The idol culture is extremely unhealthy. This is objectification turned to 11. They get a pass in the US because it seems so distant and Japan is "odd and cool" but it is actually really creepy.
Fans like those stars for their whole package (myth, personality, songs, artistic expression, style, etc) not e.g. just for their body (which is usually implied by objectification).
It's also not much different than our pop idols, especially of yore (up until the 00s or so, before several other occupations, such as games, social media, web surfing, selfies, and tons of higher quality TV and movies) basically replaced pop music as the major obsession of western kids.
There have been idols attacked (and even murdered) plenty of times in good ole US.
Further reading seems to show they are different from pop idols of the west, both in fan culture[0] and how much control a talent agency has over the idols' personal life, including forcing idols to remain single so as to seem attainable by their fan base, which "may cause fans to be unable to distinguish between fantasy and real-life" [1].
That was commonplace in the west for musicians and actors with a mass young fan base -- they often were forced by management to be single, or appear single, hide their relationships etc, not to disappoint the fans of the opposite sex. And of course actors/singers/etc who were gay/lesbian/bi/etc were forced to hide it for marketing reasons.
And we grew out of it. Japan did not. I wish we stopped giving Japan a pass for the things it does wrong. In terms of gender equality, minorities inclusiveness, gay rights, it lags far behind.
>I wish we stopped giving Japan a pass for the things it does wrong.
I also wish people stop considering their country's morals and current fashions as the yardstick to measure the whole world...
(Especially if they don't have such a great, past or present, track record even by their own standards, to begin with).
Who are you to give or give not Japan "a free pass"? Who said Japan needs a pass from outsiders?
To quote Feyman:
"The next morning the young woman taking care of our room fixes the bath, which was right in our room. Sometime later she returns with a tray to deliver breakfast. I'm partly dressed. She turns to me and says, politely, "Ohayo, gozai masu," which means, "Good morning."
Pais is just coming out of the bath, sopping wet and completely nude. She turns to him and with equal composure says, "Ohayo, gozai masu ," and puts the tray down for us.
Pais looks at me and says, "God, are we uncivilized!"
We realized that in America if the maid was delivering breakfast and the guy's standing there, stark naked, there would be little screams and a big fuss. But in Japan they were completely used to it, and we felt that they were much more advanced and civilized about those things than we were."
yeah, my main issue with it is it seems really exploitative. Get a bunch of kids and control every aspect of their lives in exchange for fame, subjecting them to all kinds of pressures and limiting their experiences...
Almost 100% of an Idol's life is manufactured by the studios. What is presented to the public is barely even a person, more of a product hyper-tailored for a specific audience.
It's all of the downsides of a celebrity multiplied by 10 and no to much of the upside. The company controls how they look, what they say, who they associated with, their entire creative output, everything. They get treated more like breakfast cereal mascots than actual living human beings.
My understanding is that the pay sucks because the company takes almost all of the income. On the other hand your expenses are also very low because the company provides everything. Housing, food, clothes, etc... Many of which are sponsored so forget about making your own choice.
The fame and fun factor are certainly a big reason why people willingly do it, but that's about it for compensation.
At what point does one differentiate between obsession with idols and obsession with pop stars in other countries? In my experience, J-idols appear to put a lot of work into their personalities as part of the group and their "talent" which goes beyond the fetishization of beauty we usually associate with objectification. In other words, do we know that Japanese fans view idols as people tending to objects?
I don't even think that's the issue. I saw a documentary on Japan and they visited one of these idol "talent agencies". It's an incredibly creepy structure that's just not comparable to anything we have in the West.
That's not too far off. But instead of having overly controlling parents the idols have overly controlling corporations running their lives and 24/7 scrutiny from an extremely fickle and difficult to please fanbase.
