AKB48 and the Evolution of Post-Gravure

Y HALO THAR HARUNYAN.

Where were you when you first saw an AKB member in a bikini?

Were you browsing through the men’s manga magazines, only to find Mai Oshima or Nozomi Kawasaki staring back at you?
Were you trawling for the latest entertainment news and gossip, when suddenly you found yourself face-to-face with a very underdressed Atsuko Maeda?
Or were you, (like me), visiting your usual uploader sites when LO AND BEHOLD IT’S HARUNA KOJIMA IN A BIKINI DEAR LORD MY PRAYERS HAVE BEEN ANSWERED?

Ever since the beginning of mass media and pop culture, there has been an inextricable link between female celebrities and swimsuits. If there is a beautiful woman, there will be horny fans who wish to feast on her with their eyes, and the best way to present that feast without turning to straight-out pr0n is by means of the swimsuit. And so it goes with AKB48, whose booming popularity over the past year has made them a common fixture in cheesecake magazines all across Japan.

But so many of us are busy drooling over their gorgeously photoshopped abs and deliciously creamy thighs that we have overlooked a minor fashion revolution taking place. At some point, AKB48′s swimsuits stopped being swimsuits. They weren’t exactly what you would call lingerie, either, since lingerie was something that slutty gravure idols like Aki Hoshino and Mikie Hara did, but surely not our innocent singing and dancing schoolgirls! Instead, AKB48 has entered an entirely new realm of celebrating the sensuality of the female form. Too impractical to be swimwear or underwear, but still intensely revealing and alluring to the eye, AKB48′s wardrobe choices have entered the realm of … post-gravure.

Building a Better Momusu (With AKB Members)

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?

Angels and Devil Girls: Cracking the INBOU48 Code

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.

INBOU

STOP! This graph is really freaking important!

Relative Attractiveness of Selected AKB48 Members

The findings presented in this graph may be one of the biggest leaps in idolographic metrology since the Ancient Greeks determined that Helen of Troy had the beauty to launch a thousand ships. Previous attempts to measure attractiveness, such as faps per second, often led to questionable results, mostly because the observer would run out of resources before being able to take an accurate reading. By comparison, measuring in buckets of drool only requires the observer to sit there and take a much more passive role; this then significantly reduces the potential for error in the measurement.

The use of a well-known commonly accepted standard (namely, the girls of AKB48), allowed for a reasonably-sized data population to be taken. The variety of results proves the effectiveness of this measurement method, taking into account unusual circumstances such as Tomomi Itano’s snaggletooth (note the large discrepancy in measurements between “mouth closed” and “mouth open”) and Erena Ono’s age. Although the “loli effect” is a phenomenon that is yet to be explained fully, there is at least one major contributing factor that seems to inflate the attractiveness value for particularly young girls:

Okay, make that two major contributing factors.

(See also: Saaya Irie.)

Also of particular note is the discovery of negative drool values for persons such as Megumi Ohori, who quite frankly should never be seen without a paper bag over her head. The fact that such a value was recorded is not necessarily a judgment on Ohori herself but rather an illustration of the robustness of this measurement method.