Johnny’s & Associates Paved the Way

Arashi’s Matsumoto Jun was interviewed for a recent article in Variety and he said something that stirred up some Kpop fans: 

“Johnny created so many boy bands in his 60 years of working and left an indelible mark not just on the entertainment industry of Japan, by bringing it up to a global standard, but also on Asian pop culture overall, even outside of Japan, [visible in] the rise of the Asian pop generation,” he says. “What you’re currently seeing now with non-Japanese groups as well all really found its roots in the foundational work that Johnny did back in the 1960s.”

Matsumoto Jun is 100% correct here. 

The Kpop fans getting heated at this should probably take a listen to my Idol Group History series but let me give you the short version here.

Johnny Kitagawa spent his formative teen years in Los Angeles, California, working part time at a local theater and it’s during this era that he developed a real appreciation for and love of Show Business and of the American music that was on the radio at the time. He returned to Japan and spent some time working as a translator for the American military but Johnny had big dreams. He put together an all-male singing and dancing group called “The Johnny’s” and began hustling for stage time around Tokyo. 

The Johnny’s (1962-1967) are for all intents and purposes the ur-model for Asian idol groups for one reason: they combined singing and a theatrical style of dancing in a unique and groundbreaking way. There had been teen idols before. There had been popular bands as well as all male singing groups before (check out the Three Funkys). But the Johnny’s weren’t just doing the microphone stand hand gesture dances or some coordinated foot stomps, these boys were dancing. And singing. Singing and dancing. 

Just watch this early television performance. Their performance style combined the singing of a group like the Three Funkys with a vigorous, masculine dancing influenced by the work of choreographers like Jerome Robbins. It was unlike anything anybody had done before, a completely unique style of performance and one that would form the foundation of an empire of boy groups.

Because let me tell you that Johnny stuck to his formula for years. Years and years. Through periods of very low times when it was very out of fashion. Johnny’s didn’t become the dominant market force until well into the 1990s. But Johnny had a dream and that dream was a successful all-male singing-and-dancing musical group. 

After the Johnny’s came the Four Leaves who swapped the theatrical Jerome Robbins style for something… funkier. 

The Four Leaves were like lightning on stage, adding acrobatics and even elements of rhythmic gymnastics to their singing-and-dancing performances

Let me emphasize again that nobody else was doing anything like this in 1973. Nobody. Anywhere. 

Going back to the Variety article, the author, Rebecca Davis, says that, “Unlike the export-minded Korean pop industry that has produced digitally savvy supergroups like BTS and Blackpink, Japan’s industry has historically focused more exclusively on the local market.”

She is not wrong but this isn’t the full story. If you’ve listened to my history series or to Episode 27 on the Taiwanese Wave dramas of the early 2000s then you know that Japan’s culture industry has had a ripple effect on Asian pop culture. While Japan does not really focus on exporting it doesn’t mean that Japanese pop culture isn’t exported. 

Western Kpop fans like to claim Seo Taiji and Boyz as the first “Kpop” group and while that is true in some ways it’s less true in others. 

This is Johnny’s group Shonentai, who debuted in 1985.

The three member unit with their modern dance-inspired choreography and dazzling electropop sounds were hugely popular (and widely imitated) all over Asia. 

For example, this is one of the very first Kpop groups, Sobangcha, who debuted in 1987. 

And just to be a completionist, here are the Taiwan’s Little Tigers (but seriously listen to episode 27, it’s an interesting story):

Matsumoto Jun is correct that Johnny’s & Associates was (and is) massively influential all around Asia. 

One of the points I try to make over and over again in my podcast and writings is that Korea is not an isolated hermit kingdom nor in a monogamous relationship with American culture. Despite the fact that Japanese music was officially banned, it was widely available on the black market and often at cheaper prices than western music. Not to mention that Fukuoka is only a short ferry ride away from Busan. 
When I discussed this era in episode 4, I played clips of a song from Kpop group Roo’Ra that is a direct copy of Johnny’s & Associates group Ninja’s song “Omatsuri Ninja” and as I said in that episode, “The reason I bring this up is not to rag on Roo’Ra--who are a great group--but because a) Roo’Ra using the Ninja song and b) music fans calling them out on it are both pretty good evidence that despite the ban on Japanese music, people were aware of it.”
When Lee Soo Man debuted Kpop group H.O.T. in 1996, their sound drew heavily from Seo Taiji and Boyz but their styling and other idol elements were heavily influenced by the Johnny’s & Associates group S.M.A.P. and that influence remains baked into the very foundation of Korean export idol music.

Does that mean Kpop is a ripoff of Jpop and Johnny’s? No, absolutely not and I don’t think Matsumoto implied anything close to that in his quote. Besides, the cultural transmission between the Korean and Japanese idol markets goes both ways these days. Kpop groups like Astro shout out Arashi as their seniors in the idol world and Johnny’s idols like teenaged Raul from SnowMan bring up Kpop groups like SuperM. 
And here’s something else that the Variety piece didn’t mention: Johnny Kitagawa was a huge America-boo. He loved American show business, especially the glitzy stage shows of Broadway and Las Vegas. Johnny Kitagawa (and by extension Johnny’s & Associates) tried more than once to crack the American market.

There was the ill-fated ALL ENGLISH debut of the Johnny’s which went nowhere… except into the collections of 1960s garage rock enthusiasts like me. The Johnny’s not only recorded in Los Angeles but also trained there for months. 

Shonentai, who I mentioned above, also tried their hand at the American market in the 1980s even “paving the way” on American television by going on the Merv Griffin show for one of the most awkward interviews I have ever seen. 

Arashi were also positioned to crack the American market, debuting in 1999 in Hawaii of all places. As Aiba Masaki said at the time, they were ready to “create a storm all over the world”. The storm was mostly limited to the Pacific Ocean but it did stretch much, much farther than Japan. 

More recently, Akanishi Jin, formerly the “A” of KAT-TUN, did a collaboration with Jason Derulo in 2011 in a song called “Test Drive” that spearheaded a brief attempt to launch himself into American pop stardom.

This test drive would go nowhere except back to the dealer’s lot.

There are many, many reasons that these previous attempts to generate some kind of buzz in the American market went nowhere but I think the biggest and most relevant one is something I’ve discussed at great length on both my podcast and on this blog: the collapse of the mainstream market.

The “Kpop moment” that’s happening in America right now comes at a time when the market for mainstream pop music is collapsing rapidly. Even back in 2011 when Akanishi was test driving an “all English” single, the domestic marketplace was still relatively strong with songs like “Party Rock” by LMFAO, “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele, “Firework” by Katy Perry, “Forget You” by Cee Lo Green, “Moves like Jagger” by Maroon 5… songs that were broadly popular and that most people could probably still sing for you if you asked them. 

2020 has… “WAP” and that’s about it. There is simply no mainstream music anymore. “Rolling in the Deep” sold millions of copies and was literally everywhere for months. A number one song in 2020 doesn’t have nearly that high of a bar. A dedicated global Kpop fandom with the support of some big funders could--and did--place a song at the top of the charts with absolutely no interest from the mainstream public. 

Arashi fans, for the most part, don’t seem particularly interested in playing these kinds of games with the charts and fair enough. Streaming and purchasing over and over and over and over again is tedious work but for better or worse, Kpop fans have come to enjoy the game of charting. As of now, Johnny’s & Associates fans have not developed a taste for grinding through spreadsheets of links to redeem mp3s and until that day comes they probably won’t see much of an impact on the American charts directly but it doesn’t mean that the agency isn’t highly influential or that their product has “flopped”.  

Just this year SixTones and SnowMan debuted with a joint double A-side single that racked up something like 1.5 million units in pure sales in Japan. And that’s actual physical singles sold at CD single prices, not mp3s downloads. And Arashi also just got their very first million selling single with “Kaito,” written by one of the very best pop songwriters right now, Yonezu Kenshi. No matter what Arashi’s legacy (or Johnny’s legacy) is in the American market, the fact remains that they and the agency have been extremely influential for decades and remain popular in Japan and across Asia because they continue to give fans high quality music and performance. 

Nothing in that Variety article was intended as or should have been read as an attack on anybody’s oppa. 
I really do blame English language Kpop writing (academic and otherwise) for the lack of context that western Kpop fans have when it comes to Asian pop music and I appreciate the author of this piece trying to fill in the gaps a little.