It seems unless you are an ardent AKB48 fanatic purchasing thousands of copies of the same CD to boost your favorite girl’s chances of appearing in the next single, if you are young in Japan, you likely aren’t spending money on music.

A recent survey found that 68.6% of respondents were actually spending 0 yen on downloads over the span of a month.

Given the new tightening of Japanese laws concerning illegal downloading, you might reasonably expect the legal side of things to benefit from hordes of frightened YouTube users rushing out (digitally speaking) to get their hands on tracks the ‘proper’ way. Not so, it seems. In fact, overall digital sales fell in 2010 and 2011, setting a bad precedent that the new law may aggravate.

Okay, so long-time observers will be neither cheered nor surprised by this news, having already no doubt noted the closure of Shibuya’s HMV in 2010, plus the general dearth of good music in the mainstream market and the lack of interest in pop music by not-so-cash-happy younger consumers.

Of course, one survey also does not full market analysis make (and we can’t immediately even find how many people were even surveyed). Music is more than downloads: there are physical CDs, mobile phone ringtones, tickets to gigs, and the empire of merchandise that surrounds grounds like AKB and the spawns of Johnny’s (typically the ubiquitous Arashi).

And yet music sales in general have plunged back to the levels of three decades’ prior, with a depressing uniformity to the “bestsellers” — they all come from a handful of groups and basically just two agencies, and what tops the charts now were in the past good only for scraping into the top ten. Thus mass market (“pop culture”) events are now more like cult fan phenomena.

But music groups in Japan are no longer created or marketed to sell music; they are born to be fundamentally only an image that can be siphoned through the Dentsu machine to front countless PR campaigns, a result that is quite literally ad nauseum. This is particularly mind-numbing when the “bands” have such sacharine aesthetics as AKB48.

AKB’s aggressive and rather cynical tactics of encouraging fans to buy multiple copies of CDs is working, with 2011′s top ten singles’ music sales improving over previous years’ — but to what real market worth, let alone artistic one?

After all the brouhaha about Perfume “going abroad” when their music was released worldwide for digital download, the predictable press release-fueled media coverage gave way soon enough to, what? Silence? Muted applause? Their fans were happy but the rest of the world — correct me if I’m wrong — did not seem to notice.

The Japanese music industry is dying.

Well, here’s a partnership we should have seen coming…

In what cynics might decry as mere geek pop culture tailored for the Brutus-reading, CINRA.net-browsing Tokyo hipster, Hiroki Azuma — the academic who has done a lot on the otaku theory circuit — and musician Keiichiro Shibuya have got together with digital vocalizer idol Hatsune Miku to create a new album, Initiation.

Hatsune Miku likely needs no introduction. The virtual idol began life as a singing synthesizer application for Yamaha’s Vocaloid 2. Since then “she” has taken on a whole cult of her own.

Keiichiro Shibuya, with his trademark hide-the-face hair line, is a favorite of Tokyo cool cats, an electronic music artist who frequently collaborates with trendy artists and dancers. Shibuya is making a new opera with Vocaloid called The End at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) in December along with another hip creative type, theatre artist Toshiki Okada. The costumes for Hatsune Miku are by Louis Vuitton’s artistic director Marc Jacobs.

Hiroki Azuma became famous overseas for writing a foundational text in what is fast becoming a mini library of academic texts about otaku culture. Not satisfied just with teaching and writing, he has also done that oddly Japanese thing of building up his own mini faction, in this case largely revolving around his journal, Shisouchizu beta (“Map of Thinking”), and his publication company, Genron.

The pages of his journals and books are filled with contributions from the likes of artist/art entrepreneur Takashi Murakami, former journalist Naoki Inose (current governor of Tokyo until gubernatorial elections are held) and Twitter advocate Daisuke Tsukuda.

The lyrics to the title song on the Initiation album have been written by Azuma, and the vocals of course created by Hatsune Miku. There are also other tracks featuring just Miku on her own, plus DJs and piano songs. The album also features a music video.

A special music video for the release in Japan of Alicia Keys’ new single, Girl on Fire, has been made by the photographer and film director Mika Ninagawa.

The special collaboration is officially only being shown in Japan (well, as it’s on YouTube it’s obviously in reality globally available).

It’s no secret among my friends how much I dislike Mika Ninagawa. Forgive me why I elucidate.

First, the praxis. Her saccharine pink floral visuals are as superficial as photographic imagery can get. And then we arrive at her professional cynicism. She displays nothing short of an insatiable appetite for every and any job she can get — from AKB48 music videos to movies, fashion portraits… Anyone who’ll pay her for some more red and pink flowers.

That’s perfectly fine — I’m hardly adverse to doing things for a salary — but then doesn’t that make you a filmmaker with an ad agency? Again, nothing wrong with that. It just doesn’t deserve the artistic hype and respect that Ninagawa commands.

The most irksome of all was perhaps her series of sakura cherry blossom photos that she — or at least her marketing people — tried to turn into some sort of Tohoku-themed requiem.

This is her first time to work with a western music artist and to be fair, it is a major coup to be showcasing the new single from one of the biggest stars on the planet.

It’s a pity then that her creativity could only muster its usual hackneyed and skin-deep hoopla.

Her inspiration for this new Girl on Fire music video project was to take her usual bricolage of flowers and add — this is the really original part — flames. Well, at least she stopped short of setting fire to Ms. Keys to make the “symbolism” even more patent.

Japanese Alicia Keys fans should be up in arms. This video “especially made for them” just looks plain cheap, seemingly shot in a small studio with some lights, projections and a mirror.

An actor is someone who acts. A dancer is someone who dances. A singer is someone who sings. They all get paid to do what their job title claims, but when it comes to singing, we tend to become more tolerant. It’s OK that singers don’t sing on stage, right? Well, maybe not anymore.

On March 5, a TV producer at Fuji Television Network Inc., Shin Kikuchi openly declared on his blog an end to lip-syncing in his show, Music Fair, to follow the same rule in his other two music programs, Bokura-no-ongaku (Our Music) and Domoto Brothers. He says that the decision was unanimous and that any professional singers should be able to sing live. While this movement might make us appreciate live performances of those who CAN sing live on stage (which by the way don’t seem to exist that many in the current Japanese music industry), traditionally in Japan we have never been so critical of singers not using their voice on TV.

Source: Fuji Television Network

After all, watching TV is a passive experience and we can change channels anytime if we don’t want to see singers lip-sync in a show. We might even be a little sympathetic to hundreds of poor idols out there, who have to dance and sing all at the same time. Because their schedule is so tight, they don’t have time for such training anyway.

So why are the Japanese so tolerant of lip-syncing?

One possible reason is that in Japan, the level of professionalism required and expected of singers is not very high to begin with. One notorious case I remember is Arashi singing in FNS Music Festival, a live music show aired on Fuji TV Network back in 2011. Arashi undoubtedly has become one of the biggest pop groups and dominated the Japanese music industry over the past decade, together with the female idol group, AKB48.

Ironically, what made their performance so controversial was not that they lip-synched — but rather that they actually sang live AND sounded completely out of tune. People immediately fired up comments online: they either mocked at Arashi’s poor live performance or backed up the idols for their diligent effort to finish the song despite having “technical problems” backstage. What really happened was not the question (the auto-tune was not working). The controversy surrounding this incident made me realize that in general, we don’t want to see people suffer on stage.

As the current Japanese music industry is in large part made of idol groups, what we expect from their performance is not their singing but merely their appearance — looking good on camera. (Plus some dancing, perhaps.) Considering that Beyonce’s alleged lip-syncing made huge headlines in the US, we could say authenticity is much more valued overseas even if it results in mediocre or even poorer performances.

The bottom line is, we just want to be entertained. If their singing is so bad, I would rather see them lip-sync and appreciate their music more. In this music video I recently found on YouTube, Rola, a Japanese model who’s also known for her supposedly “innocent” use of tameguchi slang, lip-syncs to Carly Rae Jepsen’s smash hit “Call Me Maybe”.

Why is she doing this? Is she trying to impersonate Jepsen? Personally, I don’t get this, but if the attempt was to show how easy it is nowadays for anyone to be a “singer”, then maybe Kikuchi was right. We should have been more critical.

Whether you like them or not, Golden Bomber seems to have found their own gold in the entertainment scene. Their latest album titled The Past Masters Vol. 1 which was released on April 24th, topped the Oricon hit charts in its first appearance, selling over 110,000 copies in the debut week alone. This actually follows another record they made back in January with which their thirteenth single Dance My Generation also entered top of the charts in its first appearance.

Now they have become the first music artists to achieve having both their single and album ranking at the top of the charts in their first appearance. Wait — something is missing here. Yes, their real achievement is attributed to the fact that they don’t belong to a major record label. They are proud to be the first artists representing an indie record label whose single and album both dominated the Oricon charts in their first appearance.

Perhaps they will be even more proud as they continue to see more success in the industry, knowing that people like their music for its authenticity — even though they appear to be deceiving audiences due to the very simple fact that three of the members don’t play any instruments.

Previously we published a post on lip-syncing in the Japanese music industry and talked about just how ubiquitous and accepted it is here, so some people might wonder. Lip-syncing and hand-syncing. Which is more fake?

While I can imagine some people claiming it’s a meaningless question to begin with: We know they are both bad, so what’s the point of asking which is worse? Golden Bomber, though, has made hand-syncing part of their performance and thus perhaps a little less sinful as well. After all, they owe their fame partially to the fact that they don’t play any instrument on stage or even in a recording studio. All of their songs are recorded by “professional” musicians.

Then what is it about them that attracts our attention? The popularity of so-called “visual-kei bands” peaked in the early Nineties so we have seen this kind of thing before — there’s nothing new about their heavy make-up or fashion.

It’s more likely that their popularity and fame stem from their act of not playing cool. For example, the title of their smashhit single, which basically pushed them to the fore of the music scene, is Memeshikute. The word literally means “like a woman” and is used negatively to describe any male who’s not manly enough, whatever that means.

The meaning is more easily “seen” than explained. The first twenty seconds of this music video will show you everything about being memeshii. See how this guy reacts when he gets dumped by his girlfriend.

The song is about having lingering feelings for our ex, told in a not so sentimental way. Life is a performance, they seem to say, so learn to laugh at life.

Their brutally honest expressions of what could otherwise be featured as a central theme of tear-jerking romance films can be seen in the titles of their songs alone. The level of “honesty” varies greatly from “I couldn’t ask for your phone number again” to “I’m going to kill your ex-boyfriend,” both of which are actual titles of their songs. Being uncool is the coolest thing, so embrace the darkest, the most shameful part of yourself.

In their latest single though, they are getting more political. The music video is obviously a satire mocking the people who enjoyed the triumph of Japan’s Bubble economy in the late Eighties when money was believed to take them to the top of the world.

Yet even the burst of the Bubble economy can be turned into a piece of entertainment — it’s just too much fun not to!

In 1998 the famous guitarist from pioneering visual kei rock band X JAPAN, Hideto Matsumoto (commonly known as just “hide”), suddenly passed away at the age of thirty-three. To remember this, every May Kawasaki Club Citta shows the film “hide FILM ALIVE!”

This year will mark the twentieth anniversary of hide starting his solo work and next year is also what would have been hide’s fiftieth birthday. For the occasion new merchandise will be released, such as a hide twentieth anniversary pin set, photo sets and more.

In 2000, two years after his death, a museum opened in his birthplace Yokosuka, which became a mecca for many fans from all over the world as well as Japan. This hide Museum was originally planned to be open for three years, but due to its popularity it didn’t close until September 2005. During those five years the hide Museum attracted about 450,000 visitors and now it is being reopened in Tokyo and Osaka for the first time in eight years.

In Tokyo, the hide Museum 2013 will be at DiverCity Tokyo Plaza from June 29th until July 28th, and in Osaka at Universal Studios Japan from August 7th to August 9th.

Each venue will display objects such as hide’s 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard guitar, costumes from his music videos, the mask from the cover of his first solo album “hide your face”, and more, introducing hide’s music, art and lifestyle to his fans.

Two tribute albums with “hide TRIBUTE II & III Visual Spirits” will also be released with covers of hide’s songs by other visual kei artists and bands like Sadie, heidi., or Screw, priced ¥3,000 each.

Tokyo Reporter has posted about another incident in the ongoing “No dancing” saga that is affecting Japan’s nightlife.

GP Bar in Roppongi was raided and the manager and DJ arrested for the heinous crime of allowing patrons to boogie.

This is not the first time that police have raided clubs in the Gas Panic chain and arrested staff for violating the 1948 law that prevents bars from operating as dance clubs after midnight. The antiquated law was an anti-prostitution statute and has been superseded by the fact that most prostitution in Japan involves venues where the last thing people want to do is dance, and of course, now we have proper dance clubs. The GIs are no longer in town and the sudden drive to tackle clubs, especially in Tokyo, Kyoto, Fukuoka and Osaka, is literally killing off the scene. Those clubs that are re-opening are often being careful and shutting their doors at 1am. Even big name dance clubs are avoiding using words like “DJ” on their websites and it’s not uncommon to find signs posted at establishments warning people not to dance. (For more on the background to the loaw and its effects on the club scene, Time Out Tokyo published this excellent article last year.)

The GP chain of bars and clubs in Roppongi (and one in Shibuya) are notorious for being rather sleazy dives, frequented by foreign expats looking to pick up. However, promiscuity and unsavory men are nothing new, and the police raids on Vanity and the GP chain are ridiculous. There is no justification for it except that some middle-aged police chief is being a stickler for outdated laws. There is plenty of trouble in areas like Roppongi, yet it would be a real stretch to suggest that a few drunk people in their twenties dancing badly are to blame.

Why are they doing it? This is our theory: It gives the police something to do and exert their manpower. Flashing muscle is what the police in Japan does to show how much authority they have. Although the system of koban is often praised as a way of providing communities and neighborhoods with a “listening post” for residents to drop in with problems or questions, in fact these police boxes are instruments for the police to keep an eye on the area. The police go to great lengths to establish community links (such as paying daily house visits) since a lot of crime gets reported to police by civilians. In other words, they set up an unofficial network of spies.

For a nation with very low crime statistics, the number of police greatly outweigh the necessity. Likewise, spot raids on dance clubs are not actually effective since the number of clubs and criminal dancers are too many. But raids get headlines and this instills a culture of fear.

People are fighting back, though, including flash dance mobs in protest and petition campaigns. However, it must be only a matter of time before the police raid a major Shibuya club, or perhaps the protection money to the Yakuza has some use after all.

A new world record has been set for the number of theremins ever being played together. Masami Takeuchi organized the music concert of 272 theremin instruments in Hamamatsu in Shizuoka on July 20th.

In 2000, Takeuchi also developed this Matryomin QT, a miniature theremin encased in a handmade colorful matryoshka doll. The instruments played at the Hamamatsu concert were the same design, which has a pitch distance of five octaves.

The battalion of theremin players knocked out a rendition of Amazing Grace.

Japan has always had a liking for the theremin.

Who can forget the Otamatone Sound Toy from Maywa Denki that was such a hit a few years ago?

And then there is also the increasingly inventive and fun work of Yuri Suzuki, whose many sound products and concept designs include collaborating on this Three Radio Theremin.

And for those who really love their electronic musical instruments can even build their own with the Gakken Otona no Kagaku Theremin Mini kit.

With the recent release of their 32nd single, “Koisuru Fortune Cookie,” AKB48 has once again proven their monopoly in Japan’s music industry. After hitting the physical and digital shelves on August 21st, the song topped the Oricon hit charts in its first appearance, selling over a million copies on the first day of release alone.

The number here merely reminds me of the tragic trend in J-pop today where mass production of music adds almost no value to all the “hard work” of musicians and singers but rather degrades it. However, this actually might work better for an idol group like AKB48 whose longtime catch phrase is: “Idols you can meet every day.” From the beginning, AKB has been marketed as a group of ordinary girls who don’t always find themselves at the center of attention. Their success is attributed to the “mass” part, not each individual, which gives fans a sense of belonging as if they were part of the group themselves.

It’s no surprise, then, that their latest single is now one of the most popular songs in the country. What seems to be different this time, though, is that their marketing strategy has evolved from targeting those who love idols for the sake of worshiping what I call “desexualized love interest of all” to a much wider audience of potential fans who just need a final push to be part of that AKB loving community. For this reason I have nothing but great respect for producer Yasushi Akimoto who chose to assign this role of marketing to the fans and staff, not the AKB girls themselves — a kind of marketing that is built on chain reactions.

The song has some different versions of music video, all of which can be viewed on the AKB official YouTube channel. However, the majority of “work” is done by people you have never seen before. The one that has nearly six million views is performed by the AKB staff members.

The message here is rather simple. AKB48 is supported by such a loving crew, so why not love them yourself? Another version features fashion brand Samantha Thavasa and its employees. (Certain girls from AKB48 have appeared in the brand’s advertising in the past.) The most recent collaboration is done by Saga prefecture.

With more than a thousand members participating (including governor Yasushi Furukawa and some yuru-kyara mascots) and at a cost of 500,000 yen, the video serves as a promotional attempt not so much to introduce the prefecture but rather to bring our attention to the people who work there – again, the AKB brand is used to appeal positively to nonchalant viewers who might not necessarily be so interested in this otherwise unknown yet noteworthy corner of Japan.

In fact, Saga already has its own promotional video called “Three Minutes to Saga.” The first half shows everything Saga has to offer in three minutes, as the title says, and the second half looks more like a plain guidebook. If the primary function of promotional videos is to engage viewers and keep their attention from start to finish, then the AKB song and dance has definitely helped them to improve service this purpose.

So what will their next strategy be? One thing we know for sure is that Akimoto would never turn to a fortune cookie when deciding the future prospects of his empire, as he always seems to know exactly how best to promote and sell his products.

One of our favorite Japanese enterprises, Maywa Denki, has made a typically originally and hilarious group music video to celebrate twenty years since it was founded.

Maywa Denki is part music band, part art unit, inspired by the medium-sized production companies that have been the backbone of Japan’s manufacturing and technology growth. They create unique products, run special kids’ workshops, perform concerts and more.

Its hits include the Otamatone sound toy, a remake of the classic Theremin, and many other “nonsense” machines and musical products.

And not only are these designers talented folk, they certainly don’t take themselves seriously at all, as we think you can tell from the video!

Produced by Novumichi [sic] Tosa (he’s the guy on the bottom row), past employees include the sound designer Yuri Suzuki, another one of our favorite Japanese talents. The founder styled the unit from the name of his father’s old manufacturing firm, though Maywa Denki itself was originally signed to Sony Music Entertainment and is now managed by entertainment giant Yoshimoto Kogyo.

Even better news than this video? There is going to be a twentieth anniversary concert at Akasaka Blitz on December 13th!

Nippon TV’s Song for Japan might seem like a typical singing contest except for the fact that none of the contestants are Japanese. It’s a contest that is exclusive to foreigners, presumably for the purpose of showcasing gaijin singers on stage first and foremost, for the entertainment of the Japanese. I consider this program to be more like a talent show rather than a singing competition because it’s not really the vocal skills that contestants are judged on — but on how well they can impress the audience with their unusually Japanese language talent, to say the least.

It’s one thing to say that we Japanese all love anyone who is genuinely interested in Japan and willing to show their love of Japanese songs. But why does the contest need to be so segregated, as if to say that one must first prove themselves alien to this country?

Often on the show we hear comments from the judges saying how perfectly a contestant can sing in Japanese. They say it with such good-hearted spirit it’s as if  they feel grateful for foreign singers who remind them once again of just how great Japan is. To me, this sounds a little fake, as if the entire show is scripted. They called for foreigners who love Japanese songs, so they simply got what they expected. OK, maybe enough about the contest.

Some of the winners from past contests have gone on to their professional debut in Japan.

Chris Hart is perhaps one of the best vocals in Japan’s music scene today.

On October 30th, his latest single “Yume-ga-samete” was released from Universal Music Japan, a duet with Japan’s all-time queen of music idols, Seiko Matsuda.

Diana Garnet is another winner of the contest who recently made her professional debut on the label Sony Music.

And now Nicholas Edwards has released his first mini-album “Skies”, which hit the shelves on October 9th courtesy of Warner Music Japan.

We’ve all seen Jero, an American enka singer who found himself at the center of media attention not necessarily for his singing talent alone but rather for the novelty of being the first black enka singer ever. This catchphrase, by the way, was repeatedly used in a variety of media coverage, which no doubt made him experience both the best and the worst of being a foreign singer in Japan. He is actually one of the very few foreign singers who made a success here.

The Japanese would surely praise anyone who shows their love of J-pop and Japan through singing, but things become a little different when it comes to business. Are they good singers because they are foreigners singing in a non-native language or does their singing talent come first? That’s what they have to prove themselves once they pass the first phase of fame.

As a promo for her new album ARTPOP in Japan, Lady Gaga and Universal Music Japan asked Japan’s most prestigious sex doll maker, Orient Industry, to create the Gagadoll.

Can you tell which is the “real” Gaga in this picture?

Here’s the official description:

Japan’s latest and finest technologies were put into the creation of the “GAGADOLL”. It’s the world’s first life-size human-shaped listening station that closely resembles Lady Gaga. The bone conduction system enables one to listen to her songs and message.

The “GAGADOLL” was inspired by the concept of “ARTPOP” and this masterpiece made by Japan’s master craftsmen has been highly-praised by Lady Gaga herself.

Orient Industry are more craftsmen than “adult toy” manufacturers, and their commitment to extreme detail and realism is legendary. From movable fingers and eyes to a myriad variations in body, bust and face, they provide customizable life companions for those who dare to desire one.

The Gagadoll is not on sale but it can be booked for events and appearances, according to the official website.

ARTPOP opened at number one in Japan and no doubt this marketing stunt can’t have hurt sales.

This is an awesome innovation on what many people would say is a dying medium. And the best thing about it is that it doesn’t resort to digital or technological gimmicks. It just takes two very analogue things and makes them even better.

Mieru Record is a combination of a music box and a manga comic strip. With the former you usually have a cylinder, but there are types which use a punched tape strips of paper for the music box to “read” as musical notation, like the book music read by mechanical organs.

Mieru Record, a project which explores ways to fuse sound and manga, added manga cells to the music box punched tape strip, creating a manga music box organ, the Mieru Record with Otowa.

In other words, it is a book that you listen to — and music that you read.

The idea is that the sounds and music accompany the manga strip both in terms of the melody and also the speed. As you turn you control the speed of the soundtrack, which in turn controls the speed with which you read the manga images that are revealed.

See how it works in practice with this video. Note how you slow down to read the parts with dialogue and then speed up over the more visual cells.

I guess this is like the pianists who used to accompany a silent film back in the days before talkies.

Mieru Record is a project that started earlier this year and this Mieru Record with Otowa is still only a prototype, so don’t expect it to be on sale any time soon.

It worked with seven manga artist to create the music box’s music roll paper, and the results were exhibited in a book store and gallery in Tokyo over the summer.

With more sophisticated music roll strips and organs we reckon you could create all kinds of audio manga experiences.

Work by the composer of the most famous pieces of Japanese contemporary classical music from this century is now alleged not to have been composed wholly by its official creator.

The score for Mamoru Samuragochi’s piece Sonatina for Violin was set to be published and released on February 11th but this has now been cancelled. It is also planned to be used as the music for skater Daisuke Takahashi’s solo in the showcase program at the upcoming Sochi Olympics this month, though this too may not be able to go ahead now.

Samuragochi — though sometimes written “Samuragoch,” this is apparently the preferred Romanization of his name, rather than the literal “Samuragouchi” — lost his hearing at the age of 35 and has also composed for video games such as “Biohazard” and “Onimusha”. He is a self-taught composer and a second-generation hibakusha, both his parents having suffered the Hiroshima bombing. His condition led to him being hailed (or hyped) as a modern-day Japanese Beethoven.

Hiroshima is the most famous work by Samuragochi.

“I hope listeners will feel the darkness of hopelessness and the gentle light hope that follows,” he said in 2011 when Hiroshima was released as a CD in the wake of the Tohoku disaster. It went on to sell over 100,000 copies.

Now aged 50, he began to suffer from hearing issues when a high school student but relying on absolute pitch, he could continue to compose. According to his official profile, he “suffers from neurotic depression, anxiety neurosis, and chronic headaches and has a persistent ringing in his ears, but composes by relying on his perfect pitch.”

Symphony No. 1 Hiroshima was completed in 2003. It was then premiered at a the meeting of the Group of Eight leaders in Hiroshima in 2008.

It has now been alleged that a third party actually composed much of Samuragochi’s oeuvre. Samuragochi’s agents announced that his lawyer had received a message claiming that Samuragochi had composed only the overall structures, while the finer details had been done by someone else without credit.

“I’ve been told that there are certain circumstances that make it hard for the person (who composed the works) to come out in public, and Samuragochi has come to describe himself as the sole composer,” the lawyer told Kyodo News.

Symphony No. 1 Hiroshima has also not always met universal acclaim, being criticized as too “commercial” by some classical music reviewers.

It has been reported that Samuragochi has already accepted the claims as true and expressed remorse. His ghost writer is a college music teacher Takashi Niigaki, who had received a fee from Sakuragochi to compose his music for the past ten years.

An interview with Niigaki was set to be published, which prompted the revelations at last.

*Updated*: Niigaki has said that he does not believe that Samuragochi is even deaf!

Fancy joining AKB48?

It was announced yesterday that the idol mega group is now recruiting a new member to join the ranks for a limited time only. The newbie will be over 30 years old, a stark contrast to the ever-younger girls in the group, typically in their teens or early twenties.

The Adult AKB48 Auditions campaign is looking for a female idol to join the group from April 12th to August 31st. She can be a professional or amateur, married or single — but she must be 30 or over.

She will be a central part of advertising fronted by AKB in the spring and summer, as well as participate in concerts, hand-shaking events and more. The whole thing is part of a campaign for Papico, an ice cream product by Glico.

We look forward to seeing an older AKB girl, though it remains to see how far they are prepared to take it. After all, Japanese women tend to look much younger than they are and there are plenty of famous models and actresses in their forties and fifties still regarded as beauties. But will AKB genuinely accepted a middle-aged “idol” or rather opt for a “still” cute-looking lady just into her thirties?

At present, the oldest member of AKB48 is Haruna Kojima (just under 26 years old). Mariko Shinoda graduated last year in July when she was a ripe old 27.

Applications for the new “older” AKB48 idol have already opened and close on March 28th. Ladies, what are you waiting for?!

This might be the most bizarre advertising collaboration we’ve ever heard of… but one guaranteed to become a meme.

Welsh-born, naturalized Japanese naturalist (get it?) CW Nicol has loaned his avuncular charms to a new TV commercial. Nothing so special about that, except that this is a pretty incredible matching of ecological campaign and writer, and pretty-boy Korean pop.

“I’ve seen lots of trees around the world,” says Nicol in Japanese. “Each and every tree has its own individuality. Isn’t that wonderful?”

And then comes the twist.

Nicol chuckles and uses a word we never thought he’d utter.

“But there isn’t any tree as beautiful or sexy as this.” And he leans against a tree with a copy of the TVXQ album “Tree” attached to it.

TVXQ (Tong Vfang Xien Qi) are a veteran Korean boyband, now reduced to two members, and known in Japan as Tohoshinki. Their new album “Tree” was released in Japan on March 5th.

Here’s the ad.

CW Nicol is famous for campaigning for Japan’s precious woodlands and has been a familiar bearded face on Japanese TV for decades.

K-pop has suffered a bit of late. The massive boom that saw its fortunes accelerate from subculture to the mainstream with the arrival of Girls Generation in Japan a few years ago have wound back as Japan and Korea lock horns over old issues about the war. Royalties are said to have fallen 40% in the past year. Japan is K-pop’s biggest overseas market by a long, long way, and is said to be one reason why operating profits for SM Entertainment, a major K-pop record label, were 70% down compared to the previous year.

With the worrying and distracting rise of race hate, the moneymen are looking to use novel advertising schemes to create talking points that put aside historical differences.

TVXQ (Tohoshinki) themselves are still very popular in Japan, last year playing two dates at a Kanagawa stadium to 140,000 fans. And if the inventiveness of their marketing team are anything to go by, they should be able to keep riding the wave of K-pop stardom in Japan for some time to come.

While the Japanese media always seems to be dominated by upbeat reports of the “millions” of sales that AKB48 ostensibly achieves, the real story of the Japanese music industry is one of serious decline — so chronic that some are now blaming it for a drop in global music sales.

Japan is called the world’s second largest music market, meaning its 16.7% decline is one of the reasons why the overall world music shrank by 3.9% last year, according to figures released by
International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

This is in contrast to Europe, where sales are healthy all things considered (the first grow in 13 years), and even in the US digital sales were up a few percent. Take out Japan’s share (accounting for around 20%) from the global figures and you actually get a very small increase in sales.

But Japan market is highly localized, along with South Korea’s, with US artists hardly making a dent. In Japan, this is particularly troubling, since now the major releases and “winners” of the charts are dominated almost solely by the rosters of Johnny’s and AKB, creating a very uniform and static market.

Japan is yet to fully embrace the digital music market. Instead, the music industry pressured the government to introduce new criminalization for downloads, which has left a sour taste in the mouth of digital native consumers. The question everyone is asking is: Why is the industry not trying to move forward and doing something new? As far as Japan’s music industry is concerned, it could still be 1995.

The real “success” of groups like AKB48 lies in the creators’ admittedly clever marketing and sales tactics, where handshaking and other event tickets are included with CDs along with perks like “election voting”, artificially pushing up sales when fans purchase multiple singles.

Another day, another intriguing Hatsune Miku collaboration.

From expensive opera productions to every piece of merchandise an otaku can get his hands on, Hatsune Miku is not just a virtual idol, she’s a veritable industry in her own right.

Now her paymasters have got together with Gakken, the company behind the Otona no Kagaku (“adult science”) series of magazines that always come with some sort of model or build-it-yourself kit.

The latest issue of Otona no Kagaku is bound to sell out fast because it features a Pocket Miku Singing Keyboard. The nifty DSX-39 digital pocket keyboard is preloaded with samples of Hatsune Miku’s unique vocals. Just use the touch stylus to play five sounds in the signature eVocaloid style.

You can vary the octave and do other tricks. Here you can see someone trying it out.

If you’re a fan of Hatsune Miku, you can order your own Pocket Miku Singing Keyboard via JapanTrendShop.

The second Canadian pop star to run afoul of Japan this week! Following Justin Bieber’s innocent visit to a certain shrine in central Tokyo, now comes Avril Lavigne’s music video where she pines for Hello Kitty.

A lot of the internet right now is blabbering about what may be the most cringeworthy music video to hit out eyeballs in a while.

Avril Lavigne, the rock-pop princess who is still only 29 despite seemingly having been a fixture for decades, has decided to go the way of Gwen Stefani and so many others with a Japan-inspired song that is very inappropriate in its appropriations.

While Avril has laughed off the claims by some that the video is racist, the video went online earlier this week (initially leaked unofficially) and has attracted a backlash from both fans and critics. “An Embarrassment In Any Language” is how Billboard described it.

Avril responded on Facebook: “RACIST??? LOLOLOL!!! I love Japanese culture and I spend half of my time in Japan. I flew to Tokyo to shoot this video specifically for my Japanese fans, WITH my Japanese label, Japanese choreographers AND a Japanese director IN Japan.” Fair enough.

Conceptual talk of fetishization aside, we don’t find the video offensive towards Japan per se, though we find it rather silly and derivative (didn’t Ms Stefani do this and so much better many moons ago?). What we dislike is that it uses an image of “Tokyo” to indulge in some bad dancing and lip-synching, and a zillion lazy tropes (expressionless identical Asian women, sushi, trains, weird attempts to speak snippets of Japanese). All that money and effort (and at least some talent, surely) begs the question: Couldn’t they have done something better?

Judge for yourself with the video here:

Well, however you feel about the video, the “controversy” has meant it has quickly attracted large traffic, which is a victory for the record label at any rate.

Everywhere you go at the moment you seem to hear the Pharrell Williams song “Happy”.

“Zero air-play, nothing. And the next thing you know, we put out the video on November 21 and all of a sudden—boom. I mean, when I say boom, I mean boooooom,” the behattted ever-young singer and producer told Oprah Winfrey in a recent TV interview.

“And we were like, what’s happening? First of all, people are putting up their own videos. It was like no longer my song.”

He can add another fan video to that growing list now as some folk in Harajuku have got together to create a version of “Happy”.

Starring a host of local people, including Shibuya City Mayor Toshitake Kuwahara, BEAMS CEO Yo Shitara, FIG&VIPER’s Arisa Ueno and even sumo wrestlers, they all get jiggy to the “Happy” beat on the streets of Tokyo’s famous fashion town.

Of course, this is an already familiar meme (arguably already on the wane) but we still like this local version. The video comes courtesy of a team who go by the very apt name of #harajukuhappytimes.

See how many of the locations you can recognize.

There is also this slightly less slick version filmed in a similar area with a smaller cast of (international-looking) Tokyo types.