The concept of idol in Japan bloomed after the release of the French film Cherchez l’idole in 1963 when the Japanese entertainment industry started promoting young Japanese women with the same youthful and cute aesthetics as Sylvie Vartan who performed in the movie. The growth of the idol industry can be linked with the development of television in Japan, through audition programs and variety shows. The young girls performing as idols had a very carefully crafted image, being “life sized” (Aoyagi, 1999) so that their audiences can relate to them, being the girl next door that everyone can meet or be, but also being potential role models. They always had to be irreproachable and show an “unaffected purity” (Aoyagi, 1999). They acquired a specific status, they are not considered as artists or talents, the word idol became a new category of entertainers, always specified in contracts and promoted by both the idols themselves and their managers.
The first ten years of the new century saw the appearances of multiple idol groups of various size, from the trio Perfume to the very large AKB48. Most groups kept the aesthetic of the cute but accessible girl that was at the origin of the idol industry, but, by “putting up a wide selection of idols in the same group” (Galbraith, 2012) producers attracted a larger public. The fans suddenly became more important to the industry, choosing which idol in a group should have the spotlight, with the AKB48 Senbatsu Elections for example, where fans can vote for their favourite member. They started influencing on the type of idols the industry should produce. The most evident example is Sashihara Rino, who won the AKB48 Senbatsu Election three times. In 2012, she was demoted from a full member to a trainee after the apparition of a dating scandal on Weekly Bunshun. Idols are not allowed to date, drink or smoke in order to keep their pure image, but Rino won the Senbatsu Election the very next year, showing to the idol industry that fans had moved on from the pure aesthetic of idols to the idea of someone true to themselves and hardworking. She broke the shell of the traditional idol because she considered herself an idol fan before being an idol, thinking first about what the fans wanted and valued before what the industry and producers wanted to achieve. This new generation of idols also welcomed the rise of alternative idols, opposing themselves to the traditional aesthetics of idols, such as BiS, attracting an even wider fan public.
The term “wota” was created by the fan community itself during the beginning of the 2000s with the development of Morning Musume and the Hello!Project. In Japan, otaku (おたく) refers to people with an obsessive interest, more particularly in anime and manga, a term pinpointed in the magazine Manga Burikko (Nakamori, 1983). With the new bloom of the idol industry at the end of 1990s, fans started to search for a new term to designate themselves as otaku was seen as a pejorative term, associated with Tsutomu Miyazaki, a serial killer nicknamed the Otaku Murderer. To distance themselves from this term, they decided to remove the -ku (く) and to switch from the hiragana syllabary to the katakana one, changing from the simple o (お/オ) to the syllable wo (ヲ) where the w is silent (Prideaux, 2005). This new term was then popularized through the multiple appearances of at first Morning Musume and then AKB48 on television, with fans cheering in the public.
As much as the idol industry has been studied by Japanese researchers, few of these researches have been translated in English. The two most important thesis on the subject are Aoyagi’s Island of Eight Million Smiles : Pop-Idol Performances and the Field of Symbolic Production that focusses on the construct of the pop idol culture during the 90s, and W. Galbraith’s Idol and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture that concentrates on the significance of idols as part of mass and celebrity culture in Japan. These two researches both observe the impact of the idol industry on the Japanese youth culture, from “the process in which young women are transformed by the entertainment industry into pop-idols” (Aoyagi, 1999), to the “study of idols within the framework of media and cultural studies [through] production and consumption and […] performances of idols and fans in economic, social, political, and cross-cultural perspectives” (Galbraith, 2012). These both books consider the idol fans as consumers on the commercial aspect and the cultural one, not discussing the relationships between the fans themselves, the community built around this cultural hobby. The idol industry is also a very fast paced industry and since Galbraith’s research was published, new idols have been challenging the usual aesthetics of idols, with the rise of BABYMETAL and BiS, both in 2010. While BABYMETAL kept a youthful aesthetics, simply mixing idol music with metal, BiS are credited to have revolutionized the idol style “rebelling against the classic and outdated cheesy image, gaining an infamous (yet admired) identity with provocative concepts considered morally “wrong”.” (Tofanelli, 2017) These new groups, along with the expansion of social medias, were not covered by these researches, when they both gave a new depth to the industry, the alternative idol movement attracting new fans and the social media bloom giving new ways of connecting between fans and to interact with the idols themselves.
Literature review
On the other side of this research, I read Hodkinson’s Goth : Identity, Style and Subculture published in 2002 to have a better understanding of subculture theories. It helped me understand the different aspects and the evolution of the theories surrounding subcultures, starting from 1955 with the Chicago School until the end of the century with Hodkinson own conceptualisation of subculture. His own concept aims to remove the issues, addressed or not, of the definitions given by other researchers in order to make his conception more up to date with the evolution of subculture and the world around it. Hodkinson defined four criteria that indicate the presence of subcultural substance, all of them :
“should be regarded as a contributory feature which, taken cumulatively with the others, increases the appropriateness of the term subculture”.
These four criteria are identity, commitment, consistent distinctiveness and autonomy. Identity can be defined by “a clear and sustained subjective sense of group identity” built first on the “sense of like-mindedness” between the participants. Commitment can refer to involvement and the importance of the subculture in the person lifestyle. Consistent distinctiveness constructed through a sense of belonging to the group but also a notion of distinction toward outsiders. Autonomy can be seen as the capacity for the group to create “internal or subcultural forms of media or commerce”. Another important point of Hodkinson research is simply his subject of research, the Goth community. They share a common aspect with the wota community as they are both a music related fan community.