One of the surprising outcomes from AKB48′s 2011 Jankenpon Tournament (aside from Acchan, Yuko, Tomochin, Yukirin et al. getting kicked in the early rounds, and Mika Komori throwing the Vulcan “live long and prosper” salute out of confusion) was the amount of fan wailing over who “should or shouldn’t” advance in the tournament. Trying to call a winner, or declare one participant more deserving than another, in what is essentially a game of chance is like saying that you “deserve” to win the lottery because you always play the numbers of your birthday and your relatives’ birthdays and you’ve lost the last 457 times so you’re due for a win. This makes about as much sense as insisting that Rina Izuta “deserves” to make center because She Is An Adorable And Wonderful Human Being or that Mayuchi “deserves” to advance past the first round because she won last year. Look, even the Los Angeles Lakers have to play a full season of basketball and beat several teams in the playoffs before they can be crowned champions; they can’t just stroll in and expect to be The Winner Of The NBA every year, right? That’s a lesson they quickly learned from the 2010-2011 Dallas Mavericks.
In case my shitty analogies didn’t make it clear, jankenpon/rock-paper-scissors is a game of chance and nobody “deserves” anything. But I guess that would be too logical, and the whole point of being a fan (short for “fanatic”) is to be illogical! AMIRITE?
“RIVER” is to AKB48 what the 3rd Symphony, “Eroica,” was to Beethoven.
And the way I figure is this: “Eroica” was pretty much the first step in Beethoven revolutionizing the form of the symphony FOREVAR. Before that, his other symphonies had been cute little copies of Haydn, albeit already with the fancy-ass introductions and whackjob key changes that would become his trademark. But whereas, in the olden days, a symphony was supposed to be this 20-minute piece of fluff that you could knit to, Beethoven said to himself, fuck that shit, how about 20 minutes for the entire FIRST MOVEMENT. And how about the entire symphony be, like, 45 minutes long. I bet I can make those Viennese n00bs sit down and listen for 45 minutes if I felt like it!
So he did.
Fortunately, one does not need to sit down for 45 minutes to enjoy “RIVER” (although it would be awesome if you could), but you do have to sit down for 5 minutes and withstand a barrage of unexpected musical styles, including an entire first minute that is essentially notated as “N.C.” (no chord). The whole thing is as transformative as the idea of a 45-minute symphony; it’s a song that overturns the idea of AKB48—if not all of idoldom—being these randomly hyper dance-pop songs that you can knit to. (Besides knitting, they are also great for multiplayer shooter games. You try popping a cap upside the head of some bad dude in Uncharted 2 with “Aitakatta” blaring in the background. THUG LIFE.)
Here's the story ... of 9 lovely ladies ... who had grown up from 9 very lovely girls ...
Mitsui joined. Yoshizawa graduated. The pandas showed up. Fujimoto slunk out the back door.
And just like that, we were left with the longest-running, most stable lineup in Morning Musume history (years after most normal people had given up on the group because it was too confusing trying to keep up with all the changes). But now, with Koharu Kusumi packing her bags and getting ready to go, we look back and ponder the mysteries of the era from “Onna ni Sachi Are” to “Kimagure Princess.” Why didn’t they audition for any new generations? (Part of the INBOU theorist in me believes that after all H!P programming on TV got canned, there was no longer an outlet through which auditions could be held and publicized.) Why didn’t anyone graduate?* (Probably because all the current members realized that there was no hope for them elsewhere in the entertainment industry.) Was this truly the best chemistry that MM ever had, or had fans just come to believe that because they’d gotten used to the same lineup for so long?
*Supplementary research tells me that this is because management was trying to keep the lineup stable so that Japan could re-learn who the girls are. Yeah, how’s that working for you guys?
And what if you tried to recreate the Nine Smile Morning Musume with members of AKB48?
What does the reshuffling of AKB48′s Teams portend for the rest of humankind? Will the seas run red with blood, will the great Leviathan rise from the depths, will the awful horror reign for 1290 days? (For comparison purposes, remember that George W. Bush was President of the United States for 2922 days.) Has the downfall of Japanese civilization, marked by declining population growth and two decades of economic malaise, entered its final stages?
Wow, it's like Excel is finally useful for something.
If there is one thing I have learned from working at a major Japanese corporation (albeit its US division), it is that they love to make managerial moves for the sake of making managerial moves. Not that this accomplishes anything, but it sure looks like you’re “doing something” when people get shuffled around. Of course, plenty of other corporations around the world also do this, but it is Japan that has raised these corporate shenanigans to the level of art, where you can be Product Manager one month and then suddenly be moved to Engineering Manager (even if the last time you “engineered” something was for a senior year college project) and if they really don’t like you, you get exiled to Sales.
What I see right now is a lot of idols being exiled to Sales.
Who put them there? Yasushi Akimoto, you think? Of course not! When a paradigm shift of this magnitude occurs, it can only be the invisible blue hand of INBOU.
