thoughts on an idol graduation

them parasocial relationships hit hard

My 16 year old student remarked to me the other day that I was acting out of character. “You’re so… excited,” she explained, wracking her Eiken grade-2 brain for the right word. It was just the two of us, which was both a blessing and a curse. Having a one-on-one lesson meant I wasn’t having to compete with her screeching about Genshin Impact and the boy band Snow Man in Japanese with the other girl in the class. We talked about ice cream at length, because when I can’t think of smalltalk topics to use with teenage girls, I just bring up random American restaurant menus on the iPad and we discuss it. (They both have The Cheesecake Factory on their bucket lists now.) The bad side, of course, was that I was more anxious than usual because even though I’m 30 years old, I still seek the approval of cool teens. But I’ve been nervous in class before. This was a new level of anxious. I felt almost a little manic, a little out of my body. “I’m sleepy so I’m being extra energetic,” I explained, but it wasn’t entirely true. I’d been in a weird mood for a few weeks, and I think it’s because my favorite idol was leaving.

Fan culture in Japan is intense

About ten years ago, my university Japanese class was doing a unit on haiku and senryu, which are like haiku but less rigid and involve some sort of punchline, and I wrote something along the lines of like

100枚買った

AKBの推しメン

に会うため

Which translates to “I bought 100 copies/in order to/meet my AKB48 oshimen”

After presenting it to the class, I then had to explain two things to my classmates as well as my perplexed Japanese professor:

1. How AKB48 included vouchers to apply for special events, like meet-and-greets, in their physical CD single releases, incentivizing fans to buy multiple copies

2. What an “oshimen” is

Since then, Japan has become obsessed with the concept of “oshi”, the shortened form of “oshimen,” which in turn literally means “supported member.” It refers to a person’s favorite person or character thing, their current fixation and obsession, the one they’re rooting for. “Favorite member” or “favorite character” doesn’t necessarily do it justice in my opinion. Part of the difference is just the way that various fandom spaces operate. The average Star Trek nerd or Disney adult probably has favorite characters. But the fandom isn’t really based around declaring loyalty to that character and then creating a shrine for that character in your bedroom and making liking that character part of your identity. If Western fandom spaces were designed to accommodate that, there would have been so much Kylo Ren merchandise. But a lot of Japanese properties have fandoms pre-built into them, and they’re designed to get you to pick favorites and show your dedication.

Oshi culture is everywhere now. They sell backdrops for your clear acrylic standee collection and accessories in various member colors at the 100 yen shop. I keep getting targeted ads for a private gym for nerdy women and one of the draws is that you don’t have to worry about being judged for working out with your oshi merch there to motivate you. There’s a place opening up in Osaka that will let you hold funerals if your anime oshi dies. Nail polish is sold with little blurbs like “Is your oshi’s color blue? Wear this to the next concert!”

It’s consumerism, capitalism, and objectification at its finest. But it’s also, like, really fun?

Specifically in the idol world, the oshi is a powerful thing. The reason the big groups are so successful is because there’s so many different oshi potentials. There’s a person in there for everyone, you just have to wait for someone to resonate with you and then you’re hooked. Your oshi gets some extra solo lines to sing in the new single? Serotonin! They look really cute or cool or attractive in that video clip? Dopamine! Japanese idols, especially the female kind, are all based around the concept of the entertainer working incredibly hard to inspire their fans, to give 200% effort even if they’re not that good at singing or dancing or visuals simply because they want to put on a fun show. That conceit works best when you have some faces to specifically cheer for. Members have specific colors, so you can wear clothing in their member color, or hold up lightsticks in their color so they can see it from the stage. There are fan chants for the fans to show their support. Concerts aren’t just a way to hear music you like performed live. It’s a way to show your oshi your support, to maybe, just maybe, demonstrate to them that you’re here and you love them.

Graduation is a silly euphemism but the alternatives are too depressing so here we are

Another piece of jargon: when an idol leaves, we say they’re graduating, their final concert called a graduation. This was a cutesy term used by the group Onyanko Club in the 80s, and then it was repurposed by evil genius Tsunku when he decided to create Morning Musume and Hello! Project and reshape the entire East Asian idol industry. He institutionalized the multi-generational idol group, which is how Morning Musume has been around since 1997; old girls leave, and new girls join. I won’t get into the sexist connotations of this phenomenon — you don’t hear about a lot of male idols graduating because the popular ones keep trucking well into their 30s and 40s, whereas there’s a running joke (?) in some female idol spaces of the “25-year-old retirement theory”, which is that they’re sort of obligated to step down before they turn 26 — but it’s language that most of the major groups use now. Graduation could mean that the idol is leaving to pursue a solo career. Maybe they want to expand their career into other facets of the entertainment industry, like modeling or acting or production. Maybe they want to go live abroad or finish college and then return to the industry in the future. But graduations can also mean that they’re stepping down from the entertainment industry completely and are about to fall off the face of the earth forever. It can be a bittersweet or painful thing, so they make a big deal out of it.

Graduation concerts are the final farewell between the graduating idol and their fans, as well as the graduating idol and the remaining members. They’re usually held in massive venues such as Budokan and have extended setlists. There’s speeches and solo performances and special costumes and lots of crying. It’s meant to be a big cathartic farewell. In 2010, when my three favorite Morning Musume members graduated all at once, I wasn’t able to attend the graduation concert, and I still feel weird about it. It felt like I never got to say goodbye.

My favorite is leaving soon and I’m sad about it

I got into Shiritsu Ebisu Chugaku (“Ebisu Private Junior High School”) last year when I saw their performances on THE FIRST TAKE. I’d known of them since they’d debuted; a dubbing group I was in covered the song “The Tissue ~Tomaranai Seishun~”, one of their earliest singles released when they literally were entirely made up of middle school students, and I was in charge of editing it all together. I… wasn’t a fan of that particular single, and I’m still not. It was a little shocking to see them ten years later, all grown up and genuinely good at singing?

Anyway, I quickly latched onto Kashiwagi Hinata, because I love singers with stage presence. While I was trying to familiarize myself with the members, something just clicked and I found myself wanting to watch every performance she’s ever been in. She’s considered one of the best vocalists in the idol industry right now and is also recognized for her high dancing skill, though that wasn’t always the case. She joined Ebichu in 2010 when she was just eleven years old. Due to her young age and tiny stature (at 23, she’s only 156 cm, or about 5’1”), she regularly wore her hair in pigtails and was the little sister character of the group. Her earlier nickname, Omochi, comes from a play on her last name sounding like “kashiwa mochi” and her round, mochi-like cheeks. But then she got older and her voice really developed and she became the main vocalist of the group, a powerhouse who got all of the big show-stopping lines. Now, she’s affectionately referred to as “Boss” due to her serious approach to performance and high standards for new members; she also choreographs some of their live performances.

Although I do genuinely love a lot of Ebichu’s songs, I think my interest in them has really been motivated by my love for Hinata. I like all of the members in their own way, but they don’t speak to me the same way that she does.

When she announced her graduation back in April, the first departure since Hirota Aika left in 2018, I decided that I was going to squeeze every moment I could with her in the group, just in case it was my last chance. I moved to Japan the following month and hit the ground running. I saw Ebichu live with okazakitaiiku at Zepp Haneda in July as part of their two-man Zepp tour. I saw their annual Chuon concert in the mountains of Chichibu in September. Then at the end of November, I saw Hinata’s final solo show as a member of Ebichu. And in December, I attended her graduation concert.

The primal scream of the final solo concert

It was held at Nakano Sun Plaza, a well-known concert hall that doubles as the unoffical homebase for Hello! Project concerts. I’ve been there twice before, once in 2010 for Morning Musume’s autumn concert tour, and then in July 2022 to see Juice=Juice and Yamazaki Aoi. This was the final performance of her “Kashiwagi Project” tour, a series of four shows to commemorate 12 years in the group as well as her imminent departure. I caught the live stream of her show with fellow indie-day members Mayama Rika, Yasumoto Ayaka, and Hoshino Mirei, which was very fun and nostalgic. She later performed a show with Kobayashi Kaho and Nakayama Riko, who joined the group in 2014, the first new members after their debut with a major label. Lastly, she did a show with the three members who joined just last year, Sakuragi Cocona, Kokubo Yuno, and Kazami Nonoka. She’d celebrated with every generation still active in the group, so her final show was a solo concert with a live band and back-up vocalists, including Taiyou to Ciscamoon alum Kominato Miwa. She sold out Nakano Sun Plaza, which can seat over 2000.

I was in the 13th row on the first floor, which was the worst seat I’ve had at an Ebichu concert so far, but the best seat I’ve had at Nakano Sun Plaza. The Natalie reporter, whose photos I’ve pulled for this, ran back and forth in front of me snapping pictures of the stage and crowd. The girl seated next to me bowed her head when she sat down and said “よろしくお願いします” to me — nice to meet you, I hope we get along. I murmured it back and we didn’t acknowledge each other again. She almost hit me in the face several times with her penlight glowstick in the subsequent hours.

There was a charged energy to the crowd. This was a group of people who all love Hinata, at least enough to spend money on concert tickets and merchandise and to take time out of their Monday evening to go to Nakano, and this was Hinata’s last solo concert before her graduation from the group. Graduations are a scary thing; many an idol has promised to stay in the entertainment industry only to not really gain any traction or release much new music. Many end up leaving the industry completely shortly after, virtually falling off the face of the earth. Some get married and suddenly all their content becomes about being a stay-at-home mom. Kanazawa Tomoko, who graduated Juice=Juice last year due to health problems, promised that she wouldn’t leave the industry, but then a month or two later announced that she was in fact retiring permanently. There is a possibility, despite all the optimism for the future, that this was the last time we would see her standing on a stage alone.

When the first song started, the girl next to me, the one who greeted me, started to cry.

Hinata wasn’t singing well. People who’d gone to Ebichu’s Akita Bunkou (Branch School) show two days before had said that her voice wasn’t at 100%. Maybe she had a cold. Maybe she’d strained it. It wasn’t clear, but it was obviously that she was struggling. Hinata is one of the best vocalists in the idol industry right now, her powerful voice and tight control setting her apart. She wasn’t punching as hard as she usually does. Early in the show, she admitted that she considered canceling it completely, since she couldn’t perform at her usual level. But then she decided that she couldn’t take this moment away from her fans, and so she went forward and did her best. No one cared. Everyone clapped and danced and swung their penlights as hard as they would have if she’d hit every note perfectly.

Idol concerts are meant to be interactive to a certain degree. Aside from the call-and-response, concert-goers are expected to bring penlights in the member color of their favorite member(s). Ten years ago, we brought regular glowsticks. Now, everyone has LED penlights that cycle through a dozen different colors with a press of a button. Hinata’s color is orange, and the concert hall was awash in a golden glow. There’s a synergy to this sea of glowsticks. I caught myself looking around at the people around me and mimicking what they were doing. Sometimes we’d bob our lights along to the beat of the song. Sometimes we mimicked the choreography on stage, perfectly mimicked so that her left was our left. We jumped when it was the Time to Jump, which seems to just be some agreed-upon rhythm and choreography by the fans. The newer songs had much less clearly defined audience choreography than the older hits. Once you figure out the steps for each song, it becomes natural and easy, and there’s something exhilarating about waving your light in exactly the same direction and arc as everyone around you. Photos and videos aren’t allowed in any capacity, neither are food or drink, so you’re just totally immersed in the song and movement. Due to covid, however, audiences aren’t allowed to make any noise whatsoever, so a lot of the penlight choreography has shifted to replace the call-and-response, almost like if the whole crowd bobbed their lights at precisely the right time, you’d be able hear the chants.

After the first few blocks of the concert, Hinata spoke of former member Matsuno Rina. The people around me immediately began to dab at their eyes. Rina joined the group in 2010, just six months before Hinata was added. She was a beloved member to both the fans and the members, but she passed away suddenly in 2017 at age eighteen. There’s been some sort of tribute to her at every concert, usually in the form of the song Nanairo (“Rainbow”) which was released a few months after Rina’s death and is indirectly addressed to her in the lyrics. As part of this tour, Hinata performed with every member except for Rina, who never technically graduated, so she asked us all to change our penlights to Rina’s color, blue, while she sang a medley of Rina’s favorite songs and even sang a duet with an old recording of a song they did together but never got to perform live.

Several people around me were sobbing so hard that they couldn’t stand up.

It was an excellent concert, the best I’d seen until that point. There was so much love and excitement in the crowd, everyone fully committed to the performance that she’d put together for us. But it wasn’t just about her. At the end of the show, she spoke about how she’s leaving Ebichu, but it’s not the end of the group. She doesn’t want us to stop supporting the group because she’s not there, or to show up to concerts in Hinata colors to stubbornly hold onto her. She had us all change our penlight colors to the next member we’re going to wholeheartedly support at shows — I changed mine to yellow, Kobayashi Kaho’s color — and refused to turn around until her backup singers assured her that there wasn’t a single orange glowstick in the crowd. Then she sang “Sudden Death”, a song that involves a dance-off (the motivation for which changes with each show, at the okazakitaiiku concert, they faced off against him over his manager). This time, she played against the crowd, which each member color gradually eliminated (Kaho fans were out in the first round.) It was an absolute blast, and if anything gave us all hope that she can maintain a solo career outside of the group.

The actual graduation

On December 16th, I took the day off from work and schlepped from Kanagawa Prefecture to Makuhari Messe, an arena and event space complex far out in Chiba, a few stations past Tokyo Disneyland. (I played a game on the train ride from Tokyo Station, trying to pinpoint which people were heading to the concert and who were going to Disney.) I got there a few hours early to pick up the merchandise I’d preordered, so I met up with a Twitter friend and walked around. She’s more involved in the fandom than I am, so she introduced me to something I’d never noticed before: the number of fan merch swap meets. We hunted down a girl from Twitter who was handing out homemade postcards. An unboxing youtuber was handing out packs of photocards for free. My friend herself had made keychains in member colors and a few people tracked her down for one. It felt like a community; even on the way home, we ended up sitting next to a girl who followed my friend on social media and recognized her. There was an omikuji lottery booth and whenever someone won a big prize, the whole crowd would cheer. For a little bit, the two new members, who were not performing that night, ran the omikuji booth and everyone lined up politely and no one was rude or pushy or weird about it.

From the beginning of the concert, it was clear that they didn’t want the show to be maudlin or to feel like the end of the group. Hinata sang “I’ll be here” on her own, but it quickly turned into the “Hinata’s selfish corner” block, where she put the other members into units and had them perform for her while she sat in the crowd on a golden throne.

It also doubled as a joking reference to her “Boss” persona during the 2021 new member auditions, where she absolutely terrified the auditionees in a black mask and an intensely appraising gaze.

It was the perfect reminder that after this concert, she would be joining the rest of us in the stands as a fan and supporter. Hinata’s solo show was about nostalgia and looking back at 12 years of dedication and hard work. But this felt more like the transition from member to supporter. If the solo show had been for us to show our love to her, this was Hinata’s chance to show her love for Ebichu. And she did so with thoughtfulness and good humor.

The concert was beautiful, honestly. They had some of the best stage effects and aesthetics that I’ve seen at an idol concert. The costumes were great. There was a gratuitous amount of fire during their performance of “Hot Up!”, which made me, seated in the 11th row, feel like my eyebrows were about to be singed off. They performed “Houkago Getabako Rock n Roll MX”, one of the best songs from their goofy school festival performance gimmick days, and per tradition, they danced with brooms as guitars and then tossed them into the crowd. At the midpoint, we all sat down, performers and audience alike, as they sang beneath a starry sky and surrounded by campfire-lit trees. They were dressed in their personal clothes, as if we’d all been invited on one last weekend trip with old friends. A lot of the songs on the setlist had sentimental significance — some of her favorites to perform, some that had lines that were famously difficult for her to learn or she had to work hard to be able to sing, some that featured some of her most iconic lines. I found myself thinking to myself, “Oh this is the last time I’m going to hear her sing this” over and over again. It was immensely bittersweet.

She didn’t have a special graduation dress or sing a special graduation song. It was almost like the solo show had been for us Hinata fans, and she didn’t want to inconvenience the other fans by taking up too much of their time. After the encore, she came out in her incredibly ugly striped sequin jumpsuit (comprised of all nine member colors) from the previous block of songs and read a letter. She cried. I cried. Everyone around me cried. The other members came out and they sang some more songs. They turned their back to the crowd and watched the screen as Hinata’s written messages to the other members scrolled past. I cried even more. They surprised her with a letter from her mom. We all lost it. Rather than each member delivering a prepared speech for all of us, they lowered their microphones and hugged her goodbye one-by-one. Mayama Rika and Hinata played a game of rock-paper-scissors. Yasumoto Ayaka shuffled forward with an incredible face while Hinata howled with laughter. We couldn’t hear what they were saying, but we could see it and hear things that the microphones happened to pick up like laughter and yells, and that made it even more emotional. It wasn’t a rehearsed goodbye but something more intimate and natural. It was a humble graduation, but heartfelt and touching.

The official fan club secretly requested handwritten messages from the fans a few days before the concert, and during “Superhero” they were played on the screen behind her. I don’t think she noticed, and I missed my own, but I hope she was able to read them all later on her own.

It was a two and a half hour concert. After the lights turned back on, we all sat in our seats and waited for our turn to exit — due to covid, they stagger the different sections leaving to avoid huge, tight crowds trying to leave at the same time — and were left with our thoughts. When it was finally my turn to exit, my friend was waiting for me and practically headbutted me in grief and relief. After months and months and months of anticipation and dread and build-up, it finally happened.

What comes next?

It was a great concert. I hope they release it on DVD so I can experience it again. But I’ve found that I don’t have a lot to say about it. Ebichu has been such a big part of my life for the past 18 months, and Hinata has been a major component of that. It feels surreal to think that they will continue to release new music and do events but that she won’t be there. She promises that she will continue as a soloist, but there’s no telling how long it will be. Until then, what we have is finite. There won’t be new concerts or new shirts or new releases or new photo cards to look forward to, indefinitely.

The next day, Ebichu returned to Makuhari Messe for a second concert, their first without Hinata and with the new members, Emma and Yuna. I considered watching the livestream, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I’m not ready to confront this change just yet.

Hinata deleted all of her instagram posts from before the 16th. A few days later, she posted a picture of her new short bob haircut, dyed a pinkish orange. A clean slate, a new chapter. I’m glad she’s still around and still posting, but it’s different.

I don’t know if I really have a point to all of this. My life hasn’t really changed. I don’t really know Hinata. What she chooses to do with her life is none of my business. But supporting her and loving her work has been such a comforting, motivating aspect of my life for almost two years. It kind of feels like I’ve finished a really good book, or said goodbye to an old friend. I’m just glad I was here to experience it.