese content industry